The Intercultural Dynamics of Private Lives in the Prose of Uma Parameswaran, Anita Rau Badami and Shauna Singh Baldwin

 Lucia Grosu-Radulescu’s book offers the reader an interesting comparative literary analysis of three Canadian women writers, Uma Parameswaran, Anita Rau Badami and Shauna Singh Baldwin, arguing that the private lives of the respective literary characters lend themselves to interpretations that go beyond the erotic sphere revealing a space of intercultural interaction.

 The study starts from the premise that by exploring the gender relations represented in the selected novels and short stories of these three fiction writers we can identify various social, cultural and religious elements that radically influence the characters’ perspective on intimacy. The study convincingly demonstrates that the intercultural dynamics of the characters’ private lives is actually a manifestation of the fact that the authors have assimilated an interculturality specific to the diasporic space they belong to.

The double novelty of the book lies firstly in the fact that the prose of these three Indian-Canadian writers has never been analysed comparatively from an intercultural perspective. Secondly, the author has used a three-fold eclectic approach combining interpretations in the light of diaspora criticism, from a social-psychological perspective and from a postcolonial feminist perspective.