Bride in the Cultural Imagination

Jo Parnell is Conjoint Research Fellow to the Faculty of Education and Arts, School of Humanities and Social Science, University of Newcastle.

• Foreword by Kevin Hall Introduction by Jo Parnell and Josephine May 1.Plautus, Catullus and Public Depictions of the Bride in RomeJane Bellemore 2.In Grey and Pink: The Image of the Bride through the Spanish Post-War Novela RosaRosana Murias 3.Sex and the Bride: Citra Mudgal’s Hindi Short Story Dulhin as a Mirror of Changing Family Relations in Contemporary IndiaAlessandra Consolaro 4.Here Comes the (Bollywood) Bride: Gender, Power, Family, and Patriarchy inMillennial IndiaAndrew Howe 5.Ideological and Cultural Manifestations in Bridal Narrative and the Image of the Bride in Modern Egyptian Visual CultureAzza Harras 6.The Image of a Bride in Tajik CinemaSharofat Arabova 7.The “Economics” of Bride Price in Nigerian Women’s LiteratureShalini Nadaswaran 8.The Bride’s Agency: East Africa Novelistic and Dramatic Imaginaries Wafula Yenjela 9.Advertising the Bride in South-Eastern Indian Ocean IslandsZoly Rakotoniera and Gladys Abdoul

Dr. Jo Parnell’s collection of scholarly essays on Bride is a fascinating read. The topic is riveting and the collection is beautifully put together. The poignant figure of the bride parades before us in a series of different global cultures, past and present, each of them blending tradition and (occasionally) innovation, fantasy and reality, and empowerment and subjugation. There are common threads and striking differences. Amazing that no-one has thought of doing this before, but we can rejoice that someone has now carried it off!