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Before She Sleeps
Fascinating angle on "emotional work"' MARGARET ATWOOD on Twitter In modern, beautiful Green City, the capital of South West Asia, gender selection, war and a virus outbreak have brought the ratio of men to women to alarmingly low levels. The government uses terror and technological surveillance to control its people, and women must take multiple husbands to have children as quickly as possible. Yet there are women who resist, women who live in an underground collective and refuse to be part of the system. Secretly protected by the highest echelons of power, they emerge only at night, to provide to the rich and elite of Green City a type of commodity that nobody can buy: intimacy without sex. As it turns out, not even the most influential men can shield them from discovery and the dangers of ruthless punishment. This dystopian novel from one of Pakistan’s most talented writers is a modern-day parable. It takes the patriarchal practices of female seclusion, gender selection and control over women’s bodies, and recasts them to imagine a terrifying world of post-religious authoritarianism.
Fractured Narratives and Pandemic Identities
The book considers how identities have become more fractured since COVID-19, by thinking of COVID-19 in relation to other crises (economic, social, digital, and ecological) and by drawing parallels to literature, cinema, and visual art. COVID-19 was a type of apocalypse, a catastrophic destructive event that produced dystopian measures in its wake and drew uncanny parallels to dystopic works of literature and speculative fiction. Yet the pandemic was apocalyptic in another sense too. The word apocalypse derives from apokalupsis, which means disclosure or uncovering. In this way, COVID-19 also revealed the dystopian processes already at work in the world, including digital forms of surveillan...
Alterity and Capitalism in Speculative Fiction
Speculative fiction has been traditionally studied in Marxist literary criticism, following Darko Suvin’s paradigmatic model of science fiction, according to a hierarchical division of its multiple subgenres in terms of their assumed inherent political value. By drawing on an alternative genealogy of Marxist criticism, this book presents a non-hierarchical understanding of the estrangement connecting all varieties of speculative fiction, outlining the political potential shared across the spectrum of speculative fiction, along with the specific narrative strategies by which it critically engages with its historical context of production. This study’s main point of contention is that speculative fiction performs an estrangement effect on historical reality that can potentially render visible the role of fantasies in the organisation of capitalist social practice. This narrative effect enables an estranged perspective by which the novel interprets and conceptualises historical reality in a totalising manner.
The Palgrave Encyclopedia of Urban Literary Studies
This encyclopaedia will be an indispensable resource and recourse for all who are thinking about cities and the urban, and the relation of cities to literature, and to ways of writing about cities. Covering a vast terrain, this work will include entries on theorists, individual writers, individual cities, countries, cities in relation to the arts, film and music, urban space, pre/early and modern cities, concepts and movements and definitions amongst others. Written by an international team of contributors, this will be the first resource of its kind to pull together such a comprehensive overview of the field.
The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature
The Routledge Companion to Global Comparative Literature is a collection of papers by influential scholars who are engaged in comparative literary studies and addresses a central and highly important question about the discipline: if Eurocentrism has been integral to comparative literature, and if the world we live in is undergoing radical changes, then how can, or should, the discipline change to overcome this problem, of the discipline as well as of literary history, to accommodate non-Western traditions? Addressing this significant matter and taking different approaches in response to the state of the discipline, the papers in this volume offer diverse ways of overcoming Eurocentrism: the...
Writing Pakistan
What does it mean to be an English-language fiction writer in a country that is perpetually on the brink of disaster? In this first-ever collection of interviews with Pakistani novelists writing in English, Mushtaq Bilal explores how fictions are informed by the authors' cultural identities. Is it possible, for instance, to write about Pakistan without self-censoring? How do writers contest and challenge Western stereotypes of the country? Do they even consciously do that? And what about challenging Pakistani stereotypes of the West?Providing fresh insights into some of the most important and politically engaged contemporary fiction to come out of the subcontinent, Writing Pakistan is essential reading for anyone interested in the art of storytelling, in books and in Pakistan itself - because to understand a nation, one needs to talk to those who are writing it.
Muffled Voices in the Zenana and Beyond
This book explores subaltern subjecthood, resistance and sexual agency in the works of Muslim women writers from India, Pakistan and Bangladesh since the early 20th century. Locating the Muslim woman in the fiction of these countries from a sub-continental locus, it incorporates concepts of race, diaspora and postcolonial feminism in its reading of selected texts along with precepts of Islamic feminist hermeneutics in the South Asian context. It rejects the homogenization of sub-continental Muslim women as a monolithic victim subject and focuses on the multiplicity of voices that emerge from their writing both in the colonial and the postcolonial contexts. The volume will be of great interest to scholars and researchers of literature, gender studies, cultural studies and South Asian studies.
Posthuman Pathogenesis
This multi-vocal assemblage of literary and cultural responses to contagions provides insights into the companionship of posthumanities, environmental humanities, and medical humanities to shed light on how we deal with complex issues like communicable diseases in contemporary times. Examining imaginary and real contagions, ranging from Jeep and SHEVA to plague, HIV/AIDS, and COVID-19, Posthuman Pathogenesis discusses the inextricable links between nature and culture, matter and meaning-making practices, and the human and the nonhuman. Dissecting pathogenic nonhuman bodies in their interactions with their human counterparts and the environment, the authors of this volume raise their diverse ...
Female Pakistani Fiction. A Critical Approach
Scientific Essay from the year 2015 in the subject Literature - Asia, Comenius University in Bratislava, language: English, abstract: This book is an introduction into (female) 'Pakistani Fiction'. It starts with some sort of background information on the catchphrase 'Pakistani Fiction' in order to place the female aspect into its literary background. A second step lies in a description of the position of this literary concept within 'Postcolonial Writing' which is marked and shaped by so many different cultural and religious elements. The short analysis of two selected novels, Ice Candy Man (1991) by Bapsi Sidhwa and Brick Lane (2003) by Monica Ali should help to show how female Pakistani writers deal with female matters. This literary reflection will be supported by three parameters which can be found in many novels dealing with this subject. The talk is about gender, diaspora and globalization all of which are used to portray female characters. The end will consist of some sort of outlook where 'Pakistani Fiction' stands at the moment and where its trends might go to.
A Season for Martyrs
The U.S. literary debut of an up-and-coming Pakistani novelist and journalist. The last three months of Benazir Bhutto’s life — from her arrival back in Pakistan on October 18, 2007, to her untimely death in a shooting-cum-suicide bombing on December 27th– is told through the eyes of a young television journalist in Bina Shah’s intense confessional novel A Season for Martyrs. The estranged son of a wealthy landowner from the interior region of Sindh, Ali Sikandar, is assigned by his producer to cover the arrival of Benazir Bhutto, the opposition leader who has returned home to Karachi after eight years of exile to take part in the presidential race. But Ali finds himself swept up in ...
