Vikram Seth’s A Suitable Boy: An Anthology of Recent Criticism
Edited by  Murari Prasad
 
 
This collection of essays by diverse hands offers a critical appraisal of the disparate range of themes that make Vikram Seth’s panoramic novel, A Suitable Boy, worth its weight and heft. It examines Seth’s extensive takes on the issues of inter-faith face-off, language politics, colonial hang-over in postcolonial India, modernity and gender inequity, caste prejudices, and several others in this multi-stranded Indian English novel. The interrogation of the author’s mode of narrating the nation with a variety of calling cards is consistently matched with an incisive probe into the complexity of characters and events located in the socio-cultural milieu of the early postcolonial India of nineteen-fifties. Besides, with Seth’s concise literary biography and a comprehensive bibliography for those who wish to explore the text further, this anthology is a resource which the readers and researchers can’t afford not to have.

 

Murari Prasad is currently associate professor of English in the Faculty of Education in Sana’a University, the Republic of Yemen. In India, he has taught English language and literature for over fifteen years at D.S. College, Katihar (Bihar). His professional interests include Indian English Literature as well as American and British fiction. He has published a string of papers on Amitav Ghosh, V.S. Naipaul, Arundhati Roy and contributed on Upamanyu Chatterjee to the Dictionary of Literary Biography (South Asian Writing). His latest project, Language of Contemporay Indian English Fiction, in addition to a festschrift volume for Professor Damodar Thakur is due to appear in the coming year.
Contributors : Himansu S. Mahapatra, Jatindra K. Nayak, Neelam Srivastava, Christopher Rollason, Ian Almond, Murari Prasad, Mala Pandurang, David Myers, Felicity H and Cielo G. Festino.
 
 
ISBN 81-85753-72-5           2005           180 pp           Rs.400 (hb)