The Twice Born Fiction By  Meenakshi Mukherjee First published in 1971, this study of the Indian Novel in English has remained a seminal book for the last four decades. This was the earliest work to apply rigorous standards of critical analysis to this new field of study and to situate the novels studied in their historical and social context. Written in an elegant and jargon-free language The Twice Born Fiction laid the foundations for future discourse in this field and anticipated some of the issues relating to nation, gender, power and identity that postcolonial theory was to take up subsequently. It is being reissued in the belief that the present-day reader would be interested in re-examining the paradigms that this book set up. Meenakshi Mukherjee, a widely acclaimed scholar-critic in the discipline of Indian English Literature, is the author of Realism and Reality: Novel and Society in India (1985), Re-reading Jane Austen (1991) and The Perishable Empire (2000). Among volumes edited by her are Considerations: Twelve Studies of Indian Writing in English (1977), Rajmohan’s Wife (1994) and Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (1999). She co-edited Narrative: Forms and Transformations (1986), Another India (1990) and Interrogating Postcolonialism (1996). Professor Mukherjee taught in several universities in India and abroad, the largest spell being at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi as Professor of English. She passed away in the year 2009.   ISBN 81-85753-46-6           2010           215 pp           Rs.700 (hb)     A book that makes most previous writing on the subject seem off the mark and no one interested in Indian writing in English should ignore it.. The Times of India So assured, compelling and reasonable are the arguments, insights and conclusions in The Twice Born Fiction that I must now settle down to re-reading the texts. Hindusthan Standard