Tracing Transnational Modernity through Women’s Eyes: Cross-Cultural Negotiations in Henry James’s The Golden Bowl and Rabindranath Tagore’s Four Chapters
Tanushree Mitra
National Institute of Technology Durgapur, IndiaTanushree Mitra is a University Grants Commission doctoral research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology Durgapur, India. Her research interests centre on gender and cosmopolitan/transnational modernity, postcolonial cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan nationalism, rooted cosmopolitanism, and comparative literary studies. Her ongoing Ph.D. research focuses on a comparative study of select novels by Henry James and Rabindranath Tagore, with particular emphasis on gender, cultural reconfigurations, cosmopolitan consciousness, and ethical negotiations across imperial and colonial contexts.
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0124-8997
Abstract
Despite being written in two different continental contexts, Henry James’s The Golden Bowl (1904) and Rabindranath Tagore’s Four Chapters (1934) (originally published in Bengali as Char Adhyay) are similar in that they foreground the evolving roles of women in a rapidly modernizing world. These are the final novels written by James and Tagore, representing the culmination of each author’s mature reflections on modernity, morality, and gender, and are therefore particularly suited for a transnational comparative study. Though cross-cultural negotiations and transnational modernity reached their acme with the advent of postcolonial studies, James and Tagore had reflected the same idea in their writings much earlier. The article unravels how both authors navigate the intricacies of modernity within transnational frameworks, with James portraying Anglo-American interactions and Tagore representing India under colonial rule. It closely examines the socio-cultural structures and gender norms within the novels to highlight how the characters, particularly women, challenge conventional constraints to establish a liberal society.
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National Institute of Technology Durgapur, India
Tanushree Mitra is a University Grants Commission doctoral research scholar in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology Durgapur, India. Her research interests centre on gender and cosmopolitan/transnational modernity, postcolonial cosmopolitanism, cosmopolitan nationalism, rooted cosmopolitanism, and comparative literary studies. Her ongoing Ph.D. research focuses on a comparative study of select novels by Henry James and Rabindranath Tagore, with particular emphasis on gender, cultural reconfigurations, cosmopolitan consciousness, and ethical negotiations across imperial and colonial contexts.
https://orcid.org/0009-0000-0124-8997
