Writing Women Across Cultures

Writing Women Across Cultures is a collection of eighteen essays which deal with the myriad aspects of the woman question—how women have been inscribed in culture and myth, how they have written themselves and how they write themselves. Working within comparative frameworks, the essays take up the relationships between gender, culture and narrative strategies and work through the writings of women (and also some men) both from India and the Western world. Some of the writers whose work has been considered are: Katherine Mansfield, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Alice Munro, Shashi Deshpande, Krishna Sobti, Githa Hariharan, Aritha van Herk, Dalip Kaur Tiwana, M.K. Indra, Baby Kamble, and Jainendra Kumar. The period ranges from the late nineteenth century to the present, from Bankim Chandra Chatterjee to Meera Syal. Working as they do with traditions in the making (dalit women’s autobiographies), women’s narratives of recovery, social constructs as projected in cinema and mass culture and the ways in which women negotiate social boundaries, the essays relate simultaneously to cultural, literary and women’s studies.