Why is the nation in a postcolonial world so often seen as a motherland? Stories of women is a pathbreaking study of the perenially fascinating relationship between foundational fictions of the nation and gendered images. The book focuses critically on postcolonial spaces ranging from West Africa to India.

Elleke Boehmer is Hildred Carlile Professor in English at Royal Holloway, University of London

Acknowledgements
Introduction
1. Theorising the en-gendered nation: Motherlands, mothers and nationalist sons
2. 'The master's dance to the master's voice': Revolutionary nationalism and women's representation in Ngugi wa Thiong'o
3. Of goddesses and stories: Gender and a new politics in Achebe
4. The hero's story: The male leader's autobiography and the syntax of postcolonial nationalism
5. Stories of women and mothers: Gender and nationalism in the early fiction of Flora Nwapa
6. Daughters of the house: The adolescent girl and the nation
7. Transfiguring: colonial body into postcolonial narrative
8. The nation as metaphor: Ben Okri, Chenjerai Hove, Dambudzo Marechera
9. East is East: where postcolonialism is neo-orientalist - the cases of Sarojini Naidu and Arundhati Roy
10. Tropes of yearning and dissent: The inflection of desire in Yvonne Vera and Tsitsi Dangarembga
11. Beside the West: postcolonial women writers in a transnational frame
12. Conclusion: Defining the nation differently