Includes songs by Buddhist nuns, testimonies of medieval rebel poets and court historians, and the voices of more than 60 other writers of the 18th and 19th centuries. Among the diverse selections are a rare early essay by an untouchable woman; an account by the first feminist historian; and a selection from the first novel written in English by an Indian woman.

These ground-breaking collections offer 200 texts from eleven languages, never before available in English or as a collection, along with a new reading of cultural history that draws on contemporary scholarship on women and India. This extraordinary body of literature and important documentary resource illuminates the lives of Indian women through 2,600 years of change and extends the historical understanding of literature, feminism, and the making of modern India. The biographical, critical, and bibliographical headnotes in both volumes, supported by an introduction which Anita Desai describes as "intellectually rigorous, challenging, and analytical," place the writers and their selections within the context of Indian culture and history.

The second volume following on from the first, which spanned the years 600 BC to the early-20th century, this book offers a new reading of cultural history that draws on contemporary scholarship on women and India. The books cover over 140 texts from 13 languages.

Through an analysis of the writings of three 20th century Indian women, this book explores how the memoirs, fictions, and histories written by women can be read as counter-narratives of colonial modernity.

This book is a comparative and developmental study of the expression of feminist concerns in the novels of Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal, Anita Desai, and Shashi Deshpande, among the best known and most prolific Indian novelists writing in English, who have been self-consciously engaged with women's issues during the postcolonial era.

Revised and expanded edition of Noriko Mizuta Lippit and Kyoko Iriye Selden's Stories by Contemporary Japanese Women Writers [1982]

Women Writing the Nation: National Identity, Female Community, and the British - French Connection, 1770-1820 engages in recent discussions of the development of British nationalism during the eighteenth century and Romantic period. Leanne Maunu argues that women writers looked not to their national identity, but rather to their gender to make claims about the role of women within the British nation. Discussing texts by Frances Burney, Charlotte Smith, Mary Wollstonecraft, and others in the late-eighteenth and early-nineteenth centuries, Maunu demonstrates that women writers of this period imagined themselves as members of a fairly stable community, even if such a community was composed of many different women with many different beliefs. They appropriated the model of collectivity posed by the nation, mimicking a national imagined community.

Italian Women Writers looks at the work of three of the most significant women in late nineteenth century Italy whose domestic fiction and journalism addressed a growing female readership.

Offers A Wide Range Of Writing In English Fiction, Including Stories For Children, Autobiographies, Articles, Letters-Private And Public. An Informative Introduction To The Period Adds To The Usefulness Of The Volume. Useful For Those Interested In Women`S Literature In Modern India.