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Editorial Note
Literary Voice: A Peer Reviewed Journal of English Studies (ISSN 2277-4521), Number 25, Volume 1, September 2025 comprises research papers on multiple genres and facets of British, American, Indian, Comparative Literatures, ELT. The research articles display varied range of investigations of literary texts in the context of twentieth-century feminism and its experiments with a postmodernist form of writing. The articles are informed by nuanced exploration of the inner intricacies and emotional vulnerability of literary personas through the Freudian lens of psychosexuality, intertextuality, performativity, gender dysphoria, the changing terrain of disability studies, the dynamic power structure, and the developing disgust towards femininity. Some of the essays attempt to put forward a framework to better understand the role of the Gothic in effectively articulating the horrors of posthuman warfare, and underline the importance of fiction as counter-narratives to the ‘official’ accounts of such conflicts, and promote a clear, crisp, and authentic understanding of history by encouraging people to question sources, recognize biases, and appreciate the complexity of the past. Some of the investigations focus on how literature can illuminate societal injustices and provoke critical reflection that contributes to legal change, and how English becomes a contested site for negotiating identity, power, and resistance. The explorations (a) theorize crucial ethical and moral issues and dilemmas faced by doctors when treating patients amidst war and violence, (b) concentrate on the new categories of emotion ascending from Earth’s atmosphere and environmental changes distressing young adult minds, seriously draw the reader’s attention to the necessity and pertinence of a balanced, ethically guided approach to genetic engineering, and (c) articulate a planetary consciousness by foregrounding Earth system materiality, geological deep time, and multispecies entanglements, thereby challenging anthropocentric assumptions. Besides, the articles highlight hauntology’s relevance for understanding the unfinished aftermath of conflict and the spectral condition of peace, examine the human-machine dialectic, located in the transhuman subject, and investigate how the trauma of the independence movement, though not directly experienced by the second and third generations, remains potent in the cultural memory of the nation.
The current edition comprises two book reviews, and introduces a new voice in Indian English poetry. We will earnestly wait for the feedback, dear readers!
T.S. Anand
Content
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September, 2025
Literary Voice: A Peer Reviewed Journal of English Studies
ISSN 2277-4521
Number 25 Volume 1 September 2025
RESEARCH ARTICLES
BRTISH LITERATURE
“It’s odd that there should be no ending”: A Reading of Narrative Form in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall
Dr. Madhvi Zutshi/ 1
Wolves in Wolf Hall: An Intersectional Study of Wolves and Humans in Wolf Hall Triptych
Sandhya Aduri – Prof. G.M. Sundaravalli/ 8
Precarious Life: Understanding the Vulnerability of Stanley in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party
Alankar Das Dalal/ 15
Reconceptualizing Object Agency Through Ma (間): An Object-Oriented Narratological Approach to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Select Novels
Aishwarya Maran – Dr. J. -Michael Raj/ 23
The Excremental Vision of the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Debapratim Chakraborty/ 30
AMERICAN/CANADIAN LITERATURE
Disability as Identity: Emotional Politics and Social Construction in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
Salma Banu M – Dr. K. -Suganthi/ 37
Culinary Conflicts: A Study of the Evolving Significance of Indian Food in the Select Diasporic Fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
Dr. Debabrata Banerjee/ 45
The Conundrum of being a Bacha Posh: An Analysis of Nadia Hashimi’s One Half from the East and The Pearl that Broke Its Shell
Unnati Jain – Dr Nupur Tandon/ 51
Language as Resistance: Hybridity and Marginalized Voice in Megha Majumdar’s A Burning
Akanshya Handique – Ishita Bajpai/ 57
Inhuman Battlegrounds: Mapping the Posthuman War Gothic in Ken Liu’s “In the Loop”
Steve Antony – Dr. Tania -Mary Vivera/ 66
Trans-species Empathy in Mitali Perkins’ Tiger Boy: Animal Ethics and Compassion in Children’s Literature
Jonitha Joyson – Dr S. -Visaka Devi/ 73
Rewriting Nature: Ethical Implications of Genetic Engineering in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Geetha S. Subramaniam/ 80
Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a Site of Intergenerational Trauma in Farzana Doctor’s Seven
Aftara Farmin Sultana – Dr.- Lakshminath Kagyung/ 88
INDIAN ENGLISH LITERATURE
The Imminence of Violence: Communal Conflicts in Contemporary
Indian English Fiction
A.S. Adish – Dr. Reju George Mathew/ 95
Understanding Ruskin Bond’s Book of Nature: An Ecosystem Approach
Navdeep Kahol/ 108
(Re)Visiting Her-stories: A Study of Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors
Pragya Dev – Prof. Binod Mishra/ 115
Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing: Rethinking Human and More-than-Human Relationality as Planetary
Ankit Kumar Sharma – Dr. Vipan Pal Singh/ 123
Haunted Presence: Trauma, Memory, and Spectral Testimonies in Easterine Kire’s A Terrible Matriarchy
Jenisha Singh – Dr. Prabudh Singh/ 131
Diverse Dimensions of Immigrant Experiences in the Select Poems of Surjit Patar
Dr. Mandeep Kaur/ 137
Mental Disorders and Father-Daughter Relationship: An Analysis of Gayathri Prabhu’s If I Had to Tell It Again
Shinu C. – Dr. Binu Zachariah/ 145
Reclaiming Lost Narratives: Cultural Memory, Historical Transformation,
and the Quest for Authenticity in Angami and Naga Literature
Shubhangi Singh – Dr. Deepesh Kumar Thakur/ 153
‘Ram Mohammad Thomas’ as Idiosyncratic Personality in Vikas Swarup’s Q&A
Paulreiner – Dr. S. Azariah Kirubakaran/ 160
Freedom in Fragments: An Existential Reading of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis
Hanna Binoy – Dr Narinder K. Sharma/ 167
Ecospiritual Refusals: Ontological Resistance and Decolonial Memory in Kashmiri Mystical Verse
Towfeeq Farooq – Dr. Khursheed Ahmad Qazi/ 174
Subverting Oppression: The Politics of Deification in Cho Dharman’s Koogai
Ujjwal Narayan Patowary/ 185
The Independence Paradox: A Study of Shivani Gupta’s Autobiography, No Looking Back
Kowsalya G – Dr. C. Dhanabal/ 193
Patriarchy, Parenthood, and the Politics of Absence: Single Motherhood in K.R. Meera’s Qabar
Ms. Subhasnata Mohanta – Dr. Sutanuka Banerjee/ 200
COMPARATIVE LITERATURE
Literature as a Catalyst for Legal Change: Narratives That Reshaped Justice
T K Kavya – Dr. B. Monika Nair/ 207
Eco-Emotions and Literary Solastalgia: The Adolescent Mental Discomfort in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction
Prerona Das – Dr. Mamta Anand/ 214
Labyrinths of Liberation: Mapping Transgressive Femininity in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hasini Raj I – S.Horizan Prasanna Kumar/ 221
Navigating Dehumanization: A Study of Yeonmi Park’s In Order to Live, A North Korean Journey to Freedom and Ting Xing Ye’s My Name is Number 4: A True Story
Nandini B Jayapal – Dr. Suresh Frederick/ 229
Medicine and Morality in War: Exploring the Humanitarian Imperative in Literary Narratives
Dr. Gurpreet Kaur/ 236
From Self-Doubt and Utter Anxiety to Calm Fear: Language, Perception, and the Shining Figure in Jon Fosse’s A Shining
Darakhshan Aftab – Dr. Sukanya Saha/ 242
A Phytocritical Study of Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather: A Postcolonial Perspective in Anthropocene Context
Ashima Arora – Prof. Dr. Naveen K. Mehta/ 250
Where the War Never Ended: Hauntology and the Post-War Afterlife in Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War
Dr. Rincy Saji/ 257
Postmemory, Homeland and Partition: A Reading of Sorayya Khan’s Five Queen’s Road
Farhana Khatun – Dr. Hasina Wahida/ 266
Enigma of the Ultimate Silence: Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K from a Buddhist Perspective
Dipayan Mukherjee/ 273
PERFORMANCE STUDIES
War and Womanhood as Palimpsests: Adaptation and the Female Protagonists in Gone with the Wind and Cold Mountain
Henna C – Dr R Padmapriya/ 281
Cross-cultural Adaptations and Culture Wars: An Analysis of Andrei Yermash’s Cinematic Adaptation of Asimov’s End of Eternity
Pankaj Bharti – Professor Sushila Shekhawat/ 288
Re-visioning the ‘Human’: Evolution of Transhuman Subject in Shafi Uddin Shafi’s Machineman
Mr. Shibasambhu Nandi –Dr. Bhumika Sharma/ 295
A Study of Nationalism through Collective Memory of Transgenerational Trauma and Resilience in Indian Cinema
Dr. D. Sudha Rani/ 304
Exploring Cultural and Gender Dynamics in Laapataa Ladies
Rashmita Devi/ 312
LITERARY DISCOURSE
Heterogeneity of Temporality and the Narrative: A Retrospective Glance from Postmodernism to Greek Classics
Dr. Abhay Kumar Mishra – Dr. Prem Lata Chandra/ 319
Life Writing: A Study of History and Historiography
Kanchan – Dr. Vandana Sharma/ 327
ELT
Predictive Analysis of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Leveraging Logistic Regression for Classification and Evaluation
Dr. Aditi Goyal – Dr. Vineet Mehan/ 334
The Influence of Task-Based Language Instruction on Learner Involvement and Motivation: A Quasi- Experimental Study
Mr. Vivek Sabharwal – Dr. Bishakha Mandal/ 342
BOOK REVIEWS
Aoyama, Michiko. What You Are Looking for is in the library
Translated by Alison Watts, Hanover Square Press, 2023.
