In this paper I would like to discuss two famous Modernist lesbian novels- Radclyffe Hall’s The Well of Loneliness (1928) and Djuna Barnes’ Nightwood (1936). As is well known, both novels use interwar Paris as a setting for the depiction of same-sex love. I would like to explore the patterns of consumption that queer characters engage in,and the economic prerogatives they enjoy or are denied, in the context of the city and the homes they build in the city. Through this analysis,I will attempt to trace the power dynamics between queer individualsand the capitalist market, as well as within relationships of romantic love between women.

Feminist theorists have frequently pointed out the paradoxical nature of how urban spaces treat people who do not fit the norm of the heterosexual male citizen. As Gillian Rose writes, in contrast to the ’feeling of spatial freedom which only white heterosexual men usually
enjoy’,’sexual attacks warn women everyday that their bodies are not meant to be in certain spaces, and racist and homophobic violence delimits the spaces of black, lesbian and gay communities.’ On the other hand, as Elizabeth Wilson has pointed out, the city also offers women the chance for independence, flânerie, same-sex bonding and a chance to explore one’s sexuality without the threat of familial or
community-based policing.

The post- 9/11 novel is pre-eminently a city novel and as such it is organized, written and to be read through the urban space. It is not only inscribed in the city but it also creates new spaces within the urba context and reallocates meanings within the city space. The analysed novels not only reflect the post–9/11 city, but they also create, produce, celebrate and write it. All of these texts classify as "historiographic metafiction" in Linda Hutcheon’s terms; they are both "intensely self-reflexive and yet paradoxically also lay claim to historical events and personages."

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
What are the roots that clutch, what branches grow
Out of this stony rubbish? Son of man,
You cannot say, or guess, for you know only
A heap of broken images, where the sun beats,
And the dead tree gives no shelter, the cricket no relief,
And the dry stone no sound of water. Only
There is shadow under this red rock,
(Come in under the shadow of this red rock),...
He who was living is now dead
We who were living are now dying
With a little patience . . .
. . . Shall I at least set my lands in order?
. . . These fragments I have shored against my ruins

In his famed 1819 poem, "Ode on a Grecian Urn" John Keats
optimistically assigns high value to the aesthetics of beauty and its closeness with poetic truth that redirects the poetic mind to an advanced zone of consciousness:

On September 28, 2015, a Muslim man in Dadri, Uttar Pradesh was lynched to death by a mob of Hindu fanatics under the suspicion that he had consumed beef. In India, beef has grown as an indicator of hard-line Hindu forces since colonial times, and has consequently been at the core of innumerable communal tension. Earlier in the year, the Maharashtra Animal Preservation Act (MAPA) of 1976 was amended with stricter guidelines to prohibit and criminalize the possession and consumption of beef. Since Independence, the Animal Preservation Act has been applied variedly by different states. In light of the new amendments to the MAPA and the mob lynching in Dadri, a nationwide beef ban seems to be imminent.

"Those who come
come with hearts full of fire,
with flames on their lips, but those who live here
live with hands full of ash
and eyes full of smoke.
Those who leave take with them
a bundle of extinguished beliefs,
the stub-ends of their dreams.
Such is this Valley of Four Passes
it’s a cold ashtray,
this Valley of Four Passes.

Nepali literature is relatively more recent than other literatures of the regions of Nepal, for instance Newari literature which is not less than five hundred years old. The oldest specimen of written Nepali is generally traced back to the thirteenth century royal edicts of western Nepal.These along with royal biographies and translations from Sanskrit into Nepali are regarded as early written documents in the Nepali language. Though these documents possess a historical value, their literary merit is very little. The most notable poet of Nepali literature, Bhanubhakta Acharya (1814-1868) is regarded as the founder-poet(’adi-kavi’) of Nepali literature. As the first poet to shake off the influence of sophisticated Indian literatures, Bhanubhakta’s Ramayana was shorn of heavily sanskritised language. However, the credit for the popularity of Bhanubhakta’s Ramayana goes to another great writer of
Nepali literature, Motiram Bhatta (1866-1896).

Jack M Bickham, in his book Setting, discusses how "an evocative physical description of setting can transport the reader into the story’s universe." Setting often functions as a mirror of the psychological states of characters and at other times reinforces the structure of the story by linking the different phases of the story. Again, in the case of the genre of mystery and detection, scholars have definitively recognized the significant function that setting plays. Setting is what often binds crucial elements of plot, characterization and point of view in crime fiction. Gillian Mary Hanson, in City and Shore: The Function of Setting in the British Mystery, elaborates on the merits of "city" and "shore" as settings of works of mystery. She posits that in such settings, often the space "speaks for the character and mood." Though country homes and closed, small rural-scapes have been exploited as the setting of memorable works, ". . . quite distinct in their topographical features, the settings of city and seashore in the mystery do share thematic aspects such as alienation and the carnivalesque." Whereas alienation can play out in the interactions strangers have with established communities when they have suddenly and newly arrived, Bakhtin’s idea of the "carnivalesque" forges new mode of interrelationships among individuals, which in turn reveal hidden or dormant aspects of human nature. In city settings, Hanson believes, the carnivalesque can "represent a powerful theme of evil and moral decay, a distortion of truth and human values." This is why crime fiction and the city have always been deeply entwined,necessarily because of the scope for anonymity and individualism that a city provides to its citizens, outside the safety nets of community existence, conditions often leading to crime and criminality.

During the nineteenth-century, Calcutta witnessed an unprecedented churning of the urban cauldron and some of the apparently innocuous masalas were certain indispensible characters and hitherto un-experienced commodities. Unimpeded by the imperialist nationalist discourses, that predominated the century, the exigencies of daily urban living led to imperceptible shifts in the social codes of living. It is in this vein that, the paper argues, urbanity experienced by the relevant embodied subjects had a catalytic bearing in reformatting their sensorial registers. The paper, delving into the riches of the contemporary repositories,gleans out the persons who were unavoidable in the colonial urban backdrop and were quite crucial in smudging the boundaries between the inner and the outer world of the bhadralok, namely: the housemaid and the cook. Then the gaze is turned on the staggered entries of frowned upon food in the middle-class households which was aided partially by the aforesaid onslaught and dictated by the newly realised rules of comfort and health.

"Gazing up into the darkness, I saw myself as a creature driven and derided by vanity; and my eyes burned with anguish and anger."

The concluding line from ’Araby’, the third story in Dubliners sums up the feelings of most of the protagonists of the different stories in the collection. In this story, Joyce depicts the unimaginative, conventional, narrow minded existence of the Dubliners and how the protagonist desperately tries to escape from it. He depicts it with unsparing realism with an abundance of descriptive phrases such as "the waste room littered with old papers", "the dark odorous stables", "the dark dripping gardens", and "the few straggling bushes in the garden". Joyce symbolically indicates the stagnated existence of Dubliners where the protagonist is compelled to take refuge in his reveries for a better existence amidst the stifling surroundings. The impression of this stagnation is further intensified by the details like the ’musty’ air and the ’brown’ unpainted facades of the houses in the locality. The turning point which provides a disruption amidst this stagnation is the boy’s decision to go to the oriental fair called ’Araby’ to buy a token of love for Mangan’s sister whom he is infatuated with. His definition of ideal love is ruptured when he receives a rude shock upon witnessing the shameless flirtation of a female shop assistant with two men. Like the other protagonists, he is confronted with a disturbing self-revelatory epiphany that his imaginative superiority over the crestfallen Dubliners is eventually fruitless. This ultimately transforms him from an idealistic state of innocence to the complexity of adult experience.