Contents: Preface. 1. Women in the novels of Kamala Markandaya/Jaya Srivastava. 2. Decoding the forbidden erotic landscapes: a study of Kamala Markandaya's novels/Sudhir K. Arora. 3. Some novels of Kamala Markandaya: a critical overview/Nagendra Kumar Singh. 4. Dialectics of society and self in Ruth Prawer Jhabvala's The Nature of Passion/Nagendra Kumar Singh. 5. Choreographing complexities: narrative, structural strategies in Anita Desai's fictions/Purnendu S. Goswami. 6. Racial discrimination and cultural dominance in Anita Desai's Bye Bye Blackbird/Ashok Chaskar. 7. Spiritual quest in Hermann Hesse's Siddhartha and Anita Desai's Journey to Ithaca: a study in comparative perspective/Shri. Bhambar S.B. 8. Gender discrimination in Roots and Shadows: a critical study/Amar Nath Prasad. 9. Postmodern feminist writers: a study of selected works of Shashi Deshpande and Githa Hariharan/W.S. Kottiswari. 10. Women on the uncertain cusp of nature and culture in the works of Mahashweta Devi/Pallavi Mishra. 11. The feminine sensibility in Arundhati Roy's: The God of Small Things/Indu Swami. 12. Social web and cry of the self: a critical analysis of Manju Kapur's A Married Woman/Ashok Kumar. 13. Feminist consciousness in Manju Kapur's novels/Shilpi Rishi Srivastava. 14. Marriage of educated women in Manju Kapur's A Married Woman/Murali Manohar. 15. Second thought over feminine chastity in Shobha De's Second Thoughts/Sheetal Y. Thakore. 16. Bama: the apostle of Dalit feminism in India/Shibu Simon and Sarojini Sudha. 17. Shakuntala: plight of an oppressed woman/Sharika Srivastava. 18. Kiran Desai's The Inheritance of Loss: a search for home/Shilpi Rishi Srivastava and Sarika Srivastava. 19. Kiran Desai's Inheritance of Loss: a study of exile and displacement/Santwana Haldar. 20. Reflective moods in The Inheritance of Loss/Shaleen Kumar Singh. Index.

"New Lights on Indian Women Novelists in English, Vol. IV is a collection of twenty critical papers concerning the chief Indian women novelists in English language. It evaluates the various aspects of the writings of the novelists like Kamala Markandaya, Ruth Parawer Jhabvala, Anita Desai, Shashi Deshpande, Gita Hariharan, Mahasweta Devi, Arundhati Roy, Manju Kapur, Shobha De, Bama, Namita Gokhale and Kiran Desai. All the articles included in this volume are very informative, scholarly and comprehensive and they will be very helpful to all those students and research scholars who want to extend their knowledge about the aforesaid women novelists. The book will find a warm reception in the hands of the teachers and research scholars of English literature who want to be more conversant with the critical elucidations and explorations of the works of the aforesaid writers." (jacket)