Studies In Tagore: Critical Essays

Rabindranath won the heart of the West and the Nobel Prize as a poet, but he was a versatile genius and his versatility manifested itself in different genres of literature and he was equally facile in all of them. In his novels he not only portrays the problems of his times and deals with the burning issues of his day, suggesting their solutions, but he also probes deep into the minds of his characters, especially of the women.
Studies in Tagore: Critical Essays presents thirteen papers of which eight are devoted to his fiction (covering the majority of his novels), making an incisive study of their principal themes. The first paper makes an in-depth study of the conduct of Tagore’s heroines in the patriarchal set-up and his own attitude to patriarchy. In the full-length papers on Yogayog and the last novels the gender question has been examined from the feminist angle. Different papers study the heroines of Tagore from the traditional, Freudian, Youngian and feminist perspectives. Of the three papers on Tagore’s short stories one makes a comprehensive study of the male characters in the given contexts. The last paper of the Volume is on an off-beat subject (Tagore’s handling of the European charade), while the penultimate paper focuses on Tagore’s Baul connexion.