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In Indian society the untouchables and the women are given a subaltern status. They are discriminated against and ill-treated by the patriarchal society. They are generally marginalized and do not have any space for accomplishment and survival. If any woman dares to transgress the boundary line marked by the patriarchal society she has to face denunciation and mortification. Kapur portrays the subaltern status of Indian women and their oppression and humiliation by the patriarchal society. The stories of Kasturi, Sona, Rupa, Ganga, Virmati, Astha, Pipeelika, Nina, Ishita, and Nisha amply bear this out. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The purpose of this small-scale case study was to identify and analyze key patterns in terms of gender representation in children's books in one early childhood setting. Furthermore, this case study sought to understand the perspectives of early childhood educators on gender representation in children's books. The researcher employed multiple methods of data collection, including content analysis of 15 children's books, as well as reflective journal writing and professional conversation between eight educators from one early childhood center in Dublin, Ireland. Content analysis of children's books revealed distinct gender patterns that include underrepresentation of female characters and instances of gender stereotyping. Further findings indicate that educators exhibit a lack of awareness of gender patterns and attribute limited importance to gender representation in children's books. This research hopes to aid early childhood educators in becoming aware of gender stereotyping in children's books, enhancing observation and reflective skills, and creating a more inclusive learning environment. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism is provided of the American historical fiction novels "Cloudsplitter" by James McBride and "The Good Lord Bird," by Russell Banks. Particular focus is given to the books' depiction of the 19th century radical abolitionist John Brown, including gender-related themes and Brown's brother Owen Brown's masculine identity. It briefly discusses the implications of John Brown for the future of radical social movements, within the context of the aforementioned fiction.

A literary criticism is provided on the 1967 novel "Down These Mean Streets," by the Puerto Rican American author Piri Thomas. Particular focus is given to the novel's depiction of interethnic solidarity between Black Americans and Black people from Latin America, racial hierarchy in the U.S. and gender. The book's portrayal of the racial identity of Black people is discussed.

The article presents a literary criticism of the novel "La muerte me da" by Cristina Rivera Garza. Topics discussed include the themes explored by the author in the book including violence, identity and self-discovery; the ambiguous nature of gender; and the Lacanian notion of identity's mediation through language. Also mentioned is the author's use of antonomasia to focus on the variability of a person's identity.

The article talks about the concept of the queer West and its depiction in the Western literature. Topics discussed include the references to homoerotic bonding and transgressive gender representations in Western literature; the discussion about queer in Native American and Aboriginal contexts; and the topic of female masculinity. Also mentioned are several indigenous women warriors of North America.

Departing from Renu Bora's notion of the queerness of textures, this article seeks to understand how locating the queer textures of Mário de Sá- Carneiro's 1914 novella, A confissão de Lúcio, emphasizes the work's engagement with questions of gender, modernity, and decadence. Sá-Carneiro's take on modernity has been described as decadent partly because of his refusal or failure to resolve issues of artistic representation with respect to modernity. Approaching A confissão through the queerness of tactility offers a unique insight into the peculiar relationship between the novella's narrator-protagonist, Lúcio Vaz, his friend Ricardo de Loureiro, and Ricardo's wife Marta. Through an exploration of Ricardo's framing of relationships in terms of gendered possession, this article examines Sá-Carneiro's ultimately fraught and decadent figuration of modernity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

While most early modern authors align themselves with normative views on gender, Soror Maria do Céu (1658-1753) resists and subverts this tradition in her play Clavel, y Rosa, breve comedia aludida a los desposorios de María y Joseph (Carnation and Rose, a brief play on the marriage of Mary and Joseph, 1736). She achieves this in part by creating "feminine" male characters and assigning "masculine" characteristics to her female characters. Soror Maria affords more power and authority to women in her comedia, and she likewise undermines the validity of early modern social expectations related to men and masculinity by scrutinizing gender norms. In the end, Soror Maria creates a space of negotiation between the masculine and the feminine that allows for a reassessment of what it meant to be a man in late seventeenth-century Iberia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study engages in a critical analysis of the Igbo values and how it is represented in Nigerian literature. The study makes references but not exclusively to Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart (1958) and Arrow of God (1964) and No Longer at Ease (1960) by interrogating social reality and how representations of value systems in the selected novels contribute to the understanding of Igbo socio-cultural life. Using textual analysis as a methodological choice, the study critiques the representations as well as [mis]representations of value systems in the novels. The study also draws lessons from reader response theory to examine perceptions and receptions of aspects of Igbo culture like gender and how it is portrayed in the novels. The study ascertains that the views represented in the novels were influenced by several factors such as patriarchy, socialization, consciousness, religion, and education. The study recommends that future authors of African origin should consider emerging African issues that tell the story of African story, and how the stories affect them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines materialism and vitalism in the early 18th-century satirical poem "The Rape of the Lock" by Alexander Pope. The alleged Rosicrucian framework of the poem is scrutinized along with te alleged influence of the 1670 Abbé Montfaucon de Villars book "Le Comte de Gabalis: ou Entretiens sur les Sciences Secretes" on his description of sylphs and the gendered nature of agency in the poem.

