English Literature Notes

The Scriblerian Club most consistently comprised Jonathan Swift, John Gay, John Arbuthnot,
Robert Harley, and Thomas Parnell. The group met during the spring and summer of 1714. One
group project was to write a satire of contemporary abuses in learning of all sorts, in which the
authors would combine their efforts to write the biography of the group's fictional founder,
Martin Scriblerus, through whose writings they would accomplish their satirical aims. The
resulting The Memoirs of Martin Scriblerus contained a number of parodies of the most lavish
mistakes in scholarship.

The Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus is an incomplete satirical work co-written ostensibly by the
members of the Scriblerus Club during the years 1713–14, including Jonathan Swift, Alexander
Pope and Dr. Arbuthnot. The only completed volume was published in 1741 as a part
of Alexander Pope's Works. Martinus Scriblerus was a pseudonym of Pope which was later also
adopted by George Crabbe. The "Memoirs" bears the seeds of many successful later works
borne out of the club, such as Swift’s Gulliver and Pope's Dunciad. Each chapter of the novel
satirizes a different fad or fashion of the period, mocking modern culture for its blind adherence
both to new trends and outdated beliefs. The novel tells the story of Martinus Scriblerus'
upbringing by his parents, who subject him to a range of strange customs such as refusing to
allow his wet-nurse to eat beef and instead raising him solely on butter and honey, a diet
supposedly advised by Eustathius. He grows up to be a strange, mixed character with little
common sense.

Sir Thomas More’s learned satire Utopia (1516)—the title is based on a pun of the Greek
words eutopia (“good place”) and outopia (“no place”)—shed an analytic light on 16th-century
England along rational, humanistic lines. Utopia portrayed an ideal society in
a hypothetical “no-place” so that More would be perceived as undertaking a thought
experiment, giving no direct offense to established interests.

A Cautionary Tale is a tale told in folklore to warn its listener of a danger. There are three
essential parts to a cautionary tale, though they can be introduced in a large variety of ways.
First, a taboo or prohibition is stated: some act, location, or thing is said to be dangerous. Then,
the narrative itself is told: someone disregarded the warning and performed the forbidden act.
Finally, the violator comes to an unpleasant fate, which is frequently related in expansive and
grisly detail.

Sufi literature
Some of Persia's best-beloved medieval poets were Sufis, and their poetry was, and is, widely
read by Sufis from Morocco to Indonesia. Rumi, in particular, is renowned both, as a poet and
as the founder of a widespread Sufi order. Hafez, too, is hugely admired in both East and West,
and he was inspired by Sufism if he was not actually a Sufi himself. The themes and styles of this
kind of devotional poetry have been widely imitated by many Sufi and non-Sufi poets.
The Saraswati Samman is an annual award for outstanding prose or poetry literary works in any
of the 22 languages of India listed in Schedule VIII of the Constitution of India. It is named after
an Indian goddess of knowledge. The Saraswati Samman was instituted in 1991 by the K. K. Birla
Foundation. It consists of ₹15,00,000, a citation and a plaque. Candidates are selected from
literary works published in the previous ten years by a panel that included scholars and former
award winners. The inaugural award was given to ‘Harivanshrai Bachchan' for his four volume
autobiography, Kya Bhooloon Kya Yaad Karoon, Needa Ka Nirman Phir, Basere Se
Door and Dashdwar se Sopan Tak.

Emma Woodhouse is the 21-year-old protagonist of Jane Austen's 1815 novel Emma . She is
described in the novel's opening sentence as "handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable
home and a happy disposition... and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very
little to distress or vex her." Jane Austen, while writing the novel, called Emma, "a heroine
whom no-one but myself will much like."
Emma is an independent, wealthy woman who lives with her father in their home Hartfield in
the English countryside near the village of Highbury. The novel concerns her attempts to be a
matchmaker among her acquaintances and her own romantic misadventures. Emma professes
that she does not ever wish to marry (unless she falls very much in love), as she has no financial
need to, because she has a large inheritance and does not wish to leave her father alone. Emma
finally finds herself in love with her neighbour and sister's brother-in-law George Knightley.

Marxism borrows some concepts from the nineteenth-century writings of Karl Heinrich Marx. A
premise of Marxist criticism is that literature can be viewed as ideological, and that it can be
analyzed in terms of a Base/Superstructure model. Marx argues that the economic means of
production in a society account for its base. A base determines its superstructure. Human
institutions and ideologies that produce art and literary texts comprise the superstructure.
Marxist criticism thus emphasizes class, socioeconomic status, and power relations among
various segments of society.

The idea of ambivalence sees culture as consisting of opposing perceptions and dimensions.
Bhabha claims that this ambivalence—this duality that presents a split in the identity of the
colonized other—allows for beings who are a hybrid of their own cultural identity and the
colonizer's cultural identity. Colonial signifiers of authority only acquire their meanings after the
"traumatic scenario of colonial difference, cultural or racial, returns the eye of power to some
prior archaic image or identity. Paradoxically, however, such an image can neither be
'original'—by virtue of the act of repetition that constructs it—nor identical—by virtue of the
difference that defines it." Accordingly, the colonial presence remains ambivalent, split
between its appearance as original and authoritative and its articulation as repetition and
difference. This opens up the two dimensions of colonial discourse: that which is characterized
by invention and mastery and that of displacement and fantasy.

Strategic essentialism , a major concept in postcolonial theory, was introduced in the 1980s by
the Indian literary critic and theorist Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak . It refers to a political tactic in

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which minority groups, nationalities, or ethnic groups mobilize on the basis of shared gendered,
cultural, or political identity to represent themselves. While strong differences may exist
between members of these groups, and amongst themselves they engage in continuous
debates, it is sometimes advantageous for them to temporarily "essentialize" themselves,
despite it being based on erroneous logic, and to bring forward their group identity in a
simplified way to achieve certain goals, such as equal rights.
Spivak's understanding of the term was first introduced in the context of cultural negotiations,
never as an anthropological category. In her 2008 book Other Asias, Spivak disavowed the term,
indicating her dissatisfaction with how the term has been deployed in nationalist enterprises to
promote (non-strategic) essentialism.
The concept also comes up regularly in queer theory, feminist theory, deaf studies, and
specifically in the work of Luce Irigaray, who refers to it as mimesis.

In Marxist philosophy, cultural hegemony is the dominance of a culturally diverse society by

the ruling class who manipulate the culture of that society—the beliefs, perceptions, values,
and morals—so that the worldview of the ruling class becomes the accepted cultural norm. As
the universal dominant ideology, the ruling-class worldview misrepresents the social, political,
and economic status quo as natural, inevitable, and perpetual social conditions that benefit
every social class, rather than as artificial social constructs that benefit only the ruling class.

Skeltonics , short verses of an irregular meter much used by the Tudor poet John Skelton. The
verses have two or three stresses arranged sometimes in falling and sometimes in rising
rhythm. They rely on such devices as alliteration, parallelism, and multiple rhymes and are
related to doggerel. Skelton wrote his verses as works of satire and protest, and thus the form
was considered deliberately unconventional and provocative.

The Deserted Village is a poem by Oliver Goldsmith published in 1770. It is a work of social
commentary, and condemns rural depopulation and the pursuit of excessive wealth. The poem
is written in heroic couplets, and describes the decline of a village and the emigration of many
of its residents to America. In the poem, Goldsmith criticizes rural depopulation, the moral
corruption found in towns, consumerism, enclosure, landscape gardening, avarice, and the
pursuit of wealth from international trade. The poem employs, in the words of one critic,
"deliberately precise obscurity", and does not reveal the reason why the village has been
deserted. The poem was very popular in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, but also
provoked critical responses, including from other poets such as George Crabbe.

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, Charlotte Collins (née Lucas) is a major character. She is the
eldest daughter of Sir William and Lady Lucas, and has quite a few siblings, including Maria
Lucas. She is the wife of William Collins, and a good friend of Elizabeth Bennet, and the entire
Bennet family. Charlotte, is too wealthy, educated, and upper-class to marry a working man —
that would be a kind of social demotion for her family—but too poor and average-looking to
attract a truly wealthy one. She can’t marry up or down—she can only marry sideways. She
knows and understands all of this. Collins, awful as he is, is actually her social equal. He is stupid
and horrible (or “neither sensible nor agreeable,” as Charlotte thinks), but, like Charlotte, he

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occupies the very lowest rung on the ladder of social respectability. For her whole life Charlotte
has probably known that she would end up marrying someone like him: a clergyman, probably
with some education and the prospect of a growing income in the future. She’s always known
that there wouldn’t be a lot of men to choose from.

“Valentine” is a free verse poem written by Scottish poet, author, and playwright Carol Ann
Duffy. The speaker presents their lover with a valentine in the form of an onion, then explains
the reasoning behind this unusual gift. In doing so, the speaker critiques traditional, idealized
images of love and argues for more complete and honest portrayals of its effects. Like much of
Duffy’s work, this poem employs plain, straightforward language and uses the dramatic
monologue mode to amplify a perspective that is usually sidelined from mainstream discourse.
“Valentine” was first published in Duffy’s 1993 poetry collection, Mean Time.

A Suitable Boy is set in a newly post-independence, post-partition India. The novel follows four
families during 18 months, and centres on Mrs. Rupa Mehra’s efforts to arrange the marriage of
her younger daughter, Lata, to a “suitable boy”. Lata is a 19-year-old university student who
refuses to be influenced by her domineering mother or opinionated brother, Arun. Her story
revolves around the choice she is forced to make between her suitors Kabir, Haresh, and Amit.
It begins in the fictional town of Brahmpur, located along the Ganges. Patna, Brahmpur, along
with Calcutta, Delhi, Lucknow and other Indian cities, form a colourful backdrop for the
emerging stories.
The novel alternately offers satirical and earnest examinations of national political issues in the
period leading up to the first post-Independence national election of 1952, including Hindu–
Muslim strife, the status of lower caste people, land reforms and the eclipse of the feudal
princes and landlords, academic affairs, abolition of the Zamindari system, family relations and
a range of further issues of importance to the characters. The novel is divided into 19 parts,
with each generally focusing on a different subplot. Each part is described in rhyming couplet
form on the contents page.

