Racist politics and white moral superiority are persistently parodied and subverted in Oates's recent Gothic novel, The Accursed. The novel turns back to early twentieth century Princeton, an elite society struggling under the "Crosswicks Curse," and reconsiders history through the Gothic lens to critique the discriminatory ideology of America's classic Religious Right. Appropriately, this paper isolates the recurring problematic of racism in the novel first to demonstrate how through the creation of the "other," racist politics and white moral superiority were rationalized by the powerful, and second to recognize how national leaders obsessed with ideas of purity lead double lives engendering a duality that emerges from their warped interpretations of Christianity. Further, by addressing the duplicity inherent in American history, religion, and its socialist/secularist discourses, this reading defines The Accursed as a postsecular reflection seeking to re-vision the nation's past.

This paper aims at eliciting the human and physical aspects of Michael Ondaatje's 1992 novel, The English Patient. It argues that the human and physical aspects of this novel are derived from its very signs, its author's textual existence or inclusion, its characters and their actions, and its readers' interaction with its text. The paper tries to show that the author, the text, and the reader are in a state of constant interaction and exchange of physical/bodily activities and traits/characteristics. It concludes that the writer, the text, and the readers of The English Patient are involved equally in reciprocal simulative bodiliness that forms a significant aspect of the processes of writing and reading works of fiction. Close textual reading/analysis is employed as the method of presentation in the paper.

That the ancient Indian culture is intertwined with religion goes without saying. However, understood and practiced as a simultaneously fixed as also changeable dharma in India, this concept befuddles the Western mind and also the West-influenced Indian mind. This study analyzes the concept of dharma to identify its constituent and differentiating elements like beliefs, scriptures, ethics, rituals, and symbols, and traces in some major texts of Indian English Fiction, from the earliest days to contemporary times, the treatment of external religious practices, texts, gurus, myths, and finally the transcendent spiritual consciousness. What the study finds is that not much focus is found on the intricacies of dharma in Indian English Fiction, in which it is mostly the exotic that catches the author's eye. Moreover, whatever deeper we find is a reductive and oversimplified view of dharma, seen through the Western lens. However, the tide seems to be turning with some of the young generation writers seriously undertaking the journey of self-realization and making self-experience the basis of writing.

Often migrants are caught between spaces where they live negotiating between their past and present selves. A sense of nostalgia traps them from within, which gets reflected in comparative parameters through their interaction with the new place and culture, through changing frameworks of family and relations, and through varying levels of perceptions. As a social phenomenon, migration gets potent when seen through the perspectives of time, nostalgia, and memory. Temporality hence is closely connected to the understanding of the process of migration. This paper aims to analyze the conditions and situations that the migrants face when aspects of time and remembrance are brought together on a temporal scale of past and present from select migrant narratives of India, Pakistan, and Bangladesh.

Post-1990s' internet boom and subsequent media intervention completely altered the face of representing crime investigation, medicine, science, and technology. Literary narratives, fictional and nonfictional, could also not refrain from this influence, and therefore, they too adapted themselves in a way that the narrative nonfiction too became fabricated under the supervision of the editors. An interesting but confusing event in the world history is the Bangladesh Liberation War of 1971, for it is represented in conflicting narratives of war crime and victimization. Linton (2010b) claims that over three million people were brutally killed and hundreds and thousands of women were raped by the allied forces of Pakistani army and pro-Pakistani Razakars during the nine-month-long freedom struggle. In 1992, Ibrahim (1994) in her book Aami Birangana Balchi (A War Heroine, I Speak) and Mookherjee (2015) in The Spectral Wound recount the stories of Biranganas (literally, brave heroines of the war). However, the counternarratives by Saikia (2004) and Bose (2011) argue that such generalization of Pakistani military being the only perpetrator in the 1971 war is futile as Bengali nationalists also raped non-Bengali Bihari women during and after the war. In the light of this paradoxical representation of gendered violence in the said war, the paper revisits these narratives and the related controversies to attest that truth is relative and also fabricated in narrative nonfiction.