The article focuses on American dime novels which depicts racist stereotypes with more complex and illumination of gender. Topics discussed include female American dime novelists, Lydia Maria Child and Catherine Maria Sedgwick; master plot of dime novels as made up of nationalist and class-inflected stories of the American Republic and its origins; and national allegories of the frontier tales of whites overpowering American Indians.

The article analyzes masculinity in young adult literature. It analyzes two young adult novels from two very different cultures including "Mountain Called Me" and "Flour Babies" and seeks to compare the impact of social forces on the masculinization process of their protagonists. It is noted that both novels depict interdependence between young adult masculinity and social elements and exemplifying the impact of social forces on the construction of gender identities.

In this study Walker's novel The Color Purple and Grimke's work Letters on the Equality of the Sexes and the Condition of Woman were analyzed in terms of feminism indicators and feminist views in these works were tried to reveal. The purpose of the study is to depict the feminist aspects of these two works. Generating the study, literature review was used. It is seen that to Walker and Grimke, being black women is much more difficult than being white women. In both works, authors use letter technique to convey their feminist views. Grimke metions about the equality of men and women that should exist in society. Even though she is not black woman, she defends the rights of black women. To her, both men and women were created equally, so they should have the same rights in society. There must not be superiority between sexes. Likewise, in novel of Walker feminist views can be seen clearly. To her, gender and racism is two things with which black woman should struggle. The consequence of the study is that both Walker and Grimke's works include feminist views. Both reveal that there is inequality in society considering the sexes' conditions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short story "Jumping Monkey Hill" was inspired by its author's experience at the inaugural workshop of the Caine Prize for African Writing in 2003, during which, the writer says, she was faced with the lustful and patronizing attitude of the then-administrator of the award. Adichie's piece, by virtue of being a short story about writing itself, is a so-called "metafictional" text. It is on this self-reflexive quality that this essay focuses. More precisely, the article examines the interaction between reality and fiction in Adichie's story, paying particular attention to the ways in which the text uses techniques of mise en abyme to comment on gender subjection, colonially tinged condescension, and resistance to both of these forms of oppression. Ultimately, the essay argues that "Jumping Monkey Hill" can be read as a literary manifesto that incarnates its own theorization, a conclusion that is, however, shown to be problematic in more than one respect. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The majority of characters in Victor Hugo's plays are male. Can we, based on how they are represented, identify common traits that would allow us to understand in what sense and according to what criteria Hugo's imaginary develops a certain portrait of masculinity? A dynamic concept, desire, leads us to analyze a number of portraits of men, allowing us to define this dramaturgical masculinity in terms of who and what they resemble, their differences, and their complementarity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article provides an analysis of screen adaptations based on Charlotte Brontë’s novelJane Eyre(1847). Looking at different cultures of feminism in the 1940s, 1980s and 2000s, it examines how the character of Jane has been diversely portrayed at times when gender norms were being rigorously challenged in the culture. The adaptations’ engagement with Brontë’s implicit feminism is examined in the context of each period’s prevailing feminist ideologies as well as in the practices employed by the film and television industries. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

A literary criticism of the book "In the Heart of the Country" by J. M. Coetzee is presented. It explores the South African author's interest in grounding his white female narrators in his fiction. The novel's thematic tropes and narratological patterns are discussed, as well as its representation of space, gender and affect.

