Paul Scott: The Raj Quartet and Staying On

about

A historically informed and informing study guide to Scott's four great novels of British India -The Jewel in the Crown, The Day of the Scorpion, The Towers of Silence, A Division of the Spoils - and of the popular coda, Staying On.

Contents

Part 1. Life and Works: An Overview
1.1 Paul Mark Scott, 1920–78
1.2 Work to 1964
1.3 The Raj Quartet and Staying On , 1964–77

Part 2. Facts, Fictions, and Verisimilitude: Representing the British Raj
2.1 Geography
2.2 History
2.3 Biography

Part 3. ‘Coming to the end of themselves as they were’: Witnessing Imperial Decay
3.1 The Civil
3.2 The Military

Part 4. ‘There’s nothing I can do’: Embodying Personal Nullity
4.1 Edwina Crane
4.2 Daphne Manners
4.3 Barbie Batchelor
4.4 Sarah Layton

Part 5: Class and Silence
5.1 Neo-Puritanism and the ‘Split Century’, 1850–1950
5.2 Ronald Merrick as Antagonist
5.3 Ronald Merrick as Protagonist

Part 6. Dreams, Nightmares, & Realpolitik: Representing India (and Pakistan)
6.1 Mohammed Ali Kasim, Gandhi-ji, and the Congress
6.2 Sayed Kasim, Jinnah, and the Muslim League
6.3 Ahmed Kasim, Pandit Baba, and the Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh
6.4 Hari Kumar as Good and Unknown Indian
6.5 Tusker and Lucy Smalley: Staying On

Appendix 1: Granada TV’s adaptations of Scott
Appendix 2: Critics’ Corner and Further Reading
Bibliography

author

Born and raised in Bristol, UK, John Lennard took a B.A. and D.Phil. at New College, Oxford, and an M.A. at Washington University in St Louis. He has taught for the Universities of London, Cambridge, and Notre Dame du Lac, for the Open University, for Fairleigh Dickinson University on-line, and as Professor of British and American Literature at the University of the West Indies—Mona. His publications include But I Digress: The Exploitation of Parentheses in English Printed Verse (Clarendon Press, 1991), The Poetry Handbook (OUP, 1996; 2/e 2005), with Mary Luckhurst The Drama Handbook (OUP, 2002), and Of Modern Dragons and other essays on Genre Fiction (HEB, 2007). He is General Editor of HEB's Genre Fiction Sightlines and Monographs series, for which he has written on Reginald Hill, Walter Mosley, Octavia E. Butler, Ian McDonald, and Tamora Pierce. For Literature Insights he has also written on Shakespeare's Hamlet and Nabokov's Lolita.