Women Writing In India 600 Bc To The Early Twentieth Century

Includes songs by Buddhist nuns, testimonies of medieval rebel poets and court historians, and the voices of more than 60 other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the diverse selections are a rare early essay by an untouchable woman; an account by the first feminist historian; and a selection from the first novel written in English by an Indian woman.

The second volume following on from the first, which spanned the years 600 BC to the early-20th century, this book offers a new reading of cultural history that draws on contemporary scholarship on women and India. The books cover over 140 texts from 13 languages.

Women Writing the Nation: National Identity, Female Community, and the British - French Connection, 1770-1820 engages in recent discussions of the development of British nationalism during the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Leanne Maunu argues that women writers looked not to their national identity, but rather to their gender to make claims about the role of women within the British nation. Discussing texts by Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Maunu demonstrates that women writers of this period imagined themselves as members of a fairly stable community, even if such a community was composed of many different women with many different beliefs. They appropriated the model of collectivity posed by the nation, mimicking a national imagined community.

Essential...this distinctive series presents 120 southern African texts that are rich, evocative. -- Library Journal

These ground-breaking collections offer 200 texts from eleven languages, never before available in English or as a collection, along with a new reading of cultural history that draws on contemporary scholarship on women and India. This extraordinary body of literature and important documentary resource illuminates the lives of Indian women through 2,600 years of change and extends the historical understanding of literature, feminism, and the making of modern India. The biographical, critical, and bibliographical headnotes in both volumes, supported by an introduction which Anita Desai describes as "intellectually rigorous, challenging, and analytical," place the writers and their selections within the context of Indian culture and history.

Sultanas Dream, first published in 1905 in a Madras English newspaper, is a witty feminist utopiaa tale of reverse purdah that posits a world in which men are confined indoors and women have taken over the public sphere, ending a war nonviolently and restoring health and beauty to the world."The Secluded Ones" is a selection of short sketches, first published in Bengali newspapers, illuminating the cruel and comic realities of life in purdah.

Dr Tainter describes nearly two dozen cases of collapse and reviews more than 2000 years of explanations. He then develops a new and far-reaching theory.

This collection is an invaluable overview of the rich history of Indian feminism. It brings together the writing of prominent Indian academics and activists as they debate feminism in the context of Indian culture, society and politics, and explore its theoretical foundations in India. The inevitable association with western feminism, the status of women in colonial and independent India, and the challenges to Indian feminism posed by globalization and the Hindu Right are discussed at length. It deepens our understanding of why, despite the existence of legal and constitutional rights, women are subject to oppressive practices like dowry.