In light of the notions of 'Travelling Theory' (Edward Said 1982), and 'Travelling Concepts' (Mieke Bal 2002; Birgit Neumann & Ansgar Nunning 2012), this article discusses 'feminism' as a travelling theory and 'gender' as a travelling concept in the Egyptian context, through their equivalents and translations in Arabic language. The article traces the histories of the two terms in Egypt, and problematises feminism and gender as complex transnational ideologies and categories, travelling across histories, geographies, cultures, disciplines, languages and politics. This study uses an interdisciplinary approach, and thus stands at the intersection of feminist theory, cultural studies and translation studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article looks again at the figure of the Pardoner in the Canterbury Tales and reconsiders the possibility that 'he' is a woman passing as a man. The importance of such a reading is revealed by exploring the anxieties this raises over the relationship between outward appearance and inner substance or reality, and demonstrating parallels with medieval anxieties over the authenticity of relics and the validity of religious speech acts, including those involved in the transubstantiation of the elements of the Eucharist. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article summarizes the contributions that writers of the Hispanic Caribbean can make to the understanding of the relationship between bodies, subjectivity and power in the Greater Caribbean and the Americas. Based on a more comprehensive study of coming of age novels by Caribbean authors (Antonia Palacios, Magali García Ramis, Marvel Moreno, Fanny Buitrago and Mayra Santos Febres), Celis illuminates the lessons that the writing and analysis of the stories, voices and perspectives of girls and adolescents can offer to Gender studies in the Caribbean and Latin America. In particular, the analysis focuses on the actors, scenarios, discourses and practices surrounding girls' bodies that guarantee the embodiment of gender in patriarchal societies, as well as on the connection of the process by which gender emerges with the institution and functioning of other forms of social hegemony. Celis reviews also the contributions that the concept of 'corporeal consciousness' can make to the urgent revision of the feminist project of emancipation, and to the global process of decolonization. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this paper I have analysed the artistic manifestations of the ego-forming strategies of Sándor/ Sarolta Vay (1859-1918), guided by the patterns of norm-following and norm-rejecting gender performativity and also by stepping outside of these patterns. Sándor Vay was born a woman but lived as a man, constructing his writer ego as a male author as well. This construction could be one form of queer masculinity based on corporeality. The first part of this paper demonstrates Vay's career; the second analyses Vay's poems published under a female name and those published later under a male name, investigating the strategies of textual creation of sexuality and gender. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article presents a literary criticism for the book "Las mujeres españolas, americanas y lusitanas pintadas por sí mismas," by Faustina Sáez de Melgar. The author comments on the representation of gender and race in the work and examines the role of women in the domestic space. The abolition movement in Cuba during the late 19th century as referenced in the book is also explored.

In keeping with the allusive density of Melville's writings, "The Paradise of Bachelors and the Tartarus of Maids" provides readers with a complementary pair of sketches highlighting a gamut of issues relating to gender, sexuality, domesticity, industrialization, and Anglo-American social, cultural, and economic relations. The present essay argues that the ultimate aim of the paired sketches was to educate the reader by dramatically juxtaposing scenes of (English) male privilege and (American) female oppression, showing that the latter was a truer indicator of the human condition; moreover, the second sketch provided a probing and comprehensive survey of the ruthless exploitation of female workers in one of the hundreds of industrial mills established in New England during the antebellum era. With his title drawing on a neglected tradition of proverbial wisdom, Melville incorporated a host of biblical and other religious allusions in his paired sketches in order to enhance the paradigmatic impact of his social and moral critique. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses the depictions of race and the pushing of the boundaries of Victorian gender structures in the Dime novels of Ann Sophia Winterbotham Stephens published by the House of Beadle and Adams. Topics include the characteristics of Stephens's dime novels which was concerned with social reform and a strict moral code and depictions of race and gender in Stephen's novels like "Malaeska, Indian Wife of the White Hunter" and "The Indian Queen".

A literary criticism of the novel "The Burial at Thebes: A Version of Sophocles' Antigone" by Seamus Heaney is presented. It highlights the similarities between the novel and the play, particularly the quarrel between Antigone, the daughter of Oedipus King of Thebes, Greece, and Creon, her uncle and newly appointed King of Thebes. Also discussed are the novel's connection with the 1998 Belfast Agreement and Heaney's interest in the gender politics of Sophocles.