Absurdist fiction is a genre of novels, plays, poems, films, or other media that focuses on the
experiences of characters in situations where they cannot find any inherent purpose in life,
most often represented by ultimately meaningless actions and events that call into question the
certainty of existential concepts such as truth or value.
The absurdist genre of literature arose in the 1950s and 1960s, first predominantly in France
and Germany, prompted by post-war disillusionment. Absurdist fiction is a reaction against the
surge in Romanticism in Paris in the 1830s, the collapse of religious tradition in Germany, and
the societal and philosophical revolution led by the expressions of Søren Kierkegaard and
Friedrich Nietzsche. Common elements in absurdist fiction include satire, dark humor,
incongruity, the abasement of reason, and controversy regarding the philosophical condition of
being "nothing". Absurdist fiction in play form is known as Absurdist Theatre. Both genres are
characterized by a focus on the experience of the characters, centered on the idea that life is
incongruous, irreconcilable and meaningless. The integral characteristic of absurdist fiction
involves the experience of the struggle to find an intrinsic purpose in life, depicted by
characters in their display of meaningless actions in the futile events they take part in.

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Sailing Alone Around the World is a sailing memoir by Joshua Slocum in 1900 about his single-
handed global circumnavigation aboard the sloop Spray. Slocum was the first person to sail
around the world alone. The book was an immediate success and highly influential in inspiring
later travelers.

Francophone Literature is literature written in the French language. The existence of a plurality
of literatures in the French language has been recognized, although the autonomy of these
literatures is less defined than the plurality of literatures written in the English language.
Writing in French by Africans was formerly classified as "colonial literature" and discussed as
part of colonial studies for its ethnographical interest, rather than studied for its literary merit.
Any texts in French from the colonies and territories that were considered to have merit were
subsumed under the classification of French literature. The nature and importance of
Francophone literature in various territories of the former French Empire depends on the
concentration of French settlers, the length of time spent in colonial status, and how developed
indigenous languages were as literary languages. It was only following the Second World War
that a distinction started to be made in literary studies and anthologies between French
literature and other writing in French.

In Search of Lost Time, first translated into English as Remembrance of Things Past, and
sometimes referred to in French as La Recherche (The Search), is a novel in seven volumes by
French author Marcel Proust. This early 20th-century work is his most prominent, known both
for its length and its theme of involuntary memory. The most famous example of this is the
"episode of the madeleine", which occurs early in the first volume. The novel gained fame in
English in translations by C. K. Scott Moncrieff and Terence Kilmartin as Remembrance of Things
Past, but the title In Search of Lost Time, a literal rendering of the French, became ascendant
after D. J. Enright adopted it for his revised translation published in 1992.

Nelle Harper Lee (April 28, 1926 – February 19, 2016) was an American novelist best known for
her 1960 novel To Kill a Mockingbird. It won the 1961 Pulitzer Prize and has become a classic of
modern American literature. Listed her close friend Truman Capote in his research for the book
In Cold Blood (1966). Capote was the basis for the character Dill Harris in To Kill a Mockingbird.

In October 1812, Hazlitt was hired by The Morning Chronicle as a parliamentary reporter. Soon
he met John Hunt, publisher of The Examiner, and his younger brother Leigh Hunt, the poet and
essayist, who edited the weekly paper. Hazlitt admired both as champions of liberty, and
befriended especially the younger Hunt, who found work for him. He began to contribute
miscellaneous essays to The Examiner in 1813, and the scope of his work for the Chronicle was
expanded to include drama criticism, literary criticism, and political essays. In 1814 The
Champion was added to the list of periodicals that accepted Hazlitt's by-now profuse output of
literary and political criticism. A critique of Joshua Reynolds' theories about art appeared there
as well, one of Hazlitt's major forays into art criticism.

History of a Six Weeks' Tour through a part of France, Switzerland, Germany, and Holland;
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with Letters Descriptive of a Sail Round the Lake of Geneva and of the Glaciers of Chamouni is
a travel narrative by the English Romantic authors Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley.
Published anonymously in 1817, it describes two trips taken by Mary, Percy, and Mary's
stepsister, Claire Clairmont: one across Europe in 1814, and one to Lake Geneva in 1816.
Divided into three sections, the text consists of a journal, four letters, and Percy Shelley's poem
"Mont Blanc". Apart from the poem, preface, and two letters, the text was primarily written
and organized by Mary Shelley. In 1840 she revised the journal and the letters, republishing
them in a collection of Percy Shelley's writings.

Romanticism (also known as the Romantic era) was an artistic, literary, musical, and intellectual
movement that originated in Europe towards the end of the 18th century, and in most areas
was at its peak in the approximate period from 1800 to 1850. Romanticism was characterized
by its emphasis on emotion and individualism, idealization of nature, suspicion of science and
industrialization, and glorification of the past with a strong preference for the medieval rather
than the classical. It was partly a reaction to the Industrial Revolution, the social and political
norms of the Age of Enlightenment, and the scientific rationalization of nature—all components
of modernity. It was embodied most strongly in the visual arts, music, and literature, but had a
major impact on historiography, education, social sciences, and the natural sciences. It had a
significant and complex effect on politics, with romantic thinkers influencing conservatism,
liberalism, radicalism, and nationalism.

Byron's magnum opus, Don Juan , a poem spanning 17 cantos, ranks as one of the most
important long poems published in England since John Milton's Paradise Lost. Byron published
the first two cantos anonymously in 1819 after disputes with his regular publisher over the
shocking nature of the poetry. By this time, he had been a famous poet for seven years, and
when he self-published the beginning cantos, they were well received in some quarters. The
poem was then released volume by volume through his regular publishing house. By 1822,
cautious acceptance by the public had turned to outrage, and Byron's publisher refused to
continue to publish the work. In Canto III of Don Juan, Byron expresses his detestation for poets
such as William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. In letters to Francis Hodgson, Byron
referred to Wordsworth as "Turdsworth".

Rowling's Harry Potter series has been credited with a resurgence in crossover fiction:
children's literature with an adult appeal. Crossovers were prevalent in 19th-century American
and British fiction, but fell out of favor in the 20th century and did not occur at the same scale.
The post-Harry Potter crossover trend is associated with the fantasy genre. In the 1970s,
children's books were generally realistic as opposed to fantastic, while adult fantasy became
popular because of the influence of The Lord of the Rings. The next decade saw an increasing
interest in grim, realist themes, with an outflow of fantasy readers and writers to adult works.

Sartre argued that a central proposition of existentialism is that existence precedes essence,
which is to say that individuals shape themselves by existing and cannot be perceived through
preconceived and a-priori categories, an "essence". The actual life of the individual is what
constitutes what could be called their "true essence" instead of an arbitrarily attributed essence

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others use to define them. Human beings, through their own consciousness, create their own
values and determine a meaning to their life. This view is in contradiction to Aristotle and
Aquinas who taught that essence precedes individual existence. Although it was Sartre who
explicitly coined the phrase, similar notions can be found in the thought of existentialist
philosophers such as Heidegger, and Kierkegaard.

Empirical Research is a type of research methodology that makes use of verifiable evidence in
order to arrive at research outcomes. In other words, this type of research relies solely on
evidence obtained through observation or scientific data collection methods.
Empirical research can be carried out using qualitative or quantitative observation methods,
depending on the data sample, that is, quantifiable data or non-numerical data. Unlike
theoretical research that depends on preconceived notions about the research variables,
empirical research carries a scientific investigation to measure the experimental probability of
the research variables.

Psychoanalytic theory is the theory of personality organization and the dynamics of personality
development that guides psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology. First
laid out by Sigmund Freud in the late 19th century, psychoanalytic theory has undergone many
refinements since his work. The psychoanalytic theory came to full prominence in the last third
of the twentieth century as part of the flow of critical discourse regarding psychological
treatments after the 1960s, long after Freud's death in 1939. Freud had ceased his analysis of
the brain and his physiological studies and shifted his focus to the study of the mind and the
related psychological attributes making up the mind, and on treatment using free
association and the phenomena of transference. His study emphasized the recognition of
childhood events that could influence the mental functioning of adults. His examination of the
genetic and then the developmental aspects gave the psychoanalytic theory its characteristics.
Starting with his publication of The Interpretation of Dreams in 1899, his theories began to gain
prominence.

Ambiguity
A word, statement, or situation with two or more possible meanings is said to be ambiguous. As
poet and critic William Empson wrote in his influential book Seven Types of Ambiguity (1930),
“The machinations of ambiguity are among the very roots of poetry.” A poet may consciously
join together incompatible words to disrupt the reader’s expectation of meaning, as E. E.
Cummings does in [anyone lived in a pretty how town]. The ambiguity may be less deliberate,
steered more by the poet’s attempts to express something ineffable, as in Gerard Manley
Hopkins’s “The Windhover.” At the sight of a bird diving through the air, the speaker marvels,
“Brute beauty and valor and act, oh, air, pride, plume here / Buckle!” The ambiguity of this
phrase lies in the exclamation of “buckle”: The verb could be descriptive of the action, or it
could be the speaker’s imperative. In both cases, the meaning of the word is not obvious from
its context. “Buckle” could mean “fall” or “crumple,” or it could describe the act of clasping
armor and bracing for battle.

