Contents: Preface. 1. Gender discrimination in Roots and Shadows: a critical study/Amar Nath Prasad. 2. Shashi Deshpande's Roots and Shadows: a feminist study/Gunjan Sushil. 3. Shashi Deshpande's Roots and Shadows: a critical study/S. Prasanna Sree. 4. Deception and dualities of Indu in Shashi Deshpande's Roots and Shadows/Shivani R. Upadhyay. 5. The search for a voice: a study of Shashi Deshpande's novel That Long Silence/Rupalee Burke. 6. Tremors and traumas: a psycho-familial analysis in Kamala Markandaya's Nectar in a Sieve, Anita Desa's In Custody and Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence/C. Anna Latha Devi. 7. Writing from the margins: a study of Shashi Deshpande's That Long Silence/Ram Sharma. 8. The woman steps out to conquer in The Dark Holds No Terrors/S. Prasanna Sree. 9. Facets of feminism in Shashi Deshpande's The Dark Holds No Terrors/Bhabani S. Baral. 10. Dimensional depth of female consciousness: Shashi Deshpande's The Bindings Vine/Krishna Mohan Pandey. 11. Mauling men in marriage moorings: an aspect of A Matter of Time/M. Rosary Royar. 12. The concept of modern and liberal women in Shashi Deshpande's A Matter of Time/Nagendra Kumar Singh. 13. Family relationships in Shashi Deshpande's Small Remedies/Indira Nityanandam. 14. Shashi Deshpande's Small Remedies: a woman's quest for refuge: a reappraisal/Ruby Malhotra. 15. Feminist consciousness in Shashi Deshpande's The Stone Women/Satyendra Kumar. 16. Postmodern feminist writers : a study of the selected works of Shashi Deshpande and Githa Hariharan/W.S. Kottiswari. 17. The novels of Shashi Deshpande: A Critical Observation/Sheikh Salahuddin. 18. Human relations: beyond human grasp in the Short Stories of Shashi Deshpande/Pallavi Mishra. 19. Silent submission: the roles women perform in life in Shashi Deshpande's Collected Stories Volume/Himadri Roy. Index.

"Shashi Deshpande : A Critical Elucidation is a modest attempt to the various aspects of the literary world of Shashi Deshpande. It is a collection of scholarly research papers contributed by various English teachers and scholars from the different parts of India. It features articles concerning all the chief fictions and short stories of Shashi Deshpande. Her novels discussed in this book are Root and Shadows, That Long Silence, The Dark Holds No Terrors, The Binding Vine, A Matter of Time, Small Remedies and The Stone Women. The last two articles critically examine the short stories of the novelist with different angles and perspectives.

Since the works of Shashi Deshpande have been prescribed in different universities, the book, it is hoped, will certainly cater to the need of the general readers, students and teachers who want to be more familiar with the various literary and critical shades of the works of Shashi Deshpande." (jacket)