Virginia Woolf’s novel, Orlando, offers a bold vision of the powerful effects of taking control of one’s fashion and, quite literally, trans-gendering one’s identity. The novel follows Woolf’s title character through a series of shifts in gender, time, and personal identity so fluidly. The story is part fantasy, part social critique, and part ironic positivity and hope for the future. As the character Orlando moves effortlessly from male to female to androgyny and back again, stopping only where s/he chooses, and through several centuries of time and across Europe and through Asia Minor (and back again), the reader is given a sense of the power of fashioning oneself. This can and should be read, I argue, in at least two senses: in the first place, Orlando dons and doffs and changes clothing to suit his/her needs and desires for different gender identities. In the second place, we can read “fashioning” in the constructive sense: Orlando fashions Orlando as a carpenter fashions a table. By taking control of this double sense of fashioning, Orlando offers a powerful statement, if only through the irony of the impossibility of the whole thing, on the effect of selfagency through gender performativity and deliberate creative fashioning. Since changing one’s gender identity through fashioning is impossible in real life, Woolf’s text must be seen as ironic, offering a vision of life exactly opposite of reality, but a vision that is nevertheless hopeful because at least here, in her fiction, such a life is possible. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

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This paper aims to demonstrate the influence of the theatrical experience of the authors Eliza Haywood and Jane Austen in their novels: "Fantomina, or Love in a Maze (1725) and "Mansfield Park" (1814). Fanny Price&'s story, enthralling with Jane Austen's fine and ironic humor, and the sensational narrative of Eliza Haywood around an unnamed female character, conventionally called Fantomina, will be compared from the structural and compositional point of view in order to highlight their clear relationship with the dramatic genre, explained by the interest of these English authors in the contemporary theater of their era, which in part they parodied, in part brought narrative innovations to their work under the influence of the specific dramatic art of dialogue, monologue and free indirect speech. The main effect of these modes is both free expression and the internalization of experimentation of fictional events in the case of feminine characters, so readers can understand their feelings and penetrate their ideas, otherwise hidden or ignored in the real life of eighteenth-century women bearing the "masks" in social interactions and in public space. The theoretical framework inspired by the theme of these novels will be the construction of the female identity illustrated by the gender masquerade metaphor in the feminist theory expounded by Betty Friedan in the book titled "The Feminine Mystique". [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Drawing on qualitative data of secondary school students, we examine how gender is implicated in a specific provincial literacy directive to employ comics and superhero fiction to engage boys. Grounded in a multiliteracies and masculinities framework, we interrogate the intersection of gender and literacy practices in a secondary school English classroom. The research in this article offers a counternarrative to a prevailing discourse grounded in essentialist notions of all boys as struggling readers and instead illustrates the rich potential between students' lifeworld connections and comics as engaging and critical literacy texts beyond the "boy book" approach adopted in many literacy classrooms. We further argue that a sharper focus on critical literacy pedagogy, which incorporates comics and superhero fiction, reveals an invisibility of gender differences among adolescent reading practices rather than the visibility that has prompted and maintained gendered reform strategies to "help the boys" increase achievement levels in literacy classrooms. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