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Structuralism
A movement of thought in the humanities, widespread in anthropology, linguistics, and literary
theory, and influential in the 1950s and ’60s. Based primarily on the linguistic theories of
Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism considered language as a system of signs and signification,
the elements of which are understandable only in relation to each other and to the system. In
literary theory, structuralism challenged the belief that a work of literature reflected a given
reality; instead, a text was constituted of linguistic conventions and situated among other texts.
Structuralist critics analyzed material by examining underlying structures, such as
characterization or plot, and attempted to show how these patterns were universal and could
thus be used to develop general conclusions about both individual works and the systems from
which they emerged. The anthropologist Claude Levi-Strauss was an important champion of
structuralism, as was Roman Jakobson. Northrop Frye’s attempts to categorize Western
literature by archetype had some basis in structuralist thought. Structuralism regarded
language as a closed, stable system, and by the late 1960s it had given way to post
structuralism.

Ballad
A popular narrative song passed down orally. In the English tradition, it usually follows a form of
rhymed (abcb) quatrains alternating four-stress and three-stress lines. Folk (or traditional)
ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories with emphasis on a central
dramatic event; examples include “Barbara Allen” and “John Henry.” Beginning in the
Renaissance, poets have adapted the conventions of the folk ballad for their own original
compositions. Examples of this “literary” ballad form include John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans
Merci,” Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain,” and Edgar Allan Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”

Subaltern
In postcolonial studies and in critical theory, the term subaltern designates and identifies the
colonial populations who are socially, politically, and geographically excluded from the
hierarchy of power of an imperial colony and from the metropolitan homeland of an empire.
Antonio Gramsci coined the term subaltern to identify the cultural hegemony that excludes and
displaces specific people and social groups from the socio-economic institutions of society, in
order to deny their agency and voices in colonial politics. The terms subaltern and subaltern
studies entered the vocabulary of post-colonial studies through the works of the Subaltern
Studies Group of historians who explored the political-actor role of the men and women who
constitute the mass population, rather than re-explore the political-actor roles of the social and
economic elites in the history of India.

Sociocultural Theory was created by Lev Vygotsky as a response to Behaviorism. The main idea
of the theory is that the ways people interact with others and the culture they live in shape
their mental abilities. Vygotsky believed that parents, relatives, peers and society all have an
important role in forming higher levels of functioning. Sociocultural theory, as stated by Cole,
John-Steiner, Scribner, and Souberman, is the belief that “every function in the child's cultural
development appears twice: first, on the social level, and later, on the individual level.” This

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means that the skills children learn first are related to interactions with others and they then
take that information and use it within themselves.

Hyperbole is a remarkably exaggerated statement or idea meant to be taken figuratively rather

than literally. Hyperbole exaggerates certain elements of ideas or things for comedic or
dramatic effects. Here are a few examples of hyperbole:
~ I’m so hungry I could eat a horse!
~ I’d kill for a glass of Coca-Cola.

Assonance
Repetition of similar vowel sounds within words and phrases, commonly used for a lyrical effect
in poetry and other literary forms. Emily Dickinson frequently used assonance in her poetry, as
in the opening lines of her poem “Because I could not stop for Death”.

Contemporary Philosophy is the present period in the history of Western philosophy beginning
at the early 20th century with the increasing professionalization of the discipline and the rise of
analytic and continental philosophy. Contemporary philosophy focuses on epistemology,
metaphysics, logic, ethics, aesthetics, the philosophy of mind, the philosophy of language,
political philosophy, the history of debates in these areas, and philosophical examination of the
assumptions, methods and claims of other areas of focus in science and social science.
The phrase "contemporary philosophy" is a piece of technical terminology in philosophy that
refers to a specific period in the history of Western philosophy (namely the philosophy of the
20th and 21st centuries). However, the phrase is often confused with modern philosophy
(which refers to an earlier period in Western philosophy), postmodern philosophy (which refers
to some philosophers' criticisms of modern philosophy), and with a non-technical use of the
phrase referring to any recent philosophic work.

In the Coverley Essays, Sir Roger has been characterized vividly by Joseph Addison and Richard
Steele. Sir Roger is presented in these essays as kind, generous, lovable, and sometimes as a
peculiar person. But in the hand of Joseph Addison, Sir Roger’s character is conveyed ironically.
For that reason, he sometimes seems odd. Although he is gentle and mild and lovable to
people, he has some eccentricities and oddities.

Haiku
A form of poetry consisting of three lines that follow a syllable pattern of 5-7-5 and usually
focus on the natural world.
Although the haiku form originated in Japan, poets write haikus in many different languages,
including English. A haiku translated into English from a different language may not exactly
follow the 5-7-5 syllable pattern. Consider this haiku, translated by Harry Behn, from Matsuo
Basho, a Japanese haiku master from the 17th century:
An old silent pond...
A frog jumps into the pond,

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Splash! Silence again.

Limerick
A type of poem, often humorous, made up of three long lines and two short lines that follow an
aabba rhyme scheme.
Poet Edward Lear is famous for his humorous limericks such as "There was an Old Man with a
Beard."
There was an Old Man with a beard,
Who said, "It is just as I feared!—
Two Owls and a Hen,
Four Larks and a Wren,
Have all built their nests in my beard!

John Donne's style is characterized by abrupt openings and various paradoxes, ironies and
dislocations. These features, along with his frequent dramatic or everyday speech rhythms, his
tense syntax and his tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the smoothness of
conventional Elizabethan poetry and an adaptation into English of European baroque and
mannerist techniques. His early career was marked by poetry that bore immense knowledge of
English society. Another important theme in Donne's poetry is the idea of true religion,
something that he spent much time considering and about which he often theorized. He wrote
secular poems as well as erotic and love poems. He is particularly famous for his mastery of
metaphysical conceits.

Hayavadana is a play by Indian writer Girish Karnad. The play tells the story of two friends who
are in love with the same woman and who accidentally swap heads. A comedy ending in
tragedy, the narrative also tells the story of a man with a horse's head who seeks to become
human. The play was first published in 1971.
The title of the play, Hayavadana has a significant meaning where, haya means horse/body and
vadana means man/ head. The title Hayavadana is apt for the play as the character Hayavadana
attains completeness rather than any other main characters such as Devadatta, Kapila and
Padmini.

The Modern Language Association of America, often referred to as the Modern Language
Association (MLA), is the principal professional association in the United States for scholars of
language and literature. The MLA aims to "strengthen the study and teaching of language and
literature". The organization includes over 25,000 members in 100 countries, primarily
academic scholars, professors, and graduate students who study or teach language and
literature, including English, other modern languages, and comparative literature.

Archetypal literary criticism is a type of analytical theory that interprets a text by focusing on
recurring myths and archetypes (from the Greek archē, "beginning", and typos, "imprint") in
the narrative, symbols, images, and character types in literary works. As an acknowledged form
of literary criticism, it dates back to 1934 when Classical scholar Maud Bodkin published
Archetypal Patterns in Poetry. Archetypal literary criticism's origins are rooted in two other
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academic disciplines, social anthropology and psychoanalysis; each contributed to literary
criticism in separate ways. Archetypal criticism peaked in popularity in the 1940s and 1950s,
largely due to the work of Canadian literary critic Northrop Frye (1912-1991). In the 2010s,
archetypal literary criticism is no longer widely practiced; there have not been any major recent
developments in the field (with the possible exception of biblical literary criticism), but it still
has a place in the tradition of literary studies.

Gender studies is an interdisciplinary academic field devoted to analyzing gender identity and
gendered representation. Like Queer studies and Men's studies, it originated in the
interdisciplinary program women's studies (concerning women, feminism, gender, and politics).
Its rise to prominence, especially in Western universities after 1990, coincided with the rise of
deconstructionism. Disciplines that frequently contribute to Gender studies include sexuality,
gender and sexuality in the fields of literature, linguistics, human geography, history, political
science, archaeology, economics, sociology, psychology, anthropology, cinema, musicology,
media studies, human development, law, public health and medicine. It also analyzes how race,
ethnicity, location, class, nationality, and disability intersect with the categories of gender and
sexuality.
In gender studies, the term "gender" is often used to refer to the social and cultural
constructions of masculinity and femininity and not to the state of being male or female in its
entirety. However, this view is not held by all gender theorists. Beauvoir's is a view that many
sociologists support, though there are many other contributors to the field of gender studies
with different backgrounds and opposing views, such as psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan and
feminists such as Judith Butler.
Gender is pertinent to many disciplines, such as literary theory, drama studies, film theory,
performance theory, contemporary art, history, anthropology, sociology, sociolinguistics and
psychology. However, these disciplines sometimes differ in their approaches to how and why
gender is studied. In politics, gender can be viewed as a foundational discourse that political
actors employ in order to position themselves on a variety of issues. Gender studies is also a
discipline in itself, incorporating methods and approaches from a wide range of disciplines.
Each field came to regard "gender" as a practice, sometimes referred to as something that is
performative. Feminist theory of psychoanalysis, articulated mainly by Julia Kristeva and Bracha
L. Ettinger, and informed both by Freud, Lacan and the object relations theory, is very
influential in gender studies.

The Rape of Lucrece (1594) is a narrative poem by William Shakespeare about the legendary
Roman noblewoman Lucretia. In his previous narrative poem, Venus and Adonis (1593),
Shakespeare had included a dedicatory letter to his patron, the Earl of Southampton, in which
he promised to compose a "graver labor". Accordingly, The Rape of Lucrece has a serious tone
throughout. The poem begins with a prose dedication addressed directly to the Earl of
Southampton, which begins, "The love I dedicate to your Lordship is without end." The
dedication is followed by "The Argument", a prose paragraph that summarizes the historical
context of the poem, which begins in medias res. The poem contains 1,855 lines, divided into
265 stanzas. The rhyme scheme for each stanza is ABABBCC, a format known as "rhyme royal",
which has been used by Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton and John Masefield.

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Perhaps one of the finest poems about depression in all of English literature, ‘Dejection: An
Ode’ was also, more surprisingly and controversially, inspired by the unhappily married
Coleridge’s love for another woman, Sara Hutchinson. It’s also a great poem about writer’s
block, though, and Coleridge’s inability to find a way forward in his life as well as his writing –
he wrote ‘Dejection’ in April 1802, after Lyrical Ballads had made his name as a poet, and
Coleridge found himself suffering from ‘difficult second album’ syndrome.

