Everand Logo

Welcome to Everand!

  • Discover millions of ebooks, audiobooks, and so much more with a free trial

    Only $11.99/month after trial. Cancel anytime.

    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine
    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine
    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine
    Ebook50 pages35 minutes

    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

    By Gale and Cengage

    ()

    Read preview

    About this ebook

    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's "Jasmine," excerpted from Gale's acclaimed Novels for Students.This concise study guide includes plot summary; character analysis; author biography; study questions; historical context; suggestions for further reading; and much more. For any literature project, trust Novels for Students for all of your research needs.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCengage Learning - Gale
    Release dateAug 21, 2015
    ISBN9781535826440
    A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

    Read more from Gale

    Related to A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

    Related ebooks

    Literary Criticism For You

    View More
    View More

    Related podcast episodes

    Related articles

    • Article

      Lavender Legend

      Jul 21, 2020

      Lavender Legend
      10 min read

    • Article

      Clarence Page: The Age-old Trick Of ‘Passing’: Fiction Writer The Latest To Be Disgraced By Lies About Heritage

      Mar 20, 2023

      I have never known a man who faked his own death, but I have known a man who faked his own life, then sadly failed to live long enough for us to talk about it. I’m talking about the late Hache Carrillo, a rising, award-winning literary talent whose r

      3 min read

    • Article

      Book Homeland Elegies

      Sep 3, 2020

      From the award-winning author of 2012’s American Dervish comes this engrossing, part fact, part fiction story of a father and son struggling to connect in President Trump’s divided America. In the post-9/11 landscape, this is a world in which debt ha

      1 min read

    • Article

      Biography of a Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel

      Feb 1, 2019

      Shields has composed a portrait of the complicated author and the darknesses that drove Williams to write, to overcompensate, to philander, to mansplain. The post Biography of a Man Who Wrote the Perfect Novel appeared first on The Millions.

      6 min read

    • Article

      The Book I Kept for the Cover

      Apr 13, 2018

      The Book I Kept for the Cover
      5 min read

    • Article

      The Life and Legacy of Bharati Mukherjee

      Feb 27, 2017

      When India-native Bharati Mukherjee was 11 years old, an astrologer prophesied she would move across the ocean, marry a blue-eyed foreigner, and die between July 2003 and July 2004 at the age of 63, surpassing the average life expectancy for Indians

      2 min read

    • Article

      What To Read This Summer

      Jun 5, 2020

      What To Read This Summer
      8 min read

    • Article

      The Flight Of Red Bird

      Feb 28, 2023

      It would stand to reason, given the deep-rooted bias against her race and her sex, that a Sioux Indian girl born into late-Victorian, predominantly white America might have little to no chance for growth and fame. Nonetheless, against all odds, the w

      11 min read

    • Article

      Writers to Watch: Fall 2021

      Aug 9, 2021

      This fall’s notable fiction debuts feature explorations of class, race, and sexuality. The post Writers to Watch: Fall 2021 appeared first on The Millions.

      13 min read

    • Article

      Be Bold

      Jun 12, 2019

      Be Bold
      12 min read

    • Article

      August Preview: The Millions Anticipated (This Month)

      Jul 31, 2023

      New books from Elizabeth Acevedo, Jamel Brinkley, Ann Patchett, Lydia Kiesling, and many more—here's what we can't wait to read this month. The post August Preview: The Millions Anticipated (This Month) appeared first on The Millions.

      10 min read

    • Article

      First

      Aug 16, 2017

      RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. WHEN I heard the news that Javier Zamora and Erika L. Sánchez, both of whose careers I’d been following, had placed their books with two of the most prestigious poetry publisher

      12 min read

    • Article

      First

      Aug 16, 2017

      RIGOBERTO GONZÁLEZ is a contributing editor of Poets & Writers Magazine. WHEN I heard the news that Javier Zamora and Erika L. Sánchez, both of whose careers I’d been following, had placed their books with two of the most prestigious poetry publisher

      12 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Moreno-Garcia, Myo Kyaw Myint, and More

      Aug 17, 2021

      This week, we're looking at new books from Silvia Moreno-Garcia, Thirii Myo Kyaw Myint, Jaime Cortez, and Rafia Zakaria. The post Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Moreno-Garcia, Myo Kyaw Myint, and More appeared first on The Millions.

