From Bondages to Emancipation:
Women in English Literature
ISBN 978-81-7273-656-9
Worldwide Circulation through Authorspress Global Network. The book is also available online on flipkart, infibeam, alibris, amazon, snapdeal, ebay, Southasiabooks and so on
First Published in 2012 by AUTHORSPRESS, New Delhi-110 016
ABOUT BOOK
ABOUT BOOK
For all we know,
we inhabit the ‘postmodern’ society, where voices clash, react and converge
only to split into a cacophonic harmony of new and emerging trends that
influence lives as well as cultures. Yet, when it comes to the audibility of
women’s voices in the amalgam of sounds, the volume is rather low---is it that
they still do not have a voice?...or is it that they speak and we fail to hear
them?
Working for women
through various platforms gave us both these experiences and it was while
ruminating on such issues, the idea of this book From Bondages to Emancipation: Women in English Literature germinated. The
experiences of women reflected in literature and the myriad interpretations of
those reflections by both men and women readers, seemed to be an interesting
opening towards the unlocking of their urges and longings for emancipation through
the media of pen and paper. Whether it be the discussion of literary theories
or an analysis of literary characters, this book has made an effort to
catalogue the power of women’s expressions---both reading and writing. This
analysis purports to break the stereotypical belief systems that convince us
that the burdens of power are too great to seek and the happiness of
powerlessness is too great to leave. The prisons of predictions are broken
through efforts that seek to enhance and glorify the individual destinies of
women through literature.
If writing in
one’s mothertongue can be alternatively deciphered as the continuatin of the
idea of a female linguistic/literary heritage; a discussion of alternate models
of sexuality seems to openly threaten the ideal of heteronormativism (the
idea/belief that heterosexuality is the norm from which any sexual behaviour
deviant is condemned as un-natural, immoral and “queer”.) In all forms there
registers a strong sense of what Adrienne Rich called the “Lesbian Continuum”,
which is nothing but an all-encompassing space wherein all relationships
between women, sexual and non-sexual, find articulation and strength. Well, at
all levels (and dealing with all forms of feminist articulations) the one thing
that perpetually haunted our minds was the defining of women’s creativity as
resistance and art...defining it so that the “newly found feminist” thinker in
our women readers ( and to quiet an extent in the males as well) would not feel
guilty...guilty of being a bad cook, guilty of being a bad mother...or the
guilt of being a writer in the first place...when the vegetables were waiting
to be washed in the kitchen! Writing is therapeutic, for the researcher as well
as the author...and this volume aims to present in a coherent form the
pressures of both various bondages and
resistance, both through a reading of the presented texts and their
analysis...so that we might once again be able to possibly find a way to women’s
voices...women’s emancipation! This was our attempt and we hope this volume
turns out to be as such!!
Dr. Arvind M.
Nawale
-Dr. Sheeba Rakesh
