English Literature

  INTRODUCTION: T.S. Eliot, author of the Waste Land , has been called the most influential poet of the twentieth Century. He received the Nobel Prize in 1948. He revolutionized the intellectual climate of English poetry. He initiated a new brand of poetry of the city, a poetry essentially cerebral, impersonal, imagistic, urbane, ironic and observational THEME OF THE WASTE LAND : The Waste Land , a compressed epic, is Eliot's most famous poem. It is an allusive and complex poem. It made great impact on the post war generation. It gives voice to the utter despair of modern man. Thus it is a poem of despair par- excellence.   The Waste Land , a portrait of modern society, first appeared in 1922 in a periodical named the Criterion. VIEWS ON THE WASTE LAND : About its theme various interpretations and contradictory opinions have been expressed. No two critics agree completely on its meaning. According to F. R. Leavis its theme is 'the d...

INTRODUCTION:             The post - independence Indian English fiction has seen quite a large crop of new and interesting writers. Their works are firmly based on social realism. Writers like Bhavani Bhattacharya, Manohar Malgonkar and Khushwant Singh appeared on the scene in the fifties of the last century. Quite a number of women novelists also emerged. Jhabvala, Kamala Markandaya, Nayantara Sahgal and Anitha Desai are notable among them. This development has continued ever since and one can discover many new voices. The most striking among them is Kiran Desai. Her second sweeping novel, The Inheritance of Loss won the world's most prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2006. The daughter has won where the mother could not succeed. THEME:             The Inheritance of Loss is much more ambitious than Hullabaloo in the Guava Orchard in its spatial breadth a...

WHAT IS AN ANTI HERO? Throughout history, storytellers, playwrights and writers of all kinds have woven tales of terrible deeds, tragedies, courage and conquering. In each case the story has a main character. When the main character is deeply flawed, he appears as the anti-hero. Thus an anti hero is a protagonist in a dramatic or narrative work. He lacks the traditional heroic virtues as idealism, courage, nobility and magnanimity, honesty and grace. He might be selfish, addicted, corrupt and sullen. He should not be confused with the antagonist or the villain. He has some of the personality flaws and ultimate fortune traditionally assigned to villains. An Anti-hero is always flawed or failed hero. But still that character is the main and popular. Today these characters are very popular among the readers and audience. The reason behind this is that people find these characters closer to reality. The conventional heroes seem to be the super-humans who have nothing to do with the lives...

INTRODUCTION:  Stream of Consciousness is a literary technique that presents the thoughts and feelings of a character as they occur. This technique is a very bold literary innovation of modern period. It records the multifarious thoughts and feelings of a character without regard to logical argument or narrative sequence. It is a literary technique that has become common in literary criticism. By this technique the writer attempts to reflect all the forces, external and internal, influencing the psychology of a character at a single moment. DEFINITION: Stream of consciousness is the continuous flow of sense, perceptions, thoughts, feelings, and memories in the human mind. It is a literary method of representing such a blending of mental processes in fictional characters. The term is often used as a synonym for interior monologue. To represent the full richness, speed, and subtlety of the mind at work, the writer incorporates snatches of incoherent thought, ungrammatical con...

  INTRODUCTION: The recipient of several literary awards and the winner of The Nobel Prize Saul Bellow is one of the most scrutinized writers in contemporary American literature. He has been praised for producing insightful and compelling fiction. As a novelist he rejects the orthodoxy of modernism. He claims a place of honor along with Donate, Shakespeare, Tolstoy and Dostoievski. Herzog is one of his finest achievements. LIFE AND CONTRIBUTION: Bellow was born in Lachine , Quebec , Canada on June 10, 1915. He was the son of   a Russian immigrant. His father was a businessman. After graduating he decided to become a writer. He has written 17 novels, short story collections and literary and political essays on the contemporary American scene. The titles of his popular novels are - Dangling Man, The Victim, The Adventures of Augie March, Seize the Day, Henderson the Rain King, Herzog, Mr. Sammler's Planet, Humboldt's Gift,  The Dean's December , an...

