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Historical literary works inject soul and life into historical events contained in the texts. Local historical literary works provide an alternative history that deepens the reader's understanding of the struggles of past Malay warriors. Antara Dendam dengan Perjuangan by Ali Jusoh serves as an alternative history that is vivid and provides a contemporary meaning that elevates the novel as a document filled with the struggles of the Malays in their fight against the colonizers. This article aims to analyse the psychological aspect of the main characters of this text. In doing so, historical events are reinterpreted. In the novel, the uprising of Pahang warriors is not only narrated, but through the New Historicism approach, readers can better understand the events in history. The novel narrates not only past events, but also includes the tones and nuances of silenced voices of the past. This article applies the New Historicism approach, particularly that of Greenblatt (1989), which affirms the connection between a text and its context of setting and time. This article also applies the idea advocated by Hashim (2003) that New Historicism contributes to the deconstruction of history, especially that of postcolonial societies. It also focuses on selected events that expose the characters' psyche in the novel, thus demonstrating that history and literature complement each other. Through New Historicism and the study of selected characters in the novel, particular events are re-lived and given new meaning and contemporary interpretation.
This essay highlights the way Keller’s novel, Comfort Woman (1997) explores the connection between women’s sexual bodies, colonialism and Korean nationalism. Through the resistance of heroic women characters against patriarchal definitions and feminization of a colonized nation, Keller narrates subversive feminist resistance to humiliating inscriptions of patriarchy and colonialism onto the sexual bodies of women. The text is closely analysed using tools of literary devices, in particular, subversive strategies and the idea of silences as a tool and a theme to convey the unspoken and the unspeakable. Soon Hyo’s passive silences as a comfort woman in the comfort camps and her transformation later to paranormal articulations as a shaman is interpreted as powerful forms of resistance against patriarchy’s inscription upon her body. Her silent passivity, re-interpreted as a form of active resistance becomes more meaningful as she wrestles back the identities and recognition for the thousands of comfort women that would otherwise be forgotten. Comfort Woman inquires into the links between languages, silences and subjectivity, colonial domination and Korean nationalism, sexuality and nation, resisting any attempts at separating the links. Keller invoked the power of performance and silences in the form of “strange” articulations and tropes which were culturally specific as subversive means of re-telling her story and inscribing new meanings onto women’s sexual bodies, thus rewriting the feminine constructions of a nation.
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