Anita Desai, a recipient of many literary awards in India and abroad, and a creative writing teacher at Massachusetts Institute of Technology since 1993, in addition to being a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature in London and Honorary fellow of the University of Cambridge, has proved herself to be a major Indian novelist of the post-seventies India, whose novels epitomize the emerging women’s search for self-hood in the Indian context. Fire on the Mountain (1977), winner of the 1978 National Academy of Letters Award, and generally considered Desai’s masterpiece, is a beautiful novel, focused on two elderly ladies and one small girl. Nanada Kaul retires to a hill station house in her old age, and leads on isolated life there, when her great-granddaughter comes to stay. With the arrival of Raka the story takes a new turn, gathers momentum, and unfurls quickly to a symbolic end when the mountain has been set on fire. The Atlantic critical study of Fire on the Mountain, which is primarily meant for the students of English literature of Indian universities, is a comprehensive, self-sufficient and in-depth study of the text. The author, a distinguished scholar in the area, has taken special care to combine lucidity and profundity in her treatment of the text. In its eight chapters the present study examines the text from various angles such as the title, themes, characters, images and symbols, narrative techniques, and feminist discourse, in addition to providing an ‘Introduction’, a brief ‘Story-outline’, and a detailed ‘Critical summary’ of the entire text in its three parts, along with a ‘Select Bibliography’ and sample questions. The book will be immensely useful for students, scholars and teachers in the area.
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