The Lake Poets were a group of English poets who all lived in the Lake District of England,
United Kingdom, in the first half of the nineteenth century. As a group, they followed no single
"school" of thought or literary practice then known. They were named, only to be uniformly
disparaged, by the Edinburgh Review. They are considered part of the Romantic Movement.
The three main figures of what has become known as the Lakes School were William
Wordsworth, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Robert Southey. They were associated with several
other poets and writers, including Dorothy Wordsworth, Charles Lamb, Mary Lamb, Charles
Lloyd, Hartley Coleridge, John Wilson, and Thomas De Quincey.

"A Cyborg Manifesto" is an essay written by Donna Haraway and published in 1985 in the
Socialist Review. In it, the concept of the cyborg is a rejection of rigid boundaries, notably those
separating "human" from "animal" and "human" from "machine." She writes: "The cyborg does
not dream of community on the model of the organic family, this time without the oedipal
project. The cyborg would not recognize the Garden of Eden; it is not made of mud and cannot
dream of returning to dust."
The "Manifesto" criticizes traditional notions of feminism, particularly feminist focuses on
identity politics, and encourages instead coalition through affinity. She uses the figure of the
cyborg to urge feminists to move beyond the limitations of traditional gender, feminism, and
politics; the "Manifesto" is considered one of the milestones in the development of feminist
post humanist theory.

Chiasmus
A figure of speech in which one phrase is followed by another that inverts its grammatical
construction. The following saying from Socrates employs chiasmus; the second clause is an
inversion of the first:
“Bad men live that they may eat and drink; whereas good men eat and drink that they may
live.”

Verbal Irony
The use of a statement to express an idea other than (or opposite to) the literal meaning of the
statement. In Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, the novel’s genteel characters often employ
verbal irony with a politeness that borders on passive aggression. When Mary Bennet attempts
to entertain a dinner party by singing, her father intercedes on behalf of the other guests, who
can scarcely endure her painfully bad performance:
“. . . when Mary had finished her second song, he said aloud, ‘That will do extremely well, child.
You have delighted us long enough. Let the other young ladies have time to exhibit.’” (Chp. 18)

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Literary Criticism (or literary studies) is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature.
Modern literary criticism is often influenced by literary theory, which is the philosophical
discussion of literature's goals and methods. Whether or not literary criticism should be
considered a separate field of inquiry from literary theory, or conversely from book reviewing,
is a matter of some controversy. For example, the Johns Hopkins Guide to Literary Theory and
Criticism draws no distinction between literary theory and literary criticism, and almost always
uses the terms together to describe the same concept. Some critics consider literary criticism a
practical application of literary theory, because criticism always deals directly with particular
literary works, while theory may be more general or abstract.

Literary criticism is often published in essay or book form. Academic literary critics teach in
literature departments and publish in academic journals, and more popular critics publish their
reviews in broadly circulating periodicals such as The Times Literary Supplement, The New York
Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, the Dublin
Review of Books, The Nation, Book Forum, and The New Yorker.

Cinquain
In poetry, a five-line stanza or one of several established types of five-line poems. Historically,
many English poets structured their poems in cinquains, or five-line stanzas. Over time, poets
developed several types of poems that have a single cinquain. A limerick, for example, is a
humorous cinquain that follows a particular rhyme scheme and meter.

Motif
The technique of using repetition of an idea, event, image, phrase, or symbol throughout a
literary work to illuminate and expand the major themes. Eg. In William Golding’s Lord of the
Flies, the narrator frequently describes the oppressive heat of the island at various points
throughout the story. This motif establishes a connection between the island’s hostile
environment and the physical and psychological oppression of the boys stranded there.

The British Poet Laureate is an honorary position appointed by the monarch of the United
Kingdom, currently on the advice of the prime minister. The role does not entail any specific
duties, but there is an expectation that the holder will write verse for significant national
occasions. The origins of the laureateship date back to 1616 when a pension was provided
to Ben Jonson, but the first official holder of the position was John Dryden, appointed in 1668
by Charles II. On the death of Alfred Lord Tennyson, who held the post between November
1850 and October 1892, there was a break of four years as a mark of respect; Tennyson's
laureate poems "Ode on the Death of the Duke of Wellington" and "The Charge of the Light
Brigade" were particularly cherished by the Victorian public. Three poets, Thomas Gray, Samuel
Rogers and Walter Scott, turned down the laureateship. The holder of the position as at January
2022 is Simon Armitage who succeeded Carol Ann Duffy in May 2019.

Cardenio – Attributed to William Shakespeare and John Fletcher in a Stationers' Register entry
of 1653 (alongside a number of erroneous attributions), and often believed to have been re-
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worked from a subplot in Cervantes' Don Quixote. In 1727, Lewis Theobald produced a play he
called Double Falsehood, which he claimed to have adapted from three manuscripts of a lost
play by Shakespeare that he did not name. Double Falsehood does re-work the Cardenio story,
but modern scholarship has not established with certainty whether Double Falsehood includes
fragments of Shakespeare's lost play.

Poets' Corner is the name traditionally given to a section of the South Transept of Westminster
Abbey because of the high number of poets, playwrights, and writers buried and
commemorated there. The first poet interred in Poets' Corner was Geoffrey Chaucer.

Spenser published numerous relatively short poems in the last decade of the sixteenth century,
almost all of which consider love or sorrow. In 1591, he published Complaints, a collection of
poems that express complaints in mournful or mocking tones. Four years later, in 1595, Spenser
published Amoretti and Epithalamion. This volume contains eighty-eight sonnets
commemorating his courtship of Elizabeth Boyle. In Amoretti, Spenser uses subtle humor and
parody while praising his beloved. Epithalamion, similar to Amoretti, deals in part with the
unease in the development of a romantic and sexual relationship. It was written for his wedding
to his young bride, Elizabeth Boyle. In the following year, Spenser released Prothalamion, a
wedding song written for the daughters of a duke, allegedly in hopes to gain favor in the court.

Carlyle's works amount to thirty volumes, most of which are in the genres of history and the
critical essay. His distinctive style, called Carlylese, is rich in vocabulary, humor and allusion; his
writing has been described as proto-postmodern. His early essays and translations almost
single-handedly introduced German Romanticism to the English-speaking world. In his histories,
Carlyle drew lessons from the past in order to impart wisdom on the present, using contrast to
illuminate problems as well as solutions. He championed the Captain of Industry and such
figures as Oliver Cromwell and Frederick the Great, writing that "Universal History, the history
of what man has accomplished in this world, is at bottom the History of the Great men who
have worked here."

The Shoemaker's Holiday or the Gentle Craft is an Elizabethan play written by Thomas Dekker.
The play was first performed in 1599 by the Admiral's Men, and it falls into the subgenre of city
comedy. The story features three subplots: an inter-class romance between a citizen of London
and an aristocrat, the ascension of shoemaker Simon Eyre to Lord Mayor of London, and a
romance between a gentleman and a shoemaker's wife, whose husband appears to have died
in the wars with France.
The play is a "citizen" drama, or a depiction of the life of members of London's livery
companies, and it follows in Dekker's style of depicting everyday life in London.

Couplet
In poetry or verse, a pair of consecutive lines of poetry that form a complete thought, usually
rhyming and having the same meter and sometimes placed in their own stanza.

A Shakespearian Sonnet is a fourteen-line poem consisting of three quatrains (four-line

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stanzas) followed by a rhyming couplet that often concludes the poem with an unexpected
twist.

Allegory vs. Symbolism

Allegory and symbolism are often confused, but they are not the same thing.
Symbolism is the use of symbols, usually physical objects, to represent abstract ideas or
qualities. For instance, in To Kill a Mockingbird the mockingbird symbolizes innocence and
beauty.
Allegory is a work that makes extensive use of symbolism in order to communicate a broader
moral or meaning. Nearly every aspect of an allegory—from characters, to objects, to dialogue,
to settings, to major plot events—can typically be interpreted as having a secondary, symbolic
meaning that fits into the allegory's broader meaning. For instance, in the 17th-century
allegory Pilgrim's Progress, the protagonist (named "Christian") and his journey, as well as every
other character, object, and location he interacts with along the way, symbolically fit into a
larger moral or lesson about the proper "path" to reach heaven.
So, to put it another way: an allegory is a type of work or story that represents some idea,
concept, or historical event that is different from the literal events contained within the story.
Symbolism is the technique that an allegory uses in order to be able to represent and
communicate its deeper meaning.

The Professor, A Tale. was the first novel by Charlotte Brontë (Currer Bell). It was written
before Jane Eyre, but was rejected by many publishing houses. It was eventually published,
posthumously, in 1857, with the approval of Charlotte Brontë's widower, Arthur Bell Nicholls,
who took on the task of reviewing and editing the text.

Walter Benjamin corresponded much with Theodor Adorno and Bertolt Brecht, and was
occasionally funded by the Frankfurt School under the direction of Adorno and Horkheimer,
even from their New York City residence. Moreover, the critic Paul de Man argued that the
intellectual range of Benjamin's writings flows dynamically among those three intellectual
traditions, deriving a critique via juxtaposition; the exemplary synthesis is "Theses on the
Philosophy of History". At least one scholar, historian of religion Jason Josephson-Storm, has
argued that Benjamin's diverse interests may be understood in part by understanding the
influence of Western Esotericism on Benjamin. Some of Benjamin's key ideas were adapted
from occultists and New Age figures including Eric Gutkind and Ludwig Klages, and his interest
in esotericism is known to have extended far beyond the Jewish Kabbalah.

