Family, School and Nation: The Child and Literary Constructions in 20th-Century Bengal / Edition 1

by Nivedita Sen

Overview

This seminal work examines the concurrence of childhood rebellion and conformity in Bengali literary texts (including adult texts), a pertinent yet unexplored area, making it a first of its kind. It is a study of the voice of child protagonists across children’s and adult literature in Bengali vis-à-vis the institutions of family, the education system, and the nationalist movement in the ninenteenth and twentieth centuries.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781138889484
Publisher:	Taylor & Francis
Publication date:	07/13/2015
Pages:	242
Product dimensions:	5.44(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Nivedita Sen is Associate Professor of English literature at Hans Raj College, University of Delhi. Her translated works (from Bengali to English) include Rabindranath Tagore’s Ghare Baire ( The Home and the World , 2004) and ‘Madhyabartini’ (‘The In-between Woman’) in The Essential Tagore (ed. Fakrul Alam and Radha Chakravarty, 2011); Syed Mustafa Siraj’s The Colonel Investigates (2004) and Die, Said the Tree and Other Stories (2012); and Tong Ling Express: A Selection of Bangla Stories for Children (2010). She has jointly compiled and edited (with an introduction) Mahasweta Devi: An Anthology of Recent Criticism (2008). Her collaborative translation of Sibaji Bandopadhyay’s important work, titled The Gopal-Rakhal Dialectic: Colonialism and Children’s Literature in Bengal is forthcoming.

Table of Contents

Preface. 1. Western Approaches to Childhood: An Overview. 2. Literary and Non Literary Representations of the Child in Nineteenth Century Bengal: An Overview. 3. The Twentieth Century Child versus the Home and Family. 4. Growing Resentments: The School and the Education System. 5. Escapes: Real and Fantastic. 6. Encounters with the World Beyond: Responding to the Nation in Crisis. 7. The Rebel Child and the Conformist Resolution. Glossary. Bibliography. About the Author.