Salman Rushdie, The Moor's Last Sigh

Vassilena Parashkevova (University of Surrey)

The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 10.3.5: South Asian Diasporic Literature and Culture, 1800-present.
Vol. editors: Claire Gallien (Université Paul Valéry Montpellier 3), Pavan Kumar Malreddy (J W Goethe University of Frankfurt), Delphine Munos (Université de Liège), Muneeza Shamsie (Independent Scholar - Asia), Niaz Zaman (Independent University Bangladesh)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1995

Places

India (Country of Origin)
United Kingdom (Publication/ performance)

Genres and Modes

Novel

Resources

Published six years into the fatwa provoked by his satire on exclusivist fictions of Islam in The Satanic Verses (1988), The Moor’s Last Sigh remains Rushdie’s darkest novel, marked most prominently by the theme of captivity, but also one which displays his extraordinary intellectual vivacity, attempting nothing less than a sweeping revisionist historical novel that uses satire, allegory and literary allusion to create a kind of fresco of Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Hindu relations in twentieth-century India. Perhaps in an attempt to balance his critique, since Shame (1983) satirised the political elites of Pakistan, and The Satanic Verses the Mullah’s in Iran, in this novel Rushdie turns his …

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3121 words

Citation: Parashkevova, Vassilena. "The Moor's Last Sigh". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 May 2007 [https://staging.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=129, accessed 25 November 2024.]

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