Women Writing in India 600 B.C. to the Present (Volume II the 20th Century) - Rilegato

9780195628395: Women Writing in India 600 B.C. to the Present (Volume II the 20th Century)

Rilegato

ISBN 10: 019562839X ISBN 13: 9780195628395

Casa editrice: Oxford University Press, 1993

Susie Tharu and K. Lalita's ambitiously-conceived project of compiling women's writing in India spanning twenty-six centuries has resulted in the path-breaking two-volume publication entitled Women Writing in India: 600 B.C. to the Present. Volume I of the series (600 B.C. to the Early Twentieth Century), is an astonishing collection of 140 selections of poetry and prose by sixty-eight individual authors, as well as folk songs (whose authorship is unattributable to one individual because of the nature of the genre) and two anonymous prose pieces: an 1881 speech reprinted in a newspaper, and an 1889 newspaper article. Even a complete awareness of the immensity of the scope of this anthology, which is perhaps the first-ever attempt to record in two volumes a body of writing spanning twenty-six hundred years, and which sometimes retrieves an oral subaltern (female) tradition, probably cannot communicate the ardousness of the archival work involved. And as Tharu and Lalita suggest in their preface to Volume I, careful, painstaking archival searches for women's writing had to be supplemented considerably by reports or claims of extant works which were anecdotal at best. Private collections-ranging from private libraries maintaining an interest in women's writing, to hand-written copies of poems found in prayer rooms-seem to have been a significant source. Tharu and Lalita report how the absence of formal documentation or criticism limited biographical resources to letters, memoirs, and sometimes, interviews with the women's families-and so Tharu and Lalita's meticulous biographical headnotes preceding each entry in this volume represent nothing short of miracles in original research. Apart from the range of the work published, or the biographical information provided which inscribes a female literary tradition in India, Volume I is invaluable for the quantity of first-time translations. Over half of the entries in this volume are original translations.

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