Abstract
The article argues that the progressive litterateurs who were fully cognizant of the social functionality of literature, deployed literary radicalism as a tool of articulation of radical ideas to develop an alternative vision of the state and society that clashed with the vision of military-bureaucratic nexus.1 The latter unable to appreciate its subtlety began to perceive threat from the radicalism and tried to suppress it and the apprehensions culminated into the imposition of ban of the Progressive Writers Association (PWA). Thus, the piece seeks to historicize the most crucial as well as productive phase of the literary history of Pakistan through the vantage of the Progressive Writers Association by bringing into focus the literary radicalism of the PWA. However, it asserts emphatically that the placement of ban on the PWA did not signal the end to the Progressive Writers Movement (PWM), which continued to advance the cause through myriad other radical interventions.

Irfan Waheed Usmani. (2021) Literary Radicalism and the Tools of its Articulation: Examining the Role of the Progressive Writers Association between 1948 and 1954, Journal of the Punjab University Historical Society, Volume 34, issue 2.
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