The new series—Studies in Women Writers in English—is a grateful acknowledgment of the contribution and public recognition of the emerging voice of women in the arena of literature during the last few centuries, and especially in the latter half of the twentieth century. Women writers across the globe have made their distinctive mark, with their own perception of life—be it feminine, or feminist or female.
The present volume, the fifth in the series, introduces critique of work by women writers; it bears evidence to the growing critical attention towards authors writing outside the mainstream, in America, Canada, and especially in India.
The eighteen essays included in this fifth volume of the series cover a wide spectrum of women writers across space and time. The women writers discussed in this volume include one from Britain, i.e., Mary Shelley, one from America, i.e., Toni Morrison, the Nobel Laureate for literature in 1993, one from Canada, i.e., Margaret Laurence, and a host of Indian writers, from an early pioneer like Krupabai Satthianadan to the partition novelist Bapsi Sidwa, as well as contemporary avant-gardes like Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, Shobhaa De, Manju Kapur, and Arundhati Roy as well as the émigré Indian writer Bharati Mukherjee.
Since most of the authors discussed in these articles are prescribed in the English syllabus in the universities of India, both the teachers and the students will find them extremely useful, and the general readers who are interested in literature in English and/or women writers will also find them intellectually stimulating.
A full Professor since 1982, Dr Mohit K. Ray, recently retired, is one of the seniormost Professors in the country. He has three books and a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals in India and abroad, which reflect his wide range of scholarship 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—England, France, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Estonia, America, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, etc.
Professor Ray has studied several languages including Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, French, and German.
He has edited several anthologies of critical studies, and edits The Atlantic Critical Review, an international quarterly of global circulation. He is also at present the Chief Editor of Atlantic Publishers & Distributors.
Professor Ray is associated with many international bodies including Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, Paris, and Association Internationale des Critiques Littéraires, Paris.
Dr Rama Kundu is a full Professor of English. She has been teaching in the Postgraduate Department of English, Burdwan University, West Bengal, since 1976. She is the author of three books: Vision and Design in Hardy’s Fiction, Wrestling With God: Studies in English Devotional Poetry, and a Bengali book Anandamath O Sampradaikta on Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. She has also edited an anthology of research papers on Rabindranath Tagore’s The Home and the World, a collection of essays on Thomas Hardy, two volumes of critical studies on Indian Writing in English, four anthologies of Studies in Women Writers in English, in addition to translating a volume of poems into English—On the Revolving Stage. She has written a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals and anthologies in India and abroad. Professor Kundu has participated and chaired sessions in a large number of National and International Seminars and Conferences including several stints in Europe.
