"First published: 2002"--Title page verso.
Contributed papers presented at a seminar held in Thiruvananthapurm in March 2000; focus on 19th century novel.

Section I Contexts :- Early Asamiya novels : new genre, traditional mindset and changing perspectives /Tilotama Misra ; The novel in Bangla : the first steps /Saroj Bandopadhyay ; No, not the nation : lower caste Malayalam novels of the nineteenth century /Dilip M. Menon ; Two sentences : a speculation on genre in early Marathi novels /Aniket Jaaware ; Fiction and the Tamil reading public : the inter-war period /A.R. Venkatachalapathy ; The birth of a genre : Telugu novel in the nineteenth century /C. Vijayasree ; First Urdu novel : contesting claims and disclaimers /M. Asaduddin -- Section II Texts :- The allergy of Rajmohan's wife (1864) : national culture and colonialism in Asia's first English novel /Makarand Paranjape ; Seeing and reading : the early Malayalam novel and some questions of visibility /Udaya Kumar ; Govardhanram Tripathi and 'The philosophy of consumption' : a reading of Sarasvatichandra /Tridip Suhrud ; Colonial modernity and the social reformist novel : reading Indira Bai (1899) /Shivarama Padikkal ; Aap Beeti or Jag Beeti : narration and reality in Umrao Jan Ada (1899) /Sukrita Paul Kumar ; Chha Mana Atha Guntha : the language of power and the silences of a woman /Rabi Shankar Mishra -- Chronological list of early narratives