Pakistani Anglophone Novel and Romance/ Dastan Narrative Strategies: Farooqi's‘Qissa-Novel’ as a Case of Genre Re-visitation
Abstract
The paper reads closely Musharraf Ali Farooqi’sThe Merman and the Book of Power: A Qissa (2019) asan adamantly conceived a cross between Romance/Dastan and the Novel genre. The paper explores MAF’s claim regarding the creative shortcomings of Novel genre vis-à-vis its inadequacy to cater to the needs of exploiting fantastic imagination and scrutinizes his Qissa for its model praxis in incorporating Romance/Dastan narrative strategies as a specific case of genre re-visitation. Utilizing the key term of ‘Romance’ (as in Western critical theory) and ‘Dastan’ (as in Urdu critical theory) as the theoretic perspective to help read the target text the paper concludes that MAF deliberates the (re)familiarization of the long lost narrative strategies as utilized in Romance/Dastan to the contemporary Novel genre - neither debunking it nor devaluing it - albeit expanding the scope of narrative fictions.
Authors
Dr. Aamer Shaheen
Assistant Professor, Department of English Literature, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
Dr. Muhammad Asif Khan
Assistant Professor, Department of English Literature, The Islamia University of Bahawalpur, Punjab, Pakistan
Sadia Qamar
Lecturer, Department of English Literature, Government College University, Faisalabad, Punjab, Pakistan
Keywords
Anglophone Novel, Dastan, Novel, Pakistani, Romance, South Asian Fiction