Robin E. Field

Amritjit Singh

Samina Najmi

Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora offers insights into Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’s provocative and popular fiction. In their engaging and comprehensive introduction, editors Amritjit Singh and Robin Field explore how Divakaruni’s short stories and novels have been shaped by her own struggles as a new immigrant and by the influences she imbibed from academic mentors and feminist writers of color. Twelve critical essays by both aspiring and experienced scholars explore Divakaruni's aesthetic of interconnectivity and wholeness as she links generations, races, ethnicities, and nations in her depictions of the diversity of religious and ethnic affiliations within the Indian diaspora. The contributors offer a range of critical perspectives on Divakaruni’s growth as a novelist of historical, mythic, and political motifs. The volume includes two extended interviews with Divakaruni, offering insights into her personal inspirations and social concerns, while also revealing her deep affection for South Asian communities, as well as an essay by Divakaruni herself—a candid expression of her artistic independence in response to the didactic expectations of her many South Asian readers.

Feminism and Diaspora

Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni explores the fiction of South Asian American writer, Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni, and her aesthetic of interconnectivity and wholeness. Two interviews and an essay by Divakaruni offer indispensable insights into the formal, socio-political, and thematic concerns of this multifaceted artist.

Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction identifies a new genre of American fiction, the rape novel, that recenters narratives of sexual violence on the survivors of violence and abuse, rather than the perpetrators. The rape novel arose during the women's liberation movement as women writers collectively challenged the traditional erasure of female subjectivity and agency found in earlier representations of sexual violence in American fiction. The rape novel not only foregrounds survivors and their stories in a textual centering that affirms their dignity and self-worth, but also develops new narratological strategies for portraying violent, disturbing subject matter. In bringing together many key women's texts of the last decades of the 20th century, the rape novel demonstrates the centrality of sexual assault to women's fiction of this era. The rape novels of the 21st century continue the political activism inherent in the genre - educating readers, offering community to survivors, and encouraging social activism - as the stories of male survivors are increasingly told. A radical reconsideration of late twentieth-century American novels, Writing the Survivor underscores the importance of women's activism upon the novel's form and content and reveals the portrayal of rape as rape to be an interethnic imperative.

The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction

Writing the Survivor

"Writing the Survivor explores how rape novels place survivors at the heart of narratives of sexual violence rather than the perpetrators. This new genre of American fiction develops innovative narratological strategies to sensitively portray violent, disturbing subject matter and promote political activism in its readers"--

Robin E. Field

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