Books by Samiran Kumar Paul

The Genius of George Bernard Shaw is a criticism of George Bernard Shaw's work that explores his art, aesthetics, philosophy, and revolutionary ideas. Shaw wrote his plays raising and dealing with the problems of individuals, families, society, nations, and the world. It is occasionally stated that Shaw's support for totalitarianism grew out of his frustration with nineteenth-century liberalism, which ineffectually culminated in a disastrous world war. Yet, close analysis to two of Shaw's Major Critical Essays from the 1890s shows that even then Shaw expressed a desire for a ruthless man of action unencumbered by the burden of conscience to come on the scene and establish a new world order, to initiate the utopian epoch. Indeed, further analysis of a number of plays from before the war shows the impulse to be persistent and undeniable.Shaw hated disorder, and he wanted to see society managed efficiently by a small caste of technocratic experts who were at the same time, in Karl Popper's memorable phrase, utopian social engineers. He had very little confidence in the average man and woman, who could not work mentally at the same speed‖ as the Fabian executive committee, his ideal of what a ruling caste would look like. Shaw's ideal society, what I am calling his utopian vision, resembles Plato's ideal city or Comte's Religion of Humanity more than any society that has presumably ever existed on earth. This need for absolute order and control found many means of expression in both his life and work and was intricately bound up with his longing for perfection.This book is useful for world teachers, students, and research scholars in English in schools, colleges, universities all over the world.

The Communist Party's attitude toward art in this period was, in general, epiphenomenal of its economic policy. A resolution of 1925 voiced the party's refusal to sanction anyone's literary faction. This reflected the New Economic Policy (NEP) of a limited free-market economy. The period of the First Five-Year Plan (1928-1932) saw a more or less voluntary return to a more committed artistic posture, and during the second Five-Year Plan (1932-1936), this commitment was crystallized in the formation of a Writers' Union. The first congress of this union in 1934, featuring speeches by Maxim Gorky and Bukharin, officially adopted socialist realism, as defined primarily by Andrei Zhdanov (1896-1948). Aptly dubbed by Terry Eagleton as "Stalin's cultural thug," it was Zhdanov whose proscriptive shadow thenceforward fell over Soviet cultural affairs. Although Nikolai Bukharin's speech at the congress had attempted a synthesis of Formalist and sociological attitudes, premised on his assertion that within "the microcosm of the word is embedded the macrocosm of history," Bukharin was eventually to fall from his position as the leading theoretician of the party: his trial and execution, stemming from his political and economic differences with Stalin, were also symptomatic of the fact that Formalism soon became a sin once more. Bukharin had called for socialist realism to portray not reality "as it is" but rather as it exists in socialist imagination.

Understanding Critical Theory of I.A. Richards focuses mainly on I. A. Richards 'English and American literary theory and criticism. College and university students of English literature in India and all over the world are in utmost need of a better understanding of Richards' The Principles of Literary Criticism and The Principles of Practical Criticism. Discussion and interpretations on different aspects of psychology, language and aesthetics will help one achieve a clear perception of the author and critic such as I. A. Richards.