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.
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