Women in the Frontier Land

The book is divided into five chapters. "Chapter One" entitled "Introduction," provides a comprehensive introduction to the two mentioned novelists and their works, does an extensive literature review of the existing critical works on their writings and finally, establishes the stated point of departure. The Second Chapter "War and Women Subjectivity in A Golden Age and Half of a Yellow Sun" studies the wartime agency of women in the 1971 Liberation War and the Biafran War respectively. It investigates into the genealogy of the emphatic emergence of women characters from their restrictive domestic spaces in times of national emergency and their eclectic and constructivist interventions in the said wars, from the background. "Chapter Three" entitled "Racism and Beyond: A Study of Americanah and The Bones of Grace" studies a black woman's horrid experience of racism, her relentless combat with its detrimental ramifications (as seen in Americanah), and the contours of identity formation of a Bangladeshi woman (as seen The Bones of Grace) who digs deep into the complex roots of her origin to come to terms with her amphibian existence in a civil-war-riven society. The Fourth Chapter "Women against Religious Extremism in The Good Muslim and Purple Hibiscus" studies how women deal with the nightmarish evolution of religious extremism in the two mentioned novels. This chapter traces Women in the Frontier Land| ix the trajectory of how in the said novels the fundamentalist traits of male characters are purposely pitted against the liberal and emancipatory predispositions of the women characters. The chapter shows how the misuse of religion by the fundamentalists to exert repressive authority on the common masses in a regressive manner is duly confronted by the women characters through their inculcation of an inclusive and pluralistic consciousness. The concluding chapter highlights the outcome of the book which foregrounds the positivist and reconstitutive roles played by women characters in a war-devastated society, even through their engagement in the war is not direct and frontal. The "Conclusion" emphasizes on the significance of women's critical involvement in domestic and extra-domestic spaces of their lives, the emergence of their constructivist subjectivity and their 'philosophy of action' that collectively pave the way for the inculcation of a symbiotic and sustainable outlook on life during the times of war.