This volume, the seventh in the series—Studies in Women Writers in English—is a grateful acknowledgment of the contribution and public recognition of the emerging voice of women in the arena of literature during the last few centuries, and especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. The critique of work by women writers, introduced in the present volume, bears evidence to the growing critical attention towards authors writing outside the mainstream, in America, Canada, and especially in India, as well as Indian émigré writers who can be seen sharing similar awareness and feelings regarding the woman’s angst and aspirations. The articles in this volume cover a wide range of women writers including one from Britain, i.e. the canonized and perennially popular Charlotte Brontë, three from America, i.e. Flannery O’Connor, widely known as the writer of ‘Southern Gothic’, Sylvia Plath and Tess Gallagher while Margaret Atwood figures, as usual. In addition to this, a bunch of Indian avant-garde writers of our own times, ranging from literary doyens like Shashi Deshpande and Anita Desai, to young avant-gardes, namely Githa Hariharan, Radhika Jha, Arundhati Roy, Chitra Divakaruni, Bharati Mukherjee and Shobha De, to the promising new generation of prize¬winners like Jhumpa Lahiri, and Kiran Desai. Since most of the authors discussed in these articles are prescribed in the English syllabi in the universities of India, both the teachers and the students will find the book extremely useful, and the general readers who are interested in literature in English and/or women writers will also find them intellectually stimulating.

Table of Contents:
General Preface; Preface; 1. Jane Eyre: A Site for Conflicting Contexts–Chaitali Gorai; 2. The Displaced Critic: Flannery O’Connor’s “Good Country People”–Shari Koopmann; 3. The Idea of Victimhood in Sylvia Plath’s Poetry–Shyam Sunder Padihari; 4. Sylvia Plath’s Poetry and Fiction–Mallikarjun Patil; 5. ‘Rarest Kiss of Innermost Blood’: A Study in Tess Gallagher’s Portable Kisses–Santosh K. Padhy; 6. Colonial Civilization in the Novels of Margaret Atwood–Sucheta Pathania; 7. Bharati Mukherjee’s Desirable Daughters: Cultural Perspectives–Sarika Pradiprao Auradkar; 8. Negotiating ‘Fusion’ and ‘Assimilation’ in Bharati Mukherjee’s The Middleman and Other Stories–Surekha Dangwal; 9. Alien Territory and Border Crossing with Moorings of Body and Mind in Divakaruni’s The Mistress of Spices–J. Samuel Kirubahar and R. Meena; 10. Postcolonial Displacement in Jhumpa Lahiri’s Namesake and Radhika Jha’s Smell–Pushpa Lata; 11. Love: Through and Beyond Breakers in The Inheritance of Loss–Sisir Kumar Chatterjee; 12. Shifting Images of Woman in Anita Desai’s Cry, The Peacock–Sushila Rathore and Meenakshi Raman; 13. Existential Predicament in Anita Desai’s Voices in the City–Nirmala Pant; 14. Existential Dilemma in the Novels of Anita Desai–Gauri Shankar Jha; 15. Two Christian Poetesses–Mallikarjun Patil; 16. Human Relationship in Shashi Deshpande’s The Dark Holds No Terrors–Vinod Kumar Singh; 17. Resurrecting the Literary Foremother: A Study of Shashi Deshpande’s The Binding Vine–Jaydeep Rishi; 18. Indian Folklore and Myth in Shashi Deshpande’s Novels–Amitabh Roy; 19. Widows in Shashi Deshpande’s Novels–Amitabh Roy; 20. Socio-Economic Concerns Affecting Women in the Shorter Fiction of Shashi Deshpande–Abha Shukla Kaushik; 21. Shobha De: An Overview–Gauri Shankar Jha; 22. Rebellious Eros: The Axis of Roy’s The God of Small Things–Sanjay Solanki; 23. Arundhati Roy’s The Greater Common Good: A Study–Vinod Kumar Singh and Anjani Kumar Mishra; 24. Fundamentalism, Intellectual Censorship and Githa Hariharan’s In Times of Siege–Shubha Tiwari; Contributors