Aditi Gupta/ 351
Jhumpa Lahiri. Whereabouts: A Novel India: Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2021.
Shayanti Nath – Dr. Poulomi Mitra/ 354
POETRY
Alapati. Purnachandra Rao/ 358
Nature: A Human Proxy
Humanity: The Visible
Humanity: The Invisible
Humanity: The Invincible
“It’s odd that there should be no ending”: A Reading of Narrative Form in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall
Dr. Madhvi Zutshi
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 |September 2025 | Page 1-7 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.1
Abstract
This article examines novels by two postwar British women writers, Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook and Margaret Drabble’s The Waterfall, within the context of twentieth-century feminism and its experiments with a postmodernist form of writing. The article examines how these two novels, in different ways, use strategies derived from both realist and postmodernist forms to achieve two ends: first, to reach out to a popular female readership by depicting the everyday challenges faced by women both inside the home and outside the household, and second, to subvert patriarchal ideas with innovative uses of a self-reflexive narrative form. I demonstrate that there are diverse and rich possibilities in these mid-twentieth-century narratives that freely avail of several realist and postmodernist strategies to raise feminist questions and offer answers.
Keywords: Golden Notebook, Waterfall, postmodernist writing, feminism, Doris Lessing, Margaret Drabble
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Wolves in Wolf Hall: An Intersectional Study of Wolves and Humans in Wolf Hall Triptych
Sandhya Aduri – Prof. G.M. Sundaravalli
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 |September 2025 | Page 8-14 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.2
Abstract
The present paper is an earnest endeavor to explore the characteristics of wolf through an intersectional lens in the picture gallery of Characters in the Wolf Hall Triptych, the true to Life Trilogy that maps out the ascension of Thomas Cromwell from the humble origins to the Pinnacle of Power in the Henrician Court. The symbolism embedded in the title Wolf Hall is the most intriguing and recurring motif in the triptych. Albeit, its literal meaning refers to the name of the Seymour family estate, its figurative sense connotes the Latin adage “Homo homini lupus” meaning “man is wolf to man” indicating an arena governed by survival, power, predation, and political machinations. Lupine traits reverberate throughout the Trilogy. Although all the characters in the Triptych share the characteristics of wolf, the present study examines the narrative arc of the protagonist Thomas Cromwell as he is endowed with absolute lupine traits. Also, this paper seeks to analyse the impact of the intersectional factors, such as Power, Ambition, Political Machinations and Social Hierarchy comprehensively on character behaviours and relationships.
Keywords: Wolf Hall, Wolf Symbolism, Thomas Cromwell, Power, Political Machinations and Social Hierarchy
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Precarious Life: Understanding the Vulnerability of Stanley in Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party
Alankar Das Dalal
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 15-22 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.3
Abstract
In Harold Pinter’s dramatic oeuvre, there exists a primal drive for possession operating the actions of the characters, which Robert Gordon in Harold Pinter: The Theatre of Power calls ‘the territorial imperative’. Consequently, the space occupied by them, symbolized by the central metaphor of the ‘room’, becomes a significant motif in many of his works, highlighting the psychological reality of the characters. Thus, it is not simply the space they inhabit but also their inner space that they carry within is Pinter’s concern. This paper aims at an exploration of this inner mindscape of Stanley in The Birthday Party (1957) with the objective to contend that the hidden fears, the repressed desires, and the unconscious wishes that lurk within play a dominant role in his struggle for the construction of his identity. However, in this strife, he undergoes an inevitable psychological paralysis as he ultimately regresses into infantile helplessness. Therefore, the study shall probe into the inner intricacies and emotional vulnerability of Stanley through the Freudian lens of psychosexuality, and the inter-relationship between masculinity and power. The relevance of this essay lies in contending that even men undergo emotional collapse and suffer from intra-psychic crisis.
Keywords: psychosexuality, room, identity, vulnerability, defence mechanism
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Reconceptualizing Object Agency Through Ma (間): An Object-Oriented Narratological Approach to Kazuo Ishiguro’s Select Novels
Aishwarya Maran – Dr. J. Michael Raj
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 23-29 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.4
Abstract
This study integrates Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), which treats all entities including objects as equally significant, and Ma (間), a Japanese concept emphasizing the meaningfulness of gaps and spaces, to analyze how objects function in Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Buried Giant and Klara and the Sun. Through this integration the study attempts to reconceptualize how objects are viewed in a narrative. By highlighting the complementary nature of both the concepts, this study evaluates the significance of absences, gaps and hidden meanings that are expressed through the objects in the narrative. This study focuses on the function of various significant objects in both the novels. It also analyses how those objects actively shape the novel and its themes through their placement and interaction with other objects. The analysis reveals that objects shape the narrative in their own right, beyond simply serving human characters, influencing reader interpretation and engagement. Rather than being seen as passive tools or background elements, objects are understood as having the capacity to affect relationships, emotions, and events within a story. This reconceptualization of object agency (ability of objects to influence the narrative) underscores the interconnectedness of all narrative entities and advocates for a non-anthropocentric approach to literary analysis. The study highlights the importance of what is present and what is left unsaid or unseen in a narrative, illustrating how gaps and spaces contribute significantly to the literary ecosystem.
Keywords: Object Agency, Ma (間), Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO), Narrative Dynamics, Interobjectivity
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The Excremental Vision of the Nation in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children
Debapratim Chakraborty
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 30-36 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.05
Abstract
Salman Rushdie’s novel of postcolonial hope and disenchantment Midnight’s Children is conspicuous in its copious use of scatological imagery and situation. As a governing trope of this novel, excremental images not only serve as an index of the failings of a flawed postcolonial nation but also, in my opinion, as a complex, multivalent sign in the novel’s engagement with the discourses about the nation and national identity. Excrement, the site of what Kristeva calls the abject, occupies the ambiguous zone between the self and the other. When inscribed upon the body of the nation they thus mediate and inform our understanding of the author’s complex ambivalence towards his nation. The in-betweenness of Rushdie’s stance vis-à-vis the nation, his simultaneous disenchantment with the actual trajectory of the postcolonial Indian nation and his desperate faith in the resilience of the secular ideal of India thus provide a fertile ground for the reading of the scatological tropes in his novel. This paper aims to envisage an interpretive idiom for reading the use of scatology in Rushdie’s novel thereby not only providing new insights into Rushdie’ craft but also suggesting the efficacy of scatological humour in capturing the complexities of the postcolonial condition.
