About the Book
This volume brings together thirty-four essays on women’s writing. They focus on the validity of women’s writing and trace its contribution to the construction of a female self. Marginalised as trivial, ghettoised as militant and subversive, opposed to the ‘universal’ and downgraded as concerned with the victim syndrome, women’s writing has finally found a place for itself as voicing the experience of half of humanity. The ‘Text’ of the title works at several levels. There is first of all the literary text: fiction, novel, drama, theory, poetry and autobiography. There is the socio-cultural text which moves into the traditional context. There is then the bodily and physical awareness of participation in the making of this text as a reader. ‘Contexts’ again are multiple: epistemological, patriarchal, legal and social.
The essays in this volume concern themselves with theoretical issues and historical perspectives, with spatial metaphors and discourse analysis, with cultural constructs and linguistic textures, with myth and mythologising and history and dehistoricising. Rebellion, defiance, madness, fantasy, and comedy are some of the strategies used by women writers to communicate and get their meaning across. The work is of value not only to the young scholar and the fresh initiate, but it is also of equal significance to serious scholars of literature and history and of socio-cultural studies.
New to this third edition is the revised and updated introduction and three new essays expanding the horizon of this text.
Contents
1. Reading Women’s Writing / Jasbir Jain
2. Feminist Literary Theory / Sarla Palkar
3. The Mad Scientist in the Laboratory: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein / Preeti Kapoor
4. The Rights of Women in the Nineteenth Century / Neelam Raisinghani
5. Inching Toward Freedom / Krishna Rathore
6. Better Deal for the Better Half / Sarojini
7. Aurora Leigh / Santosh Gupta
8. Women Without Men / Veena Singh
9. The World of Cranford / Veena Singh
10. The Coming of Age of Shakespeare’s Sister / Savita Goel
11. Killing the Angel in the House / K.V. Surendran
12. Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea / Veena Jain
13. Writing Postcoloniality and Feminism / C .Vijayshree
14. The Epistemology of Inequality / Santosh Gupta
15. Simone de Beauvoir’s Memoirs of A Dutiful Daughter / Madhuri Chatterjee
16. Mythologising History / Jasbir Jain
17. Rich Like Us / Viney Kirpal
18. Power Structure in Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us / Mini Nanda
Sudha Rai
19. Nayantara Sahgal’s Rich Like Us
20. Autobiography / Sarojini
21. My Story / Ranjana Harish
22. Protest Against Sexual Colonialism / Iqbal Kaur
23. Rebellion and Escape / Rama Rani Lall
24. Erasing the Margins / Jasbir Jain
25. Unveiling Womanhood / Rashmi Chaturvedi
26. Discreet Rebellion / A.K Tiwari
27. Feminist Drama: The Politics of the Self / Jasbir Jain
28. Metaphor of ‘Space’ / Tanuja Mathur
29. Exploring Female Bonds / Fatima Sugarwala
30. Image as Meaning in Moore’s Poetry / Supriya Agarwal
31. Narrative Strategies in A Room of One’s Own / N.K. Jain
32. Interpretation of Literature / Santosh Gupta
33. Whose Story is Mary Barton? A Study of Emotional and Moral Conflict / Jasbir Jain
34. Spare Parts in a Human Garage / Urmil Talwar
About the Author / Editor
Jasbir Jain, formerly Emeritus Fellow at the University of Rajasthan, Jaipur and Sahitya Akademi writer in residence, is recipient of several awards. Jain has an extensive range of interest. She has worked extensively on feminist writing and postcolonial literatures. Amongst her recent publications are Indigenous Roots of Feminism: Culture, Subjectivity and Agency (2001) and Theorizing Resistance (2013). Currently she is working on the ‘Problematics of Forgiveness’.
