• ISBN13: 9788126902088
• Binding: Hardcover
• Subject: English Literature
• Publisher: Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Ltd
• Publisher Imprint: Atlantic
• Publication Date: August 12, 2003
• Pages: 248
• Original Price: INR 450.0
• Language: English
• Edition: N/A
• Item Weight: 260 grams
• BISAC Subject(s): General

The present book is an addition to the study of Arun Joshi’s novels in the context of the theme of the crisis of identity in the post-modern world in the wake of colonial hangover, economic depression, psychological split-up as well as existential angst and freedom of choice. The major characters in Joshi’s novels find themselves in a predicament from which they find it difficult to get disentangled. The one world is dead and the other powerless to be born. The worldly affluence is not enough. The escape from the outer world to the inner keeps one engaged. Bred on the Western literary and philosophical obsession in Camus, Sartre, Malamud, and other American novelists, Joshi finds it a fashionable craze to write about the crisis of identity almost in the same vein in which the seventeenth century English authors posed to be melancholy.

Shankar Kumar (born in November 1968) got his B.A. (Hons.) and M.A. Degrees in English from Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga (Bihar), respectively in 1987 and 1989. He was awarded the degree of Ph.D. in English in 1997 on “Crisis of Identity: A Study of the Major Characters in the Novels of Arun Joshi” by Lalit Narayan Mithila University, Darbhanga. He is also a holder of P.G. Diploma in Journalism from Bhartiya Vidya Bhavan, New Delhi and in Human Resource Management from IGNOU. A person of academic and creative interest, Dr. Kumar has been working as Translator in the Department of Space (ISRO), New Delhi since 26th May 1995.

• Part-I–Introduction

• 1. Crisis of Identity in Indian English Fiction and Arun Joshi
• 2. Influences upon Arun Joshi: Literary, Philosophical and Linguistic

• Part-II–Exposition

• 3. The World of Business and Personal Relationships in The Foreigner and The Last Labyrinth
• 4. The Primitive World versus the Civilized World in The Strange Case of Billy Biswas
• 5. The Innocence and Experience of the “Homespun” World of The Apprentice
• 6. People at Strife in The City and the River

• Part-III–Conclusion

• 7. Fictional Technique of Arun Joshi
• 8. Summing-up