It is a pleasure to place in the hands of our readers the fourth volume in the series, Studies in Literature in English. The essays included in this volume cover a broad spectrum of British canonical authors and texts and the studies are as insightful as they are topical. If feminism is very much in the air today, as many as six essays employ the latest tools of feminist criticism in examining eminent authors like William Blake, Lord Byron, Thomas Hardy, W.B. Yeats, D.H. Lawrence, and Doris Lessing. Other perspectives used in other essays are no less interesting. It is fascinating to see how effectively the scholars, in their in-depth critical studies of the works of Charles Dickens, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, D.H. Lawrence, E.M. Forster, H.G. Wells, T.S. Eliot, Harold Pinter and Julian Barnes use the modern ideas of diaspora, alienation, quest for identity, etc. An excursion into the worlds of these writers is bound to be as delightful as it will be rewarding. Since most of the authors discussed are widely prescribed in the university syllabus in India and abroad, teachers, scholars and students of English literature will find this volume extremely useful. The common readers who are interested in English literature will also find this book an interesting and precious aesthetic experience, because it is always exciting to see an old author in a new critical perspective.

Table of Contents:
1. Women in Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience –S. Chattopadhyay 2. Byron’s Ambivalent Attitude to Women –R.P. Kachhway 3. Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd: A Portrayal of a Tragic Heroine –Mallikarjun Patil 4. ‘Woman’ in the Poetry of W.B. Yeats –Tejinder Kaur 5. The Time Machine: Retrogression in Future –A.G. Joshi 6. The Invisible Man: Reversal of Reality –A.G. Joshi 7. Symbolism in Forster’s Short Stories –Bidya Nath Jha 8. The Quester Heroines in the Novels of D.H. Lawrence: A Feminist Reading –Joyjit Ghosh 9. Doris Lessing and Feminism –Sharada Iyer 10. Dombey and Son and the Old Ideals –Mallikarjun Patil 11. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: A Picture of Stephen’s Imaginary Journey throughthe Hell and Heaven –Mallikarjun Patil 12. Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse: A Quest for Identity –Kumar Chandradeep 13. D.H. Lawrence’s Poetry: An Imagist Perspective –Chhote Lal Khatri 14. The Wagner Passage in The Waste Land –C.R. Mittal 15. Diasporic Elements in T.S. Eliot’s Plays –D.S. Kaintura 16. Shifting Images of the Past in Pinter’s Plays –Sanjay Kumar 17. Julian Barnes’s A History of the World in 10½ Chapters and Human Struggles for Survival –Mallikarjun Patil