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The seventeen essays that constitute this volume cover a wide range of authors across space and time. Starting chronologically with Christopher Marlowe’s classic play Doctor Faustus, which is ever amenable to fresh interpretation, the essays take us to the shadowy world of Othello, the anti-materialist stand of Ruskin, the bizarre world of Kurtz in Conrad’s archetypal novel, Heart of Darkness, the Theater of the Absurd and the absurd world of Waiting for Godot, the complexities of the novels of Greene, and enigmatic world of Da Vinci Code. The essays then open up new vistas of the world of the American O’Neill and the Canadian stalwarts like Margaret Atwood, George Ryga and Rohinton Mistry. After an encounter with the Indian trilogy of Naipaul the book moves on to Germany and examines Bertolt Brecht’s famous play, Mother Courage and Her Children. The essay on Tagore’s Hungry Stone illustrates the expert handling of a critical theory, while the last essay is on the much debated Reader Response Theory. Since most of the essays address authors and texts prescribed in the university syllabus, both the teachers and the students of literature in English will find this anthology interesting and useful. General readers who are interested in literature in English will also have a delightful aesthetic experience in going through the essays included in this anthology. About Author: A full Professor since 1982, and recently retired, Dr. Mohit K. Ray, is one of the seniormost Professors in the country. He has four books and a large number of research papers published in scholarly journals in India and abroad, which reflect his wide range of scholarship including Criticism, Comparative Literature, New Literatures, Canonical Literature, Comparative Poetics and Translation Studies. Professor Ray has attended and chaired sessions as an invited participant in many international conferences, seminars, and colloquia held in different parts of the globe—England, France, Portugal, Austria, Finland, Estonia, America, Canada, Japan, Hong Kong, Turkey, etc. Professor Ray has studied several languages including Latin, Sanskrit, Arabic, French, and German. He has edited several anthologies of critical studies, and edits The Atlantic Critical Review, an international quarterly of global circulation. He is also, at present, working as the Chief Editor of Atlantic Publishers & Distributors (P) Ltd. Professor Ray is associated with many international bodies including Association Internationale de Litterature Comparee, Paris, and Association Internationale des Critiques Litteraires, Paris, and SANART Association of Aesthetics and Visual Culture. Books by Mohit K. Ray include T.S. Eliot: Search for a Critical Credo (1978); Bhasa Bijnaner Godar Katha (in Bengali); Studies in Literary Criticism (2001); and Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness: A Critical Study (2005). Professor Ray has also done a UGC-sponsored Major Research Project (2002-05) “A Comparative Study of the Indian Poetics and the Western Poetics”.