Indrani Karmakar

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.

Storying Relationships explores the sexual lives of young British Muslims in their own words and through their own stories. It finds engaging and surprising stories in a variety of settings: when young people are chatting with their friends; conversing more formally within families and communities; scribbling in their diaries; and writing blogs, poems and books to share or publish.These stories challenge stereotypes about Muslims, who are frequently portrayed as unhappy in love and sexually different. The young people who emerge in this book, contradicting racist and Islamophobic stereotypes, are assertive and creative, finding and making their own ways in matters of the body and the heart.Their stories – about single life, meeting and dating, pressure and expectations, sex, love, marriage and dreams – are at once specific to the young British Muslims who tell them, and resonant reflections of human experience.

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.

Storying Relationships explores the sexual lives of young British Muslims in their own words and through their own stories. It finds engaging and surprising stories in a variety of settings: when young people are chatting with their friends; conversing more formally within families and communities; scribbling in their diaries; and writing blogs, poems and books to share or publish.These stories challenge stereotypes about Muslims, who are frequently portrayed as unhappy in love and sexually different. The young people who emerge in this book, contradicting racist and Islamophobic stereotypes, are assertive and creative, finding and making their own ways in matters of the body and the heart.Their stories – about single life, meeting and dating, pressure and expectations, sex, love, marriage and dreams – are at once specific to the young British Muslims who tell them, and resonant reflections of human experience.