Abstract
Abstract This article situates Amitav Ghosh—as both critic and novelist—in relation to the contemporary genre turn, as a means of questioning the logical distinctions undergirding ideas of literariness. Readers of Ghosh tend to cast the overtly science-fictional The Calcutta Chromosome: A Novel of Fevers, Delirium and Discovery as a generic anomaly in his otherwise historical realist oeuvre. Against such automatic delineations, this article argues that Ghosh's 1995 work is not such an outlier when we break down the multiple genres at play within novels across his career, and how their interactions produce effects that have been mistakenly attributed to one or other isolated genre. In The Calcutta Chromosome and the Ibis trilogy (case studies that seem generically distant), critical representations of globalization are developed through recourse to speculative genre frames for archival contents, with the effect of estranging historical continuity, collectivity, and narrative conventions. Attending to ambivalent deployments of genre allows for more precise identification of how contemporary novels formally construct and confuse their own world-building effects, and how critics categorize texts and attribute political-critical impact to them.
Published Version
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