With focus on queer resistance emanating from place, this article examines Michelle Paver’s 2010 novelDark Matter: A Ghost Story, set in the 1930s and focused on an all-male expedition to Svalbard. As representatives of the norm, the fictional expedition members attempt to enforce heteronormative models of interpretation characterizing depictions of the Arctic, but several aspects blur the boundaries between previously discreet categories. Starting from Sara Ahmed’s discussions about spatial and existential orientation inQueer Phenomenology(2006), the article maps how the Arctic is imagined and perceived by Jack Miller, the novel’s protagonist. Although hoping that Svalbard will constitute a productive testing ground for a particular kind of inter-war, British masculinity, specificities of place represent a progressively more threatening transgression of what Jack perceives of as normal. The Arctic is thus initially constructed as a stable place; geographical particularities then overturn possibilities for Jack’s orientation, and supernatural occurrences finally violate boundaries between past and present, sane and mad. What Ahmed refers to as ‘queer moments’ that slant that subject’s perception of the world are in the novel produced by the actual as well as the supernatural Arctic: they highlight a continuous, geographically specific resistance to categorization. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Julia Kristeva’s idea of the semioticchōracontinues to haunt gender, literary, and political theory and practice. Reaching what some might consider its controversial climax in the early to middle 1990s – following its introduction inLa revolution du langage poétique– the fate of thechōrawas left mainly with Judith Butler’s deconstruction of Kristeva’s use of the term inGender TroubleandBodies that Matter. Respectively Butler argues: (a) ‘Kristeva restricts herself to an exclusivelyprohibitiveconception of the paternal law, [and] is unable to account for the ways in which the paternal lawgeneratescertain desires in the form of natural drives’ and (b) ‘Kristeva insists upon [the] identification of thechorawith the maternal body.’ The present article seeks to resurrect this debate with a critique of Kristeva’s as well as Butler’s position regarding thechōra; my argument is twofold: (i) Kristeva is guilty of being unable to account for the generative capacity of the paternal law and (ii) Kristeva’s use of the semioticchōradoes indeed resonate uncomfortably close to certain frequencies of essentialism in gender theory; however, both criticism can be overcome by addingchōros, the masculine form ofchōra, to Kristeva’s theoretical lexicon. In order to sketch out the implications for gender, literary, and political theory and practice I turn to American author and critic Samuel R. Delany’sThrough the Valley of the Nest of Spiders. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Chaucer's Merchant's Tale has long been criticized for its apparently disjunctive themes and style, yet by reading it as a series of five debates concerning gender and marriage, its organic unity comes into sharper focus. The primary sections of the tale--the marriage encomium, Justinus and Placebo's argument, May's wedding night, the mythological interlude of Pluto and Proserpina, and the tale's fabliau resolution--each highlight various aspects of the classical and medieval debate tradition, as they also foreground considerations of male and female desires within the marital realm. A sixth debate emerges in Chaucer's metatextual construction of the pilgrims' varying views of gender and marriage. As the masculinist arena of debate is regendered through the tale's unfolding, its fabliau humor envisions a world in which women can debate as persuasively as men--even through their silence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study presents a comparative and cross-linguistic (English and Czech) examination of female and male characters in contemporary British and Czech fiction texts written by female and male authors. We approach the texts within the corpus stylistics framework using four broadly comparable corpora of British and Czech fiction. Our focus is on the most frequent nouns occurring with the possessive pronouns his and her and jeho and její, respectively. By examining the nouns we look at how female and male characters are linguistically represented: what are the main differences between their representation and to what extent they are similar. We also aim to look at whether the author's gender plays a role in the process of characterisation. Further, we aim to pinpoint the differences in characterisation by comparing the British and Czech fiction texts. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper examines the interplay between polygyny and gender by exploring the way in which family structure and gender roles are negotiated, imagined and exercised in fiction. Aminatta Forna's Ancestor Stones (2006) is read in order to explore how the institution of polygyny changes over time and how it influences gender role negotiation. Using an African feminist approach, the paper juxtaposes the historical and contemporary institution of polygyny in relation to gender role negotiation and how contemporary writers build on their literary precursors in re-writing the history of polygyny and gender according to the socio-cultural needs of twenty-first century Africans. These changes in socio-cultural, economic and political spheres in Africa have played a pivotal role in altering family structure and arrangements. I therefore argue that the changes in familial structure and arrangement necessitate gender role negotiation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A literary criticism of the novel "Philidore and Placentia: or, L'Amour trop Delicat," by Eliza Haywood, is presented. Topics include the role of the masculinity and virtue of the character Philidore in the novel, Aristotelian aspects of the view of gender in the novel, and the use of the romance genre to depict masculinity, virtue, and desire.

The article discusses several novels including "Orlando" by Virginia Woolf, "Gender Trouble" by Judith Butler, and "Trans Liberation" by Leslie Feinberg. "Orlando" highlights transnational modernism and questions gender and sexual identity in the 20th century. It talks about the use of the prefix 'trans' in understanding of gender and its relevance in literary studies. It states that most of the U.S. forms of identification require a definitive statement about gender.

A literary criticism of the book "Carrie," by Stephen King, is presented. It considers the novel within the genre of American Gothic literature written in the post-war period with a suburban setting, highlighting the periods social anxieties. Topics explore how the work present a white middle class neighborhood, other in literature, and the interrelationship between gender, women, and witchcraft.

