Prison Literature: A Global Perspective

The Prison Literature over the years has emerged as a voluminous and complex body of literature with canonical writers like Malory, Defoe, Oscar Wilde, Dostoevsky, Chekov, Tolstoy, Alex La Guma, Soyinka, Nehru and Gandhi and works ranging from autobiography, memoirs and letters to poetry, novel and short stories. The present anthology comprising seventeen scholarly research papers on prison writers from America, India, African and European countries is a pioneering critical work in the field of prison literature and gives a fair insight into the genre. It covers Indian prison writers like Nehru, Tilak, Jay Prakash Narayan, S H Jhabvala, European writers like John Bunyan, Albert Camus, Nikolai Bukharin, Cesar Vallejo, Jean Rhys, Richard Lovelace African authors like Herman Charles Bosman, Alex La Guma, D M Zwelonke and an American short story writer O Henry besides synoptic papers on Prison literature, Prison poetry and Aesthetics of Prison literature.

The book would be of immense value for students, researchers, teachers of literature in general and of Prison Literature in particular. It holds good for those who are working in the field of marginal studies and cultural studies.