Asia Book Club
Showing all 13 books
Alice Walker stands as one of the most significant contemporary black American women writers and a pioneering literary figure. Her focus in her poetry, essays, short stories, novels, documentaries and feature films has been on feminist issues within the black community. She has also been a courageous spokesperson on issues that affect women worldwide, particularly male oppression through female circumcision. She has won many literary awards, including the ...
Gabriel Garcia Marquez, the Nobel Laureate, is perhaps the the best-known Latin American novelist. His novel One Hundred Years of Ssolitude is one of the most significant contemporary literary creations. The present volume, devoted to Chronicle of a Death Foretold, discusses Marquez’s contribution to Latin American Literature and offers a detailed study of this unique novel, which skillfully fuses detective fiction with investigative journalism. It reveals ...
Ever since its publication in 1980, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children has been regarded by critics and scholars a literary masterpiece. A trail-blazing work in many respects, it broke new ground in fiction and set an innovative trend for a whole generation of creative writers. It infused new life into the Indian English novel and elevated its art from the mundane to the magical. The present book, divided into two major sections, is a serious attempt at ...
Toni Morrison is one of the foremost contemporary African-American women novelists. She was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1993. She is best known for her novels The Bluest Eye and Beloved; the latter won her the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. The present book makes a detailed study of Toni Morrison as a novelist with a focus on her novel Beloved. Divided into two sections, it has a unique framework. The first section introduces Toni Morrison, with ...
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818) was instantly rejected by her contemporaries who could at best recognize the work simply as a 'crude Gothic novel'. Thanks to the recent feminist interest in women's writings, Frankenstein is now elevated to the status of a 'novel of ideas'. The present book, a serious study on the background, theme and technique of the novel, brings within its purview all the existing trends of reading the novel in the light of key discourses ...
Nadine Gordimer is the winner of the prestigious Nobel Prize for Literature. Her works, spanning more than five decades, relentlessly expose the traumas and tensions of apartheid in South Africa. My Son's Story (1990) marks a shift in her focus from concern with the role of whites in a sharply polarized society to the experience of those on the other side of the colour bar. Her study of the psychological dilemmas faced by a coloured family and the heavy price ...
Shashi Deshpande is the best known contemporary Indian woman novelist. She is the recipient of Sahitya Akademi Award for her novel That Long Silence. This novel has been acclaimed by critics as the manifesto of Indian feminism. The present book offers a detailed study of the novel that adds to the fast growing corpus of feminist criticism and women’s studies.
Ever since the publication of Chandragupta (1931), the twelfth play by Jayshankar Prasad (1889-1937), Hindi critics have found similarities between this play and the Bengali play with the same title, written by the poet-playwright Dwijendralal Roy (1863-1913). The Bengali play was extremely popular on the Bengali stage and was at the same time enghusiastically read in the contemporary Hindi literary circles. The question of affinity between the two plays or ...
The discussion of feminism in literary context, particularly in the context of recent Indian fiction, is an endeavour of highly innovative nature representing a significant departure from the traditional mode of critical evaluation. The present volume highlights feminine voice articulated in the recent fiction by writers like Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Bharati Mukherjee, Taslima Nasreen, Shobha De and Arundhati Roy. The book projects the ...
Girish Karnad is the best known contemporary Indian Playwright. His plays like Tughlazy, Tale Danda and The fire and the Rain have been immensely popular with the stage and also the readers. The present volume offers a detailed examination of Karnad's play Hayavadana. This is the first full length study of the play and is addressed to students, schoarls and specialists of Indian drama.
August Strindberg (1849-1912) ranks as one of the great master of modern European drama and a major influence on many innovative writers of the twentieth century. His varied and prolific writings encompass a vast range of styles from naturalism and symbolism to expressionism and even a kind of surrealism in his “dream†plays. Miss Julie (1888) belongs to Strindberg’s naturalistic period in which his own violent conflicts and anxieties about class and sexual ...
Rohinton Mistry is an eminent writer of the Indian Diaspora. Settled in Canada, he has emerged as a significant literary figure during the recent years. His very first novel Such a Long Journey received a wide acclaim and has been regarded as a landmark in the history of Indian fiction. The novel, overtly socio-political, vividly depicts Bombay and the Parsi world. The present volume, the first of its kind, offers a critical and insightful commentary on this ...
Raja Rao's Kanthapura is one of the best-known Indian novels in English and regarded a contemporary Indian classic. Published in 1938, it presents a phase of Indian history through the story of a south Indian village in the nineteen thirties with a unique force of evocative and interesting details. The novel made such a strong impact on Indian psyche that during the last six decades since it was published, it has intensely gripped the minds of the readers, in ...