In literary theory, Formalism refers to critical approaches that analyze, interpret, or evaluate
the inherent features of a text. These features include not only grammar and syntax but also
literary devices such as meter and tropes. The formalistic approach reduces the importance of a
text's historical, biographical, and cultural context. Formalism rose to prominence in the early
twentieth century as a reaction against Romanticist theories of literature, which centered on
the artist and individual creative genius, once again placing the text itself in the spotlight to
show how the text was indebted to forms and other works that had preceded it. Two schools of
formalist literary criticism developed, Russian formalism, and soon after Anglo-American New

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Criticism. Formalism was the dominant mode of academic literary study in the US at least from
the end of the Second World War through the 1970s, especially as embodied in René
Wellek and Austin Warren's Theory of Literature.

"The Chimney Sweeper" is the title of a poem by William Blake, published in two parts in Songs
of Innocence in 1789 and Songs of Experience in 1794. The poem "The Chimney Sweeper" is set
against the dark background of child labor that was prominent in England in the late 18th and
19th centuries. At the age of four and five, boys were sold to clean chimneys, due to their small
size. These children were oppressed and had a diminutive existence that was socially accepted
at the time. Children in this field of work were often unfed and poorly clothed. In most cases,
these children died from either falling through the chimneys or from lung damage and other
horrible diseases from breathing in the soot. In the earlier poem, a young chimney
sweeper recounts a dream by one of his fellows, in which an angel rescues the boys from
coffins and takes them to a sunny meadow; in the later poem, an apparently adult speaker
encounters a child chimney sweeper abandoned in the snow while his parents are at church or
possibly even suffered death where church is referring to being with God.

Aphorism
A brief, memorable statement that captures a broad, universal truth or idea. Benjamin
Franklin’s Poor Richard’s Almanack contains many well-known aphorisms. Two of the most
famous are:
“Early to bed and early to rise, makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.”
“God helps them that help themselves.”

Rossetti's first edition of poems was printed in 1807 by Giovanni Avalloni, who offered to have
Rossetti's poems published after hearing him recite a few passages. Throughout his early
career, Rossetti published poems that were "patriotic" and supported the "popular movement"
in Sicily which resulted in him receiving a grant from Ferdinand I of the Two Sicilies in 1820.
When the king revoked the constitution in 1821, many supporters of the constitution were
persecuted, but Rossetti instead, was forced into exile in Malta for three years before a British
admiral of the Royal Navy sent Rossetti to London in 1824. He held the post of Professor of
Italian at King's College London from 1831, as well as teaching Italian at King's College School,
until failing eyesight led to his retirement in 1847.

Author Geetanjali Shree’s translated Hindi novel, ‘Tomb of Sand’, has become the first book
written in an Indian language to be awarded the prestigious 2022 International Booker Prize.
Originally published in Hindi as Ret Samadhi, the book is translated into English by Daisy
Rockwell. “I never dreamt of the Booker, I never thought I could. What a huge recognition, I’m
amazed, delighted, honored and humbled,” said Geetanjali Shree, in her acceptance speech.

Essay of Dramatic Poesie is a work by John Dryden, England's first Poet Laureate, in which
Dryden attempts to justify drama as a legitimate form of "poetry" comparable to the epic, as
well as defend English drama against that of the ancients and the French. The Essay was
probably written during the plague year of 1666, and first published in 1668. In presenting his
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argument, Dryden takes up the subject that Philip Sidney had set forth in his Defence of
Poesie in 1580.
The treatise is a dialogue among four speakers: Eugenius, Crites, Lisideius, and Neander. The
four speakers are Sir Robert Howard [Crites], Lord Buckhurst or Charles Sackville [Eugenius], Sir
Charles Sedley [Lisedeius], and Dryden himself (Neander means "new man" and implies that
Dryden, as a respected member of the gentry class, is entitled to join in this dialogue on an
equal footing with the three older men who are his social superiors). On the day that the
English fleet encounters the Dutch at sea near the mouth of the Thames, the four friends take a
barge downriver towards the noise from the battle. Rightly concluding, as the noise subsides,
that the English have triumphed, they order the bargeman to row them back upriver as they
begin a dialogue on the advances made by modern civilization. They agree to measure progress
by comparing ancient arts with modern, focusing specifically on the art of drama (or "dramatic
poesy"). The four men debate a series of three topics: (1) the relative merit of classical drama
(upheld by Crites) vs. modern drama (championed by Eugenius); (2) whether French drama, as
Lisideius maintains, is better than English drama (supported by Neander, who famously
calls Shakespeare "the greatest soul, ancient or modern"); and (3) whether plays in rhyme are
an improvement upon blank verse drama—a proposition that Neander, despite having
defended the Elizabethans, now advances against the skeptical Crites (who also switches from
his original position and defends the blank verse tradition of Elizabethan drama). To Crites'
argument that the plots of classical drama are more "just," Eugenius can retort that modern
plots are more "lively" thanks to their variety. Lisideius shows that the French plots carefully
preserve Aristotle's unities of action, place, and time; Neander replies that English dramatists
such as Ben Jonson also kept the unities when they wanted to, but that they preferred to
develop character and motive. Even Neander's final argument with Crites over whether rhyme
is suitable in drama depends on Aristotle's Poetics: Neander says that Aristotle demands a
verbally artful ("lively") imitation of nature, while Crites thinks that dramatic imitation ceases to
be "just" when it departs from ordinary speech—i.e. prose or blank verse.

Absalom and Achitophel is "generally acknowledged as the finest political satire in the English
language". It is also described as an allegory regarding contemporary political events, and a
mock heroic narrative. On the title page, Dryden himself describes it simply as "a poem". In the
prologue, "To the Reader", Dryden states that "the true end of satire is the amendment of vices
by correction". He also suggests that in Absalom and Achitophel he did not let the satire be too
sharp to those who were least corrupt: "I confess I have laid in for those, by rebating the satire,
where justice would allow it, from carrying too sharp an edge."
Absalom and Achitophel has inspired a great deal of discussion regarding satire: how satire was
defined when Dryden wrote. Dryden himself is considered a father of the modern essay, and
one of literature's most important critics of the literary form, particularly in his essay "A
Discourse Concerning the Original and Progress of Satire", where he writes a history of satire
"from its first rudiments of barbarity, to its last polishing and perfection".

Epigraph
An epigraph is when an author inserts a famous quotation, poem, song, or other short passage
or text at the beginning of a larger text (e.g., a book, chapter, etc.). An epigraph is typically

17
written by a different writer (with credit given) and used as a way to introduce overarching
themes or messages in the work. Some pieces of literature, such as Herman Melville's 1851
novel Moby-Dick, incorporate multiple epigraphs throughout.
Example: At the beginning of Ernest Hemingway's book The Sun Also Rises is an epigraph that
consists of a quotation from poet Gertrude Stein, which reads, "You are all a lost generation,"
and a passage from the Bible.

Antihero/ Antiheroine
A protagonist (main character of a story) who lacks heroic qualities such as integrity, courage,
and morality. In J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye, protagonist Holden Caulfield serves as an
antihero, narrating his misguided and unsuccessful attempts to make meaningful personal
connections in a society he largely despises.

Marxist Feminism is a philosophical variant of feminism that incorporates and

extends Marxist theory. Marxist feminism analyzes the ways in which women are exploited
through capitalism and the individual ownership of private property. According to Marxist
feminists, women's liberation can only be achieved by dismantling the capitalist systems in
which they contend much of women's labor is uncompensated. Marxist feminists extend
traditional Marxist analysis by applying it to unpaid domestic labor and sex relations. Because of
its foundation in historical materialism, Marxist feminism is similar to socialist feminism and, to
a greater degree, materialist feminism. The latter two place greater emphasis on what they
consider the "reductionist limitations" of Marxist theory but, as Martha E. Gimenez notes in her
exploration of the differences between Marxist and materialist feminism, "clear lines of
theoretical demarcation between and within these two umbrella terms are somewhat difficult
to establish."

"Byzantium" is Irish poet W.B. Yeats's meditation on the relationship between mortality and
immortality, the physical world and the spiritual world, and humanity and art. In this complex,
mysterious poem, the speaker's visions of the sacred city of Byzantium trace a "winding path"
that leads from messy, emotional human life to the serenity and perfection of great art. Art, the
poem suggests, is paradoxical: even artworks that seem to touch immortal perfection need to
be made by mortal human hands. Yeats first published "Byzantium" in his 1930
collection Words for Music, Perhaps, and Other Poems.

"The Second Coming" is one of W.B. Yeats's most famous poems. Written in 1919 soon after
the end of World War I, it describes a deeply mysterious and powerful alternative to the
Christian idea of the Second Coming—Jesus's prophesied return to the Earth as a savior
announcing the Kingdom of Heaven. The poem's first stanza describes a world of chaos,
confusion, and pain. The second, longer stanza imagines the speaker receiving a vision of the
future, but this vision replaces Jesus's heroic return with what seems to be the arrival of a
grotesque beast. With its distinct imagery and vivid description of society's collapse, "The
Second Coming" is also one of Yeats's most quoted poems.

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The Good Soldier: A Tale of Passion is a 1915 novel by the British writer Ford Madox Ford. It is
set just before World War I, and chronicles the tragedy of Edward Ashburnham, the soldier to
whom the title refers, and his seemingly perfect marriage, along with that of his two American
friends. The novel is told using a series of flashbacks in non-chronological order, a literary
technique that formed part of Ford's pioneering view of literary impressionism. Ford employs
the device of the unreliable narrator to great effect, as the main character gradually reveals a
version of events that is quite different from what the introduction leads the reader to believe.
The novel was loosely based on two incidents of adultery and on Ford's messy personal life.

The God of Small Things is a family drama novel written by Indian writer Arundhati Roy.
Roy's debut novel, it is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives
are destroyed by the "Love Laws" prevalent in 1960s Kerala, India. The novel explores how
small, seemingly insignificant things shape people's behavior and their lives. The novel also
explores the lingering effects of casteism in India. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.
The God of Small Things was Roy's first book and only novel until the 2017 publication of The
Ministry of Utmost Happiness twenty years later. She began writing the manuscript for The God
of Small Things in 1992 and finished four years later, in 1996. It was published the following
year.

