Here is the Second volume of the New Series, Studies in Literature in English.
The present volume includes studies on some celebrated canonical British texts and authors like Milton, Austen, Lawrence, Conrad and Eliot, as well as some major postcolonial writers of Canada and Africa like Atwood, Kroetsch, and Achebe. Again, even as it casts a look back at Emerson and his affinity with Hinduism, it goes ahead to accommodate the South Asian-Canadian Diaspora. Finally, the volume winds up with a glance at Indian literature in English translation with special reference to Tagore’s Red Oleander.
The studies undertaken from variegated perspectives introduce a wide critical spectrum — ranging from ethics to sociology, feminism to alienation, religion to aesthetics, myth criticism to cultural nationalism, diasporic angst to the search for indigenous roots. That English literature today is not one but many literatures in English and that any study of it requires that appropriate critical idiom which can do justice to this extraordinary richness and variety become evidenced by the nature of this anthology — both by its choice of subjects and by the respective treatments rendered to the subjects.
Anybody who is interested in the study of English literature(s) will find this book interesting and valuable. Teachers, scholars, and students of Literature in English will also find the book useful because of the authors’ competent and insightful analyses of some of the major British, American, African and Canadian writers and their texts. The discussions on Tagore’s — play in English translation — is another highlight of the collection.
It is, indeed, a pleasure and a profit to go through the well researched papers of the volume, some of which are refreshingly original and perceptive.
Mohit K. Ray, a full Professor since 1982, is one of the seniormost Professors of English in the country. He has to his credit 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, German etc.
He has edited several anthologies of critical studies and edits The Atlantic Critical Review, an international quarterly of global circulation.
Professor Ray is a distinguished member of many international bodies including Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, Paris, and Association Internationale des Critiques Littéraires, Paris.
Professor Ray is, at present, the Chief Editor of Atlantic Publishers and Distributors.
