A.K. Ramanujan represents the quintessential Indian English poet engaged in a relentless quest for self in the welter of tradition and contemporary reality as well as that for a well-adapted poetic idiom. His poetry refracts the essential Indian sensibility fused artistically with the temper of modernity. Ramanujan emerges out of his artistic predicament to a state of creative freedom by means of cultivating a uniquely personal idiom. It is within this thematic and linguistic framework that Ramanujan’s poetry projects a self assuming a number of identities in time, rendering the quality of transparence.
Applying closely textual, formal, socio-cultural, philosophic, imagistic and post-colonial approaches of literary appreciation and analysis, the essays in the present anthology take a fresh look at Ramanujan’s poetry, revealing aspects of study hitherto unexplored, offer critically incisive and insightful probes into different collections of poems and examine in depth the deployment of images, symbols and other poetic and rhetorical devices.
An indispensable source-book for students, researchers and teachers of Indian English and Commonwealth literature in general and poetry and A.K. Ramanujan in particular.
Dr. Manmohan K. Bhatnagar is Professor, Department of English, M.D. University, Rohtak (Haryana), India. A distinguished scholar and a veteran teacher of more than two decades’ standing, he has been Chairman, Department of English, M.D. University, Rohtak and also Chairman, State Inter-University Common Syllabi Committee in English of Kurukshetra University, Kurukshetra and M.D. University, Rohtak.
Having been selected for the prestigious Commonwealth Academic Staff Fellowship, Professor Bhatnagar has been a U.G.C.-empanelled Resource Person and part of the Guest Faculty at a number of U.G.C-sponsored Refresher Courses for College Lecturers. He has also chaired individual sessions at national seminars. He has been a U.G.C. Fellow at Panjab University, Chandigarh and a U.G.C. Research Associate at University of Poona, Poona. Currently, he is engaged in working as Principal Investigator in a Major U.G.C. Project on Indian English Fiction.
Professor Bhatnagar’s publications include, besides a number of research articles in prestigious journals in India and abroad, Political Consciousness in Indian English Writing, Perspectives and The Fiction of Nayantara Sahgal. His areas of interest are: Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, Commonwealth and Indian English Literature and Third World Fiction.
