Gender or Socio-political Background? War in Savushun and Landlocked

Showalter's Gynocriticism focuses on literary representations of female experience and affirms that women authors react in a similar way to a common social reality, though they might be geographically distant from each other. Taking the concept of war as a social reality common to Daneshwar and Lessing, this book analyses the ways the authors implement their experience of war in their autobiographical novels, Savushun and Landlocked, to test the efficiency of Showalter's Gynocriticism. The present research in the first place traces the authors' personal opinion of war; and finds Lessing's disillusionment in contrast to Daneshwar's hopeful emphasis on the necessity of politics and struggle. In the second chapter, the book compares the representations of the sociopolitical context in which the authors have experienced war; and clarifies how they develop their own desired theme and point of view by their selective reference to historical facts. And finally the book focuses on the second layer of the novels to analyze the similar development of Daneshwar and Lessing's self-awareness in the novels, and to illustrate the miseries the authors share with their own female characters.