...Janice Ho This essay situates Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses within the historical context of a politics of extremity that was mobilized by ethnic migrants in postwar Britain in their struggles against racism. Such a politics—characterized by the discourses of war, militancy, rioting, and heat...

... run counter not only to assumptions that are commonly made in the practice of political criticism of literature, but also to basic features of our ordinary engagement with fictional discourses. The essay then examines the controversy surrounding Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses , a controversy...

... or thereabouts, two real, full-grown, living men fell from a great height, twenty-nine thousand and two feet, toward the English Channel, without the benefit of parachutes or wings, out of a clear sky. —Salman Rushdie, The Satanic Verses (1988) An unforgettable image on the printed page: the plummet...

.... Naipaul, and Salman Rushdie. Here he spices up the standard fare of postcolonial accounts of Englishness (cricket, landscape, and dis- cussions of hybrid identities in The Satanic Verses) by increasingly questioning Bhabha's account of the two times of the nation. The idea at stake...

...- nized sociability” (103) provide another rationale. But the greater portion of this interlude is taken up with historicizing the sublimation of the sea. Beginning with Longinus and the provocatively titled “Satan on the Beach”—in which Cohen reads Milton’s Satan as a bold, maritime adventurer...

... artifice” (49). Joyce’s Dubliners is “best known for the minutiae rather than for the majesty of his style,” for the “collage of foreign cultures, details from places” near and far from Dublin that “gives texture to an insubordinate cosmopolitanism” (57). Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses “values...

... but only “Sathan [sic] keeping his Court” and the “innumerable Legions that attended his immediate Service” (240). This vision of invisible bureaucracy, with Satan’s ministers of state all “continually employed,” carrying “his Orders” and executing “his Commissions in all Parts of the World” (241...

... founded on incorporating the past. In Hogg’s masterpiece, Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, a novel about a satanically possessed fratri- cidal antinomian, Scott’s post-Humean skeptical pragmatic conservative fictions—“socially mike goode...

... versions of Great Expectations (1946 and 1998), Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses (1989), and Peter Carey's Jack Maggs (1997). Indeed, as one might expect of a former president of the Society for the Study of Narrative Literature, Clayton is at his best when analyzing fiction and film. One...

... insanity. It maps the disruption of the heterosexual domestic sphere, the failure of English masculinity, the absurdity of archaic class politics, and the crisis of self produced by virtue of dwelling in the disintegrating imperial urban space. His reading of Salman Rushdie's Satanic Verses...

... to Chennai, “whose daily bustle came to epitomise to me Nancy’s inoperative community” (v); he describes Salman Rushdie’s Satanic Verses (1988) as “without doubt the single most important prototype of the contemporary cosmo- politan novel” (28); and we are told that Arundhati Roy has been included...

..., serves a “vital documentary function” in the likes of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and Zadie Smith’s White Teeth, but these novels no longer aspire to neatly catalog their characters after the fashion of the Great Exhibition. Contemporary film similarly revises Victorian tropes: Patrick...

... and philosophy. At one point in the space of half a page, Lovelace is compared to ‘‘Milton’s Satan’’ as well as to ‘‘Macbeth after the murder of Banquo who ‘‘resembles no one so much as Chaucer’s Pardoner’’ (70–71); by the bottom of the page he is similarly aligned with Robinson Crusoe and Victor Frankenstein...

...,” reads against the grain Rushdie's engagement in The Satanic Verses and in numerous essays with secularization as progress. Neuman fruitfully recovers Rushdie's vision of fiction as an enchanting compensation for culture's “god-shaped holes” (41). An extended section on Rushdie's novel Shalimar...

... rival views of the world together without the author’s or the reader’s having to choose between them? Hogg produced texts with central mysteries that seem to court a variety of explanations—Satanic possession, individual madness, collective delu- sion, and the distorting lens of history might all...

... of temporality; it is one of the most compelling moments in his argument. The heroes of the epic, he says-he mentions Odysseus and Achilles, but the same is true of Dante's poet, or Milton's Satan-"do not experience time within the work itself' (121); rather, "what they experience and the way...

... Jekyll, if ever I read Satan’s signature upon a face, it is on that of your new friend” (42). From this point forth, to think about Jekyll and Hyde is to hallucinate script: as Utterson imagines warning Jekyll, “once more he saw before his mind’s eye, as clear as a transparency, the strange clauses...

... Satan, That is to say, they are not, in a t!zorough sense, original at all. They are novel, or singular, or striking, or captivating, or all four at once. (204) Claiming a place for him among the great characters in Western literature, on par with Hamlet, Quixote, and Satan, chapter 44...

... discussion of Frankenstein, Ulysses, Satanic Verses, "and other postcolonial texts." But Bush's conclusion-that "Rushdie like Joyce before him implicates the ironies of a comedy of postcolonial hybridity in a thoroughgoing interrogation of the authority of sacred texts" (146)-is surely an unsurprising...

... acknowledges the authority of a law that his moral stance requires him to deny. This "impossibility" is also what the novel helps dramatize by exteriorizing the dividedness of Kantian consciousness (or conscience, however satanic it is in the Memoirs) in the figures of Robert and his tormenting...