Sreemati Mukherjee

Women and the Romance of the Word (eBook, PDF)

19th Century Contexts in Bengal

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

Around the middle of the 19th century, woman emerges as a new sign disrupting the cultural economy of Bengal and reversing and realigning conventional notions and expectations of woman's agency and power. The colonial interface would have been important because a need for women's overall development was felt amongst the male intelligentsia of the period and some of the key texts that circulated at the beginning of the 19th century were Mary Wollstonecraft's Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), Thomas Paine's Rights of Man (1791), James Mill's History of British India (1817), Richard Carlile's Every Woman's Book (1826) and William
Thompson's Appeal of One Half the Human Race, Women, against the Pretensions of the Other Half, Men (1825). The inaugural moment of this outstanding efflorescence of women's writing in polemics, travel writing,
autobiography and journal articles could be said to begin with Kailashbasini Devi's Hindu Mahilaganer Heenabastha (The Woeful Plight of Hindu Women, 1863), in autobiographies like Rassundari Devi's Amar Jiban (My Life, 1876) and Binodini Dasi's Amar Katha (My Words, 1913) and in personalised travelogues like Krishnabhabini Das's Englande Banga Mahila (A Bengali Woman in England, 1885). As Kailashbasini, Rassundari, Krishnabhabini and Binodini write, the romance of the word, the romance of learning and self-realisation is enacted. A new dramatic script emerges as Bengali women become the scriptwriters of their own histories.

Produktdetails

• Verlag: Bloomsbury UK eBooks
• Seitenzahl: 186
• Erscheinungstermin: 30. April 2024
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9789356406049
• Artikelnr.: 72250545

Autorenporträt

Sreemati Mukherjee is Professor in the Department of Performing Arts at Presidency University, Kolkata, India. Her areas of academic
competence are Feminist Criticism and Theory, Narrative Theory, African American and African Women's Writing, Postcolonial Criticism and Literature, Theatre Studies, and Music. She was
a Fulbright Visiting Lecturer to the Department of English and Comparative Literature at San Diego State University, in the Fall of 2011. She has five books to her credit and her essays on
various critical aspects of women's writing have been published by Routledge, Amsterdam University Press, Litteraria Pragensia, Oxford Journals and JSL. Her latest publication The Many Dialogues of the Sri Sri Ramakrishna Kathamrita which is a Bakhtinian analysis
of this iconic text was published by Hawakal, Delhi and Kolkata.
Sreemati Mukherjee is also a documentary film maker and a trained Rabindrasangeet singer.

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgements
1. Questions of Gender, Nation, Reform and Writing: 19th-Century Women's
Writing in Bengal
2. Autobiography Definitions, Mutations and Transformations
3. Feminism and Polemics: Kailashbasini Devi's 'The Woeful Plight of Hindu
Women' ('Hindu Mahilaganer Heenabastha')
4. Rassundari Dasi's Amar Jiban: Romancing the Self and the Text
5. Travel Writer, Feminist, Sociologist, Patriot: Krishnabhabini Das in
Englande Banga Mahila (A Bengali Woman in England)
6. Writing Theatre, the Performing Self and the Nation: Binodini Dasi's
Amar Katha
7. The Story Goes On
References
Index
About the Author