Keywords: scatology, abject, nation, plurality, postcolonial India
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Disability as Identity: Emotional Politics and Social Construction in John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars
Salma Banu M – Dr. K. Suganthi
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 37-44 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.6
Abstract
John Green’s The Fault in Our Stars offers a deep exploration of disability, illness, and the strong desire for identity within the changing terrain of disability studies. Set in a world of teenage life affected by serious health issues, the story follows Hazel Grace Lancaster and Augustus Waters as they face big questions, deal with loss, and value their relationships. Green shows characters living with the long-term effects of cancer not as helpless victims but as complex individuals with their own choices and dreams. The story challenges the romantic view of illness and questions common beliefs that ignore or stereotype disabled people. Through Hazel and Augustus’s emotional connection, the novel explores the challenges of disabled youth dealing with love, grief, and lasting impact. This study looks at The Fault in Our Stars through the lens of disability studies, discussing how John Green recognizes disability as part of identity instead of a limitation. This analysis relies on three main theoretical ideas: Susan Sontag’s discussion of illness metaphors, Sara Ahmed’s theory on emotions and their flow, and the social model of disability, which sees disability as caused by social barriers rather than individual flaws.
Keywords: Disability Studies, Theory of Conflict, stigma, affliction, spoiled identity
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Culinary Conflicts: A Study of the Evolving Significance of Indian Food in the Select Diasporic Fiction by Jhumpa Lahiri and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
Dr. Debabrata Banerjee
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 45-50 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.7
Abstract
Food has emerged as one of the basic components of culture preservation among the Indian Diaspora throughout the globe. Indian food with its unique blend of flavours and tastes establishes its separate identity from the food consumed in the orient as well as in the occident. The strong attachment of the first-generation diaspora towards Indian culinary practices and their attempt to recreate elaborate Indian meals in their adopted homes in the foreign land, is a part of the nostalgic longing for homeland that the diaspora experiences; however, it may also be read as the resistance to the western influence that most of the first-generation migrants consider corrupting for their children. In this paper a close reading of selected works by Jhumpa Lahiri (The Namesake and Interpreter of Maladies) and Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni’ Mistress of Spices has been made, in order to study the importance of food as a device of culture preservation as well as an instrument of resistance against the foreign cultural hegemony by the Indian Diaspora.
Keywords: food, diaspora, nostalgia, culture preservation, resistance, mongrelization.
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The Conundrum of being a Bacha Posh: An Analysis of Nadia Hashimi’s One Half from the East and The Pearl that Broke Its Shell
Unnati Jain – Dr Nupur Tandon
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 51-56 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.8
Abstract
Afghanistan has witnessed decades of war, turmoil, invasions, and political upheavals. Umpteen years of violence and socio-political unrest have immensely contributed to the subjugation and oppression of Afghan women in the name of religion, war, and fundamentalism. The patriarchal society and its disregard for women’s liberation and emancipation has adversely affected the position of women in the country. This paper attempts to discuss the existence and identity of a ‘Bacha Posh’, through a reading of Nadia Hashimi’s fictional works One Half from the East and The Pearl that Broke Its Shell. Prevalent in many tribal societies of Afghanistan and neighbouring Pakistan, the custom of dressing a girl as a boy (Bacha Posh is a Dari word which literally means “dressed as a boy”) is evidence of the androcentric mentality of privileging of boys over girls and the control exercised over women’s bodies, both publicly and privately. The paper will analyse aspects of gender dysphoria, performativity, and the dynamic power structure as experienced by the “boy-girl” and will also study the developing disgust towards effeminacy, femininity and the transition from boyhood to womanhood of a bacha posh.
Keywords: Bacha Posh, Performativity, Contested Identity, GID, Afghan women
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Language as Resistance: Hybridity and Marginalized Voice in Megha Majumdar’s A Burning
Akanshya Handique – Ishita Bajpai
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 57-65 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.9
Abstract
This paper examines how Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (2020) portrays language as both a means of resistance and a marker of marginality in postcolonial India. The novel highlights the layered use of English, shaped by regional idioms, sociolects, and non-standard grammar, to reflect India’s social hierarchies. The three protagonists, Jivan, Lovely, and PT Sir, inhabit distinct linguistic backgrounds that signify their socio-economic status and shape their access to voice, justice, and visibility. Drawing on postcolonial theory, including Bhabha’s concept of hybridity, Spivak’s critique of subaltern speech, and Berlant’s notion of emotional legibility, the paper examines how Majumdar reimagines Indian English as both expressive and exclusionary. A Burning stands as a notable post-2000 Indian Anglophone novel, where English becomes a contested site for negotiating identity, power, and resistance.
Keywords: Indian Anglophone fiction, hybridity, language and power, marginality, postcolonial narrative
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Inhuman Battlegrounds: Mapping the Posthuman War Gothic in Ken Liu’s “In the Loop”
Steve Antony – Dr. Tania Mary Vivera
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 66-72 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.10
Abstract
The Gothic has had a history of being intertwined with war narratives, providing a language to express the physical and mental horrors of military conflict. The Gothic’s link with war has been present since its beginning and has carried forward to the contemporary era in fiction and non-fiction. Ken Liu’s “In the Loop” explores this Gothic tryst with war in the context of drone operations in modern-day military conflicts. The use of posthuman technologies like drones has far-reaching implications for the future of warfare and human identity in military conflicts. The human identity is altered by its entanglement with these posthuman systems within the assemblage of war, which Liu conveys through his characters and their gradual transformation. This study attempts to put forward a framework to better understand the role of the Gothic in effectively articulating the horrors of posthuman warfare, demonstrated through an analysis of Ken Liu’s short story.
Keywords: Military science fiction; Posthuman warfare; War Gothic; Monstrosity; Dehumanization
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Trans-species Empathy in Mitali Perkins’ Tiger Boy: Animal Ethics and Compassion in Children’s Literature
Jonitha Joyson – Dr S. Visaka Devi
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 73-79 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.11
Abstract
Trans-species empathy disrupts the traditional human-centered perspectives and represents an expansion of compassion for non-human animals. This paper reads Mitali Perkins’ Tiger Boy (2015) as a narrative of trans-species empathy that enhances the symbiotic significance and consciousness among readers. The study employs Suzanne Keen’s concept of strategic empathy to show how children’s literature uses narrative empathy to transform the outlook of young readers towards animal protection. This paper argues that empathetic responses towards animals can be fostered through fiction and help establish human, animal, and nature relationships as embodied experiences.
Keywords: anthropomorphism, empathy, trans-species empathy, strategic empathy, children’s narrative
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Rewriting Nature: Ethical Implications of Genetic Engineering in Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake
Geetha S. Subramaniam
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 80-87 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.12
Abstract
Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood is set in a future where people, animals and even laboratory-created life is a blurred line that asks immediate, pressing ethical questions. The paper interprets the novel as an allegorical exploration of biotechnological advancements and their enduring social and environmental consequences. Centring on characters like Snowman and Crake, Oryx and Crake considers the dissonance between scientific progress and ecological responsibility. The research enters current discussions about genetic modification and synthetic biology by means of close reading of the text. Atwood’s tale functions as a warning against human hubris, ecological disaster, and the commercialization of life itself. The book highlights the consequences of scientific exploration that is not bound by ethical practices, and explores the toll it can take on individuals and society to meddle with life forms. In connecting with current global debates about biotechnology, the study draws the reader’s attention to the necessity and pertinence of a balanced, ethically guided approach to genetic engineering that will respect humanity as well as nature.
Key Words: Genetic engineering, biotechnology, dystopia, ecological responsibility, extrapolation, bioethics.
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Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) as a Site of Intergenerational Trauma in Farzana Doctor’s Seven
Aftara Farmin Sultana – Dr. Lakshminath Kagyung
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 88-94 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.13
Abstract
This paper examines Farzana Doctor’s Seven (2020) as a literary site for interrogating the intergenerational trauma associated with Female Genital Mutilation (FGM) within the Dawoodi Bohra Muslim community. The paper argues that Seven presents FGM not only as an act of bodily harm but also as a multidimensional trauma – at once personal, psychological, familial, and cultural – that is transferred across generations of women through silence, denial, and normative expectations, while also demonstrating that confronting and narrativising trauma is essential for disrupting the cycle of violence. Through the protagonist’s journey of uncovering both personal and collective histories, the narrative exposes the mechanisms by which trauma is both sustained and challenged. Employing qualitative textual analysis, this study offers a close reading of the theme of FGM in Seven, drawing on Cathy Caruth’s trauma theory, Marianne Hirsch’s concept of postmemory, sexuality theory and postcolonial feminist frameworks. These theoretical lenses illuminate how the novel critiques systems of gendered violence and advocates for intergenerational healing and accountability. Seven serves as a critical feminist intervention that challenges the normalisation of FGM and foregrounds the transformative power of voice and narrative.
