About the Book Literary Criticism In India, Texts, Trends and Trajectories: Literary criticism in Indian languages has a history that goes back to the second half of the nineteenth century. As modernity manifested itself in new forms of knowledge and institutions in colonial India, the literary field reinvented itself through new prose-centric forms. Society had to evolve new criteria of evaluation and judgment to make sense of the complex relations between tradition and modernity as well as literature and the public sphere. The present volume makes available to the reader a cross-section of critical perspectives on a range of issues such as: the nature of the quest that informs the discourse of literary criticism in India in various modern Indian languages, the continuing relevance of the legacy of Sanskrit and Tamil aesthetics in modern day critical practices, the enabling role of theory in shaping new directions in Indian literary criticism and the contestations and conflicts that have shaped the content of specific traditions of literary criticism in Indian languages. The eighteen essays by eminent critics from the major Indian languages collected here testify to the inherent rigour and polyphony of critical discourses in Indian languages as they negotiate the social dynamics of progressive democratization and pluralization of literary points of view.
About the Author E. V. Ramakrishna is a well-known critic in Malayalam and English, besides being an Indian English poet and a translator. He retired from Central University of Gujarat as Professor and Dean in 2015, and has been a Professor Emeritus in the same institution. He is presently the President of Comparative Literature Association of India (CLAI) and a Vice-President of the International Comparative Literature Association (ICLA). He has published six critical works in Malayalam among which are Aksharavum Aadhunikathayum (1994), Vakkile Samooham (1997), Desheeyatakalum Sahityavum (2001), Anubhavangale Aarkkanu Peti (2008) and Malayala Novelinte Desakalangal (2017). Among his publications in English are: Making It New: Modernism in Malayalam, Marathi and Hindi Poetry (1995), Narrating India: The Novel in Search of the Nation (Edited, 2001), Locating Indian Literature: Texts, Traditions, Translations (2011), Interdisciplinary Alter-Natives in Comparative Literature (Co-edited, 2013), Indigenous Imaginaries: Literature, Modernity, Region (2017) and Bakhtinian Explorations of Indian Culture: Pluralism, Dogma and Dialogue through History (co edited, 2019). He is the recipient of Kerala Sahitya Akademi Award (1995), Vaikhari Award (2017) and Odakkuzhal Award (2018).
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