English Studies in India: Widening Horizons
By   C.D. Narasimhaiah

This volume offers a critique of the problematics involved in the discipline of English Studies in India over the past fifty years. In a closely argued discourse the author constructs and validates his intellectual odyssey in English Studies in terms of an irreversible movement away from the exclusive domain of a literature written in the U.K. to a more inclusive, enriching and composite concept of literature written in English the world over. Jargon-free and suffused with mellowed critical sensibility, this wide-ranging study also carries scholarly revaluations of several major writers including Shakespeare and Milton, Emerson and Eliot, Achebe and Soyinka, Patrick White and A.D. Hope, Sri Aurobindo and Raja Rao. The volume, at once a pioneering and lasting contribution, makes indispensable reading.


C.D. Narasimhaiah , educated at the Universities of Mysore and Cambridge, was Professor of English at the University of Mysore from 1950 to 1979. Rockefeller Fellow at Princeton University (1949-50) and Fulbright Visiting Lecturer at Yale University (1958-59), he was Visiting Professor at several universities, including Leeds (U.K.), Texas (U.S.A.), Queensland and Flinders (Australia). He was also Director, The Literary Criterion Centre for English Studies and Indigenous Arts, Dhvanyaloka, Mysore.

Professor Narasimhaiah has authored / edited over a dozen books published, among others, by Macmillan, Oxford University Press, Indian Institute of Advanced Study, Shimla and Pencraft International, Delhi. His major book-length studies include The Swan and the Eagle, Essays in Commonwealth Literature and Makers of Indian English Literature.

Professor Narasimhaiah was elected (Global) Chairman, Association for Commonwealth Literature (1974-77), and President, All India English Teachers’ Conference (1989). Awarded Padma Bhushan by the Government of India in the year 1990, he ranks among the most sensitive, bold, and distinguished scholar-critics of India.
 
ISBN 81-85753-51-2           2002           272 pp           Rs.495(hb)
 
A valuable critique of the problematics involved in the discipline of English Studies in India over the past 50 years.
The Hindu