Aditi Upmanyu

Thesis title: Maternity and Maternal Authority in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Century Women's Novels

Supervisor: Ros Ballaster

Thesis summary: My dissertation examines the construction(s) of maternity in the eighteenth century and how the Jacobin and progressive women writers responded to the discursive definitions that were taking shape in their contemporary society. The 1790s was a decade of intellectual ferment and radical reform in Britain. Studying the works of Mary Robinson, Wollstonecraft, Edgeworth, and Charlotte Smith, I hypothesise that maternity performs a revolutionary function and that political authority shapes the discourse of domestic authority, specifically maternity, in the 1790s women's novels. 

My DPhil is funded by the government of Rajasthan, my home state in India.

Publications and Articles

https://theconversation.com/how-three-18th-century-deviant-mothers-defie...

https://www.english.ox.ac.uk/article/the-woman-of-colour

Upmanyu, Aditi. "Homes and Warzones: Reading Resistance and Protest in Nayomi Munaweera's Island of a Thousand Mirrors". Routledge UK, 2023, pp 67-78. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.4324/9781003272335-7

---. “Remembering Wajida Tabassum’s Radical Short Fiction.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 56, no. 39, 2021.
---. “Mary Hays: Forgotten Feminist.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 56, no. 16, 2021
---. “Jean Rhys and Reading the Fiction of Failure.” Economic and Political Weekly, vol. 54, no. 41, 2019