With Kiran Desai the ‘fine tradition’ of Indian Booker Prize winners continues. Like her mother Anita Desai, Kiran Desai emerges as a gifted writer. From the mother to the daughter we see a literary tradition being built, starting from Anita Desai’s psychological explorations in her fiction to Kiran Desai’s experiment in the making of a comic fable in Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard and her insightful and often humorous commentary on multiculturism, cross-cultural and cross-class understanding, globalization and immigrant experience in The Inheritance of Loss. From the fablesque magic and satiric comedy in her celebrated debut, exuding ‘poetry and joy in language and life’, Desai’s Man Booker Prize winning novel moves effortlessly to ‘illuminate the pain of exile, describing the encroaching morass of westernization and the lingering effects of colonialism,’ spanning continents, generations, religions, and races, with equal felicity and ease.
Though Desai’s novel holds a mirror up to the world today, looking at the cultural collisions, cultural encounters, postcolonialism and continuing consumerist imperialism, yet what makes her irresistible is her immense tenderness for the human condition and her understanding of human relationships.
By engaging closely with the work of the iconic 21st century writer, Kiran Desai, Critical Responses to Kiran Desai, explores a wide range of critical approaches on various ‘hot button issues’ such as multiculturism, colonialization, representation, diaspora, and globalization which are of much relevance today. Composed substantially of insightful essays, the collection brings together the voices of esteemed scholars as well as those of emergent scholars. One of the first few attempts to offer a sustained and compelling critique of the much acclaimed writer, the book will prove to be valuable to the scholars, students and teachers of English Literature.
Sunita Sinha, a gold medallist from the Patna University, Bihar has been teaching English in Women’s College, Samastipur, L.N. Mithila University, Bihar. She has authored two books, Graham Greene: A Study of His Major Novels and Post-Colonial Women Writers: New Perspectives. She has edited three anthologies: New Urges in Postcolonial Literature: Widening Horizons; Reconceiving Postcolonialism: Visions and Revisions; and Postcolonial Imaginings: Fissions and Fusions. She has participated in many national and international seminars and conferences. Dr. Sunita has written many scholarly papers which have been published in various national and international journals. She is the Assistant Editor of The Atlantic Critical Review.
Bryan Reynolds is Professor of Drama at the University of California, Irvine. He is the author of Transversal Subjects: From Montaigne to Deleuze after Derrida (2008); Transversal Enterprises in the Drama of Shakespeare and his Contemporaries: Fugitive Explorations (2006); Performing Transversally: Reimagining Shakespeare and the Critical Future (2003); and Becoming Criminal: Transversal Performance and Cultural Dissidence in Early Modern England (2002). He is the co-editor of Rematerializing Shakespeare: Authority and Representation on the Early Modern English Stage (2005); and Shakespeare Without Class: Misappropriations of Cultural Capital (2000). Reynolds is Co-General Editor of a book series on theatre and performance studies, entitled Performance Interventions. He is also a playwright and co-founder of the Transversal Theater Company.
