The twenty-five essays included in this volume, which is actually a sequel to Studies in Literary Criticism (2001), is a selection of articles published in different journals and periodicals. Most of the essays were occasioned by seminars and conferences held in India and abroad, and were published in different books and journals over a long period of time. The purpose of collecting some of them in this volume is to make them easily accessible to the students and scholars who are interested in the areas dealt with.
The volume covers a wide spectrum of areas and begins with the good old Shakespeare, and includes essays on mainstream canonical authors such as Conrad, Joyce, Yeats, Eliot, Owen, Golding. Furthermore, it also addresses some major writers outside the mainstream British literature such as Hemingway from America, Craven and Kroetsch from Canada, Brodsky the exile, and a bunch of Indian authors—from Nirad C. Chaudhuri to Amit Chaudhuri, including Gita Mehta, V. Tendulkar, Arundhati Roy, Manoj Das, Girish Karnad in-between—and above all Rabindranath Tagore as also the great ancient Sanskrit poet Kālidāsa.
Various critical theories and concepts, such as Archetypal Criticism, Myth Criticism, New Criticism, Historicism, Feminist Criticism, Eco-Feminism, Transculturalism, Phonoaesthetics, Textual Criticism, Intermediality of Art and Music, Aristotle’s Poetics and Indian Poetics—as well as the possibility of evolving a New Poetics—have been discussed and used in examining authors and texts, both literary and critical. In course of exploring this wide spectrum of literature, the author further reaches out to interesting areas like Mozart’s opera, Japanese Kabuki theatre, ancient Indian nāţyaśāstra, the Indian tradition of oral literature and folk-drama, etc., thereby introducing a remarkable range and perspective in the studies.
A full-time Professor since 1982, and now retired, Dr Mohit K. Ray (1940-) is one of the seniormost Professors in the country. He has five books and a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals in India and abroad, which reflect his wide range of literary works including Criticism, Comparative Literature, New Literatures, Canonical Literature, Comparative Poetics and Translation Studies.
Professor Ray has attended and chaired sessions as an invited participant in many international conferences, seminars, and colloquia held in different parts of the globe. He has studied several languages including Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, French, and German.
Professor Ray has edited several anthologies of critical studies, and is editor of The Atlantic Critical Review, an international quarterly with global circulation. He is also at present working as the Chief Editor of Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Ltd. He is associated with many international bodies including Association Internationale de Litérature Comparée, Paris, (International Association of Comparative Literature) and Association Internationale des Critiques Littéraires, Paris, (International Association of Literary Critics) and SANART Association of Aesthetics and Visual Culture. His CV is available in Who’s Who in the World, Who’s Who in the Commonwealth, International Book of Honour, etc.
Professor Ray was awarded the ‘International Man of the year 2003’ title by International Biographical Centre, Cambridge. He received the C.V. Kapoor Education Foundation Distinguished Teacher Award in 2000. He has also done a UGC-sponsored Major Research Project on “A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics”.
