During the last few centuries women writers have considerably widened and deepened the areas of human experience,—with their sharp, feminine perception of life successfully transmuted into verbal artifact. The world body of literature in English would have been much poorer today but for the contribution of women writers. The new series—Studies in Women Writers in English—is a grateful acknowledgment of that contribution and public recognition of their voice.
Sixteen essays included in this first volume of the series cover a wide spectrum of women writers across space and time. The women writers discussed in this volume include two each from Britain, America, Canada, one from Africa, and six from India; they are Charlotte Bronte, Doris Lessing, Lorraine Hansberry, Sylvia Plath, Margaret Laurence, Alice Munro, Nadine Gordimer, Ruth Prawer Jhabvala, Kamala Das, Kamala Markandaya, Shashi Deshpande, Anita Desai, and Arundhati Roy.
Since most of these authors 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.
MOHIT K. RAY, a full Professor since 1982, is one of the senior most Professors of English in the country. He has published three books and a large number of research papers 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.
Professor Ray is a distinguished member of many international bodies including Association Internationale de Littérature Comparée, Paris, and Association Internationale des Critiques Littéraires, Paris.
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 Ānandamath O Sāmpradaikatā 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, and a volume of critical studies on Indian Writing in English, in addition to translating a volume of poems into English—On the Revolving Stave. 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 many National and International Seminars and Conferences including six stints in Europe.
