Five Novellas By Women Writers

"Bringing together the work of five highly accomplished contemporary Indian women writers - Mrinal Pande, Saniya, Nabaneeta Dev Sen, Vaidehi, and B. M. Zuhara - this collection of novellas from five Indian languages revolves around the lives of women from various walks of life. With the novellas translated in English for the first time, the book includes a critical introduction by Uma Chakravarti." "This book will be of value not only to general readers interested in Indian writing in translation, but also to students of modern Indian literature, gender studies, comparative literature, and cultural studies." --Book Jacket.

Today, following the tsunami of women's protest at widespread abuse, we do more than read them; we listen and live with their astonishing bravery and eloquence.

An anthology of stories by Caribbean women writers explores such themes as residency in a tourist environment that invites visitors to make the area their own, the sexual exploitation of Caribbean women, and the region's tragic colonial history, in a volume that includes contributions by such authors as Edwidge Danticat, Jamaica Kincaid, and Dionne Brand. Reprint.

A new edition of the acclaimed novel about a Puerto Rican girl coming of age in New York City during WWII.

Chandrabati, the first woman poet in Bangla, lived in the sixteenth century in Mymensingh district in present day Bangladesh. She was also the first poet in the Bangla language to present a retelling of the Ram story from the point of view of Sita. Idolised as a model of marital obedience and chastity in Valmiki’s Ramayan, Chandrabati’s lyrical retelling of Sita’s story offers us a fresh perspective. Written in order to be sung before a non-courtly audience, mainly of womenfolk of rural Bengal, Chandrabati’s Ramayan adds new characters and situations to the story to provide new interpretations of already known events drawing richly on elements of existing genres. Its location in the tales of everyday life has ensured that Chandrabati’s Ramayan lives on in the hearts of village women of modern-day India.

United by a common focus on writing by and about women, this collection of contemporary essays, spanning the novel, poetry, drama, film and criticism, emphasises some of the problems of theory and practice posed by writing as a woman and by women's representation in literature. The subjects of individual essays range from the nineteenth and twentieth century novel to avant-garde film, and from Victorian women poets to Russian women poets of today. Drawing on structuralism, psychoanalysis, semiotics, socio-linguistics and Marxist analyses of literature, the diverse essays suggest the variety and vigour of contemporary feminist literary criticism, as well as representing the debates animating it. Successfully bridging the gap between literary criticism and literary production, the scope of this collection will be of considerable interest to those concerned with developments in literary criticism as well as to those in the field of women's studies.