Keywords: Female Genital Mutilation, Intergenerational Trauma, Postmemory, Cultural Silence, Female agency.
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The Imminence of Violence: Communal Conflicts in Contemporary Indian English Fiction
A. S. Adish – Dr. Reju George Mathew
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1| September 2025 | Page 98-107 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.14
Abstract
The paper explores the representation of communal riots in Indian English fiction, focusing on the depiction of the precarity of Muslims in post-2014 India. India has a long history of communal conflicts, starting with its independence in 1947. Indian English fiction’s engagement with the concept of India continues to develop, as it addresses grievances arising from an increasingly ethnic democracy characterised by communal tensions. We analyse these novels with help from the literature on riots, especially by Gyanendra Pandey and Paul R. Brass. While many novels have depicted the communal conflicts of the period, Megha Majumdar’s A Burning (2020) and Devika Rege’s Quarterlife (2023) expose how the institutionalised riot systems operate with identitarian political parties controlling and making use of the conflicts by alluding to true incidents from India’s recent past. These novels also underline the importance of fiction as counter-narratives to the ‘official’ accounts of such conflicts.
Keywords: riots, ethnic democracy, institutionalised riot systems, counter narratives
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Understanding Ruskin Bond’s Book of Nature: An Ecosystem Approach
Navdeep Kahol
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 108-114 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.15
Abstract
Nature writing is emerging as a promising field as its scope and range are expanding. Beginning as solitary enjoyment of wilderness to the anthropocentric view of nature, it has come a long way. The rich existing body of nature writing has explored many generic forms — memoir, travelogue, natural history and literary essay, not to mention bibliographies, endnotes, glossaries, and maps. The present paper analyses the nature of nature writing in Ruskin Bond’s Book of Nature using an ecosystem approach. It contends that Bond’s writing is free from the confines of genre and assumes as varied shapes as the nature does. It narrates, documents, contemplates, reminisces, breaks into poetry, moves as a travelogue, philosophises on various aspects of nature. It is hybrid in nature and contains some bit of every genre thus simulating the unplanned nature. Citing limitations of the existing taxonomy, the paper attempts to place Bond’s The Book of Nature using Barnhill’s approach. It tries to locate his work vis a vis the fresh ways of looking at the landscape. It is a theoretical take on his work focussing on the structure and subject of his work and its significance in achieving the desired effect.
Keywords: nature writing, genre, taxonomy, ecosystem, Ruskin Bond, landscape,
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(Re)Visiting Her-stories: A Study of Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors
Pragya Dev – Prof. Binod Mishra
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 |September 2025 | Page 115-122 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.16
Abstract
The quest for powerful women to receive recognition has suffered at the hands of patriarchy since time immemorial. Ambitious women who failed to comply with men could never grow out of the “whore” accusation imbued by society. These powerful women were transgressors who were deliberately shunned by society to set an example, yet they became aspirations for others and demonstrated that women’s geniuses could combat the influence of patriarchy. Kavitha Rao’s Lady Doctors: The Untold Stories of India’s First Women in Medicine (2021) is a compilation of the stories of six powerful yet forgotten women of the past, and this paper intends to explore the social milieu characterizing these women’s lives and their formation of identities. Further, it also scrutinizes the role of men in the lives of the six women and attempts to deconstruct gender biases within the field of medicine.
Keywords: Colonial, identity, lady doctors, medicine, patriarchy
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Shubhangi Swarup’s Latitudes of Longing: Rethinking Human and More-than-Human Relationality as Planetary
Ankit Kumar Sharma – Dr. Vipan Pal Singh
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 123-130 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.17
Abstract
Contemporary debates on the climate crisis and the Anthropocene increasingly distinguish the ‘planet’ from the ‘globe’ as a means to understand and address the interconnected ecological, political, and humanitarian crises of the twenty-first century. This planetary perspective emphasises Earth as a shared ecological system, shaped by profound human–more-than-human interdependencies across deep spatial and temporal dimensions. Contemporary fiction actively engages planetary imaginaries, offering critical frameworks for examining ecological trajectories and envisioning alternative futures. Yet few studies explore how South Asian fiction contributes to this discourse through narratives rooted in regional ecologies and cultural cosmologies. Shubhangi Swarup’s novel Latitudes of Longing (2018) exemplifies this literary potential. Through close readings informed by Amy Elias and Christian Moraru’s theorisation of planetarity: a term used as an alternative or critique of globalization or related ideas like the ‘globe’, this paper aims to show how the novel articulates a planetary consciousness by foregrounding Earth system materiality, geological deep time, and multispecies entanglements, thereby challenging anthropocentric assumptions. Ultimately, the study concludes that the novel’s narrative strategies reveal the limits of global frameworks for addressing the present crisis and underscore the need to reconceptualise the planet epistemologically and ontologically.
Keywords: Anthropocene, Climate Change, Latitudes of Longing, Planetarity, Shubhangi Swarup
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Haunted Presence: Trauma, Memory, and Spectral Testimonies in Easterine Kire’s A Terrible Matriarchy
Jenisha Singh – Dr. Prabudh Singh
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 131-136 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.18
Abstract
In A Terrible Matriarchy, Easterine Kire takes us on an evocative journey of the Angami community’s struggle to heal in the traumatic mid-20th century Nagaland. This paper examines the novel through the lens of trauma studies, focusing on how intergenerational trauma, silence, and memory shape the lived experiences of the Naga people. The novel exposes the embedded trauma of political conflict, gendered violence, and historical silencing in family structures and communal life. Fascinating to the portrayal of the trauma in the novel is the presence of ghosts and spirits. By giving us realistic portrayals of the spirits of the dead that inhabit the quiet hills and valleys of Nagaland, Kire establishes that ghosts are more than literary anthropomorphism or theoretical metaphor but rather serve as culturally meaningful mechanisms of witnessing and healing. The paper argues that the text through the portrayal of ghosts and spirits functions both as a testimony to collective suffering and as a literary site for recuperative memory and emotional reconstitution.
Keywords: Trauma Studies, Nagaland, Easterine Kire, Intergenerational Trauma, Cultural Memory, Silence, Witnessing
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Diverse Dimensions of Immigrant Experiences in the Select Poems of Surjit Patar
Dr. Mandeep Kaur
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 137-144 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.19
Abstract
The meaning of migration for Punjabis is radically different from that of a person from Europe. It appears to be a significant arena for Punjabis, as they willingly undertake numerous risks and employ every possible means to achieve success. Surjit Patar is highly feted Punjabi non-immigrant writer though his poetry effectively articulates the diverse dimensions of immigrant experiences. The immigrant consciousness embedded in Patar’s writings can be divided into three distinct sections: the nostalgic recollections of immigrants and their yearning for their homeland, the portrayal of the accomplishments that immigrants have achieved in their adopted nations, and the depiction of the experiences of migrant labourers who travel to Punjab from various regions in search of work. The purpose of this paper is to elucidate each of these three distinct components of Patar’s poetry by anchoring it in the theoretical framework of the postulates given by Homi K. Bhabha and Salman Rushdie. It also examines the migrants’ dilemma of assimilation or alienation, as portrayed in Patar’s poetry, as well as their nostalgic recollections of the motherland in the light of J. W. Berry’s theory. These aspects are analysed using the methods of close reading and textual analysis.
Keywords: Surjit Patar, Immigrants, Punjabi Literature, Assimilation, Alienation.
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Mental Disorders and Father-Daughter Relationship: An Analysis of Gayathri Prabhu’s If I Had to Tell It Again
Shinu C. – Dr. Binu Zachariah
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 145-152 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.20
Abstract
A balanced mind and stable mental health are imperative for a quality life. Literature, by recounting the stories of mental illness, demystifies the concept of psychological disorders and promotes inclusivity. The act of writing about subjective experiences of mental disorders aids the author in finding relief from feelings of stress and anxiety. Hampered mental health inadvertently affects emotional, psychological and social well-being. This research paper attempts to analyse psychological instability as recollected in the book If I Had to Tell It Again: A Memoir by Gayathri Prabhu. The memoir foregrounds the conflicting memories of mental disorder and depression, experienced by a father and a daughter, by delving into the complex dynamics of their relationship. The father’s incessant thoughts of suicide arise due to a sense of loss and low self-esteem. His reluctance to accept the illness delays or prevents the acquisition of coping skill mechanisms. These unmanaged, distressed feelings are detrimental to the psychological development of the daughter. Conspicuously, traumatic childhood experiences, unsupportive sociocultural factors, and poor parenting can contribute to the triggering of mental disorders at any stage of life. Tenets of psychoanalytical theories of depression are employed for the critical examination of the text. Narratives about psychological disorders proclaim the need to preserve and restore mental health to evade the diffusion of life and death instincts.
