Modern Indian Literature as Cosmopolis: Conversations with Hanuman

Didier Coste is Professor Emeritus of Comparative Literature at Université Bordeaux Montaigne. He has taught in Belgium, Australia, France, Spain, the United States, Canada, and Tunisia and was twice a fellow of Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. His book Narrative as Communication (1989) has become a Narrative Theory classic. The collection Migrating Minds: Theories and Practices of Cultural Cosmopolitanism (Routledge 2022) co-edited with Christina Kkona and Nicoletta Pireddu was awarded the René Wellek Prize 2023 of the ACLA for the best edited collection in Comparative Literature and is prolonged by the Migrating Minds Journal of Cultural Cosmopolitanism. Coste’s methodological sum A Cosmopolitan Approach to Literature: Against Origins and Destinations (Routledge 2023) laid the theoretical foundations for the present book. Coste is also a trilingual poet and novelist; Indian Poems, his latest collection, was published by the legendary Writers Workshop of Calcutta in 2019. As a literary translator, he was the recipient of a major French award in 1977.