LOCATING GENDER IN MODERNISM: THE OUTSIDER FEMALE

This book visits modernism within a comparative, gendered, and third-world framework, questioning current scholarly categorisations of modernism and reframing our conception of what constitutes modernist aesthetics. It describes the construction of modernist studies and argues that despite a range of interventions which suggest that philosophical and material articulations with the third world shaped modernism, an emphasis on modernist "universals" persists. Ramanathan argues that women and third-world authors have reshaped received notions of the modern and revised orthodox ideas on the modern aesthetic. Authors such as Bessie Head, Josiane Racine, T.Obinkaram Echewa, Raja Rao, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Sembene Ousmane, Salman Rushdie, Ana Castillo, Attia Hossain, Bapsi Sidhwa, and Sahar Khalifeh, are visited in their specific cultural contexts and use some form of realism, a mode that western modernism relegates to the nineteenth century.