This chapter takes as its starting point Mulk Raj Anand’s literary interest in what he describes as “earthiness”, and argues that it is neither a simplistic yardstick of social realism, nor simply a derivation of Anglo-American modernism, but something in between, something different, and perhaps something more. In common with many of the other chapters in this volume, I make the case that Mulk Raj Anand was neither a modernist nor a realist, and that for a more satisfactory evaluation of Anand-the-novelist, we need to follow an entirely different literary tradition. Focusing on the dirtiness and squalor that is present in much of Anand’s writing, I argue that Anand deploys this trope to make the novel into neither a realist depiction of the world, nor a disaffected, alienated exercise in aestheticism, but as a vehicle to explore what it might mean to be modern, what it might mean to be anti-colonialist and what it might mean to be nationalist.

Chapter 3 approaches Guru Nanak’s poetic artistry in “the language of infinite love – bhākhiā bhāo apāru” from seven angles: (1) the pluralistic medieval north-Indian linguistic context, (2) theophilial heteroglossia comprising infinite names of the singular truth, (3) anthropophilial commercial configurations (4) somatophilial signifiers of the formless One, (5) female-embodied theophilia, (6) biophilial worship (Arati, Samā’), (7) Kristeva’s materiality of language in the guru-bāṇī identity. The chapter explores how Guru Nanak’s images, symbols, paradoxes, metaphors, and allusions materialize the transcendent One. The message and the medium seamlessly coalesce to reveal the shared humanity usurped by age-old dualities, theological conflicts, and colonial mechanisms. The finale analyzes the guru-bāṇī (language) identity birthed by the founder Guru Nanak and embodied in the textual Guru (the GGS) – the sovereign presiding at all Sikh ceremonies and rites of passage, the sacrosanct body circulating with the flow of Sikh gurus, Hindu bhagats, and Muslim sufis.

The absence of lyrical voice in pieces such as Schumann’s Manfred and Ballads for Declamation may point not only to the absence of the other but also to the absence of the subject itself. ‘Absence of the Self’ explores the potential loss of self implied by the absence of lyrical voice, highlighted in the missing silent ‘inner voice’ of the Humoreske, which forms an apt exemplification of later twentieth-century accounts of the illusory, ‘barred’ subject proposed by such thinkers as Lacan, Kristeva, and Žižek, or the empty centre at the heart of the Eichendorff Liederkreis that results from the absence of a unified subject position and any sense of narrative continuity.

Roman elegy makes frequent use of themes of ugliness and disfigurement, juxtaposing them with images of ideal beauty and sentiment. In order to overcome the obstacles to his erotic relationship, the poet–lover repeatedly represents his rivals and opponents in such a way as to ridicule their appearance and to degrade their social standing. My purpose in this study is to explore the theme of corporeal, intellectual, and social degradation from a perspective attentive to the aesthetic significance of the grotesque imagery with which such degradation is accomplished. I undertake to show that the grotesque plays a significant role in the self-definition of the genre in which it is least expected. Grotesque and idealizing imagery constitute the polarities of a dialectic that lies at the core of elegy. Classical scholars have long been interested in the use of grotesque imagery in such genres as comedy, invective, and satire. There is a sophisticated discussion of the grotesque in these areas of classical literature, which are concerned in part with themes of transgression and excess. Grotesque imagery occurs frequently also in elegy, a genre that foregrounds love and beauty.