S.K.Desai Essays :A Novelist's Response To Literature by Ganesh Devi

"The twentieth century has been an age of continual crisis, an age of disintegrating values, an age of anxiety. The crisis may be said to have started with modern industrialism with its attendant urban civilization, which has meant a gradual breakdown of the old authoritative pattern of private and social life and the rise of a new ethic of money and success, of competition and self interest... We are trapped in tension between two traditions, the alien and the indigenous, rediscovery of myth or creation of new myths occasioned by the urge to shape a national identity and various forms of alienation caused by the force of modernization associated with the impact of the West, in the conflict between individualism and conformity to social norms and needs, the conflict between tradition and modernity, time and causality..."  S.K. Desai was a charismatic Kannada writer and a distinguished scholar of Literature in English. S.K. Desai Essays: A Novelist's Response of Literature is a collection of some of his critical writings in English reflecting on British fiction. Indian drama and poetry, literary criticism and literary values in Indian Literature. G. N. Devi is a literary critic and a cultural activist