Keywords: Attachment; Childhood Trauma; Depression; Mental disorder; Suicide
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Reclaiming Lost Narratives: Cultural Memory, Historical Transformation, and the Quest for Authenticity in Angami and Naga Literature
Shubhangi Singh – Dr. Deepesh Kumar Thakur
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 153-159 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.21
Abstract
‘Any individual within a culture is going to have his or her interpretation of the collective cultural code; however, the individual’s worldview has its roots in the culture—that is, in the society’s shared philosophy, values and customs’ (Saul 194). But what if the passage of time significantly influences our shared philosophy, perception, and retelling of histories? The lack of evidence and the malleability of human memory can transform real events into stories, myths, or folktales. This research paper, by textually analyzing two novels, The Black Hill and A Respectable Woman by Angami and Naga writers, Mamang Dai and Easterine Kire, respectively, aims to explore how histories change over time and how factors like cultural hegemony and social memory contribute to their transformation. It throws light on the fact that it is also important to promote a clear, crisp, and authentic understanding of history by encouraging people to question sources, recognize biases, and appreciate the complexity of the past.
Keywords: Colonization, Culture, History, Myths, Storytelling
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‘Ram Mohammad Thomas’ as Idiosyncratic Personality in Vikas Swarup’s Q&A
S. Paulreiner – Dr. S. Azariah Kirubakaran
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 160-166 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.22
Abstract
Idiosyncratic personality is a modern personality style closely associated with the New Age movement. Individuals with idiosyncratic personalities are not easily influenced by others’ ideologies or spiritual and religious beliefs. Their pursuit of knowledge and personal growth is entirely self-directed, and their beliefs are uniquely their own. This paper examines the experiences and challenges of a slum boy in Vikas Swarup’s Q&A. It applies the theory of John M. Oldham and Lois B. Morris’ “Idiosyncratic Personality” to analyze the character Ram Mohammad Thomas. The study is conducted within an Indian context, examining the impact of the protagonist’s struggles and triumphs on the slum dwellers. In Q&A, Swarup highlights the protagonist’s fight against the rich and powerful, ultimately showcasing his journey to becoming a millionaire through participation in a quiz show. The novel is a social commentary that addresses issues such as child labor, violence against women, juvenile delinquency, overcrowding, and poor sanitation in urban areas. This paper argues that self-efficacy-the ability to overcome life’s obstacles-can lead to success regardless of one’s socioeconomic status. No matter how poor a person is, they can achieve their goals through determination and perseverance.
Keywords: Idiosyncrasy, Personality traits, Oppression, Resistance, Self-Efficacy, Social Thriller, Slum
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Freedom in Fragments: An Existential Reading of Jeet Thayil’s Narcopolis
Hanna Binoy – Dr Narinder K. Sharma
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 167-173 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.23
Abstract
This paper explores Thayil’s Narcopolis (2012) through the lens of existential philosophy with a precise focus on how its characters, particularly Dimple, the protagonist, grapple with freedom and self-deception in this shadowy world of addiction and marginality. Using some of the key insights from Sartre, Heidegger, and Camus, such as bad faith, authenticity, and thrownness, the study attempts to explore how the protagonist struggles to find meaning in lives that are marked by loss, dislocation, and narcotic escape. Notably, the opium den in the narrative is not just a physical refuge but a symbolic space where personal responsibility is evaded and freedom is quietly surrendered. The narrative also stages moments of painful clarity and existential reckoning, especially with special reference to Dimple’s later reflections on her life. In this way, Narcopolis presents the problematics of a layered human struggle to negotiate with the existential weight of choice and freedom.
Keywords: Freedom; Bad faith; Addiction; Thrownness; Authenticity; Marginal lives.
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Ecospiritual Refusals: Ontological Resistance and Decolonial Memory in Kashmiri Mystical Verse
Towfeeq Farooq – Dr. Khursheed Ahmad Qazi
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 174-184 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.24
Abstract
Modernity’s ecological crises arise from deeper epistemic ruptures—chief among them, the disavowal of relational ontologies embedded in indigenous and non-Western cosmologies. These frameworks, often erased, articulate the world not as inert matter but as a field of sacred immanence, where knowledge is inseparable from being. Within this context, the poetry of Nund Rishi and Lal Ded—rooted in Kashmir’s mystical tradition—offers a sustained intervention. Emerging from Islamic Sufism and Kashmiri Shaivism, their respective invocations of Wahdat al-Wujūd and Pratyabhijñā constitute a non-dual metaphysics that resists colonial modernity’s ontological separations: between human and nonhuman, spirit and matter, self and world. Their verses call forth an ethics rooted in restraint, remembrance, and inner discipline—forms of ecological attention irreducible to managerial or instrumental paradigms.
Rather than treating mysticism as retreat, this paper reads their poetics as decolonial acts of world-making. In recovering sacred relation as the ground of ethical life, Nund Rishi and Lal Ded offer not only spiritual insight but a philosophical resource for reimagining ecology, responsibility, and being otherwise. Their poetry invites a reconsideration of how ethical presence emerges—not through mastery or intervention, but through attunement, humility, and a deepened sense of participation in the more-than-human order of being.
Keywords: Decolonial Ecology, Eco-spirituality, Sacred Immanence, Relational Ontology, Kashmiri Mysticism
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Subverting Oppression: The Politics of Deification in Cho Dharman’s Koogai
Ujjwal Narayan Patowary
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 185-192 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.25
Abstract
This paper examines the subversion of caste and patriarchal hierarchies in Cho Dharman’s Koogai, focusing on the deification of violated Dalit women. Through an analysis of the Homo Sacer status of Dalits, the paper discusses how Dharman reclaims the agency of Dalit women by transforming them into goddesses, thereby overturning their position in both the social and spiritual hierarchies. This embodied resistance not only challenges the caste system but also reimagines “untouchability” in a positive light. Drawing on the indigenous folk tradition of Amman worship, this study further explores how Dharman uses these religious tropes to liberate Dalit women from patriarchal and upper-caste control. The divine possession, a common feature in Amman traditions, is reinterpreted here as inhabiting not living bodies but the bodies of women already marked by caste and sexual violence creating a powerful form of resistance and reclamation.
Keywords: Dalit literature; caste; deification; Amman worship; untouchability; resistance.
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The Independence Paradox: A Study of Shivani Gupta’s Autobiography, No Looking Back
Kowsalya G – Dr. C. Dhanabal
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 193-199 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.26
Abstract
People with disabilities are often perceived as dependent individuals. Disability studies scholars propose various models of disability that conceptualize different viewpoints that are prevalent in society. Each model takes a different stance on disability and dependency. The most practiced is the medical model that views disability as an individual responsibility where the disabled are dependent on the medical professionals for support and care. Whereas the social model proposes that dependency prevails partly because of the environmental and attitudinal barriers created by the society. The Independent Living Model, taken for this research, solely focuses on the aspects of dependence and independence and how systematic dependence can be implemented to the benefit of the disabled. This paper has taken the autobiography, No Looking Back by Shivani Gupta to analyze her experiences, which are reflective of the disability scenario in India. This study scrutinizes the facets of the Independent Living framework and attempts to find the gaps that hinder the autonomy of the disabled through her autobiography. It also examines how being dependent on certain services can help the disabled to lead an independent life.
Keywords: disability, dependence, Independent Living model, autobiography, interdependence
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Patriarchy, Parenthood, and the Politics of Absence: Single Motherhood in K.R. Meera’s Qabar
Ms. Subhasnata Mohanta – Dr. Sutanuka Banerjee
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 200-206 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.26b
Abstract
The paper examines how K.R. Meera’s novella Qabar (2022) critiques patriarchal family structures by emphasising how women often bear disproportionate burdens of motherhood, particularly in the absence of a father figure. The novella, originally written in Malayalam in 2021 and translated into English by Nisha Sushan in 2022, explores how women are expected to perform emotional, material and social responsibilities associated with childcare, while men can easily disengage from the process after the marital separation. Protagonist Bhavana’s struggle to raise her neurodivergent son intersects and merges with her professional challenges, reflecting societal expectations that equate womanhood with maternal sacrifice. Her husband Pramod’s absence in parenting highlights the systematic privileges granted to fathers by the patriarchal structure. The narrative eventually reveals single motherhood as a paradox of autonomy and subjugation. By situating Meera’s novella within the discourse of gendered labour and parenting, this paper critiques family structure by showing how the absence of a father intensifies the single mother’s struggles and also offers a space to assert her agency.
