ABSTRACT
Dineshchandra Sen, in so many ways, was a scholar at the turnof the century. This statement draws its validity not from the fact that the years spanning Dineshchandra Sen’s life (1866-1939) fall in equal halves in to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries but rather from the way his literary output can be situated in the scholarly ‘horizon of expectation’ spanning the fourth quarter of the former and the first half of the latter. But he was also the man who suffered a dramatic reversal of fate so far as the reception and criticism of his own works are concerned. After the success of his first major work, the first volume of the history of Bengali literature, written in Bengali, and his subsequent rise to fame, he gradually slid out of favour of most of the contemporary critics. This setback is generally attributed to his inability to keep pace with his time, his outright refusal to adopt new methodologies of writing history and his dogged adherence to his own brand of knowing and recounting the past.