The Pickwick Papers is a sequence of loosely related adventures written for serialization in a
periodical. The action is given as occurring 1827–28, though critics have noted some seeming
anachronisms. For example, Dickens satirized the case of George Norton suing Lord
Melbourne in 1836. The novel's protagonist Samuel Pickwick, Esquire is a kind and wealthy old
gentleman, the founder and perpetual president of the Pickwick Club. He suggests that he and
three other "Pickwickians" should make journeys to places remote from London and report on
their findings to the other members of the club. Their travels throughout the English
countryside by coach provide the chief subject matter of the novel. A romantic
misunderstanding with his landlady, the widow Mrs Bardell, results in one of the most famous
legal cases in English literature, Bardell v. Pickwick, leading to them both being incarcerated in
the Fleet Prison for debt. Pickwick learns that the only way he can relieve the suffering of Mrs
Bardell is by paying her costs in the action against himself, thus at the same time releasing
himself from the prison.

Proletarian Literature refers to the literature created by left-wing writers mainly for the class-
conscious proletariat. Though the Encyclopædia Britannica states that because it "is essentially
an intended device of revolution", it is therefore often published by the Communist Party or left
wing sympathizers, the proletarian novel has also been categorized without any emphasis on
revolution, as a novel "about the working classes and working-class life; perhaps with the
intention of making propaganda". This different emphasis may reflect a difference between
Russian, American and other traditions of working-class writing, with that of Britain. The British
tradition was not especially inspired by the Communist Party, but had its roots in the Chartist
movement, and socialism, amongst others.
The word proletarian is also used to describe works about the working class by working-class
authors, to distinguish them from works by middle-class authors such as Charles Dickens (Hard

19
Times), John Steinbeck (The Grapes of Wrath), and Henry Green (Living). Similarly, though some
of poet William Blake's (1757–1827) works are early examples of working-class literature,
including the two "The Chimney Sweeper" poems, published in Songs of Innocence in 1789
and Songs of Experience in 1794, which deal with the subject of child labor, Blake, whose father
was a tradesman, was not a proletarian writer.

Historical Fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting related to the past
events, but is fictional. Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for the historical
romance, it can also be applied to other types of narrative, including theatre, opera, cinema,
and television, as well as video games and graphic novels. An essential element of historical
fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the manners, social conditions and other
details of the depicted period. Authors also frequently choose to explore notable historical
figures in these settings, allowing readers to better understand how these individuals might
have responded to their environments. Some subgenres such as alternate history and historical
fantasy insert speculative or ahistorical elements into a novel. Works of historical fiction are
sometimes criticized for lack of authenticity because of readerly criticism or genre
expectations for accurate period details. This tension between historical authenticity,
or historicity, and fiction frequently becomes a point of comment for readers and popular
critics, while scholarly criticism frequently goes beyond this commentary, investigating the
genre for its other thematic and critical interests. Historical fiction as a contemporary Western
literary genre has its foundations in the early-19th-century works of Sir Walter Scott and his
contemporaries in other national literatures such as the Frenchman Honoré de Balzac, the
American James Fenimore Cooper, and later the Russian Leo Tolstoy.

Murray has written three novels: his first, An Evening of Long Goodbyes, was shortlisted for
the Whitbread First Novel Prize in 2003 and nominated for the Kerry Group Irish Fiction Award.
His second novel Skippy Dies was longlisted for the 2010 Booker Prize and shortlisted for the
2010 Costa Prize, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the National
Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction. It was also #3 on Time magazine's top ten works of fiction
from 2010. His latest novel, The Mark and the Void, was one of Time's top ten best fiction
books for 2015, and joint winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize in 2016.

I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a 1969 autobiography describing the young and early years
of American writer and poet Maya Angelou. The first in a seven-volume series, it is a coming-of-
age story that illustrates how strength of character and a love of literature can help
overcome racism and trauma. The book begins when three-year-old Maya and her older
brother are sent to Stamps, Arkansas, to live with their grandmother and ends when Maya
becomes a mother at the age of 16. In the course of Caged Bird, Maya transforms from a victim
of racism with an inferiority complex into a self-possessed, dignified young woman capable of
responding to prejudice.

The long poem is a literary genre including all poetry of considerable length. Though the
definition of a long poem is vague and broad and unnecessary, the genre includes some of the
most important poetry ever written. With more than 220,000 (100,000 shloka or couplets)

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verses and about 1.8 million words in total, the Mahābhārata is the longest epic poem in the
world. It is roughly ten times the size of the Iliad and Odyssey combined, roughly five times
longer than Dante's Divine Comedy, and about four times the size of the
Ramayana and Ferdowsi's Shahnameh. In English, Beowulf and Chaucer's Troilus and
Criseyde are among the first important long poems. The long poem thrived and gained new
vitality in the hands of experimental Modernists in the early 1900s and has continued to evolve
through the 21st century. The long poem has evolved into an umbrella term, encompassing
many subgenres, including epic, verse novel, verse narrative, lyric sequence, lyric series, and
collage/montage.

Children's literature can be traced to traditional stories like fairy tales, that have only been
identified as children's literature in the eighteenth century, and songs, part of a wider oral
tradition, that adults shared with children before publishing existed. The development of early
children's literature, before printing was invented, is difficult to trace. Even after printing
became widespread, many classic "children's" tales were originally created for adults and later
adapted for a younger audience. Since the fifteenth century much literature has been aimed
specifically at children, often with a moral or religious message. Children's literature has been
shaped by religious sources, like Puritan traditions, or by more philosophical and scientific
standpoints with the influences of Charles Darwin and John Locke. The late nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries are known as the "Golden Age of Children's Literature" because many
classic children's books were published then.

Four writers to date have won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction multiple times, one nominally in the
novel category and two in the general fiction category. Ernest Hemingway was selected by the
1941 and 1953 juries, but the former was overturned and no 1941 award was given.
Booth Tarkington, 1919, 1922
William Faulkner, 1955, 1963 (awarded posthumously)
John Updike, 1982, 1991
Colson Whitehead, 2017, 2020

An adage (/ˈædɪdʒ/; Latin: adagium) is a concise, memorable, and

usually philosophical aphorism that communicates an important truth derived from
experience, custom, or both, and that many people consider true and credible because of its
longeval tradition, i.e. being handed down generation to generation, or memetic replication.
Many professions and subcultures create their own adages, which are cognizable as a kind
of jargon; such adages may find their way into popular use, sometimes being altered in the
process. Online communities, such as those that develop in Internet
forums or Usenet newsgroups, often generate their own adages.

Neoclassicism (also spelled Neo-classicism) was a Western cultural movement in

the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew inspiration
from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassicism was born in Rome largely thanks to
the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, at the time of the rediscovery
of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but its popularity spread all over Europe as a generation of

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European art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to their home
countries with newly rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals. The main Neoclassical movement
coincided with the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, and continued into the early 19th
century, laterally competing with Romanticism. In architecture, the style continued throughout
the 19th, 20th and up to the 21st century.

Translation Studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with the systematic study of the
theory, description and application of translation, interpreting, and localization. As an
interdiscipline, translation studies borrows much from the various fields of study that support
translation. These include comparative literature, computer
science, history, linguistics, philology, philosophy, semiotics, and terminology. The term
"translation studies" was coined by the Amsterdam-based American scholar James S. Holmes in
his 1972 paper "The Name and Nature of Translation Studies", which is considered a
foundational statement for the discipline. English writers, occasionally use the term
"translatology" (and less commonly "traductology") to refer to translation studies.

The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. The work is
generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle or
device to travel purposely and selectively forward or backward through time. The term "time
machine", coined by Wells, is now almost universally used to refer to such a vehicle or device.
Utilizing a frame story set in then-present Victorian England, Wells' text focuses on a recount of
the otherwise anonymous Time Traveller's journey into the far future. A work of future
history and speculative evolution, Time Machine is interpreted in modern times as a
commentary on the increasing inequality and class divisions of Wells' era, which he projects as
giving rise to two separate human species: the fair, childlike Eloi, and the savage,
simian Morlocks, distant descendants of the contemporary upper and lower classes
respectively. It is believed that Wells' depiction of the Eloi as a race living in plenitude and
abandon was inspired by the utopic romance novel News from Nowhere (1890), though Wells'
universe in the novel is notably more savage and brutal. In his 1931 preface to the book, Wells
wrote that The Time Machine seemed "a very undergraduate performance to its now mature
writer, as he looks over it once more", though he states that "the writer feels no remorse for
this youthful effort".

An idyll (from Greek eidullion, "short poem"; occasionally spelt idyl in American English) is a
short poem, descriptive of rustic life, written in the style of Theocritus' short pastoral poems,
the Idylls. Unlike Homer, Theocritus did not engage in heroes and warfare. His idylls are limited
to a small intimate world, and describe scenes from everyday life.

Assonance is the repetition of the vowel sound across words within the lines of the poem
creating internal rhymes. Examples of assonance across words include: crying time; hop-
scotch; great flakes; between trees; and, the kind knight rides by.

Christabel is a long narrative ballad by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in two parts. The first part was
reputedly written in 1797, and the second in 1800. Coleridge planned three additional parts,
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but these were never completed. Coleridge prepared for the first two parts to be published in
the 1800 edition of Lyrical Ballads, his collection of poems with William Wordsworth, but left it
out on Wordsworth’s advice. The exclusion of the poem, coupled with his inability to finish it,
left Coleridge in doubt about his poetical power. It was published in a pamphlet in 1816,
alongside Kubla Khan and The Pains of Sleep.

