A Pragmatic Study of Manju Kapur's Selected Novels

The author feels that the speech-act analysis of the fictional works carried out can be rewarding in the context of character analysis and literary criticism. Along with the hidden agenda and deixis that occurred in the interactions between characters can be studied from psychoanalytic point of view. There can also be sociological dimension to the study of characters as they are consciously or unconsciously influenced by the social structure obtaining in the family and the society they live in. This book focuses on the study of speech-acts in the fictional works of Manju Kapur in terms of the sociological aspects of the middle-class society in which family life of men and women is constrained by middle-class morality and its social constraints and taboos they face. Apart from this, the fiction of Manju Kapur provides considerable material to study it from the point of view of feminism, how the life of women is affected by the manners and morals of the typical Indian middle-class society, the male-chauvinism and the social conventions. The author has made an honest effort to minutely study the speech-acts in the selected fiction of Manju Kapur, employing the speech-act theory.