For long, literary criticism has been a product of inspired intuition. During the last
century, attempts were made to provide a palpable scientific base for critical analysis with the pioneering works of Russian Formalists, the proponents of Practical Criticism and adherents of Stylistic analysis of texts. A paradigm shift occurred in critical approaches. While analysis of the choice of sentence structure, clausal and phrasal devices and the like can provide a glimpse into the mind of the man, it cannot explore the whole creative process. Attempts have been made the world over to take the marginalized from the periphery to the center of agonized awareness of humanity. And in this urgent endeavor, the contribution of sensitive writers—especially, women—is central. Even among the marginalized women, the plight of subaltern women is much more pitiable. The plight of transgender persons is most pathetic.

In the first paper, “London’s The Mutiny of the Elsinore: A Tragic Allegory of the Whole Proletarian Destiny”, Abdulsalam Hamad examines London’s novel as a presentation of protest by the proletarian class working under inhuman conditions on board Elsinore, which serves as microcosm of brutality and animality of the capitalist section of the society.

The agony of marginalized women is explored by two novelists discussed by Shymasree Basu in her paper, “Memoirs of Two Marginalized Women: A Comparative Study of A Life Less Ordinary and The Truth About Me – A Hijra Life Story”. The women attempt to find for themselves ‘a safe space’ where they can locate their identity. In the first novel, A Life Less Ordinary, the writer presents the struggle of Baby to find the desired space for herself by walking out of her house and domestic harassment with the sole purpose of educating her son and achieves a measure of success when the family of Tatush offers her shelter. But in the case of Doraiswamy who turned into transgender Revathi, in the second novel, The Truth about Me: A Hijra Life Story, she meets with derision and humiliation from all sides. When she goes to join the community of hijras, she is reduced to the status of a sex worker.

Vaishali Punjani, in her paper, “The Sufferings of a Subaltern Mother: A Comprehensive Study of Baburao Bagul’s Short Story ‘Mother’”, studies the status of women in a patriarchal setup, when a woman is treated no better than a reproducing machine, without any rights over the children. The woman, in the story “Mother” by Baburao Bagul, remains nameless. Women are abused in the house and are largely slave mothers.

The women who are cursed with twin disadvantages of caste and color are more marginalized, but white women of South Africa are less marginalized, as portrayed by J M Coetzee in Foe, which is a take on Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. K Narasimha Rao argues, in his paper, “Inhabiting Feminism and the Feminine in J M Coetzee’s Foe”, that the novel is a critique of Anglo-Saxon feminism and explores the voice of women as an expression of otherness.

The pangs of the Parsi community, which once dominated the commercial world in Mumbai (then Bombay) is touchingly evoked by Rohinton Mistry in his novel, Such a Long Journey. Richa Joshi Pande, in her paper, “The Difficulty of Being Good in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey”, discusses the pitiable situation of the members of the community, while bringing out the essential goodness of the unassailable hero, Gustad. The paper is an insightful study of Mistry’s novel.
Khushwant Singh is popularly known for his salacious gossip and cocktail of scotch and sex, but Radika Chopra in her paper, “Fiction as Social History: A Study of Khushwant Singh’s Novels”, brings out the solid literary contribution of Khushwant as a social critic through memorable presentation of the events during partition, which split the peace- loving members of the Hindu, Muslim and Sikh communities before they are rudely jolted out of their religious tolerance and mutual respect, in Train to Pakistan.

Julia Devardhi and Deepika Nelson, in their paper, “Whitman’s ‘One’s Self I Sing’:
A Linguistic and Stylistic Analysis Based on Formalism”, traces the development of stylistics drawing largely from formalistic criticism and tries to explore the authorial posture through the choice of syntax, semantics and inversion of expressions. The analysis brings out the universalism of the poet, while starting with focus on one’s self.

We offer a critical evaluation of contribution of the celebrated Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, who passed away recently, by GRK Murty in his paper, “Chinua Achebe (1930-2013): Light of Conrad’s Dark Africa”. Achebe was indeed an eloquent articulator of the paramount need for assertion of African identity and was a tireless champion of the aspirations of the erstwhile colonized all over the world.

-- S S Prabhakar Rao
Consulting Editor