The Book : Amitav Ghosh: Critical Perspectives presents a wide range of incisive scholarly criticism on the eminent Indian Writer's work to date. With an introduction that places Amitav Ghosh in the context of his historical/cultural/ social/political times, this anthology brings together both established and new critics in their perceptive grasp of Ghosh's extraordinary oeuvre of fiction, staring from The Circle of Reason(1986) through The Shadow Lines(1988), In an Antique Land(1992)and The Calcutta Chromosome(1996) to the fairly recent The Glass Palace(2000), Ghosh's best-known and most influential piece of political writing. A greater emphasis is placed on The Shadow Lines and In an Antique Land, which have received the widest critical attention and are, as yet, the Ghosh text most taught in university courses across the world. An innovative 'pedagogy' section in this collection also explores these texts from both teachers' and students' perspectives, as they play out in classrooms at locations as far apart as Delhi and the American mid-west. An interview with Amitav Ghosh animates this anthology with an authorial intervention that - perhaps unwittingly - both validates and questions the praxis of literary critism today in its peculiarly postmodern predicament.

The Contributors : Kavita Daiya, GJV Prasad, Vinita Chandra, Neelam Srivastava, Roma Chatterji, Shirley Chew, Bishnupriya Ghosh, Rakhee Moral, Tapan Basu, Meenakshi Malhotra, Mita Bose, Srimati Basu, et al.

The Editor : Brinda Bose studied English at Presidency College Calcutta, and at Oxford before obtaining her Ph.d. from Boston University. She teaches in the Department of English, Hindu College, Delhi University, and researches in postcolonial literature and theory, and gender and cultural studies. Her publications include critical editions of Woolf's Mrs Dalloway (New Delhi: Worldview, 2001) and Conrad's Heart of Darkness (New Delhi : Oxford University Press, 2001). She is the co-editor of Interventions: Feminist Dialogues in Third World Women's Literature and Film (New York: Garland, 1997) and editor of Translating Desire: The Politics of Gender and Culture in India (New Delhi: Katha, 2002).