Though there is a slew of critiques on women's visions of utopia/dystopia as a systematic worldview (in which gender, body, sexuality, culture, environment, technology, psychology, and belief are entangled) that takes diverse generic forms, this paper aims to map out the shift from utopian vision to dystopian paradox, which demolishes old certainties in favor of a new, and sometimes, perhaps, a more disconcerting vision of a feminist future as portrayed in Manjula Padmanabhan's Escape. While there is a tremendous amount of significant research linking the recent trends in contemporary feminist theorizing about how and why events, practices, knowledge(s), and texts are forms of expression of patriarchal power relations, there are very few studies which enable some understanding of the transformative potential as well as the ideological blind spots of this utopianism. This paper aims to address these issues through simultaneously close and contextualized readings of Begum Rokeya Sakhawat Hossain's Sultana's Dream (1905) and Padmanabhan's Escape (2008).

Few institutions challenge more deeply our ethos of individual freedom and equality than that of Purdah and Marriage the separation of women from all men except their husbands and brothers, and sequestering them in women's compound of gendered mansions. Marriage is often seen as the identity symbol for women, and getting settled in husband's home is the only bliss that women are supposed to be content with. The present paper sheds light on two novels Rama Mehta's Inside the Haveli and Manju Kapur's Difficult Daughters to portray the subjugation and identity crisis of women. The paper problematizes the concepts of female space, subjugation, identity crisis, and liberation through the protagonists: Geeta in Inside the Haveli and Virmati in Difficult Daughters.

In recent times, postcolonial diaspora writing is principally concerned with themes such as marginalization, resistance, racism, ethnicity, adaptability, and self-independence. In the novel Jasmine, Bharati Mukherjee showcases the problems of women, particularly those related to cross-cultural crisis and quest for identity. Themes such as expatriate sensibility, the unresolved dilemma of modern women, and immigrants' admiration for Americanness find expression in the novel. This paper explores expatriatehood as a metaphysical experience of exile and the manifestations of diaspora by probing the protagonist's search for identity and transformation in Jasmine.

This paper analyzes the amalgamation of absurdism and realism in Harold Pinter's The Dumb Waiter. The Dumb Waiter is the last of three earliest plays by Pinter that possesses the traits of the Theatre of the Absurd. The play projects the life of two hired killers during one of their missions and is highly flavored with realistic essence, which is mostly in contradiction with the principles of the Theatre of the Absurd. But due to the amalgam of absurdism and realism in Pinter's oeuvre, finding the realistic streaks in his works is not a tough task. Behind the thick layer of absurdity in The Dumb Waiter, the real characters with internal fears depict the pathetic status of a powerless man in a menacing atmosphere. The characters' futile struggle to protect themselves from their powerful master is rendered realistically.

This paper presents a summary of the most recent research-oriented studies with a focus on two of the most important categorizations of Form-Focused Instruction (FFI): isolated versus integrated. The theoretical differences between the two different types of FFI are provided and a brief summary of the most recent studies is reported. The paper finds that isolated versus integrated instruction is a necessary technique and needs to be applied to the teaching process at the appropriate time. In general, the findings indicate that the tendency toward implicit learning of grammar through using communicative forms of the language is improving and the final outcome of this approach shows improvement and progress in the learners' production and language development.

This paper aims at exploring the projection relations in the genre of court decisions. Projection is considered an important resource for meaning making. According to Halliday (Halliday and Matthiessen 2014, 506), it is the second type of logico-semantic relations by which a clause can combine with another clause to form a clause complex. The first type is known as "expansion," which is a direct representation of a nonlinguistic experience. On the other hand, "projection" is regarded as a "representation of a (linguistic) representation." Thompson (1994, 2) observes that a projection relation is a metaphenomenon wherein language is used to construe language itself rather than construing the experiential metafunction (i.e., real-world experiences). This paper analyzes the construal of projection relations in six court judgments three pertaining to civil law and three to criminal law.