Keywords: single motherhood; absent father; patriarchy; maternal burdens
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Literature as a Catalyst for Legal Change: Narratives That Reshaped Justice
T K Kavya – Dr. B. Monika Nair
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 207-213 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.27
Abstract
Literature, while often influenced by real-world events, also holds the power to shape them, particularly within legal and social frameworks. This paper explores how literary texts function as legal advocacy tools and social justice catalysts. Through a literary-legal approach, the study examines how narratives extend beyond fictional boundaries to affect legal consciousness and institutional decisions. This research examines two key case studies: Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which contributed to anti-slavery movements in the United States, and The Legend of Nangeli from Kerala, symbolically challenged caste-based oppression. The paper demonstrates how literature can illuminate societal injustices and provoke critical reflection that contributes to legal change. It argues for the recognition of literature as a potent force in shaping legal thought and policy reform.
Keywords: Literature, Narratives, Social Justice, Law
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Eco-Emotions and Literary Solastalgia: The Adolescent Mental Discomfort in Contemporary Young Adult Fiction
Prerona Das – Dr. Mamta Anand
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 214-220 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.28
Abstract
Current ecocritical literature claims that young minds are affected by sudden changes in their surrounding environment on a large scale, as they lack the maturity to cope with sudden blows of eco-emotions. These eco-emotions are called Psychoterratic syndromes, which include eco-anxiety, ecological grief, climate worry, and climate trauma. Solastalgia is a prominent emotion that can mould people from all walks of life. Younger generations are anticipated to experience more upsetting occurrences over their lifetimes due to extreme climate events’ increased frequency, severity, duration, and spatial extent. Teenagers or the ‘young-adults’ react more aggressively to stressful news and changes, making them emotionally vulnerable. Drawing on the theory of ‘solastalgia’ by Glenn Albrecht, this paper will inspect how drastic changes in select young adults’ home environment provoke ecological insecurity, peril, and chaos in their minds through a close reading of the three children’s novels. This study will concentrate on the new categories of emotion ascending from Earth’s atmosphere and environmental changes distressing young adult minds.
Keywords: Psychoterratic emotions, Solastalgia, Anthropocene, vulnerability, Mental distress.
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Labyrinths of Liberation: Mapping Transgressive Femininity in Silvia Moreno-Garcia’s Mexican Gothic and Stieg Larsson’s The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Hasini Raj I – Horizan Prasanna Kumar
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 221-228 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.29
Abstract
Transgressive female characters in literature often serve as catalysts for challenging entrenched gender conventions and social norms. The study aims to decipher the complexities of societal expectations put upon women and the ways that literature acts as a potent vehicle for subverting established norms by analyzing the actions, motivations, and outcomes of boundary-pushing female characters like Noemí Taboada from Mexican Gothic (2020) by Silvia Moreno-Garcia and Lisbeth Salander from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo (2005) by Stieg Larsson. The women in these narratives, despite being rooted in different cultural and temporal contexts, confront patriarchal structures, social expectations, and conventional gender roles. This study examines that both characters embody contemporary versions of the Gothic heroine—women who challenge categorization and subvert societal norms. Noemí’s defiance within a deteriorating patriarchal estate resonates with traditional Gothic elements infused with a contemporary posthumanist perspective, whereas Lisbeth’s urban battle against systemic abuse merges tech-noir with psychological Gothic. Together, they demonstrate the ongoing evolution of transgressive femininity in literature, providing a thought-provoking analysis of gender, power, and identity. The study also takes into account how these representations may affect more general discussions on women’s agency, empowerment, and how gender roles are changing in literature.
Keywords: Transgressive females, Gothic heroine, Postcolonial Gothic, Societal norms, Digital resistance, Women’s agency
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Navigating Dehumanization: A Study of Yeonmi Park’s In Order to Live, A North Korean Journey to Freedom and Ting Xing Ye’s My Name is Number 4: A True Story
Nandini B Jayapal – Dr. Suresh Frederick
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 229-235 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.30
Abstract
Dehumanization in the form of wars and ostracisation has been present since time immemorial as a defensive mechanism to an emergency need alongside man’s coexistence. However, dehumanization as a normative practice began with the world wars and was subjected to totalitarian whims. Totalitarians navigate their power by repressing social and emotional connections between people and cultivating enmity through intimidation. This paper focuses on how routinized dehumanization occurs by nullifying humanity and subjectivity through eroding social trust in an autocracy. The article draws upon human rights methodologies and psychological insights to explain human degradation with a specific focus on the life narratives of North Korean defector Yeonmi Park’s In Order to Live, A North Korean Journey to Freedom, and Ting Xing Ye’s My Name is Number 4: A True Story
Key Words: Social Trust, Dehumanization, Subjectivity, Affective Socialization.
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Medicine and Morality in War: Exploring the Humanitarian Imperative in Literary Narratives
Dr. Gurpreet Kaur
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 236-241 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.31
Abstract
This paper examines how literary and visual narratives of war and violence have long highlighted the experiences of remarkable doctors and their encounters with health and illness. These works artistically portray the trauma and pain of historical events, such as the 1945 atomic bombing of Hiroshima, through written and oral testimonies. This paper aims to shed light on writers who, having first practiced medicine—particularly during nuclear conflict—and dutifully served humanity, later sought to communicate the inexpressible to future generations. Through the lens of the emerging genre of Medical Humanities, this paper offers an insightful depiction of these narratives, focusing on writings either penned by doctors or centered on them. In times of disease, misery, hopelessness, and death, works like The Plague offer solace. This paper will explore characters such as Dr. Bernard Rieux in The Plague, Bakshi ji in Rajinder Singh Bedi’s “Quarantine,” Dr. Parsons and other medical professionals in The End of October, the unnamed doctor in Vikram Seth’s poem “A Doctor’s Journal Entry for August 6, 1945,” Dr. Terufumi Sasaki in John Hersey’s Hiroshima, and Dr. Nagai Takashi in Susan Southard’s novel Nagasaki: Life after Nuclear War. These figures, alongside other dedicated medical professionals, embody unwavering commitment despite knowing the dire consequences. This research paper will theorize crucial ethical and moral issues and dilemmas faced by doctors when treating patients amidst war and violence.
Keywords: Literature, war, violence, trauma, morality, doctors, medical humanities
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From Self-Doubt and Utter Anxiety to Calm Fear: Language, Perception, and the Shining Figure in Jon Fosse’s A Shining
Darakhshan Aftab – Dr. Sukanya Saha
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 242-249 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.32
Abstract
Jon Fosse’s A Shining redefines fear as an evolving psychological state rather than a singular emotion. This paper explores how fear evolves through cognitive and linguistic processes, reshaping Fosse’s protagonist’s perception and emotional experience. The journey unfolds through pervasive self-doubt and an overwhelming sense of existential anxiety, ultimately leading to a transformative calm fear, catalysed by the mysterious “shining” figure, illustrating fear’s fluid nature. His oscillation between rational thought and fragmented internal dialogue reveals language as an active force in constructing and deconstructing reality. Integrating phenomenological insights from Maurice Merleau-Ponty and existential reflections from Jean-Paul Sartre and Martin Heidegger, this paper argues that Fosse’s portrayal of fear challenges conventional understandings. Fear functions as both a defiant emotional state and an epistemological force, urging the protagonist and the reader to confront uncertainty, dissolve self-boundaries, and reimagine the interplay between language and lived experience.
