Contents: 1. The short story and the Ballad: perspective of form/Amarendra Kumar. 2. Treatment of death in the novels of Graham Greene/Prema Jha. 3. George Orwell's Polemics and vision in animal form/Subhash Chandra. 4. A sociological analysis of the Essays of Richard Steele/Anupam Shukla. 5. Poets in Plato's republic/Najwa Brax. 6. Brave new world: a study in mysticism/Amrendra N. Singh. 7. Einstein's relativity and the epistolary tradition in Lawrence Durrell's Alexandria Quartet/Sanjai Yadav. 8. Virginia Woolfs to the lighthouse: a quest for identity/Kumar Chandradeep. 9. D.H. Lawrence's poetry: an imagist perspective/Chhote Lal Khatri. 10. Under western eyes: Conrad's political vision/C.L. Khatri. 11. The literary contour and context of Jane Austen/Kumar Chandradeep. 12. Virginia Woolf's Jacob's room: Snapshots of an unfulfilled life/Randhir Pratap Singh. 13. Virginia woolf's Mrs Dalloway: the hazards of loss of feeling and communication/Randhir Pratap Singh. 14. Myths : an expression of ethnicity in English literature/Jaya Prasad. 15. T.S. Eliot : the traditionalist and revolutionary/Dipika Sahai. 16. Elizabeth Barret Browning's poetry "The Real and Ariel": an appraisal/Manju Tewari. 17. Rudyard Kipling as a short story writer/Madhulika. 18. E.M. Forster as a short story writer/Udayan Mukherjee.

"It is a pleasure to present this book to the discerning readers of English Literature as it constitutes, mainly the critical responses of Indian academicians and scholars to the British novelists and poets and their texts. The eighteen essays included in it are well researched, comprehensive and insightful. Since the texts studied here are classics in literature they are amenable to multiple interpretations. Every age discovers a new meaning, a new dimension in the classics. It is all the more interesting and objective to view the authors and the texts with a distance of time and space. The distance provides the authors an opportunity to reevaluate the text in a changed perspective of time and to see the difference of result. The criticism, thus, becomes more objective and relevant to the time. In a way it points to the need of reevaluation of the classical works in the present context. The volume covers a broad spectrum of English literature from the origin and development of the short story and evaluation of Plato's Republic to Graham Greene George Orwell, Aldous Huxley, Conrad, E.M. Forster, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot. Papers on myth, Browning's poetry, Richard Steele, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, D.H. Lawrence, D. Lawrence are no less insightful and scholarly.

The Students of English literature will find the book extremely useful, and the common readers will also find it refreshingly interesting." (jacket)