LITERARY ESSAYS AND STUDIES
ISBN 81-7389-009-9

By Professor (Dr) Visvanath Chatterjee

Size : Double Demy v Price Rs.450/- v Pages : 332

The present volume contains a number of insightful and interesting essays which can be read with profit and pleasure by specialists and students alike. The subjects include Ben Jonson’s literary criticism, Milton’s  Paradise Lost, Tennyson in our time, Browning in our time, D. H. Lawrence : poetry and letters, Forster’s A Passage to India, and T. S. Eliot.  

Professor M. K. Naik, the doyen of Indian literary critics, writes in a Book Review in The Journal of Indian Writing in English (ed. G. S. Balarama Gupta), Vol.38, No.1, January 2010 :

“It is not uncommon for superannuated academics to bring together their essays written over a number of years. What sets the present collection apart from such literary efforts is the sheer range and scope of the literary material it covers.

Though the majority of the essays in the book are inevitably on British writers (Chatterjee has been teaching English literature for decades) the author seems to write with equal conviction on German (Goethe and Bertolt Brecht, French, Baudelaire, and Italian Egenio Nontale also). Among those who wrote in English outside England, we have Sri Aurobindo (India) and Patrick White (Australia). The general impression left on the reader’s mind, as he finishes reading the book, is that here is a distinguished citizen of the Republic of books with eclectic tastes, who is eager to share with the reader his enthusiasm.

One is happy to note that Chatterjee does not seem to subscribe to any of the new shining critical theories currently in fashion and so escaped the fate of those who hurry to embrace the latest theory only to find it becoming outmoded. soon after, one is equally gratified to note that Chatterjee’s style is totally free from the kind of critical jargon, which seems to be the fashion with bright, young critics today. They write in a style which is opaque, obtuse and dense and they are perhaps intelligible only to bright young fellow critics, who lisp in the same idiom.

The comparative study of Saratchandra Chatterjee and Dickens is of special interest and importance. One of the few examples of its kind, it is an able attempt to build a bridge between two writers who belong to different countries and cultures. Surely we need many more bridges of this kind with travellers journeying both ways.......

But a book must not be judged solely by its weak link, otherwise who should escape with [the impression in the] discerning reader’s mind, after he finishes reading  Literary Essays and Studies, isthat he has made the acquaintance of a mind with remarkably catholic tastes, rare penetrative powers and an uncanny knack of going straight into the heart of a book and what more can a serious book reader want from a senior researcher?

—M. K. Naik.

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