The present anthology of critical essays on Twentieth Century English Literature seeks to put together the body of writing — criticism, poetry, fiction, short-story, — in England, America, Australia, Africa and India in the present age, to discover how, despite its seeming divergence and dissimilarities, it falls into a broad pattern with regard to the choice of themes and formal strategies.
The essays included are theoretical, comparative and exigetical, expounding movements like Modernism and Post-Modernism; critical perspectives like the Scientifico-Psychological Approach and its practical application, and critiques of T.S. Eliot, Thomas Hardy, E.M. Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, G.B. Shaw, Harold Pinter, Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Wole Soyinka, Manohar Malgonkar, Nayantara Sahgal, C.J. Koch and Frank Moorhouse.
The anthology reveals ‘the family resemblance’ in twentieth century English literature irrespective of geographic and cultural barriers, reinforcing the view that in the ‘global village’ that the world has become, literature in English all over the world in the modern context has come to assume the form of a community-discourse.
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 on a U.G.C. Major 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 Novels of Nayantara Sahgal. His areas of interest are: Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, Commonwealth and Indian English Literature and Third World Fiction.
