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.

“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.

The literary history, as I conceive it, is an account of one strand, so to speak, in a very complex tissue: it is connected with the intellectual and social development; it represents movements of thought which may sometimes check and be sometimes propitious to the existing forms of art; it is the utterance of a class which may represent, or fail to represent, the main national movement; it is affected more or less directly by all manner of religious, political, social, and economical changes; and it is dependent upon the occurrence of individual genius for which we cannot even profess to account. I propose to take the history of English literature in the eighteenth century. I do not aim at originality: I take for granted the ordinary critical judgments upon the great writers of whom so much has been said by judges certainly more competent than myself, and shall recall the same facts both of ordinary history and of the history of thought. What I hope is, that by bringing familiar facts together I may be able to bring out the nature of the connection between them; and, little as I can say that will be at all new, to illustrate one point of view, which, as I believe, it is desirable that literary histories should take into account more distinctly than they have generally done.