Contents: Preface. 1. No place for a woman : a brief tour of Janette Turner Hospital's writing/Paul Sharrad. 2. The female space through Indian and Australian poetic lenses/Sudhir K. Arora. 3. Ethel Anderson on India/Alur Janaki Ram. 4. History of women's writing in Bengal/Saumitra Chakravarty. 5. Multiculturalism in change of skies and The time of the Peacock: protest and acquiescence in the novels of Yasmine Gooneratne and Mena Abdullah/Pradip Kumar Patra. 6. Indians in exile: self-assertion and (Re)-creation in Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni's The Mistress of Spices/Ludmila Volna. 7. Postcolonial immigration and psychic devaluation in Jhumpa Lahiri's "Once in a Lifetime"/Sule E. Egya. 8. Tales They Tell: early Australian and Indian women's travel writing/K. Sreenath Muraleedharan. 9. Narrative techniques in Shashi Deshpande's A Matter of Time/Arun Verma. 10. Gita Mehta's Raj: a study of woman's struggle for her identity and existence/M.B. Gaijan. 11. Gujarati Dalit Novel Shosh: a study in connection with psychodynamics of women/M.B. Gaijan. 12. Structure against place, fate and cruelty: deplorable state of Bush women from the works of Barbara Baynton/P. Bhubaneswari. 13. Peace and freedoms for Indian women in the digital era/Stephen Gill. 14. Shellshocks and aftershocks: scars of the holocaust problematising identity in Elizabeth Jolley's Milk and Honey/V. Lakshmanan. 15. Nova Peris: telling a personal story/Supla Pandirajan. 16. Understanding the father and the son--a study of Anita Desai's short story " A Devoted Son"/Usha Bande. 17. The voyage within: a study of Archana Sahani's First Fire/Jaydeep Sarangi. Index.

"Women's Writing in English: India and Australia is a collection of essays which sets out to open the possible limits of the women's writing as a literary as well as social discourse. Moving beyond the plot of so-called critical practice it has come to represent a complex web of meaning produced through multiple strategies of reading and interpreting it. The present collection of critical essays represents myriad, interesting and insightful explorations on textuality and intertextuality of the women's writing of India and Australia, its meaning in recent critical practice. Indian and Australian Women's writing have become intellectual curiosity these days. The contributors of this timely anthology have explored the subject referring to different genres in connection with their traditional and radical interpretation into consideration." (jacket)