Although Indian women’s short fiction has always enjoyed equal importance and popularity as their novels, very little critical attention has been paid to it so far. Indian Women’s Short Fiction seeks to fulfil this long felt need. It puts together fifteen perceptive and analytical articles by scholars across the world. The articles, which are focussed on native Indian writing as well as diasporic short fiction, deal with such interesting literary issues as construction of femininity, disablement and enablement, Bengali heritage, hybrid identities, nostalgia, representation of the Partition violence, tradition and modernity, and cultural perspectivism. It is hoped that the book will prove useful to scholars interested in short fiction studies in general and Indian women’s short fiction in particular.

Table of Contents:
1. Constructions of Femininity in Cornelia Sorabji’s “Greater Love” and Githa Hariharan’s “Revati” — Ellen Dengel-Janic 2. Narratives of Disablement and Enablement: Jayapraga Reddy’s The Unbending Reed and On the Fringe of Dreamtime and Other Stories — Betty Govinden 3. South Asian Diasporic Women’s Short Fiction: The South African Contribution — Samantha Naidu 4. Colonial Woes in Postcolonial Writing: Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s Arranged Marriage — Husne Jahan 5. “The Old Rules Aren’t Always Right”: An Analysis of Four Short Stories by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni — Felicity Hand 6. Looking Through the Glass House: Diasporic Women Writers of Bengali Heritage — Antonia Navarro Tejero 7. The Spectral Art of Storytelling: Disease, Displacement and Death in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies — Puspa Damai 8. Hybrid Identities in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Interpreter of Maladies — Rajeshwar Mittapalli 9. The Nostalgic Note in their Flute: A Reading of Arundhati Roy and Jhumpa Lahiri — Nandini Sahu 10. A Paradigm Shift in the Representation of Violence in Partition Short Stories by Women: Political Irony in Shauna Singh Baldwin’s “Family Ties” — Beerendra Pandey 11. Tradition and Modernity as Played out in Anjana Appachana’s “Her Mother” — Rebecca Sultana 12. Cultural Perspectivism in Bharati Mukherjee’s Short Stories — Andrew Hammond 13. A Battle for the Palate or a Feast of Fragrance?—Bulbul Sharma’s The Anger of Aubergines: Stories of Women and Food — Joel Kuortti 14. A Home of My Own (?): A Feminist Critique of Lakshmi Kannan’s Going Home — Mala Pandurang 15. Anita Desai’s Diamond Dust and Other Stories: A Narrative Analysis — Basavaraj Naikar and Joel Kuortti Contributors