Böcker av Ruth Maxey

Bharati Mukherjee was the first major South Asian American writer and the first naturalized American citizen to win the National Book Critics Circle Award. Born in Kolkata, India, she immigrated to the United States in 1961 and went on to publish eight novels, two short story collections, two long works of nonfiction, and numerous essays, book reviews, and newspaper articles. She was professor emerita in the Department of English at the University of California, Berkeley, until her death in 2017. In Understanding Bharati Mukherjee, Ruth Maxey discusses Mukherjee's influence on younger South Asian American women writers, such as Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Divakaruni. Mukherjee's powerful writing also enjoyed popular appeal, with some novels achieving best-seller status and international acclaim; her 1989 novel Jasmine was translated into multiple languages. One of the earliest writers to feature South Asian Americans in literary form, Mukherjee reflected upon the influence of non-European immigrants to the United States, following passage of the Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965, which abolished the quota system. Her vision of a globalized, interconnected world has been regarded as prophetic, and when Mukherjee died, diverse North American writers-Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Russell Banks, Michael Ondaatje, Ann Beattie, Amy Tan, and Richard Ford-came forward to praise her work and its importance. Understanding Bharati Mukherjee is the first book to examine this pioneering author's complete oeuvre and to identify its legacy. Maxey offers new insights into widely discussed texts and recuperates overlooked works, such as Mukherjee's first and last published short stories, her neglected nonfiction, and her many essays. Critically situating both well-known and under-discussed texts, this study analyzes the aesthetic and ideological complexity of Mukherjee's writing, considering her sophisticated, erudite, multilayered use of intertextuality, especially her debt to cinema. Maxey argues that understanding the range of formal and stylistic strategies in play is crucial to grasping Mukherjee's work.

A major interpretation of recent South Asian diasporic writing and cinema in specifically transatlantic terms Ruth Maxey provides readings of canonical and less well-known South Asian American and British Asian texts and key cinematic works. She explores the formal and thematic tendencies of the works, relating them to gender politics, the marketplace, and issues of literary value and historical change. While engaging with established debates, Maxey also intervenes in new ways in transatlantic, postcolonial literary, and Asian American cultural studies. Key features * Looks at writers including Jhumpa Lahiri, Bharati Mukherjee, Mohsin Hamid, Hanif Kureishi, Monica Ali, and Nadeem Aslam * Explores films such as Mischief Night, Mississippi Masala, A Love Supreme, and Praying with Anger * Sources used include articles from mainstream American, Asian and British newspapers such as The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Hindu, New Statesman, The Daily Telegraph, and The Guardian * Engages with critics including Susan Koshy, Sukhdev Sandhu, Rajini Srikanth, and James Procter * The book is organised around the four key themes of: home & nation, travel & return, racial mixing, and food & eating.