The Nightingale: A Conversation Poem is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge in April
1798. Originally included in the first edition of Lyrical Ballads, which he published with William
Wordsworth, the poem disputes the traditional idea that nightingales are connected to the idea
of melancholy. Instead, the nightingale represents to Coleridge the experience of nature.
Midway through the poem, the narrator stops discussing the nightingale in order to describe a
mysterious female and a gothic scene. After the narrator is returned to his original train of
thought by the nightingale's song, he recalls a moment when he took his crying son out to see
the moon, which immediately filled the child with joy.

Imagery
Elements of a poem that invoke any of the five senses to create a set of mental images.
Specifically, using vivid or figurative language to represent ideas, objects, or actions. Poems that
use rich imagery include T.S. Eliot’s “Preludes,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,”
Sylvia Plath’s “Daddy,” and Mary Oliver’s “At Black River.”

"Ode to a Nightingale" is a poem by John Keats written either in the garden of the Spaniards
Inn, Hampstead, London or, according to Keats' friend Charles Armitage Brown, under
a plum tree in the garden of Keats' house at Wentworth Place, also in Hampstead. According to
Brown, a nightingale had built its nest near the house that he shared with Keats in the spring of
1819. Inspired by the bird's song, Keats composed the poem in one day. It soon became one of
his 1819 odes and was first published in Annals of the Fine Arts the following July.

The Tragedie of Gorboduc, also titled Ferrex and Porrex, is an English play from 1561. It was
first performed at the Christmas celebration given by the Inner Temple in 1561, and performed
at Whitehall before Queen Elizabeth I on 18 January 1561, by the Gentlemen of the Inner
Temple. The authors were Thomas Norton and Thomas Sackville, said to be responsible for the
first three Acts, and the final two, respectively.

Epistolary novels can be categorized based on the number of people whose letters are
included. This gives three types of epistolary novels: monophonic (giving the letters of only one
character, like Letters of a Portuguese Nun and The Sorrows of Young Werther), dialogic (giving
the letters of two characters, like Mme Marie Jeanne Riccoboni's Letters of Fanni Butler), and
polyphonic (with three or more letter-writing characters, such as in Bram Stoker's Dracula). A
crucial element in polyphonic epistolary novels like Clarissa and Dangerous Liaisons is the
dramatic device of 'discrepant awareness': the simultaneous but separate correspondences of
the heroines and the villains creating dramatic tension. They can also be classified according to
their type and quantity of use of non-letter documents, though this has obvious correlations

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with the number of voices - for example, newspaper clippings are unlikely to feature heavily in
a monophonic epistolary and considerably more likely in a polyphonic one.

The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (originally The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere) is the longest
major poem by the English poet S. T. Coleridge, written in 1797–1798 and published in 1798 in
the first edition of Lyrical Ballads. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner recounts the experiences of
a sailor who has returned from a long sea voyage. The mariner stops a man who is on his way to
a wedding ceremony and begins to narrate a story. The Wedding-Guest’s reaction turns from
bemusement to impatience to fear to fascination as the mariner's story progresses, as can be
seen in the language style: Coleridge uses narrative techniques such as personification and
repetition to create a sense of danger, the supernatural, or serenity, depending on the mood in
different parts of the poem.

Anachronism
An historically inaccurate detail in a literary work, included by the author either unintentionally
or deliberately. E.g. In Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar, the characters refer to a clock striking three.
This is an anachronism because clocks had not been invented at the time Julius Caesar lived.

Blackwood's Magazine was a British magazine and miscellany printed between 1817 and 1980.
It was founded by the publisher William Blackwood and was originally called the Edinburgh
Monthly Magazine. The first number appeared in April 1817 under the editorship of Thomas
Pringle and James Cleghorn. The journal was unsuccessful and Blackwood fired Pringle and
Cleghorn and relaunched the journal as Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine under his own
editorship. The journal eventually adopted the shorter name and from the relaunch often
referred to itself as Maga. The title page bore the image of George Buchanan, a 16th-century
Scottish historian, religious and political thinker.

The Sentimental Novel or the novel of sensibility is an 18th-century literary genre which
celebrates the emotional and intellectual concepts of sentiment, sentimentalism,
and sensibility. Sentimental novels relied on emotional response, both from their readers and
characters. They feature scenes of distress and tenderness, and the plot is arranged to advance
both emotions and actions. The result is a valorization of "fine feeling", displaying the
characters as a model for refined, sensitive emotional effect. The ability to display feelings was
thought to show character and experience, and to shape social life and relations.

Caribbean Literature is the literature of the various territories of the Caribbean region.
Literature in English from the former British West Indies may be referred to as Anglo-
Caribbean or, in historical contexts, as West Indian literature. Most of these territories have
become independent nations since the 1960s, though some retain colonial ties to the United
Kingdom. They share, apart from the English language, a number of political, cultural, and social
ties which make it useful to consider their literary output in a single category. The more wide-
ranging term "Caribbean literature" generally refers to the literature of all Caribbean territories
regardless of language—whether written in English, Spanish, French, Hindustani, or Dutch, or
one of numerous creoles. Through themes of innocence, exile and return to motherland,

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resistance and endurance, engagement and alienation, self determination, Caribbean literature
provides a powerful platform for Post-Colonial studies and to Caribbean literatures in
importance the context of all literature.

Nectar in a Sieve is a 1954 novel by Kamala Markandaya. The book is set in India during a
period of intense urban development and is the chronicle of the marriage between Rukmani,
youngest daughter of a village headman, and Nathan, a tenant farmer. The story is told in the
first person by Rukmani, beginning from her arranged marriage to Nathan at the age of 12 to
his death many years later. The title of the novel is taken from the 1825 poem “Work Without
Hope”, by Samuel Taylor Coleridge. An excerpt from the poem is the epigraph of the novel:
“Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.”
In the novel, Rukmani comments, “Change I had known before, and it had been gradual. But
the change that now came into my life, into all our lives, blasting its way into our village,
seemed wrought in the twinkling of an eye.”

Literary Modernism, or modernist literature, originated in the late 19th and early 20th
centuries, mainly in Europe and North America, and is characterized by a self-conscious break
with traditional ways of writing, in both poetry and prose fiction
writing. Modernism experimented with literary form and expression, as exemplified by Ezra
Pound's maxim to "Make it New." This literary movement was driven by a conscious desire to
overturn traditional modes of representation and express the new sensibilities of their
time. The horrors of the First World War saw the prevailing assumptions about society
reassessed, and much modernist writing engages with the technological advances and societal
changes of modernity moving into the 20th century.

Types of Comic Relief

Comic relief comes in two forms, which can often be found side-by-side in the same book or
movie:
Internal Comic Relief is when the joke is actually part of the story – for example, the character
makes a joke and other characters laugh. We’re laughing with the characters.
External Comic Relief is when the audience laughs, but the characters themselves don’t. This
could happen, for example, when a character slips on a banana peel: nobody onscreen is
laughing, but the audience still finds it funny. We’re laughing at the characters.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: with Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects (1792),
written by British proto-feminist Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797), is one of the earliest works
of feminist philosophy. In it, Wollstonecraft responds to those educational and political
theorists of the eighteenth century who did not believe women should receive a rational
education. She argues that women ought to have an education commensurate with their
position in society, claiming that women are essential to the nation because they educate its
children and because they could be "companions" to their husbands, rather than mere wives.
Instead of viewing women as ornaments to society or property to be traded in marriage,
Wollstonecraft maintains that they are human beings deserving of the same fundamental rights
as men.
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Wollstonecraft was prompted to write the Rights of Woman after reading Charles Maurice de
Talleyrand-Périgord's 1791 report to the French National Assembly, which stated that women
should only receive domestic education. From her reaction to this specific event, she launched
a broad attack against double standards, indicting men for encouraging women to indulge in
excessive emotion. Wollstonecraft hurried to complete the work in direct response to ongoing
events; she intended to write a more thoughtful second volume but died before completing it.
While Wollstonecraft does call for equality between the sexes in particular areas of life,
especially morality, she does not explicitly state that men and women are equal. Her ambiguous
statements regarding the equality of the sexes have made it difficult to classify Wollstonecraft
as a modern feminist; the word itself did not emerge until decades after her death.
Although it is commonly assumed that the Rights of Woman was unfavorably received, this is a
modern misconception based on the belief that Wollstonecraft was as reviled during her
lifetime as she became after the publication of William Godwin's Memoirs of the Author of A
Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1798). The Rights of Woman was generally received well
when it was first published in 1792.

Perhaps Derrida's most quoted and famous assertion, which appears in an essay
on Rousseau in his book Of Grammatology (1967), is the statement that "there is no out-of-
context". Critics of Derrida have been often accused of having mistranslated the phrase in
French to suggest he had written "There is nothing outside the text" and of having widely
disseminated this translation to make it appear that Derrida is suggesting that nothing exists
but words. Derrida once explained that this assertion "which for some has become a sort of
slogan, in general so badly understood, of deconstruction ... means nothing else: there is
nothing outside context. In this form, which says exactly the same thing, the formula would
doubtless have been less shocking."

Caribbean poetry is vast and rapidly evolving field of poetry written by people from
the Caribbean region and the diaspora. Caribbean poetry generally refers to a myriad of poetic
forms, spanning epic, lyrical verse, prose poems, dramatic poetry and oral poetry, composed in
Caribbean territories regardless of language. Caribbean writers, performance poets, newspaper
poets, singer-songwriters have created a popular art form, a poetry heard by audiences all over
the world. Caribbean oral poetry shares the vigor of the written tradition. Among the most
prominent Caribbean poets whose works are widely studied (and translated into other
languages) are: Derek Walcott (who won the 1992 Nobel Prize for Literature), Kamau
Brathwaite, Edouard Glissant, Giannina Braschi, Lorna Goodinson, Aimé Fernand Césaire, Linton
Kwesi Johnson, Kwame Dawes, and Claudia Rankine. Common themes include: exile and return
to the motherland; the relationship of language to nation; colonialism and postcolonialism; self-
determination and liberty; racial identity. Zoo or letters not about love is a novel by Viktor
Shklovsky.

