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City, Wall, and (Feminist) Dystopia: Urban Poetics and Narrative in Prayaag Akbar's Leila

City, Wall, and (Feminist) Dystopia: Urban Poetics and Narrative in Prayaag Akbar's Leila

Moulina Bhattacharya
Copyright: © 2023 |Pages: 23
ISBN13: 9781668466506|ISBN10: 1668466503|ISBN13 Softcover: 9781668466513|EISBN13: 9781668466520
DOI: 10.4018/978-1-6684-6650-6.ch004
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MLA

Bhattacharya, Moulina. "City, Wall, and (Feminist) Dystopia: Urban Poetics and Narrative in Prayaag Akbar's Leila." Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East, edited by Moussa Pourya Asl, IGI Global, 2023, pp. 59-81. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-6650-6.ch004

APA

Bhattacharya, M. (2023). City, Wall, and (Feminist) Dystopia: Urban Poetics and Narrative in Prayaag Akbar's Leila. In M. Pourya Asl (Ed.), Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East (pp. 59-81). IGI Global. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-6650-6.ch004

Chicago

Bhattacharya, Moulina. "City, Wall, and (Feminist) Dystopia: Urban Poetics and Narrative in Prayaag Akbar's Leila." In Urban Poetics and Politics in Contemporary South Asia and the Middle East, edited by Moussa Pourya Asl, 59-81. Hershey, PA: IGI Global, 2023. https://doi.org/10.4018/978-1-6684-6650-6.ch004

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Abstract

Prayaag Akbar's debut novel Leila (2017) is a compendium of dystopian feminism, misogyny, religious and casteist devaluation, and a post-apocalyptic portrayal of a futuristic urban India that is subjugated by a totalitarian government. This chapter aims to examine the narrative ambiguity and the unresolved problem of narrative reliability in the novel by exploring the cognitive process of the female protagonist Shalini in the context of the art of her storytelling. It is argued that the narrative pattern in this dystopian novel is mainly non-linear in spatial terms which creates a fragmented and patchy experience of reading. Using a spatial-psychoanalytical approach, the study reveals that the narrative is defied by the mental projection of the city-space and city as a gendered space.

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