Postcolonial Fiction and the Question of Influence: Arundhati Roy, The God of Small Things and Rumer Godden

Abstract

This essay compares Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things (1997) with Rumer Godden’s mid-twentieth-century fictions set in India—Black Narcissus (1939), The River (1946), and a later work, The Peacock Spring (1975)—and suggests that Roy's writing shares an unrecognised 'metaphorical economy' with Godden's work. The essay goes to to use this comparison to ask broader questions about critical paradigms of influence and intertextuality in postcolonial studies.