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This book explores the dramatic rise in popularity of the women’s biopic in contemporary Bollywood, within the context of wider cultural shifts over the past decade. Delving into the societal shifts reflected in the genre, both on and off screen, the book explores the contours of individual agency and the centring of women in Indian cinema. The book offers new insight into women-centric Hindi biopics, a fast-rising genre carving out a tradition of its own, with female directors and actors contributing to this rising postfeminist celebration of women’s agency and individuality. The authors posit that the alternative narratives, created by Bollywood and accepted by mainstream audiences, have become a catalyst to elevate women or female actors to protagonists, without the need to conform to the sexist mores of mainstream Bollywood. This book will be of interest to scholars, researchers and upper-level students in the areas of film studies, media industries, gender and feminism, and South Asian studies.
The research on men and masculinities traces back to the women’s and gay liberation movements that challenged existing understandings of gender and power. This proposes to look into gender as socially constructed than what was earlier thought to be biological. As a logical extension of Feminism, Masculinity Studies looks into sex/gender as a discursive social construct and tries to understand them through theoretical hermeneutics. Instead of considering masculinity to be ‘natural character type’, ‘a behavioural average’ or ‘a norm’, the focus should be given to the process through which the gendered bodies perform. In this regard, sex/gender is not fixed, instead is in a continuous flux; thus, masculinity should be recognised as a gender presentation that is continuously transforming and evolving. This volume, Body Politics: Rethinking Gender and Masculinity will engage with the current developments in the field of Masculinity Studies and will try to diversify the issues of gender and masculinity.
Transoceanic Perspectives in Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy studies Ghosh’s Sea of Poppies (2008), River of Smoke (2011) and Flood of Fire (2015) in relation to maritime criticism. Juan-José Martín-González draws upon the intersections between maritime criticism and postcolonial thought to provide, via an analysis of the Ibis trilogy, alternative insights into nationalism(s), cosmopolitanism and globalization. He shows that the Victorian age in its transoceanic dimension can be read as an era of proto-globalization that facilitates a materialist critique of the inequities of contemporary global neo-liberalism. The book argues that in order to maintain its critical sharpness, postcolonialism must re-direct its focus towards today’s most obvious legacy of nineteenth-century imperialism: capitalist globalization. Tracing the migrating characters who engage in transoceanic crossings through Victorian sea lanes in the Ibis trilogy, Martín-González explores how these dispossessed collectives made sense of their identities in the Victorian waterworlds and illustrates the political possibilities provided by the sea crossing and its fluid boundaries.
‘Rabindranath Tagore's Drama in the Perspective of Indian Theatre’ maps Tagore’s place in the Indian dramatic/performance traditions by examining unexplored critical perspectives on his drama such as his texts as performance texts; their exploration in multimedia; reflections of Indian culture in his plays; comparison with playwrights; theatrical links to his world of music and performance genres; his plays in the context of cross-cultural, intercultural theatre; the playwright as a poet-performer-composer and their interconnections and his drama on the Indian stage.
In Middlemarch, George Eliot famously warns readers not to see themselves as the centre of their own world, which produces a ‘flattering illusion of concentric arrangement’. The scholarly contributors to Antipodean George Eliot resist this form of centrism. Hailing from four continents and six countries, they consider Eliot from a variety of de-centred vantage points, exploring how the obscure and marginal in Eliot’s life and work sheds surprising light on the central and familiar. With essays that span the full range of Eliot’s career—from her early journalism, to her major novels, to eccentric late works such as Impressions of Theophrastus Such—Antipodean George Eliot is committed to challenging orthodoxies about Eliot’s development as a writer, overturning received ideas about her moral and political thought, and unveiling new contexts for appreciating her unparalleled significance in nineteenth-century letters.
The first edited collection of essays dedicated to Shyam Benegal's career and films.
Outside the world of children’s literature studies, children’s books by authors of well-known texts “for adults” are often forgotten or marginalized. Although many adults today read contemporary children’s and young adult fiction for pleasure, others continue to see such texts as unsuitable for older audiences, and they are unlikely to cross-read children’s books that were themselves cross-written by authors like Chinua Achebe, Anita Desai, Joy Harjo, or Amy Tan. Meanwhile, these literary voices have produced politically vital works of children’s literature whose complex themes persist across boundaries of expected audience. These works form part of a larger body of activist wr...
A notable contribution on Tagore's vision of womanhood This book theorizes the continuous reconfigurations--'making' and 'unmaking'--of female subjectivity in Tagore's life, his times, and his works. This transhistorical approach in the book makes gender formations and discourses of the past relevant and necessary to the understanding of postmodern gender issues and ideologies. A unique feature of this compilation is the variety of genres that it covers, ranging from Tagore's poems, dance dramas, dance forms and their innovative uses, the gender-specific nature of several Rabindrasangeet, his travel writings and paintings, to highlighting the postmodern reworks of Tagore's novels on celluloid. On the whole, this edited collection with its extensive focus on the issues of gender, heterosexual love, marriage and patriarchy in relation to the works of Tagore strengthens the claim that the politics of culture and the gendering of social subjectivity were intrinsic to the representative ideologies of literature of the nineteenth and twentieth century.
Highlighting neo-Victorian biofiction’s crucial role in reimagining and augmenting the historical archive, this volume explores the complex ethical consequences of a creative movement of historiographic revisionism, combining biography and fiction in a dialectic tension of empathy and voyeuristic spectacle.
Discusses Tagore's uniquely varied output across literature, music, art, philosophy, history, politics, education and public affairs.