Exploring a huge variety of texts written in English from India and Canada, the eighteen essays contained in the present anthology belong to current debates on the scope and methodology of comparative literary and cultural studies. These essays speculate on their interrelatedness as they consider them in new combinations from different critical angles. Although the emphasis is mainly on feminine/feminist perspectives and on women writers, some male writers—most notably Sri Aurobindo and Amitav Ghosh—have also been studied in the anthology. There are essays on fiction and non-fiction including novels, memoirs, autobiographies, short stories, cultural criticism, author interviews, as also essays on poetry—both Indian and Canadian. Authors frequently cited are Deshpande, Desai, Das, Markandaya from India, and Atwood, Kogawa, Laurence, Munro and First Nations women writers from Canada.
In addition, there are some thought-provoking comparative studies across historical periods and references to literary critics, cultural historians, Indian and Western theorists, which raise challenging questions about the appropriateness of uncritically applying Western feminist and postcolonial theories to readings of some Indian women’s fiction or to First Nations women’s poetry. Besides, some essays deal with gender issues—women’s spaces, women’s bodies and violence against them, women’s silences and their struggle to voice their subjective experiences, women’s quest for identity, and women’s relation to nature and tradition.
Quilting Relationships is remarkably an original collection exploring new angles of interpretations and speculations that construct new and exciting theoretical perspectives. It will definitely serve as a guiding spirit for scholars and researchers of English literature, particularly those who want to examine new methods of approaching literary texts, thereby making the book an exciting, interesting and motivating venture.
H. Kalpana teaches English at Pondicherry University, India. She has specialized in Commonwealth literature, with special emphasis on Canadian literature and is keen on studies dealing with women’s fiction and feminist theories. She had been the recipient of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Graduate Research Award in 1994. As a SICI scholar she was affiliated with the University of Alberta, Edmonton, Canada and worked on the project, “Re-Shaping the Self: Feminine Identity in the Short Stories of Alice Munro and Shashi Deshpande”. She completed her doctorate in 1996. She was awarded a research fellowship (1999-2002) from the Ministry of Human Resource Development and completed a project “Interpretation of Media through Feminist Theories”. She was an associate (2001-04) at the Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla, India where she researched on “Feminism in Kannada and Telugu Literature”.
Dr. Kalpana has to her credit a number of publications primarily dealing with women’s issues and women’s writing in a comparative perspective. With her specialization in Canadian writing she has been teaching North American writing besides other British Literature papers.