INTRODUCTION: The poetic drama is a great achievement of the modern age. It is a mixture of high seriousness and colloquial element. It is the combination of the tradition and the experiment and of the ancient and the new. It is symbolic and difficult. Its verse form is blank verse or free verse. In short, its vehicle is verse, its mechanism is imagery, its substance is myth and its binding force is musical pattern. Beginning:             The 18th and the 19th century contributed little to the development of poetic drama due to the unfavourable conditions. There were signs of rebirth of this drama by 1920. But it could not gain much ground. The reason was that most of the dramatists of this period were interested in realistic drama. A change was noticed with the passage of time. The disciples of Ibsen began to be overshadowed. At the Abbey Theatre Yeats tried to revive poetic drama. But he could not s...

Dr. Hareshwar Roy   INTRODUCTION : An objective correlative is a very popular literary term. It has now attained popularity as a literary concept. It refers to a literary description that depicts an emotion and hopefully evokes that emotion in the reader or viewer. It is employed in a literary work to describe a set of objects, a sequence of events, cluster of images and setting which shall be the formula of that particular emotion. If a work of art inspires the right emotion, the creator has found just the right objective correlative. If it invokes the wrong emotion that particular objective correlative doesn't work. ORIGIN OF TERMINOLOGY : The term “objective correlative” was first used by poet and painter Washington Allston around 1840 in the "Introductory Discourse" of his Lectures on Art. By this term he described the process by which the external world produces pleasurable emotion.  In 1919, T. S. Eliot gave the...

INTRODUCTION:  Naipaul is one of the best known English novelists of the modern times. He is a very prestigious literary member of Indian Diaspora. His popularity reached its zenith when he received the Nobel Prize for literature in 2001 . He is regarded a prophet, a soothsayer, a doom-watcher and a teller of unpalatable truths. Critics generally agree that A House for Mr. Biswas is his finest work. His Half a Life is also a piece of literary craftsmanship. CAREER:             Naipaul’s prolific writing career includes works such as A House for Mr. Biswas, India: A Wounded Civilization, An Area of Darkness, India: A Million Mutinies Now , A Bend in the River , The Mystic Masseur, The Suffrage of Elvira, Guerillas, Miguel Street, A Flag on the Island, The Mimic Men, In a Free State, Mr. Stone and the Knights Companion, The Enigma of Arrival, The Loss of El Dorado etc. Apart from the Nobel Prize, he won Booker ...

Dr. Hareshwar Roy INTRODUCTION: Metaphor is a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to a person, idea, or object to which it is not literally applicable. It is an implied analogy or unstated comparison which imaginatively identifies one thing with another. This device is used by authors to turn or twist the meaning of a word. They use them to make their writing more interesting or entertaining. Metaphors are the most often used figure of speech. Other rhetorical comparative figures of speech, such as metonymy, parable, simile, Antithesis, hyperbole and synecdoche are species of metaphor. SHORT HISTORY OF METAPHOR: Metaphor is present in the oldest written Sumerian language narrative. The term is from the Greek metaphora , meaning “ transference ”. It is formed by combining meta, meaning “ over ” and pherein, meaning “to carry .” The idea of metaphor can also be traced back to Aristotle who says “Metaphor is the application of a word that belon...

Dr. Hareshwar Roy INTRODUCTION: The term Classicism is very confusing because it carries so many meanings. Despite this confusion, the term is still useful in describing particular styles and impulses in literature and the arts. Classicism means clearness, elegance, symmetry, and repose produced by attention to traditional forms. It is sometimes synonymous with excellence or artistic quality of high distinction. More precisely, the term refers to the admiration and imitation of Greek and Roman literature, art, and architecture. Order, maturity, harmony, balance and moderation are important qualities of Classicism. DEFINITION: Classicism developed so gradually and exhibited so many phases that a perfect definition is not possible. Classicism is based on the idea that nature and human nature could be understood by reason and thought. It has attached much more importance to reason than imagination. More broadly, Classicism refers to the adherence to virtues i...