Framed as a series of staged exchanges between Ulysses and Sigmund Freud's writings on forms of sexual dysfunction, this essay theorizes the narrative effects and hermeneutic disturbances of "detotalized details" in both. By tarrying slowly and at dizzyingly close proximity with these tiny details and their textual milieus, I illuminate in these artificial accessories or capricious beauty spots the emergence of differential forms threaded together by their pleasurable referential emptiness, diegetic short-circuiting, and the spotting with glitches the seamlessly draped fantasy of textual totality. I examine these interstices of formal lack and hermeneutic hollowing through the lens of three undercut conceptual webs: femininity, uselessness, and failure. In conversation with theorists of aesthetic mediation and subjectivity in modernism (Emily Apter, Walter Benjamin, Adolf Loos, Naomi Schor, and Georg Simmel), this essay dwells on the productive discursive dysfunctions of form in Joyce's novel and of psychoanalytic theory, fashioning through stretchy garters, snug stockings, and overdetermined panties what their mutual discursive imbrication can teach us about the uses and uselessnesses of interpretation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Mahesh Dattani is a versatile playwright, actor, director, screen writer, film maker, teacher and a man of erudite aspects. His writing is the metamorphosis for the modern contemporary Indian society, of his own life and of others too. The present paper is a brief study (homosexuality, gender issues) by Dattani in his plays. (The term queer is used here in nonpejorative modern sense, as analysis of the history of the use of the term clearly shows that it is used as part of gay pride.) The themes of taboo relationship and homosexuality are the prime motives of the plays like On a Muggy Night in Mumbai and Do the Needful. Queer presence in Dattani's work can be seen in the play Do the Needful (1997). The plot centers on the negotiations for an arranged marriage between Alpesh, a Gujarati man, and Lata, a Kannada woman. It is revealed that the woman is not ready for the marriage because she loves Salim, a Muslim man, while the prospective groom is in love with a man named Trilok. Although she tells Alpesh about her love for another man, Alpesh keeps mum about his homosexual relationship. Alpesh's homosexuality is revealed to Lata when she surprises him and the gardener of her family having sex in the cow shed, just as she is about to flee with Salim. At first horrified, she decides that the best way to cope up with the situation is to marry Alpesh. On a Muggy Night in Mumbai (1998) places homosexuality at its central attraction. In this play, five are gay men and one is a lesbian. The plot hinges on Kamlesh's trying to conceal from his sister Kiran the fact that he was in a relationship with the man she is about to marry. The play samples a wide canvas of male homosexual presence in Indian society. Kamlesh is a compromising & straight-acting gay man. His ex-boyfriend Sharad is intelligent and campy. Ed is in denial and is ready for a heterosexual marriage after having an affair with his fiancée's brother, Kamlesh. Bunny is a celebrity and in the closet. Having all these themes and ideas into focus, in this paper my attempt is to analyze the plays of Dattani in the light of Queer Space. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The American feminist writer Joanna Russ (1937-2011) finds her way to claim women's position not only in society but also in 'life' in the feminist utopian genre. Her famous work The Female Man was hardly the first feminist science fiction novel. It was originally written in 1970 and first published in 1975 Russ creates While away , the literary utopian space of The Female Man, a world that resembles paradise where no man lives, and where woman 'while away their time' and live life their own way. The character Joanna in the novel calls herself the 'female man' because she believes that she must forget her identity as a woman in order to be respected. A relatively common motif in speculative fiction is the existence of single-gender worlds or single-sex societies .These fictional societies have long been one of the primary ways to explore implication of gender-difference in science fiction and fantasy. The novel follows the lives of four women living in parallel worlds that differ in time and place. When they cross over to each other's worlds, their different views on gender roles startle each other's preexisting notions of women hood. In the end, their encounters influence them to evaluate their lives and shape their idea of what it means to be a woman. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article is about Rabindranath Tagore’s construction of the new bhadramahila in ‘‘The Wife’s Letter’’ (1914) and The Home and the World (1915). In particular, the arguments focus on the constitution of ‘‘independent’’ women subjects by three interrelated authorial strategies: first, the modification of the home to repurpose gender relations; second, the importance of the ‘‘Lotus feet’’ or charan in the reconstitution of the new bhadramahila, and, third, the establishment of the benevolent, reformed bhadralok as the saviour. In conclusion, the article states that even if Tagore considered ‘‘the women’s question’’ in a pragmatic manner, he saw it more as a social, rather than as a political, problem. Therefore, he could not liberate the female protagonists completely. Instead, he reconstitutes the home as a ‘‘locus of the unconquered and uncompromised [space] under the tutelage of the reformed bhadralok and reaffirming women’s subordinate position’’ (Mitra 247). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]