English has played a part in Indian writing for well over a century and a half, and R. K. Narayan, William Walsh claims, 'is the senior and one of the most distinguished novelists now writing in English in the Commonwealth. His work is an original blend of Western method and Eastern material, and he has succeeded ... in making an Indian sensibility wholly at home in English art.' Born in Madras in 1907, Narayan published his first book in 1935, and has since written nine novels and several collections of short stories, as ...
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English has played a part in Indian writing for well over a century and a half, and R. K. Narayan, William Walsh claims, 'is the senior and one of the most distinguished novelists now writing in English in the Commonwealth. His work is an original blend of Western method and Eastern material, and he has succeeded ... in making an Indian sensibility wholly at home in English art.' Born in Madras in 1907, Narayan published his first book in 1935, and has since written nine novels and several collections of short stories, as well as essays and critical studies. The little town of Malgudi, 'a metaphor of India', is the background to all his novels, but such is the authenticity of his themes and observation that what happens there happens in all India-and perhaps everywhere. The typical Narayan hero is middle-class, tentative, sensitive, appealingly limited, his personality formed- and sometimes reformed -by the play of external influences and events. Written with a remorseless eye for psychological detail and foible, and with a delicate blend of realism, poetry, wisdom, humour and melancholy, Narayan's novels wholly fulfil Professor Walsh's paradoxical description of them as 'comedies of sadness'. Professor William Walsh is Professor of Education, Douglas Grant Fellow and Professor-Elect of Commonwealth Literature in the School of English at Leeds University. His publications include The Use of Imagination (I959), A Human Idiom: Literature and Humanity (1964), Coleridge: The Work and the Relevance (1967), and A Manifold Voice: Studies in Commonwealth Literature (1970), as well as papers on literary and educational subjects in British and American Journals.
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