      3 min read

    • Article

      Those Who Left Us: Select Literary Obituaries of 2017

      Jan 10, 2018

      Poets, editors, songwriters, teachers, journalists, novelists—some great writers and some under-sung ones left us this year. Here, in chronological order of their deaths, is a selective compendium of literary obituaries from 2017.     Bhara

      15 min read

    • Article

      Tuesday New Release Day: Starring Habib, Kaplan, Zevin, and More

      Jul 5, 2022

      Here’s a quick look at some notable books—new titles from Conner Habib, Isabel Kaplan, Gabrielle Zevin, and more—that are publishing this week. Want to learn more about upcoming titles? Then go read our most recent book preview. Want to help The Mill

      5 min read

    Related categories

    Reviews for A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine

    0 ratings

    0 ratings0 reviews

    What did you think?

    Tap to rate

    Review must be at least 10 words

      Book preview

      A Study Guide for Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine - Gale

      11

      Jasmine

      Bharati Mukherjee

      1989

      Introduction

      Bharati Mukherjee's Jasmine, the story of a widowed Punjabi peasant reinventing herself in America, entered the literary landscape in 1989. The same year, Salman Rushdie published Satanic Verses. Rushdie, also an Indian writer, received international attention for his novel when a fatwa (an Islamic legal judgment) was issued against him. The fatwa essentially proclaimed it a righteous act for any Muslim to murder Rushdie. Michelle Cliff's No Telephone to Heaven, Jill Ker Conway's The Road to Coorain, Tsitsi Dangarembga's Nervous Condition, Jamaica Kincaid's A Small Place, and Amitav Ghosh's The Shadow Lines were all published during this period. Each of these writers works in the genre of postcolonial literature. Although there is considerable debate over the term postcolonial, in a very general sense, it refers to the time following the establishment of independence in a former colony, such as India, which was a colony of Great Britain until the midtwentieth century. The sheer extent and duration of the European empires and their disintegration after World War II have led to widespread interest in postcolonial literature.

      Partly because of the abundance of such postcolonial works, some critics suggested Jasmine was part of a fad. The New York Times Book Review, however, named it one of the year's best works. It is available at bookstores and online in a 1999 Grove Press paperback edition.

      Mukherjee's time as a student at the University of Iowa's acclaimed master of fine arts program, the Writers' Workshop, almost certainly informed the setting of Jasmine. Iowa City is a small college town, and the state as a whole is 95 percent farmland. In the 1980s, when Jasmine is set, many family farmers on the outskirts of Iowa City faced the same dilemma as Darrel Lutz, a character in Jasmine. The hard life of farming coupled with tough economic times persuaded many farmers to sell out to large corporate farms or to nonagricultural corporations. Other farmers struggled on, determined to save the farm their parents and grandparents had built up, as well as to preserve this unique way of life.

      Author Biography

      Mukherjeewas born on July 27, 1940, into an elite level of society in Calcutta, India. ABengali Brahmin (a high caste, or social grouping), Mukherjee grew up in a house cluttered with extended family, forty to forty-five people by her own count. In a 1993 interview with Runar Vignission in Journal of the South Pacific Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies, Mukherjee said she had to drop inside books as a way of escaping crowds.

      Mukherjee was educated as a proper Indian girl of a good family: she spoke Bengali her first three years, then entered English schools in Britain and Switzerland. She returned to India in 1951 and attended the Loretto School, run by Irish nuns. She subsequently studied at universities in Calcutta and Baroda, where she earned a master's degree in English and Indian culture. She immigrated to the United States in 1962 to attend, on scholarship, the Writers'

      Enjoying the preview?
      Page 1 of 1