Maternal Fictions

Writing the Mother in Indian Women's Fiction
1. Auflage 2022
ISBN: 978-1-032-10204-7
Verlag: Routledge

Buch, Englisch, 162 Seiten, Format (B × H): 157 mm x 235 mm, Gewicht: 398 g

Reihe: Routledge Research in Postcolonial Literatures

This book constitutes a feminist literary analysis of motherhood as presented in selected Indian women’s fictions across a diverse range of geographical, linguistic, class and caste contexts.

Situated at the crossroads of motherhood studies and literary studies, this book offers a rigorous examination of the prosody and politics of motherhood in this corpus. In its five thematically focused chapters, the book scrutinises in depth such key concerns as maternal ambivalence; maternal agency and caste; mother–daughter relationships; motherhood and diaspora; and non-biological motherhood. It attempts to understand the literary ramifications of these issues in order to identify the ways in which fiction writers reconceive of the notion of motherhood and maternal identities from and against multiple perspectives. Another pressing concern is whether these Indian women writers’ visions furnish readers with any different understandings of motherhood as compared to dominant Western feminist discourses.

Maternal Fictions advances feminist literary criticism in the specific area of Indian women’s writing and the overarching areas of motherhood and literature by acting as a launchpad into a complex constellation of ideas concerning motherhood. The fictional universe is at once ambivalent, diverse, contingent, grounded in a specific location, and yet well placed to converse with discourses emanating from other times and places.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Karmakar, Indrani

Fachgebiete

• Sozialwissenschaften Politikwissenschaft Internationale Beziehungen Kolonialismus, Imperialismus
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Stoffe, Motive und Themen
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziale Gruppen/Soziale Themen Gender Studies, Geschlechtersoziologie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literaturen sonstiger Sprachräume Indische & Dravidische Literatur
• Sozialwissenschaften Soziologie | Soziale Arbeit Soziologie Allgemein Feminismus, Feministische Theorie
• Geisteswissenschaften Literaturwissenschaft Literarische Gattungen
• Geisteswissenschaften Geschichtswissenschaft Geschichtliche Themen Kolonialgeschichte, Geschichte des Imperialismus

Inhaltsverzeichnis

Introduction: Of Motherhood, Metaphor and Materiality

Chapter 1

Reluctant Mothers?: Maternal Subjectivity and Ambivalence

Chapter 2

Cast(e)ing Motherhood: Caste, Marginality and Maternal Agency

Chapter 3

Mothering Daughters: Vicissitudes of Mother–Daughter Relationships

Chapter 4

Motherhood and Diaspora: Remembering and Remaking Home

Chapter 5

Maternal Non-mothers: Motherhood Beyond Biology

Coda

Moving the Maternal: Towards Solidarity

Über Autor(innen)

Indrani Karmakar is an Alexander von Humboldt Postdoctoral Fellow based at the Chemnitz University of Technology, Germany and prior to that, she was an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at Rhodes University, South Africa. Her works have previously appeared in the Journal of Commonwealth Literature and Wasafiri, and she is the co-author of Storying Relationships: Young British Muslims Speak and Write about Sex and Love (2021).