Author Description

Born in India but raised and educated in England, Salman Rushdie brings to his fiction a unique awareness of cultural difference and conflict. His complex, buoyant style, first recognized internationally with the Booker Prize-winning Midnight's Children (1981), has brought him to the forefront of postmodern literature. The political and religious controversy Rushdie's satiric work often generated exploded into open hostility when The Satanic Verses was published in 1988. James Harrison's lively study of Salman Rushdie argues that, in experimenting with different prose styles and narrative modes, as well as in his use of plot, satire, parody, and intrusive authorial commentary, Rushdie expresses his preference for a world of multiplicity, flexibility, and tolerance. Through a close analysis of the major fiction, including Grimus (1975), Shame (1983), and the irresistibly entertaining children's book Haroun and the Sea of Stories (1990), Harrison clearly shows Rushdie's opposition throughout his work to religious fundamentalist thought as a political force. Harrison discusses the relationship between Rushdie's life and work, analyzes all the novels and perceptively and sympathetically assesses the writer's conflict with Muslim and Hindu religious authorities. This invaluable study provides a much needed insight into Salman Rushdie's writings and the exception that has been taken to them by Muslim fundamentalists.