Challenging Gender and Genre: Women in Contemporary Indian Crime Fiction in English

2018 ◽  
Vol 66 (1) ◽  
pp. 105-117 ◽  
Author(s):  
Neele Meyer
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Women Writers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Wide Spectrum ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Social Criticism ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Testing Ground ◽  
Different Types

Abstract This paper looks at three Indian crime fiction series by women writers who employ different types of female detectives in contemporary India. The series will be discussed in the context of India’s economic growth and the emergence of a new middle class, which has an impact on India’s complex publishing market. I argue that the authors offer new identification figures while depicting a wide spectrum of female experiences within India’s contemporary urban middle class. In accordance with the characteristics of popular fiction, crime fiction offers the possibility to assume new roles within the familiar framework of a specific genre. Writers also partly modify the genre as a form of social criticism and use strategies such as the avoidance of closure. I conclude that the genre is of particular suitability for women in modern India as a testing-ground for new roles and a space that helps to depict and accommodate recent transformations that connect to processes of globalization.

Leffler (Edgren), Anne Charlotte (1849–1892)

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Irina Hron
Keyword(s):  
Women Writers ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Family Structure ◽  
19Th Century ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Women’S Rights ◽  
Sexual Morality ◽  
Late 19Th Century ◽  
Literary Movement ◽  
Del Pezzo

Anne Charlotte Leffler was one of the most acclaimed Swedish women writers of the modern breakthrough in late 19th-century Scandinavia. Joining the circle known as Young Sweden, a leading literary movement of the 1880s, she was part of the Ibsen-inspired debate about women’s rights, sexual morality, and the normative bourgeois family structure. During her lifetime, Leffler’s plays were performed more frequently than Strindberg’s, and she was known as a notable salon hostess. After her divorce from Gustaf Edgren in 1889, she married the Italian mathematician Pasquale del Pezzo, duke of Cajanello, and settled in Italy. In 1892 she died of appendicitis at the age of forty-three. In her provocative works, sometimes close to popular fiction, Leffler depicts not only dysfunctional middle-class marriages but also 19th-century notions of love, in particular eroticism. Her major works are translated into several languages, including English, German, Russian, Italian, Croatian and Dutch.

Ownership without Legitimacy?

2008 ◽  
pp. 85-105 ◽  
Author(s):  
R. Kapeliushnikov
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Critical Appraisal ◽  
Birth Trauma ◽  
Fair Play ◽  
Different Types

The paper examines the problem of legitimation of the privatization’s outcomes in Russia and provides a critical appraisal of various political proposals for its resolution. The analysis proceeds from a distinction between two different types of ownership illegitimacy: "definite" and "vague" ones. The paper argues that the "vague" illegitimacy that has evolved in Russia is not an absolute obstacle for economic growth but rather an institutional birth trauma which is common for all post-socialist countries and which could be cured only by piecemeal approaching of relationships between "strong" and "weak" economic actors to principles of fair play.

Popular Fiction

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Roslyn Weaver
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Historical Fiction ◽  
Popular Fiction ◽  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Historical Change ◽  
Fiction Writers ◽  
History Of

This chapter discusses the history of popular fiction in Australia. The question of place has always been central to Australian fiction, not only as a thematic element but also as a critical or political preoccupation. In part, this is because popular fiction writers, wanting to attract broad audiences, either exploited their Australian content to appeal to international readers or have excised the local to produce a generic and thus more readily accessible setting for outsiders. The chapter considers works by popular fiction writers who adopt a range of positions in relation to their focus on place, but often tackle many different aspects of Australian social and historical change. These novels cover various genres such as crime fiction, historical fiction and romance, science fiction and fantasy, and include Fergus Hume's The Mystery of a Hansom Cab (1886), Nevil Shute's On the Beach (1957), Damien Broderick's The Dreaming Dragons (1980), and Cecilia Dart-Thornton's The Ill-Made Mute (2001).

Outsourcing the Self

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sunil Bhatia
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Romantic Relationships ◽  
Call Center ◽  
Global Economy ◽  
Public Spaces ◽  
The Self ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
First World ◽  
Class Youth ◽  
Call Center Workers

This chapter analyzes how call center workers, who are mostly middle- and working-class youth, create narratives that are described as expressing modern forms of “individualized Indianness.” The chapter demonstrates how call center workers produce narratives of individualized Indianness by engaging in practices of mimicry, accent training, and consumption; by going to public spaces such as bars and pubs; and by having romantic relationships that are largely hidden from their families. The narratives examined in this chapter are created out of an asymmetrical context of power as young Indians work as “subjects” of a global economy who primarily serve “First World” customers. The interviews with Indian youth reflect how tradition and modernity, mimicry and authenticity, collude with each other to dialogically create new middle-class subjectivities.

Green Politics and the New Class: Selfishness or Virtue?

1989 ◽  
Vol 37 (2) ◽  
pp. 205-223 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robyn Eckersley
Keyword(s):  
Middle Class ◽  
Production Process ◽  
Green Movement ◽  
New Class ◽  
Green Parties ◽  
New Middle Class ◽  
Social Composition ◽  
The Social ◽  
Green Politics ◽  
Material Values

The predominantly new middle-class social composition of the green movement has become a matter of increasing interest in the wake of the success of green parties and the growth of an international green movement. This paper considers the concept of the ‘new class' in relation to two explanations for the social composition of the green movement. The class-interest argument seeks to show that green politics is a means of furthering either middle-class or new-class interests while the ‘new childhood’ argument claims that the development of the green movement is the result of the spread of post-material values, the main bearers of which are the new class. Against these arguments a more comprehensive explanation is presented, which focuses on the education of the new class and its relative structural autonomy from the production process.

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