Key Words: Fear, Uncertainty, Anxiety, Perception, Language
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A Phytocritical Study of Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather: A Postcolonial Perspective in Anthropocene Context
Ashima Arora – Prof. Dr. Naveen K. Mehta
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 250-256 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.33
Abstract
Bessie Head’s When Rain Clouds Gather (1968) is much more than a tale of survival—it is a powerful blend of environmental endurance and resistance to colonial exploitation. The portrayal of reclaiming land extends beyond ecological restoration to a powerful act of political defiance. Viewed through a lens that emphasises the role of plants in literature, phytocriticism, agriculture is reinterpreted as a dynamic interaction with vegetation, where native plants emerge as strong allies against the uniform, single-crop systems enforced by colonial powers. Women, whose intimate understanding of the soil nurtures both the earth and their communities, are central to this story. Their traditional farming methods gradually dismantle profit-seeking cattle empire of the village chief, reinstating indigenous ways of caring for the land. This occurs even as the fragile state of our current era (the Anthropocene), marked by degraded soil, persistent droughts, and damaged relationships between humans and nature, challenges the land. The novel challenges the colonial view of nature as inert property that treats land as a commodity to own and exploit. True decolonisation requires collaboration beyond humans. In this way, the text confronts two associated legacies to co-create resilience against dual violence of colonialism (dispossession and cultural erasure) and Anthropocene (human-caused climate chaos and extinction).
Keywords: Ecocriticism, Justice, Postcolonial, Anthropocene, Phytocriticism
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Where the War Never Ended: Hauntology and the Post-War Afterlife in Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War
Dr. Rincy Saji
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 257-265 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.34
Abstract
This article examines the spectral afterlife of Sri Lanka’s civil war through a reading of Samanth Subramanian’s This Divided Island: Stories from the Sri Lankan War (2014). Drawing on the hauntological framework developed by Jacques Derrida and expanded by Mark Fisher and Merlin Coverley, it explores how trauma, erasure, and surveillance continue to shape Sri Lanka’s postwar landscape. The analysis focuses on spatial and symbolic registers of haunting—erased cemeteries, repurposed monuments, militarized zones, and national iconography—that embed violence into the everyday. Through close attention to narrative testimonies, public memory, and the affective politics of fear, the article situates Subramanian’s work as a counter-archive that disrupts official narratives of reconciliation. In tracing how the ghosts of ethnic division inhabit space, gesture, and silence, the article highlights hauntology’s relevance for understanding the unfinished aftermath of conflict and the spectral condition of peace.
Keywords: hauntology, memory, ethnic conflict, Sri Lankan civil war, travel narrative, Samanth Subramanian, This Divided Island
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Postmemory, Homeland and Partition: A Reading of Sorayya Khan’s Five Queen’s Road
Farhana Khatun – Dr. Hasina Wahida
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 266-272 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.35a
Abstract
This article deals with the workings of “postmemory” in the aftermath of partition as depicted in the novel Five Queen’s Road (2009) Sorayya Khan, focusing on family histories entangled with the image of home and land. The long-lasting impacts of partition left an indelible mark on the human psyche in such a way that the generations after who were born and brought up outside the nation-state and who worked for various places are still suffering post-partition trauma. Even though they have no lived experiences of partition yet they continue with the traumatic memories of their first generation through the lens of postmemory. This article examines how Sorayya Khan, as a second-generation writer on partition, inherited memories of her parental generations through listening to stories and the image of the house “Five Queen Road”. Posing Dina Lal’s emotional attachment to his homeland, this study stresses the collective remembrance of the people who did not choose to be displaced and their traumatic past that continues to “bleed” from the first generation to the subsequent generation. Finally, this article traces how the traumatic memory of past generations reverberates in post-partition generations and provides them with a new perspective for understanding partition across the globe.
Keywords: Postmemory, Familial memory, collective memory, Partition, Homeland, Communal Conflict, Harmony.
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Enigma of the Ultimate Silence: Reading J.M. Coetzee’s Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K from a Buddhist Perspective
Dipayan Mukherjee
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 273-280 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.35b
Abstract
The paper attempts to contextualize J.M. Coetzee’s notion of life within a Buddhist perspective. In a Buddhist vein, Coetzee shows that the entire domain of human mental world centring around the notion of an integrated self is a false construction of language while the entrapment of all lives within a state of suffering and impermanence constitute the only reality. The paper, with a special focus on Coetzee’s Disgrace and Life and Times of Michael K, shows how in Coetzee’s works the characters’ loss of ego due to suffering and humiliation leads to breakdown of subject-object division and to emergence of true compassion. The paper explores human notion of time which is closely connected to construction of human subjectivity and shows how the focus on the immediate present ‘now’ within Coetzee’s works, in a vein similar to Buddhist mindfulness meditation, challenges the temporal foundation of human idea of self. The deep anti-philosophical nature of Coetzee’s works is akin to the anti-doctrinal position of Madhyamika school of Buddhism and the radicalness of Coetzee is reflected in his desire to push language towards its own cessation, that is, in his realization of the need for the logical mind to surrender to the ultimate silence beyond language as path to the deepest ontological truth.
Keywords: Buddhism, Impermanence, Self, Mindfulness, Language, Compassion, Silence
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War and Womanhood as Palimpsests: Adaptation and the Female Protagonists in Gone with the Wind and Cold Mountain
Henna C – Dr R Padmapriya
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 281-287 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.36
Abstract
This paper examines film adaptations of Gone with the Wind (1936) and Cold Mountain (1997), particularly how their female protagonists, Scarlett O’Hara and Ada Monroe, respectively, are transformed by war and survival. With Linda Hutcheon’s concept of adaptation as a layered process, as discussed in A Theory of Adaptation, this paper explores how the films inscribe new ideas over the novels, yet continue to leave the source texts visibly imprinted, exactly like a palimpsest. The American Civil War serves as the backdrop for both texts, which portray war as a transforming force that breaks and changes socially accepted gender norms, rewriting female identity, emotion, and agency in ways that typically reconfigure or soften the contentiousness of these original characters. Concluding that adaptation is not just replication or a mere copy, but a layered process of cultural redrafting that mirrors shifting historical, ideological, and gendered perspectives.
Keywords: adaptation, palimpsest, war, womanhood, gender norms, identity
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Cross-cultural Adaptations and Culture Wars: An Analysis of Andrei Yermash’s Cinematic Adaptation of Asimov’s End of Eternity
Pankaj Bharti – Professor Sushila Shekhawat
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 288-294 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.37
This paper is devoted to a critical analysis of the 1987 Russian-language cinematic adaptation of Isaac Asimov’s novel The End of Eternity (1955), written and directed by Andrei Yermash. It aims to evaluate how the adaptation’s movement from one politico-cultural space to another is shaped by policing, and which can be seen in the significant deviation of the film’s opening and ending from the novel. The paper, subsequently, highlights how this transformation becomes the basis of a line of argument that the Soviet Union had been consistently pushing forth in the Cold War era’s culture wars.
Keywords: Cross-cultural adaptation, Time-travel, Science-fiction, Social engineering, End of Eternity,
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Re-visioning the ‘Human’: Evolution of Transhuman Subject in Shafi Uddin Shafi’s Machineman
Mr. Shibasambhu Nandi – Dr. Bhumika Sharma
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 295-303 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.38
Abstract
Science and technology have revolutionized human existence and conventional perspectives of the universe. Today, science is not just an epistemological enquiry, but it is a vehicle for transforming human position by re-setting the traditional organizational hierarchies. There is an innate human desire to transcend human limitations and attain power. The notion of ‘ transhuman’ is one of the recent cultural expressions of the same human aspiration. Transhumanism strives for human transformation by broadening the boundaries of human capabilities, blurring its predetermined perimeters, and metamorphosing the human into something greater than the original self. As visualized in many science fiction narratives, the altered humans may act like superhumans and be capable of amazing feats. However, such speculative conceptions simultaneously envision the rise of a dystopian society. The present paper aims to investigate the idea of transhuman as an unpredictable agency and its connection to the Darwinian theory of evolutionary change. It also looks into the speculative outcome of transhumanism as a form of technological domination in the imagined future. The paper undertakes the proposed study through an analysis of Shafi Uddin Shafi’s Machineman and endeavors to examine the human-machine dialectic, located in the transhuman subject.
Keywords: Transhumanism, Superhuman Motif, Evolution, Dystopia, Technological Domination
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A Study of Nationalism through Collective Memory of Transgenerational Trauma and Resilience in Indian Cinema
Dr. D. Sudha Rani
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 |September 2025 | Page 304-311 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.39
Abstract
This paper explores the role of Indian cinematic representation of transgenerational memory of trauma and resilience of the freedom fighters in shaping nationalism. Drawing theories from memory studies, the paper examines how films serve as prosthetic memory, recreating the collective trauma of colonial rule and the resilience of freedom fighters as a unifying factor for a new generation. By analyzing select films from Hindi, Telugu, and Tamil cinema, this study investigates how the trauma of the independence movement, though not directly experienced by the second and third generations, remains potent in the cultural memory of the nation. In this context, cinema emerges as a powerful tool for the cultivation of nationalism and patriotism, shaping the national identity of young Indians today. The paper concludes that the portrayal of trauma and resilience in films play a crucial role in sustaining the narrative of India’s struggle for independence and reinforcing its collective memory, fostering a sense of unity and pride.
