There are, first of all, two kinds of authors: those who write for the subject’s sake, and those who write for writing’s sake. While the one have had thoughts or experiences which seem to them worth communicating, the others want money; and so they write, for money. Their thinking is part of the business of writing. They may be recognized by the way in which they spin out their thoughts to the greatest possible length; then, too, by the very nature of their thoughts, which are only half-true, perverse, forced, vacillating; again, by the aversion they generally show to saying anything straight out, so that they may seem other than they are. Hence their writing is deficient in clearness and definiteness, and it is not long before they betray that their only object in writing at all is to cover paper. This sometimes happens with the best authors; now and then, for example, with Lessing in his Dramaturgie, and even in many of Jean Paul’s romances. As soon as the reader perceives this, let him throw the book away; for time is precious. The truth is that when an author begins to write for the sake of covering paper, he is cheating the reader; because he writes under the pretext that he has something to say.

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.

In The Myth of the Female Hand: Forms of Female Power, Şeyda Sivrioğlu explores the symbolic representations and the significance of the female hand as a means to open up literary and critical space for the oppressed and marginalized female figure in different centuries and in different patriarchal cultures and genres. Inalterably, in a culture where creativity is defined purely in male terms, women “exist only to be acted on men, both as literary and sensual objects” (Gilbert and Gubar, 8). This comprehensive study, however, traces the origins of the female hand symbolism from a fairy tale to a play-text and finally to a science fiction novel in order to illustrate how, to borrow Margaret Atwood’s words, the hand as an extension of the brain, in this case the female brain, becomes an important tool for indicating the development of the power of women.