The Book : This volume of essays examines some of the important issues in Indian English literature emerging both from its search for a new sense of identity and its affiliation to a global perspective in the wake of post colonialism. The essays comprising this volume address topics such as nation and nationalism, hybridization and assimilation, problems of exile and migration, the question of location and boundaries and the place of Indian English literature in the changing canon of English Studies. By focusing on the shifting paradigms of Indian English literature as a part of the subtle transformation of the global configurations of English, the volume attempts to place the genre of this writing within a broad range of issues stemming from the peculiar and problematic role of English as a creative medium deployed in various ways in the countries which were once a part of the British Empire. For illustrative diagnostic purposes some important writers like Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Attia Hosain, Vikram Seth, Arundhati Roy are included in this volume. But the overall focus of this volume is not on the individual writers or texts and their close readings, but on conceptual and ideological formations of the genre of Indian English literature and the way it has entered the canon of English Studies in India both in its contestatory and collaborative modes.

The Editors : Prafulla C. Kar is Professor of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He was Deputy Director of the American Studies Research Centre, Hyderabad during 1982-86, and Chair, Department of English at Baroda during 1995-2000. He visited Universities of Chicago, Taxas at Austin, and California at Berkeley under a Fulbright postdoctoral fellowship. He was a Fellow at the School of Criticism and Theory at Dartmouth College, USA in 1986. Besides editing several scholarly books, he has published papers on American literature, critical theories and new literatures in English. He is one of the editors of the Journal of Contemporary Thought, Baroda.

U.M. Nanavati is a reader in the department of English at the Maharaja Sayajirao University of Baroda. He was the recipient of the Shastri Indo-Canadian Fellowship to Visit Canada to work on a project on postcolonial include Indian Literature and Aesthetics, Comparative Literature and Literary Theory.