In an Antique Land
| Author | Amitav Ghosh |
|---|---|
| Country | India |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-fiction |
| Publisher | Ravi Dayal Publishers |
Publication date | 1992 |
| Media type | Print (hardback) |
| ISBN | 0679727833 |
| Followed by | Dancing in Cambodia and at Large in Burma |
In An Antique Land is an ethnography written in narrative form by the Indian writer Amitav Ghosh.
Summary
The book contains two narratives. The first, an anthropological narrative, revolves around two visits made by Ghosh to two villages in the Nile Delta, while he was writing his doctoral dissertation (1980–81) and again a few years later (1988). In the second narrative, presented parallel to the first one in the book, Ghosh reconstructs the history of a 12th-century Jewish merchant, Abraham Ben Yiju, and his slaves Ashu and Bomma, using documents from the Cairo Geniza.[1]
Commentary
In an Antique Land is considered to be a stylistically curious book. Written after the success of Ghosh's first two books, Circle of Reason and The Shadow Lines, and written more than a decade after the dissertation on which the book is based, In an Antique Land defies easy description and has been called "generically indefinable" and could be labeled as "narrative, travel book, autobiographical piece, historical account".[2]
References
- ↑ Desai, Gaurav. "Old World Orders: Amitav Ghosh and the Writing of Nostalgia". Representations. California University Press. 85 (Winter 2004): 125–148. JSTOR 10.
- ↑ Srivastava, Neelam. "Amitav Ghosh's Ethnographic Fictions: Intertextual Links between In An Antique Land and His Doctoral Thesis" (PDF). The Journal of Commonwealth Literature. Sage Publications. 36 (June 2001): 45–64. doi:10.1177/002198940103600205. Retrieved 11 April 2011.
Sources
- Thieme, John. "In an Antique Land". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 28 March 2003 accessed 22 September 2010.
- Chalmers, Claire "Anthropology as Cultural Translation: Amitav Ghosh’s In an Antique Land". Postcolonial Text, Vol 2, No 3 (2006)
- "Book Review: In an Antique Land", Desicritics, February 24, 2010
- "Trapped by Language: On Amitav Ghosh's In an Antique Land", Brian Kiteley, University of Denver