Literary critics, especially the American ‘lemon squee¬zers’, have made nimbu pani out of everything from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. Much of the terrain between Virginia Woolf and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf has similarly been squeezed—often so hard that dribbles of lemon rind have made the result pretty un-swallowable. Fortunately the best Indian critics—most notably A.N. Kaul in The American Vision and Sukanta Chaudhuri in Infirm Glory have been more interested in discovering and demonstrating the links between text and context, between experience and ideas on the page and ex¬perience and ideas in real life. Noorul Hasan’s interests, to his credit, lie in the direction of what might be said to con¬stitute the ‘Great Tradition of Indian Criticism’.
The normal sociological ap¬proach to Hardy’s fiction has been somewhat mechanical. The fiction has often been seen as a sensitive or inaccurate record of a short stretch of Dorset history in the late nine¬teenth century.
July-August 1983, volume 8, No 1