Nancy Ellen Batty

In The Ring of Recollection, Nancy Batty challenges the critical orthodoxy that Shashi Deshpande’s fiction is transparently realistic and narrowly focused on domestic and women’s issues. This study shifts attention towards the labyrinthine structure and modernist style of most of Deshpande’s writing. Features hitherto viewed as deviations from her realism, or even as flaws, are re-situated in the light of a gothic poetics that works to uncover a structural trope of transgenerational secrecy, ...