Keywords: trauma, resilience, memory, prosthetic, freedom struggle, nationalism
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Exploring Cultural and Gender Dynamics in Laapataa Ladies
Rashmita Devi
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 312-318 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.40
Abstract
Cinema is the visual medium that tells intriguing stories and presents various social, cultural, political, economic, and psychological aspects. Indian cinema is bestowed with diversity and richness in presenting multifaceted expressions of reality. Bollywood, one of the major film industries in India, has captured the attention of a global audience for its depictions of many such issues through multiple genres. There has been a rise in the production of woman-centric films offering minute expressions on the issues of gender and culture. In this context, this paper attempts to explore various socio-cultural issues reflected in the Hindi film, Laapataa Ladies (2024), directed by Kiran Rao. As an analytical study, while discussing the plight of Indian rural women, the paper primarily delves into gender and cultural dynamics in the Indian social scenario. Further, it aims to shed light on themes like women’s identity assertion, discovery of self, freedom of choice, and expression through feminist lenses. It also critiques the issues of forced arranged marriage, dowry, domestic violence, veiling, and female education to reflect on the predicaments experienced by women living in rural India due to rigid socio-cultural codes and structures.
Keywords: Bollywood, Socio-Cultural Realities, Patriarchy, Rural India, Gender and Culture, Laapataa Ladies
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Heterogeneity of Temporality and the Narrative: A Retrospective Glance from Postmodernism to Greek Classics
Dr. Abhay Kumar Mishra – Dr. Prem Lata Chandra
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 319-326 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.41
Abstract
The postmodern narratives manifest divergent forms of literary representation of time, notably as circular, contradictory, multi-linear; depicting also the chronological crisscrossing and temporal leaps of events. Noticeable in the works of late modernism also, such facets of temporality suggest a discernible continuity from late modernism to postmodernism. The dramas of Shakespeare too offer instances of his encounter with time as a complex entity, and his play “A Midsummer Night’s Dream” portrays the plural relation of a single frame of time to human beings. This paper is based on the curiosity concerning the absorbing question if the above characteristics of time as multilinear, plural, chronologically multiple can be traced back to Greek antiquity and thus postmodern narrative’s relation with ancient Greek narrative can be hypothesized. Interestingly, invoking the reign of justice in nature, Anaximander had underscored the passage of contradictory phenomena into each other as the cornerstone of temporality commanding human destiny. Euripides’ Medea and Homer’s the Iliad illustriously testify to express time in its reverse flow, and in its plural, enigmatic elasticity. Greek classical literature, to a reliable extent, proves an allegiance to the imagination of time in its heterogenous dimension, which resists being categorized into the conception of a harmonious time. Such an instance allows for affirming a tangible convergence across history, enacting an affinity of late modern, postmodern period with the classical Greek antiquity concerning the literary portrayals of time in its heterogeneity.
Keywords: Postmodernism’s unconventional temporality, Thoms Mann’s notion of Aussparung (Gap), Significance of events/experiences and narrative length, Time’s reverse flow, The Iliad and time’s elasticity
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Life Writing: A Study of History and Historiography
Kanchan – Dr. Vandana Sharma
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 327-333 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.42
Abstract
Autobiographies of/by the downtrodden (‘dalits’ in the Indian context) are a study in chronicling both history and historiography of the said caste, with the avowed aim of revealing the baneful hierarchizing of humans as also incorporating their chronicle into the Indian social mainstream. Such writings shore up their erasure in social history, as also see them as examples of engagement with construction of the Dalit chronicle to stand alongside the narrative of ‘higher castes’ in the oriental context, since erasure of dalit narrative has been deliberate and arbitrary. It is a form of class struggle, whose prognosis has been presented, in a different context, by scholars like Ernest Mandel (in Late Capitalism) and its cultural correspondences by acclaimed authors like Fredric Jameson (in Postmodernism). Dalit oeuvre celebrates their life as also their struggles and authenticity as courageous people who strive and exhibit their fortitude and never-say-die attitude. These autobiographies reveal their writers’ comprehension of gradual evolving of the power dynamics of class, ethnicity and social identity, and their much-needed rupturing of the flawed social fabric. This essay will critically analyze the socio-political and historical causes and consequences of Dalit struggles, and the possible solutions as envisaged by influential thinkers, social reformers, and grass root movements. It also tries to analyze how the struggles have influenced modern-day Dalit identity, confronted institutionalized oppression, and added to the debate on social justice, equality, and constitutional provisions in India.
Keywords: Proletariat, Organic Intellectual, Historiography, Dalits, Episteme, Neocolonialism, Egalitarianism, Indologist
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Predictive Analysis of Grimm’s Fairy Tales: Leveraging Logistic Regression for Classification and Evaluation
Dr. Aditi Goyal – Dr. Vineet Mehan
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 334-341 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.43a
Abstract
The research paper aims to discover automatic classification of Grimm’s Fairy Tales by exploring the Machine Learning insights. A corpus of 44 tales is taken for the experimentation purpose. A set of 5 predictor variables are Title, Abstract, Content, Aarne-Thompson-Uther (ATU) Numerical and ATU Type. ATU topic is taken to be the response variable. Preprocessing techniques applied include Transformation, Tokenization and Filtering. Bag of Words model is applied to generate the numerical representation of contents in the form of a vector. Word cloud represents the existence of words on the basis of frequency of occurrence. Various regression algorithms are applied for predicting the Grimm’s classification. Nomogram represents the relationship among top 4 variables identified for classification. Parameters for evaluation include Area under Curve (AUC), Classification Accuracy (CA), F1 Score, Precision, Recall and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC). Effectiveness of machine learning model is achieved for automatic classification by evaluating the parameters and achieving correlations. The research. work displays the effectiveness of logistic regression in analysing and classifying Grimm’s Fairy Tales, giving important insights into the predictive modelling of literary texts.
Keywords: Predictive Analysis; Logistic Regression; Grimm’s Fairy Tales; Classification; Machine Learning
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The Influence of Task-Based Language Instruction on Learner Involvement and Motivation: A Quasi- Experimental Study
Mr. Vivek Sabharwal – Dr. Bishakha Mandal
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 342-350 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.43b
Abstract
The study aims to examine how Task Based Language Teaching (TBLT), a new language pedagogical method, influences students’ interest and enthusiasm in learning the language at DAV Centenary College, Faridabad, India, a region of an emerging global economy. Given the increasing demand for strong English communication skills, this research investigates the relative efficacy of Task-Based Language Teaching and conventional instructional strategies using a 12- week quasi-experimental framework. Quantitative surveys and qualitative interviews were used to collect data to assess the movement in levels of student motivation and engagement. The results indicate significant improvement of engagement and motivation by adopters of TBLT, with enhanced enhancement for language related tasks and a greater sense of achievement for global readiness. The study adds valuable insight to the expanding body of work on effective language instruction, offering practical relevance for educators aiming to enhance student outcomes in English learning, especially within the context of increasing global interconnectedness.
Keywords: Engagement, English language learning, Globalization, Motivation, Quasi-Experimental design, Student Outcomes
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BOOK REVIEWS
Aoyama, Michiko. What You Are Looking for is in the library Translated by Alison Watts, Hanover Square Press, 2023.
Aditi Gupta
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 351-353 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.44
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Jhumpa Lahiri. Whereabouts: A Novel. India: Penguin Hamish Hamilton, 2021.
Shayanti Nath – Dr. Poulomi Mitra
Literary Voice | Number-25, Volume-1 | September 2025 | Page 354-357 | DOI: https://doi.org/10.59136/lv.2025.25.1.45
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POETRY
Nature: A Human Proxy
Humanity: The Visible
Humanity: The Invisible
Humanity: The Invincible
Alapati. Purnachandra Rao
Literary Voice | Vol 1, Issue 25 |September 2025 | Page 354-357 | DOI:
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