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Fairy Tale, Tragedy, Fantastic: Three Generic Exceptions in the Short Stories of Anita Desai

Focusing on Anita Desai’s collection Diamond Dust and Other Stories (2000), this article examines three short stories: “Diamond Dust – A Tragedy,” “The Man Who Saw Himself Drown” and “The Rooftop Dwellers.” Respectively borrowing from tragedy, the fantastic and the fairy tale, they use the generic malleability of the short story and entail a questioning of the hybrid nature of this literary genre. The notion of hybridity also resonates as a political strategy of ideological and formal subversion, and this article examines the possible link between the hybrid generic nature of those three texts, and the themes they explore – gender, otherness and Indian identity.