In the Shadow of Change is a study of literary works produced and consumed in Indonesia.In the Shadow of Change is an important milestone in the writing of the history of Indonesian literature. Through this book, Tineke Hellwig conveys her research findings of 5 years, ranging from 1984 to 1989, which is a re-reading of 25 novels and three long stories in the past 5 decades (1937 to 1986) using female point of view. Tineke takes feminist literary theory, which is rooted in social changes in Western and has been developing in the Western academic world, to make a critical reading of Indonesian literary works. Feminist literary criticism examines how the texts represent women; how the text defines femininity and masculinity, and how the text asserted, questioned, or criticized the ideology of gender. Feminist interpretation is part of the struggle against the dominant patriarchal ideology.

In the Shadow of Change is a pioneer in applying feminist literary criticism as an approach to read text one by one synchronically, then diachronically mapping them to answer one fundamental problem. Tineke shows that feminist criticism “has a clear political goal ‘with the vision to” promote the construction of the fact that a feminist perspective” based on feminist ideology that “leads into the subject-conscious women on sexual and gender identity”.

Feminist criticism used by Tineke is inevitably normative. Therefore, although admitted the possibility of diversity of meanings, the normative framework used tends to indicate the priority of a particular meaning, and it is not possible that it also tends to limit the tolerance to the possibility of other meanings. ***

Title: In The Shadow of Change, Images of Women in Indonesian Literature
Author: Tineke Hellwig
Publisher: Women Research Institute & Desantara, Juli 2003
Page: xxiii + 283 pages
ISBN: 979-96461-5-4
Price: Rp. 0,-