Indian English literature has come to have a throbbing, distinctive presence of its own, having graduated from the imitative, realistic and psychological stages to the experimental one. The poets, short-story writers and novelists reflect the Indian reality imaginatively, imbuing it with universal import. The writers have evolved a new idiom and experimented with bold technical innovations — all of which deserve detailed analysis, definition, classification and evaluation.
The present Volume, comprising papers by eminent scholars on different aspects of Indian English Literature, aims at appraising and evaluating thematic concerns, formal strategies and narrative techniques, often from a comparative perspective. The writers examined are : Anita Desai, Nargis Dalal, Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujan, Jayant Mahapatra, Raja Rao, Khushwant Singh, Bhabani Bhattacharaya, Anita Desai, Kamala Markandaya, Arundhati Roy, Kamala Das and Mulk Raj Anand.
A fresh perspective on old and established works. A thought provoking critique of recent works.
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 Fellow-ship, 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 in a Major U.G.C. 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 Fiction of Nayantara Sahgal. His areas of interest are: Literary Theory, Comparative Literature, Commonwealth and Indian English Literature and Third World Fiction.
Dr. M. Rajeshwar is an Assistant Professor of English at Kakatiya University, Warangal, Andhra Pradesh. His published works of criticism include The Novels of Wole Soyinka (1990) and Indian Women Novelists and Psychoanalysis (1998). The books he has edited are : Post-modernism and English Literature (1999), Lifescapes : Telugu Short Stories by Naveen and Indian Fiction in English. He has been the Associate Editor of the prestigious Kakatiya Journal of English Studies for several years. He has published 26 articles on Indian, African and American fiction in such reputed journals as New Quest, Indian Literature, The Journal of Indian Writing in English, Commonwealth Quarterly, The Commonwealth Review, Revaluations and Triveni. Many of these articles have been repeatedly anthologized.
Dr. Rajeshwar is currently working on a project entitled “The Discovery of Regional Language Fiction : A Study of Ten Major Telugu Novels” as part of a fellowship awarded by the Department of Culture, Ministry of Human Resource Development, Government of India, New Delhi.
