Comparative English Literature, beginning with a wide-ranging discussion of the theoretical dimensions of the comparative study of literature, its limits and prospects, includes a host of in-depth scholarly articles incorporating inter-genre, inter-authorial, and inter-textual studies from the perspective of comparative studies which constitute an innovative strategy to access recesses of texts hitherto unexplored. The perspective here is taken from other texts, facilitating a fuller appreciation of the texts involved and the artistic intent of the authors. The authors/texts covered in this anthology include Shakespeare and Kalidas; Wordsworth and Yeats; T.S. Eliot and The Gita; John Steinbeck and The Bible; Harold Pinter and Samuel Beckett, Sylvia Fraser, Susanna Moodie, and Yasmine Gooneratne; Margaret Atwood and Gita Mehta; Margaret Laurence and Bharati Mukherjee; Jawaharlal Nehru and Nirad C. Chaudhary; and Shobha De and Balwant Gargi. Also, it includes intra-authorial studies of the poems of Tagore and the novels of Santha Rama Rau and an inter-genre appraisal of fiction and film. It gives an invaluable exposure to the theory as well as practice of Comparative Study of English Literature.
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 Pune, Pune.
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.
