Maryam Mirza – författare

South Asian Literature focusses on a rich and substantial body of writing that has emerged from South Asia over the past twenty-five years. It places literatures from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in their rapidly shifting social, political, literary, and legal contexts.Drawing on a wide cross-section of texts, the book explores these vibrant literary landscapes as they are currently evolving. Over six chapters, it examines thematic strands that allow productive points of entry into the contested, embattled terrain of South Asia: ‘Colonial Times and Legacies’; ‘Conflict’; ‘Gender and Sexuality’; ‘Caste’; ‘The City’; and ‘Migrations, Displacements and Dislocations’.This book is an important resource for scholars of South Asian literature as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of world literatures in English, postcolonial studies, and South Asian cultural studies.

South Asian Literature focusses on a rich and substantial body of writing that has emerged from South Asia over the past twenty-five years. It places literatures from India, Pakistan and Sri Lanka in their rapidly shifting social, political, literary, and legal contexts.Drawing on a wide cross-section of texts, the book explores these vibrant literary landscapes as they are currently evolving. Over six chapters, it examines thematic strands that allow productive points of entry into the contested, embattled terrain of South Asia: ‘Colonial Times and Legacies’; ‘Conflict’; ‘Gender and Sexuality’; ‘Caste’; ‘The City’; and ‘Migrations, Displacements and Dislocations’.This book is an important resource for scholars of South Asian literature as well as undergraduate and postgraduate students in the fields of world literatures in English, postcolonial studies, and South Asian cultural studies.

‘Mirza’s theorization of resistance is a substantive addition to feminist and postcolonial scholarship, and her rich readings of different literary texts make a valuable contribution to feminist literary studies.’ Nalini Iyer, Professor of English, Seattle University'Resistance and its discontents in South Asian women’s fiction is a rigorous and impassioned exploration of the concept of resistance in postcolonial literature. It is an essential contribution to the field of postcolonial studies and a compelling excavation of resistance in South Asian women’s writing.'Claire Chambers, Professor of Global Literature, University of York'Mirza’s comprehensive take on what counts as “resistance” in Anglophone fiction by women writers from South Asia and its diaspora—not just its heroic manifestations but also its limits, its contradictions, its marginality and even its absence in the reality of women’s lives—makes this a provocative theoretical inquiry into female agency. Resistance and its Discontents in South Asian Women’s Fiction makes a major contribution to postcolonial criticism as well as feminist theory.' Rajeswari Sunder Rajan, Formerly Global Distinguished Professor, New York University‘Maryam Mirza’s new book is sure to become a major work of reference in the field of South Asian literary studies and of literature by (and on) women. Its breadth, depth, and level of detail are astonishing, and it offers a thoroughly new reboot of the genre of “resistance literature”, by enlarging and complexifying the semantic reach of the term “resistance” beyond its current remit within contemporary fictional narratives.’ Neelam Srivastava, Professor of Postcolonial and World Literature, Newcastle UniversityThis book is an examination of how English-language fiction by women writers from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka has grappled with the idea and practice of resistance. A valuable, original and timely contribution to the field of South Asian literary and cultural studies, this book extends and complicates existing debates about the meanings of resistance. It brings to the fore not only the emancipatory potential of resistance, but also the contradictions that it can encompass as well as the anxieties that it can generate, particularly for women. Focusing on novels and short fiction, the book explores fiction by Arundhati Roy, Kamila Shamsie, Tahmima Anam, Jhumpa Lahiri, Manju Kapur and Ru Freeman, amongst others.