Family, School and Nation

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.

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.