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Giraya and the Gothic Space: Nationalism and the Novel in Sri Lanka
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 84, Number 4, Fall 2015
- pp. 29-53
- Article
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The essay turns to Punyekante Wijenaike’s 1971 novella, Giraya, to study the ways in which the Gothic features as a framing device for the exploration of the gendered and ideological domain of home in twentieth-century Sri Lankan writing. The walauwe or feudal manor is transformed, in Wijenaike’s novella, into a spectral space that challenges the prevailing nationalist discourses and literatures which fashioned the Sri Lankan nation as a rural utopia. Nostalgia and visions of national utopias give way to terror and dislocation as the fragmentary narrative of Giraya calls into question, from the very heart of the idealized nation – its home – the representational powers of the ordered social realist novel, Sri Lanka’s most dominant literary genre in the post-Independence era.