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Item Voicing the Choice: Metaphor in Ismat Chughtai’s Short Story—“The Quilt”(Premier University, Chattogram, 2022-05) Das, ShantanuIsmat Chughtai is a well-known feminist author in twentieth-century Urdu literature. She is given a special place in South-Asian Feminist Studies because of the way she interweaves the discourse of female sexuality with certain stylistic patterns. In her short story, “The Quilt,” the voiceless woman character, Begum Jaan, holds on to her choice regarding her sexuality despite living in a time and a society immersed in patriarchy. The unconventional and ‘unladylike’ choice of homosexuality would not be well-received if openly expressed. Chughtai still writes about this choice in a very suggestive manner through the powerful metaphor of the quilt in “The Quilt”. The metaphor speaks louder than the protagonist herself, thus becoming a means to voice the choice of the woman in the story. This also attributes the metaphor with the quality of a living character in Chughtai’s narrative technique. Through this technique, Chughtai has contributed to the discourse of female sexuality in the Urdu literary subculture of her time. Taking the twentieth-century definitions of metaphor and a theoretical frame of Simone de Beauvoir’s discussion on female sexuality, this paper takes into account this short story, “The Quilt,” to examine, in a qualitative approach, the nature of the choice made by the female protagonist Begum Jaan and how the metaphor is used to voice her choice in the story.Item Keatsian Romantic Escapism in Syed Shamsul Haq’s Short Stories “নাম“ (Name) and “স্বপ্নের ভিতর বসবাস“ (Living in Dreams)(Premier University, Chattogram, 2021-06) Das, ShantanuOne of the most prolific writers from Bangladesh, Syed Shamsul Hag, has shown his mastery over diverse genres of literature, and hence, he has proudly been called an ambidextrous writer. The nuance with which he has created a mesmerizing world of fiction is unique among his contemporaries. As a writer of short stories, he has never compromised in depicting the struggle of the middle class people. In two of his short stories “নাম“ (Name) and “স্বপ্নের ভিতর বসবাস“ (Living in Dreams), the protagonists, Ashraf and Badsha respectively, represent that struggle. They build their own worlds based on sheer imagination —a self-imposed identity and a lie —and occasionally escape into these worlds being bugged by the pangs of their middle class life. As a result, a fine thread of Romantic Escapism can be found in both Ashraf and Badsha. This sort of Romantic Escapism partially echoes one of the English Romantic poets, John Keats, whose manner of exhibiting Romantic Escapism, as seen especially in his “Ode to a Nightingale” anticipates much of the substance of Haq’s two stories we are treating in this paper, which aims at showing the extent of Keatsian Romantic Escapism that prevails over the characters of Ashraf and Badsha--the protagonists of the stories.