Postmodern literature and arts are not novel and pure, rather they represent and present a great challenge. They create an active medium for their followers as Roland Barthes tags postmodernism writerly “in that the reader frequently has to fill in gaps in the narrative, thus, in Barthes’ terms of reference, becoming part of the production of the textual meaning. Postmodern texts and arts enforce a sort of invention, imagination, and suspension for the reader. Postmodern literary fashion does not provide a fixed cultural status quo, yet it undermines the authority of an omniscient narrator and his dominance over the textual meaning. These features and many others that you will find throughout each chapter in this book make postmodern texts and art much more pleasurable and rewarding to study.

“The title of Salman Rushdie’s famous essay, which later formed the title of a book of essays by him, ‘Imaginary Homelands’, is based on one side of a common and age-old perception of home: we make it in the mind or the imagination. Ordinary language has versions of it too: home is where the heart is, I don’t feel at home in my own town/country, this is my spiritual home, etc. On the other hand, there is a physical aspect to home too – ranging from walls associated with ancestral property or parents or some other such inheritance, and extended, through the imagining of communities, as Benedict Andersen would phrase it, sometimes to a land, a country, even a nation. To say that any one of these broad definitions of home is wrong is to cut off large sections of humankind: those who do not belong where they live or those who cannot return to where they used to live. To feel at home and to live at home are both valid cravings, and though they do not necessarily overlap, neither can be dismissed in favour of the other” Tabish Khair

Home in Western Language is a compilation of selected papers presented at the 7th BAKEA Symposium, 2021. In the time of the pandemic, when home has acquired more meanings, this book reads the idea of home and explores its connotations as presented in different genres and ages of English, American, French and literatures.

Sylvia Plath and Nilgün Marmara… Two female poets of distinct geographies, cultures, societies and periods followed a life with distinct sufferings and scars, but they produced similar poetries with the same wish and outcry for death. And in the end, both poets said their last words in the face of life through suicide. Indeed, there is this passionate bridge between these two poets since Marmara was a keen admirer of Plath’s poetry and art.

And today, standing on this very bridge, this book renders a detailed comparative reading and analysis on their poetry within the context of the psychoanalytical perspectives to death and self-destruction. Through the psychoanalysis of their poetical lines that are intermingled with pains and traumas centered around the obsession of death and self-destruction, this book traces and unearths the mutual poetical mechanisms of the unconscious and the human psyche that turn the poetry of both poets into ‘art of dying’ as in the wording of Plath and ‘swan songs’ as in the wording of Marmara. Psychoanalyzing their poetic personas in their ‘art of dying’, this book highlights how Plath and Marmara became both the victims and the victors of their ‘swans songs’ via various psychological scars and existential dilemmas.