This dissertation is a study of contemporary Pashto prose writing in a context of war and crisis based on a corpus of digitally published and/or printed short stories from the 1990s onwards. Out of this larger corpus, 16 stories have been selected and analysed under four topics: "The Terrorist", Female agency: Representations of and by, "The Madman", and Axtar: Longing for peace or imaging disillusion. A central idea is that the analysis should be text-oriented, but the contextualisation of the analysed texts is a secondary important focus. Chapter one presents the material and gives a general context to the study. In the second chapter, after a general conceptualisation of the short story genre, I discuss the borders between prose and poetry. In chapter three I provide an overview of Pashto literature where the aim is to pinpoint certain characteristics of literature in what I call a poeticised community, such as that of the Pashtuns. The fourth chapter contains an introduction to the four topics mentioned above, a summary of each of the four stories belonging to the specific topic with selected parts in direct translation from the Pashto original, as well as a discussion of form and contents of each topic separately. Chapter five consists of a general conclusion. An appendix with the original Pashto text of translated sections is found before the bibliography. One feature that has emerged from this study is the notion of how the narratives are often found to communicate and respond to their immediate surroundings, in time as well as in space. Another important conclusion is that devices normally regarded as belonging to the realm of poetry are not uncommon in Pashto short story writing.

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