Women Writing Violence: The Novel and Radical Feminist Imaginaries - Hardcover

A fine study of ecriture feminine, ranging over time and space.... Subramanian has offered a brilliant analysis of eight novels cutting across culture and history.

[The book] explores the various ways in which women who are violence of victim seek solace and ways to move on by forging new ‘imagined communities’...[it] also seeks to understand the different levels at which community works and contributes to a better understanding of how women try to bring meaning into suffering.

The author interweaves the literary landscapes of African-American writer Toni Morrison with the oeuvre of South Asian writers Mridula Garg, Tahmina Durrani, Amrita Pritam, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Mahasweta Devi. This results in the opening of a new gateway into the thinking about violence and survival through a feminist, transnational lens.

Subramanian places women's literary imaginary at the margins of both the nation-state and the patriarchal community. She creates a specifically female language and emphasizes the ingenious ways in which women characters in novels restore dignity and agency to their kin and beloved. The book focuses on voice and narrative techniques within the novel and transgresses the confines of the Enlightenment discourse to reckon with conceptual categories such as community and belonging.