International Journal of Language & Literature

Interconnectivity between Feminist Literature and Prison Literature or Feminist Prison Literature: al-Sharnaqa Novel as a Sample
Dr. Līnāal-Sheikh-Ḥishmeh

Abstract
This study confirms the existence of intersection and interconnectivity between Feminist Literature and Prison Literature. Both genres intersect and interconnect in their approaches and aesthetic tools. Since the Feminist Literature is a breaking through revolutionary literature that seeks to achieve liberation and breaking away from the traditional chains on the level of form and content, it intersects with the Prison Literature at these points. Since the Prison Literature is an act of struggle, rebellion and revolution against the regimes of suppression and the political authority and its prisons, the Feminist Literature is nothing but rebellion, resistance and revolution against the masculine norms including breaking of political, social and religious taboos. Thus, the quest for freedom, revelation, unbosoming, revolution against persecution and destruction of all the forms of authority constitute central points of intersection and interconnectivity, which reach their burning point when the writer herself is the prisoner who lives the experience of imprisonment and she reveals her experience through writing a narrative text, in which she does not forget her feminist discourse. Thus, her revolutionary cry doubles against the trilogy of the social, religious and political injustice. The study suggests calling this type of literature written by such women writers as "Feminist Prison Literature" and seeks to clarify this interconnectivity and prove that the prison literature that the woman writes does not differ in its themes and features of its revolutionary content, its artistic devices and techniques from men's prison literature for two reasons: first, for the resemblance of prisons and their real conditions, and second, for the resemblance of the nature of the human experience between men and women in prison. To achieve these objectives, the study chose the novel of al-Sharnaqa/ the Cocoon by the Syrian woman writer, ḤasībaʿAbd al-Raḥmān, as a sample.

Full Text: PDF      DOI: 10.15640/ijll.v6n2a8