This is the fifth volume of Studies in Literature in English.
The nineteen essays that constitute this volume cover a wide range of authors across time and space. Starting with Ben Jonson, the celebrated British dramatist of the Elizabethan Renaissance, the essays offer a fresh look at a number of British canonical authors—Fielding, George Eliot, Hardy, Hopkins, Lawrence and Orwell—and then take the readers across the Atlantic, to revisit and re-evaluate some of the makers of American literature: Emily Dickinson, R.S. Crane, Tennessee Williams, Carsan McCullers, Jack Gelber down to the postmodern Thomas Pynchon. Then, for a change, we have a glimpse of the Parsi life in the novel of Bapsi Sidhwa. We conclude our literary tour with the Pulitzer-winning Jhumpa Lahiri.
The anthology bears testimony to the rich variety of aesthetic relish promised by literatures in English produced across continents and in different cultures. That English literature today is not one literature but many literatures in English and that any meaningful study of it calls for an appropriate critical idiom which can do justice to this extraordinary richness and variety, become evident from the nature of this anthology—as much by its choice of subjects as by the fine critical insights with which the subjects are treated.
Since most of the authors critically discussed in this volume are widely prescribed in the universities, the students will find this volume extremely useful, and the common readers who are interested in literature in English will also find it quite interesting because of the variety of aesthetic pleasure assured by the diversity of subjects.
Mohit K. Ray, a full Professor since 1982, is one of the senior most professors 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 Literature, Canonical Literature, Comparative Poetics and Translation Studies.
Professor Ray is associated with many international bodies, and has attended and chaired sessions as an invited participant in many international Conferences, Seminars and Colloquia held in different parts of the globe—England, America, Canada, France, Hungary, Austria, 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 three research journals including The Atlantic Critical Review.
