A multi-faceted creative personality, Rabindranath Tagore is one of the greatest stalwarts of both English and Bengali literatures. He created a Renaissance in India, where people were awakened by the great corpus of creative work produced during the country's struggle for independence from the British. Tagore was undoubtedly a champion of this literary protest. He produced masterpieces in Bengali literature and later translated them into English. Gitanjali, his masterpiece collection of poems with a foreword by William Butler Yeats, is renowned for its rhythmic, optimistic, and lyrical nature. It won Tagore the Nobel Prize for Literature, the first awarded to an Asian writer, and a knighthood. In this landmark study, noted Indian scholar P. V. Laxmiprasad offers the most comprehensive critical study of Tagore's work to date.

Folktales of Mizoram is a translated collection of sixty-six short stories from northeast India taken up for a critical evaluation. The stories depict a typical Mizo culture in spirit and practice. This study focuses on the transformation of oral literature into written narratives. Folk practices, folk medicine, folk narratives, traditional songs, and received wisdom dominate these stories. A more insightful approach into folk narratives and songs emphasizes the world of new hermeneutics. The land, the culture, the language, the traditions have been remarkably explored through an elegant reading and evaluation of this collection. Antiquity speaks through the folk tales. The spirit of folktales becomes one of unique exploration of hermeneutics in the end.

In this incisive new book, P. V. Laxmiprasad addresses the great Indian queen Rani Chennamma of Kittur as a character in Indian fiction. The Queen of Kittur by Basavaraj Naikar highlights the themes of honor and glory, patriotism and freedom, betrayal and defeat of the royal family of Kittur as revealed by the life of Rani Chennamma. This novel is a precious jewel in Indian literature. Laxmiprasad's critical evaluation contextualizes female Indian royalty as a subject in historical fiction and rising force of nationalism, heroism, and solidarity.

This critical volume of essays explores how texts and literary theories interrelate and interconnect different principles of critical evaluation. Reading for pleasure is different from reading for aesthetic sensibility. To read literature is to seek experience but interpreting the text is to add perspective. A skilled reader will apply multiple lenses to the same text to explore how different texts and theories interact with each other. The Mirror and the Reflections collects various approaches to literary theory from a postcolonial perspective. It offers an invaluable resource for those who wish to familiarize themselves with multifaceted approaches to literature.