As a poet Kamala Das merits a place among the best women poets of the twentieth century. She has made enormous contribution to Indian poetry in English by adding a feminist dimension to it, although she is not inclined to admit it. Perhaps deriving her inspiration from her matrilineal background she celebrates woman’s body and pleads for its integrity in her poems. She writes poetry as only as woman can write and takes pride in the fact of being a woman and that is certainly the starting point of all kinds of feminism.
The present volume puts together deeply perceptive articles which study various facets of her poetry from feminist and other perspectives and often with reference to her life, a confessional poet that she is.
Rajeshwar Mittapalli is an Associate Professor of English at Kakatiya University, Warangal, Andhra Pradesh, India. His published works of criticism include The Novels of Wole Soyinka (1990) and Indian Women Novelists and Psychoanalysis (1998). Apart from Volume -1 in this series and several volumes in another series entitled Indian Writings in English, he has edited Post-modernism and English Literature (1999), Lifescapes (1999), Indian Fiction in English (1999), The Novels of Anita Desai (2000), The Novels of Mulk Raj Anand (2000), The Fiction of Raja Rao (2001), Modern American Literature (2001) and IT Revolution, Globalization and the Teaching of English (2001).
Dr. Mittapalli is currently the editor of The Atlantic Literary Review published from New Delhi. He was for several years the Associate Editor of Kakatiya Journal of English Studies.
So far he has published 28 articles on Indian, African and American fiction and ELT in such reputed journal as New Quest, Indian Literature, The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Commonwealth Quarterly, The Commonwealth Review, Revaluations, Triveni and College English Review. Some of these articles have been repeatedly anthologised.
Pier Paolo Piciucco has a Ph.D on “Mythical Heritage of Female Characters in Indian English Fiction” from the University of Bologna, Italy.
He has published articles in The Journal of Indian Writing in English, In-Between, The Journal of Literature and Aesthetics, Englishes, Africa America Asia Australia, Linea d’Ombra, Il Tolomeo and L’Indice.
His articles have also been included in volumes such as Cross-Cultural Voices, Routes of the Roots: Geography in the English-Speaking Countries (both by Bulzoni, Rome), Arundhati Roy: the Novelist Extraordinary (Prestige, New Delhi) and Indian Writings in English, Volume - 7 (Atlantic, New Delhi).
He collaborates with the Italian academic institute CSAE (Centre for the Study of Literatures and Cultures of Emerging Areas) and for them he has edited and translated into Italian a bilingual volume of Indian short stories entitled Feminine, Plural. For Atlantic he has edited with Rajeshwar Mittapalli Studies in Indian Writing in English, Volume - 1 and Kamala Das: A Critical Spectrum.
He is currently working on South African Theatre as a post-doctoral fellow at the University of Turin, Italy.
