1st Edition
Family, School and Nation The Child and Literary Constructions in 20th-Century Bengal
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.
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.
Biography
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.
