About the Book

Feminist Literary and Cultural Criticism explores inter-disciplinary connections across Cultural Anthropology, Geography, Psychology, and feminist literary criticism to develop a theoretical framework for spatial criticism. Using the spatial gynocritics framework developed in the book, it analyzes selected texts from five different genres–short-story, novel, film, cartoons, and OTT series, created by women. The creators discussed in the book constitute a transnational collectivity of women that shares common concerns about gender, environment, technology, and social hierarchies. They comprise a geographically and linguistically diverse group from India, Uruguay, Spain, Argentina, and the USA. The book offers immense potential for a comparative study on numerous aspects, among which the present work concentrates on the treatment of Space, demonstrating that spatial logic and grammar are essential elements of the feminist praxis. The book reveals the unexamined potential in the women creators’ praxis of destabilizing, decentring, and destroying the ascribed centres around which social arrangements are structured. Moreover, the book offers valuable analytic tools that add to scholarship in literary theory, comparative cultural studies, comparative literature, gender studies, feminist criticism, and interdisciplinary humanities. It is an indispensable aid to students and faculty in these areas of study, enabling them to critique texts from a fresh perspective.

Contents

Interdisciplinary Vectors

The Anthropological Vector

The Geographic Vector

The Psychological Vector

The Literary Vector

The Resultant Vector: A Model for Spatial Gynocritics

Interstitial Spatial Views

Cristina Peri Rossi’s Postmodernist Short Story

Manjula Padmanabhan’s Science Fiction Novel

Lucrecia Martel’s Transnational Cinema

Sumukhi Suresh’s Satirical Comedy

Carol Lay’s Comics

About the Author / Editor

Java Singh has a Ph.D. in Hispanic Literature from JNU, New Delhi, and also holds an MBA from IIM, Ahmedabad. She was awarded the Rafael Iruzubieta prize for being the top student in her MA (Spanish) class at JNU. She won the best paper award at the 2017 conference of the South Asian Literary Association in Philadelphia. Her short story was judged as the runner-up in a competition organized by Unisun Publications and was published in the anthology of selected stories titled Two is Company (2010). Her most recent book is Post-Humanist Nomadisms in Non-Oedipal Spatiality (2022), published by Vernon Press, USA. Another book “Gendered Ways of Transnational Un-belonging from a Comparative Literature Perspective” (2020) was published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing, UK.