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Along with a range of socio-cultural, political and economic concerns, the focus on ‘self’ has been an inevitable assertion of writers during the last quarter of the twentieth century. Individualistic in tone, the contemporary women novelists are trying to portray realistically the predicament of modern women torn between the forces of tradition and modernity, their sense of frustration and alienation, the emotional and psychological turmoil and complexities of man-women relationships and subtleties of feminine consciousness against the persistent patriarchal social set-up. Cognizant of the evils originating from patriarchy, a positive sense of feminine identity has been recognized by them and the result is the emergence of a new woman in Indian society and its concept in the Indian English novel which has assumed a strident posture in the contemporary writings by women. The shift from submission to assertion, acquiescence to resistance and obedience to rebellion, however, has not been abrupt and effortless. Women are still in the process of negotiation with different limiting factors and thresholds of patriarchy to claim their due space and affirm their identity. The present study is an attempt to critically investigate the negotiations with cultural norms by the women characters in the selected novels by the contemporary novelists, namely Manju Kapur and Anita Nair. Almost all the women characters, major and minor, from the selected novels have been considered and positioned as per their ideological leanings and convictions under two thematic chapters namely “Women in the Clutches of Traditional Norms,” and “Tradition to Modernity.” The major issues around which the novels move – education, marriage, gendered space and mother-daughter relationships – are taken up to put them within the contemporary social conditions in which women characters live. The present book is divided into five chapters to make a critical and analytical study of the select novels of these contemporary Indian women writers in English. The present work is focused on five selected novels: Manju Kapur’s “Difficult Daughters”, “Home” and “Custody” and Anita Nair’s “Ladies Coupé” and “Mistress”.

Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History brings together two authors, Umberto Eco and Orhan Pamuk, not frequently studied in comparison. By focusing on their non/fictional works to present a unique study of the methods and concepts of representation, Murthy uses contemporary historical novels to examine fictional depictions of reality, and provides a fresh perspective on representation studies in literature. Written in an accessible style, and tapping into fields as varied as literary and critical theory, the historical novel, postmodernism, and historiography, Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History considers the ways in which reality, as discourse, confronts a text-external reality, and how this confrontation affects the autonomy of the fictional space – topics that remain persistently problematic areas within literary studies. Eco’s The Name of the Rose and Baudolino, and Pamuk’s My Name is Red and Snow, with their topical concerns and methods of representation, promise a rewarding comparative study. This book provides an early critical framework for these four works, placing them within the rubric of the postmodernist historical novel, as creative works that also comment on the process of literary writing through their recreation of historical pasts. In this respect, Historicizing Fiction/Fictionalizing History promises to be an engaging read in literary criticism and historiography, as well as a handy companion for Eco and Pamuk enthusiasts.

The book is an attempt to analyze the construction of India by five authors in their seminal works of literature. The first of the five novels is A Passage to India by E. M. Forster published in 1924. Chronologically, it is followed by Midnight’s Children, the “Booker of Bookers” for the year 1993, published in 1981 by Salman Rushdie. The third one is The Great Indian Novel , modeled on the Great Indian Epic, The Mahabharata, published in 1989 by Shashi Tharoor. The fourth one belongs to the canon of Regional Literature and is composed by Kamleshwar. The original title is Kitne Pakistan published in 2000 and the English translation Partitions came in 2006. The book makes use of the text in Hindi for reference and quoting. There are two reasons for this: first, language is not merely a medium between the text and the reader, but also something that carries a ‘voice’. The use of Hindi by Kamleshwar has a bearing on the kind of di scourse bei ng generated, as di scussed l ater. Secondl y, language acts in a cultural context and hence the impact that it carries is properly highlighted only in the original language in which the work has been composed. A translated work is, at times, not able to convey the spirit behind the words. The quotes from the text have been given in Roman script. The last one taken is Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, published in 2006 and the winner of the “Man Booker Prize” in the same year.