Contents: Acknowledgements. Preface. 1. Paradigms of subversive construction in Manjula Padmanabhan's Harvest. 2. Human dimension of partition in Shiv K. Kumar's A River with Three Banks. 3. Text/textuality of Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things. 4. Violation of female sexuality and the process of nation-building: a reading of Jyotirmoyee Devi's The River Churning. 5. Reign of terror in the Grand Guignol days of partition: a select of reading of Alok Bhalla's (Ed.) Stories About the Partition of India, Vol. I. 6. Enmeshing relationships in modern drama: a reading of Girish Karnad's Hayavadana. 7. Rationale of sexual diversity in Manju Kapur's A Married Woman. 8. Dialogics of posthumanism in Upamanyu Chatterjee's English, August. 9. Issues of love and guilt in the select poems of Judith Wright. 10. Poetry of A.J.M. Smith: an overview. 11. Towards a sexual neutrality of phallocentricism/Gynocentricism in Margaret Laurence's The Diviners. 12. Towards revisioning a 'Postmodern Pastoral': a reading of Aritha van Herk's Judith. 13. Words are Memory: readings into Jeannette Armstrong's select poems. 14. Issues of ecofeminism in Margaret Atwood's Surfacing. 15. Dialogics of digital aesthetics in Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake. 16. 'Unanchored Souls' and their fear of imminent extinction: a reading of V.S. Naipaul's The Mimic Men. 17. Postcolonial conundrum in Caribbean poetry: re-readings into the select poems of Mervyn Morris and Edward Brathwaite. 18. Reinforcing societal values in the select poems of Gordon Challis. Index.

"This anthology of critical/research papers addresses a wide range of subjects/issues quite relevant to the English major students of all levels studying New writings in English in the Eastern/Western Universities. Participating in the ongoing debate of using the recent theories to the application and understanding of literary texts, they provide a useful resource to both researchers and literary scholars with the objective of enriching their response to and appreciating the eighteen or so different texts covering the geo-political regions of India, Australia, Canada, the Caribbean Islands, and New Zealand. This text in reality is a comprehensive survey of the most important literary texts published in the fourth quarter of the twentieth century and later, willingly prescribed and hotly debated in the academic circles. It offers scholars and other readers a variety of ways to interpret literary texts, ranging from conventional approaches through cultural studies into feminist criticism, postcolonial criticism and postmodern criticism." (jacket)