Literature and Literary Criticism: Indian and Western Perspectives

This collection of the ‘Perspectives’ comprises of fifteen essays grouped under three different sections, namely, ‘Pearl Buck’, ‘New Criticism and the modern Critical Thought in Marathi’ and ‘Appreciation’. Most of these essays are of interdisciplinary and comparative nature. The first section deals with the cultural, religious and political encounter between the East and the West as reflected in some of the novels of Pearl Buck. The second section deals with the Anglo-American ‘New Criticism’ and its influence on the critical thought (Theory) in Marathi. Here, an attempt is made to deal with the critical encounter through some of the basic categories of literature such as ‘Imagination and Experience’, ‘Creative Process’, ‘Poetic Form’ and ‘Poetic Meaning’. The first two essays in the third section, deal with E.M. Forester’s ‘A Passage to India’ and O’Neill’s ‘Mourning Becomes Electra’, and the other two essays in that section deal with Nailker’s ‘The Thief of’ Nagarhalli and Other Stories’ and Acharya Atre’s ‘Suryasta’. These four essays attempt to appreciate the core parts of these works. The fifth essay is an attempt to underline the New Critics’ emphasis on the medium which is expressed by the Marathi Saint-poet, Tukaram, in the 17th century. If cross-cultural, comparative and interdisciplinary studies are significant, these ‘Indian and Western Perspectives’ will be really useful to scholars, teachers and students of literature and literary criticism.