Nineteen critical essays that constitute this Volume cover a wide range of authors and literary works of different parts of the world: England, France, Norway, Africa and Latin America, for example. The authors discussed are: Hardy, Auden, Osborne, Dan Brown, Henry James, Malamud, Achebe, Ibsen, Camus, Rushdie and Coelho. There are also some perceptive essays on the trends in New English drama, on the contemporary relevance of teaching English literature and on the development of Culture Studies as an independent discipline.
It is always an intellectual pleasure and an aesthetic delight to see an old author or an old text in a new light as it is a great joy to suddenly discover a realm of gold hidden in an old or a new literary work. The essays thus offer an experience of suddenly being transported to a different world altogether accompanied by a pleasant surprise of looking at a familiar world in an unfamiliar fashion.
Since most of the authors discussed here are prescribed in syllabi of Indian Universities, both the teachers and the students of English literature will certainly find these essays useful, and anybody interested in literature in English or in some of the established literary classics is bound to be delighted by the richness and variety of aesthetic experience and intellectual delight promised by these luminous essays.
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”.
