Studies In 20th Century Literature

Study Of Literature Is The Study Of Man S Struggles And Aspirations, Which In The Twentieth Century Context Have Come To Assume Across The World A Striking Similarity In Both Form And Content, Irrespective Of The Disparate Geographical, Political, Social And Cultural Situations.The Present Volume Of Twentieth Century Literature In English Examines A Wide Selection Of Writers From Different Parts Of The World England, America And The Commonwealth To Substantiate And Scrutinize This Contention. Comprising Detailed Critiques Of Modern Trends/Movements Like Science Fiction And Feminism, Broad-Based Critical Analyses Of Commonwealth Literary Studies And Women In Literature, The Volume Also Includes In-Depth Exploration Of The Works Of Thomas Hardy, Virginia Woolf, John Osborne, Henry Miller, Henry David Thoreau, Nissim Ezekiel, Krishna Srinivas, Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, And Bhabani Bhattacharya.Incorporating Original Studies Of Twentieth Century Literature In English From Hitherto Unexplored Perspectives, The Volume Facilitates A Thorough Re-Evaluation Of Modern Literature In English.

Discusses characters from the works of major novelists, dramatists, and short story writers of the twentieth century. Offers insights into characterization, author intention, and narrative.

Undecidability is a fundamental quality of literature and constitutive of what renders some works appealing and engaging across time and in different contexts. This book explores the essential literary notion and its role, function and effect in late nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature and literary theory. The book traces the notion historically, providing a map of central theories addressing interpretative challenges and recalcitrance in literature and showing ‘theory of uncertainty’ to be an essential strand of literary theory. While uncertainty is present in all literature, and indeed a prerequisite for any stabilisation of meaning, the Modernist period is characterised by a particularly strong awareness of uncertainty and its subforms of undecidability, ambiguity, indeterminacy, etc. With examples from seminal Modernist works by Woolf, Proust, Ford, Kafka and Musil, the book sheds light on undecidability as a central structuring principle and guiding philosophical idea in twentieth-century literature and demonstrates the analytical value of undecidability as a critical concept and reading-strategy. Defining undecidability as a specific ‘sustained’ and ‘productive’ kind of uncertainty and distinguishing it from related forms, such as ambiguity, indeterminacy and indistinction, the book develops a systematic but flexible theory of undecidability and outlines a productive reading-strategy based on the recognition of textual and interpretive undecidability.

Considering The Great Popularity Of The First Four Editions Of The Book, Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, And Keeping In Mind The Valuable Suggestions Received From Several Quarters, The Present Fifth Edition Has Been Revised And Enlarged By An Addition Of Twelve New Chapters. It Contains Fifty Chapters In All, Organized Into Two Parts.Part I Of The Book Lays Emphasis On Various Schools Of Criticism That Are Prevalent In India And The West. Each Chapter Contains An Analysis Of The Theory In Question And Shows The Trend And Development As Well As The Methodology Of Literary Criticism In The 20Th Century. Recent Issues In Twentieth Century Criticism, Postcolonial Theory, Translation Theory, Cultural Criticism And Gender Studies Are Among The Many Attractions Of The Book.Part Ii Of The Book Contains Discussions On A Large Number Of Critical Essays And Critics Such As Eliot, Richards, Leavis, Barthes, Foucault And The Postcolonial Critics. The Seminal Critical Essays Included In This Section Have Influenced The Critical Trends In The Twentieth Century And Changed The General Perception Of Criticism. These Chapters, Apart From Giving A Comprehensive Idea Of The Critical Concepts Also Provide An Analytic Study Of The Critical Works. Important Postcolonial Critics Like Edward Said, Homi K. Bhabha And Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak Have Been Discussed With New Insight.Professor Das Has Explained The Theories And The Texts With Clarity And Precision In A Lucid Language. This Is An Invaluable Reference Book For Anyone Interested In The Field Of Literary Criticism In The Twentieth Century.

The contributors to this collection of essays on the literary use of myth in the early twentieth century and its literary and philosophical precedents from romanticism onwards draw on a range of disciplines, from anthropology, comparative literature, and literary criticism, to philosophy and religious studies. The underlying assumption is that modernist myth-making does not retreat from modernity, but projects a mode of being for the future which the past could serve to define. Modernist myth is not an attempted recovery of an archaic form of life so much as a sophisticated self-conscious equivalent. Far from seeking a return to an earlier romantic valorizing of myth, these essays show how the true interest of early twentieth-century myth-making lies in the consciousness, affirmative as well as tragic, of living in a human world which, in so far as it must embody value, can have no ultimate grounding. Although myth may initially appear to be the archaic counterterm to modernity, it is thus also the paradigm on which modernity has repeatedly reconstructed, or come to understand, its own life forms. The very term myth, by combining, in its modern usage, the rival meanings of a grounding narrative and a falsehood, encapsulates a central problem of modernity: how to live, given what we know.

The twentieth century witnessed dramatic changes in terms of the structure of society, economics, politics, science, and technology, driving a change in Western literature from traditional to modern: old value systems were shattered; writing approaches and aesthetics changed; writers began to explore the psychological world and expand the discussion of humankind and modern civilization. This title takes classic literature by European and American authors of the twentieth century as research objects in order to comprehensively explore their thoughts, values, aesthetics, and narratives. Six major themes are used as units for analysis—existential meaning, self-identity, war and human nature, growing confusion, love and marriage, and anti-utopia. The authors argue that the six themes extend the themes of traditional literature and epitomize the unique characteristics of twentieth-century Western literature. The book will be of interest to students and scholars of literature, especially Western literature and twentieth-century literature.