Namrata Ghosh

'Maus' is one of the earliest and most prominent examples of how graphic novels are making their place in literature. It is a frame-narrative story in the form of a graphic novel which intertwines three storylines into one. Art Spiegelman narrates an experience of him writing the book after interviewing his father Vladek about his experiences of the Holocaust. This paper aims to study the lives and characters of both the father and son, who are both incidentally 'survivors', in a deeper sense of the term. I will be attempting to read the text keeping the experiences of the Holocaust as a background to how it shaped Vladek's personality, both before and after the war. There are instances of slippage throughout the text where we perceive the difference between Vladek and Artie, i.e., one who has lived through the horrific past and one who is listening to/reading the story. I would try to look at this from the lens of Adorno's essay 'Commitment', and if writing about the Holocaust is ethical and moral at all. A section of this essay will also focus on the question of the graphic novel format being more approachable to the readers than usual texts by comparing the reception of 'Maus' with other Holocaust literary texts.

Looking back on history, the need for a massive change in the social and cultural construct seemed quite necessary as one half of the society was actively repressed by the other over centuries. The New Woman emerged in the late 19 th century as a beacon of light to guide women towards emancipation. The change was almost radical, spaced out for over two centuries now. Although rooted in the feminist revolution is something that has been problematic since longer than one imagines: the problem of Orientalism. The New Woman has been understood almost exclusively, as Angelique Richardson points it out-'a transatlantic phenomenon'. The New Woman is a cultural construct. Beyond the boundaries of transatlantic nationalities, the new woman is a curious blend of race and gender. In this paper, I will be talking about a novelist whose futuristic analysis of gender roles had stirred the minds of veteran suffragists, Victoria Cross(e). The Pakistan-born English author was famous for her notoriety and eccentric depiction of female heroines. I have taken into account her first published work 'Theodora-A Fragment' and her magnum opus 'Anna Lombard'. I will attempt to see how Ghosh 1 primarily her English-born heroines blends into or inquires of the figure of the third world new woman. Both Theodora and Anna struggle with their own notions of gender roles while subjected to an alien environment. Being sketched by the deviant Cross(e), their characters become even more intriguing while viewed from a biographical perspective. Reading along the scope of these two novels, I will try to defy the rumor of the new woman being a transatlantic phenomenon, and will attempt to look into how the literary new woman transcended her Atlantic borders into third world feminism.