Outcast Examples

John Steinbeck's Use of Social Outcast Characters as an Ironic Comment on the Middle Class

Postcolonial Urban Outcasts

Extending current scholarship on South Asian Urban and Literary Studies, this volume examines the role of the discontents of the South Asian city. The collection investigates how South Asian literature and literature about South Asia attends to urban margins, regardless of whether the definition of margin is spatial, psychological, gendered, or sociopolitical. That cities are a site of profound paradoxes is nowhere clearer than in South Asia, where urban areas simultaneously represent both the frontiers of globalization as well as the deeply troubling social and political inequalities of the global south. Additionally, because South Asian cities are defined by the palimpsestic confluence of, among other things, colonial oppression, anticolonial nationalism, postcolonial governance, and twenty-first century transnational capital, they are sites where the many faces of empowerment and disempowerment are elaborated. The volume brings together essays that emphasize myriad critical approaches—geospatial, urban-theoretical, diasporic, subaltern, and others. United in their critical empathy for urban outcasts, the chapters respond to central questions such as: What is the relationship between the politico-economic narratives of globally emerging South Asian cities and the dispossessed? How do South Asian cities stand in relationship to the nation and, conversely, how might South Asians in diaspora construct these cities within larger narratives of development, globalization, or as sources of authentic ethnic identities? How is the very skeleton—the space, the territory—of South Asian cities marked with and by exclusionary politics? How do the aesthetic and formal choices undertaken by writers determine the potential for and limit to emancipation of urban outcasts from their oppressive circumstances? Considering fiction, nonfiction, comics, and genre fiction from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, and Sri Lanka; literature from the twentieth and the twenty-first century; and works that are Anglophone and those that are in translation, this book will be valuable to a range of disciplines.

Female Outcasts

This book analyses the cultural and social subordination of women in American society as represented in the American novelistic tradition in the context of sociological, psychological, and historical perspectives peculiar to the period. The selection of the novels has been based on a wide range of different cultural and historical periods, which enables the reader to witness the general outcast position of woman as depicted in the American novel and her subordination in this society by way of some historical and cultural forces. The endeavor has been to illustrate how, from the earliest examples of the American novel depicting colonial life to the contemporary ethnic and minority novels, the persistent negative image as social stereotypes are imposed on women as an unavoidable and unalterable destiny.