Revisiting W.B. Yeats's World and Art (Hardbound - 2016)

Revisiting W.B. Yeats’s World and Art is a well-researched book occasioned by the poet’s 150th birth anniversary in 2015. This book is meant to be a tribute to the great poet W.B. Yeats from India by way of appreciation and admiration for him. Ten well-known Professors from India have analysed Yeats’s work from new angles. For instance, Yeats’s parallelism with Henry David Thoreau is both innovative and intensive in terms of scholarship and criticism. Purely Indian approach is exhibited in the application of Dhvani Theory to Yeats’s poetry. The Upanishadic concepts like ‘Shreyas’, ‘Preyas’, ‘Para’ and ‘Apara’ are employed to explicate Yeats’s poetry. Yeats’s political vision has been analysed vis-à-vis his poetry and plays. Yeats’s love has been the subject of some of the papers included in this volume. Finally, the question of personality and impersonality in Yeats’s poetry has been studied with insight. Above all, Yeats has been studied along with Eliot as an appropriate ending of the book.

Professor Bijay Kumar Das has edited the book with an incisive ‘Introduction’ which unfolds a distinct Indian approach to W.B. Yeats. This is an invaluable book on W.B. Yeats’s poetry and plays in the twenty-first century.

Bijay Kumar Das, Ph.D., D.Litt., is a contributor to The Encyclopaedia of World Literature in the 20th Century (New York). He has published a number of reference books which include Interpreting Poetry and Evaluating Criticism (2015); Perspective on the Poetry of A.K. Ramanujan (2013); Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (2010, 2012, 2014); Critical Essays on Post-Colonial Literature (2007, 2012); The Poetry of Jayanta Mahapatra (2009); A Handbook of Translation Studies (2005, 2008, 2009, 2011, 2013); Form and Meaning in Mahesh Dattani’s Plays (2008); Post Modern Indian English Literature (2006); Critical Essays on Poetry (2003); A Handbook of Communication Skills and Functional English (2002, 2007); Shiv K. Kumar as a Post-Colonial Poet (2001); A Reader’s Guide on Ten Twentieth Century Indian Poets (1999); Aspects of Commonwealth Literature (1995); The Horizon of Nissim Ezekiel’s Poetry (1995); Perspectives on Indian English Poetry Criticism (1998); and Modern Indian English Poetry (1992). He has edited five reference books: Academic Lives of Fifteen Eminent Teachers of English (2014); New Readings in Indian English Literature (2011); Comparative Literature (2000, 2012); Perspective on the Poetry of R. Parthasarathy (1998); and Contemporary Indo-English Poetry (1992). He has also co-edited one reference book entitled Studies in Post-colonial Literature (2007) and several textbooks including Nineteenth Century English Poetry (OUP, 1992, 1998); Twenty Essays (OUP 1998). He has successfully guided 22 Ph.D. scholars and had been the Chief Editor of The Indian Journal of English Studies for three years (2007-09). He is the Editor of The Critical Endeavour since 1995.

Formerly a Reader in English at Ravenshaw College, Cuttack, Dr. Das is now a Professor of English at Burdwan University, Burdwan (West Bengal).