Nineteen Eighty-Four (also stylized as 1984) is a dystopian social science fiction novel
and cautionary tale written by the English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June
1949 by Secker & Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed in his lifetime.
Thematically, it centers on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass

26
surveillance and repressive regimentation of people and behaviors within society. Orwell,
a democratic socialist, modelled the totalitarian government in the novel after Stalinist
Russia and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines the role of truth and facts within
politics and the ways in which they are manipulated.

Suspension of Disbelief, sometimes called willing suspension of disbelief, is the avoidance

of critical thinking or logic in examining something unreal or impossible in reality, such as a
work of speculative fiction, in order to believe it for the sake of enjoyment. Aristotle first
explored the idea of the concept in its relation to the principles of theater; the audience ignores
the unreality of fiction in order to experience catharsis. Suspension of disbelief is sometimes
said to be an essential component of live theater. Poetry and fiction involving the supernatural
had gone out of fashion to a large extent in the 18th century, in part due to the declining belief
in witches and other supernatural agents among the educated classes, who embraced the
rational approach to the world offered by the new science. Alexander Pope, notably, felt the
need to explain and justify his use of elemental spirits in The Rape of the Lock, one of the few
English poems of the century that invoked the supernatural.

Vasily Andreyevich Zhukovsky was the foremost Russian poet of the 1810s and a leading figure
in Russian literature in the first half of the 19th century. Zhukovsky is credited with introducing
the Romantic Movement into Russia. The main body of his literary output consists of
free translations covering an impressively wide range of poets, from ancients
like Ferdowsi and Homer to his contemporaries Goethe, Schiller, Byron, and others. Many of his
translations have become classics of Russian literature, regarded by some to be better written
and more enduring in Russian than in their original languages.

Captains Courageous is an 1897 novel by Rudyard Kipling that follows the adventures of fifteen-
year-old Harvey Cheyne Jr., the spoiled son of a railroad tycoon, after he is saved from
drowning by a Portuguese fisherman in the North Atlantic. The novel originally appeared as a
serialization in McClure's, beginning with the November 1896 edition with the last instalment
appearing in May 1897. In that year it was then published in its entirety as a novel, first in the
United States by Doubleday, and a month later in the United Kingdom by Macmillan. It is
Kipling's only novel set entirely in North America. In 1900, Teddy Roosevelt extolled the book in
his essay "What We Can Expect of the American Boy," praising Kipling for describing "in the
liveliest way just what a boy should be and do."

Spenser’s masterpiece is the epic poem The Faerie Queene. The first three books of The Faerie
Queene were published in 1590, and the second set of three books was published in 1596.
Spenser originally indicated that he intended the poem to consist of twelve books, so the
version of the poem we have today is incomplete. Despite this, it remains one of the longest
poems in the English language. It is an allegorical work, and can be read (as Spenser presumably
intended) on several levels of allegory, including as praise of Queen Elizabeth I. In a completely
allegorical context, the poem follows several knights in an examination of several virtues. In
Spenser’s “A Letter of the Authors”, he states that the entire epic poem is “cloudily enwrapped

27
in allegorical devices”, and that the aim behind The Faerie Queene was to “fashion a gentleman
or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline”.

Kubla Khan (/ˌkʊblə ˈkɑːn/) is a poem written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, completed in 1797
and published in 1816. It is sometimes given the subtitles "A Vision in a Dream" and "A
Fragment." According to Coleridge's preface to Kubla Khan, the poem was composed one night
after he experienced an opium-influenced dream after reading a work describing Shangdu, the
summer capital of the Mongol-led Yuan dynasty of China founded by Kublai Khan (Emperor
Shizu of Yuan). Upon waking, he set about writing lines of poetry that came to him from the
dream until he was interrupted by "a person from Porlock". The poem could not be completed
according to its original 200–300 line plan as the interruption caused him to forget the lines. He
left it unpublished and kept it for private readings for his friends until 1816 when, at the
prompting of Lord Byron, it was published.

Annie Ernaux started her literary career in 1974 with Les Armoires vides (Cleaned Out), an
autobiographical novel. In 1984, she won the Renaudot Prize for another of her works La
Place (A Man's Place), an autobiographical narrative focusing on her relationship with her
father and her experiences growing up in a small town in France, and her subsequent process of
moving into adulthood and away from her parents' place of origin. Early in her career, she
turned from fiction to focus on autobiography. Her work combines historic and individual
experiences. She charts her parents' social progression, her teenage years, her marriage, her
passionate affair with an Eastern European man (Passion simple), her abortion, Alzheimer's
disease, the death of her mother, and breast cancer. Ernaux also wrote L'écriture comme un
couteau (Writing as Sharp as a Knife) with Frédéric-Yves Jeannet.
A Woman's Story, A Man's Place, and Simple Passion were recognized as The New York
Times Notable Books, and A Woman's Story was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize. Shame was named a Publishers Weekly Best Book of 1998, I Remain in Darkness a Top
Memoir of 1999 by The Washington Post, and The Possession was listed as a Top Ten Book of
2008 by More magazine.
Her 2008 historical memoir Les Années (The Years), well-received by French critics, is
considered by many to be her magnum opus. In this book, Ernaux writes about herself in the
third person ('elle', or 'she' in English) for the first time, providing a vivid look at French society
just after the Second World War until the early 2000s. It is the story of a woman and of the
evolving society she lived in. Her popularity in anglophone countries increased sharply after The
Years was shortlisted for the International Booker.
On 6 October 2022, it was announced that she was to be awarded the 2022 Nobel Prize in
Literature "for the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots,
estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory". Ernaux is the 16th French writer,
and the first Frenchwoman, to receive the literature prize. In congratulating her, the president
of France, Emmanuel Macron, said that she was the voice "of the freedom of women and of the
forgotten".

Mappings is a first book of poems by Vikram Seth originally published by the Writers
Workshop, Calcutta (now Kolkata), as a hand-set, hand-printed and hand-bound volume (“in

28
Hardback or Flexiback”) in 1980 or 1981 (the Flexiback edition copyright date is 1981). With the
growth of Seth’s reputation, the volume has been reprinted by mainstream publishers.
Original poems range from a cautionary tale in rhyming couplets (“The Tale Of Melon City”),
through Seth’s characteristic musings – some serious and some light-hearted – on life, love and
landscape, to the title poem reflecting on the different selves “mapped” by his earlier writings.

Epithalamion is an ode written by Edmund Spenser to his bride, Elizabeth Boyle, on their
wedding day in 1594. It was first published in 1595 in London by William Ponsonby as part of a
volume entitled Amoretti and Epithalamion. The volume included the sequence of 89 sonnets
(Amoretti), along with a series of short poems called Anacreontics and the Epithalamion, a
public poetic celebration of marriage. Only six complete copies of this first edition remain
today, including one at the Folger Shakespeare Library and one at the Bodleian Library.

The Spenserian Stanza is a fixed verse form invented by Edmund Spenser for his epic poem The
Faerie Queene (1590–96). Each stanza contains nine lines in total: eight lines in iambic
pentameter followed by a single 'alexandrine' line in iambic hexameter. The rhyme scheme of
these lines is ABABBCBCC. Spenser's invention may have been influenced by the Italian
form ottava rima, which consists of eight lines of iambic pentameter with the rhyme scheme
ABABABCC. Another possible influence is rhyme royal, a traditional medieval form used
by Geoffrey Chaucer and others, which has seven lines of iambic pentameter that rhyme
ABABBCC. More likely, however, is the eight-line ballad stanza with the rhyme scheme
ABABBCBC, which Chaucer used in his Monk's Tale. Spenser would have been familiar with this
rhyme scheme and simply added a line to the stanza, forming ABABBCBCC.

A cultural critic is a critic of a given culture, usually as a whole. Cultural criticism has significant
overlap with social and cultural theory. While such criticism is simply part of the self-
consciousness of the culture, the social positions of the critics and the medium they use vary
widely. The conceptual and political grounding of criticism also changes over time. Cultural
critics came to the scene in the nineteenth century. Matthew Arnold and Thomas Carlyle are
leading examples of a cultural critics of the Victorian age; in Arnold there is also a concern for
religion. John Ruskin was another. Because of an equation made between ugliness of material
surroundings and an impoverished life, aesthetes and others might be considered implicitly to
be engaging in cultural criticism, but the actual articulation is what makes a critic. In
France, Charles Baudelaire was a cultural critic, as was Søren Kierkegaard in Denmark
and Friedrich Nietzsche in Germany.

Structuralism in “Beginning Theory” by Peter Barry

Structuralism is a literary movement which began in France in the 1950s. It first appeared in the
works of anthropologist Claude Levi-Straus and the literary critic Ronald Barthes. The
movement has its origins in the work of Swiss linguist Ferdinand de Saussure who introduced a
new approach to the study of linguistics. Structuralism may be defined as an analytical
approach which is less concerned with the unique qualities of any individual example than with
the structures that underlie the individual examples. According to Peter Barry its essence is the
belief that things cannot be understood in isolation. They have to be seen in the context of the

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larger structures they are part of.

Herbert’s only prose work, A Priest to the Temple (usually known as The Country Parson),
offers practical advice to rural clergy. In it, he advises that “things of ordinary use” such as
ploughs, leaven, or dances, could be made to “serve for lights even of Heavenly Truths”. It was
first published in 1652 as part of Herbert’s Remains, or Sundry Pieces of That Sweet Singer, Mr.
George Herbert, edited by Barnabas Oley. The first edition was prefixed with unsigned preface
by Oley, which was used as one of the sources for Izaak Walton’s biography of Herbert, first
published in 1670. The second edition appeared in 1671 as A Priest to the Temple or the
Country Parson, with a new preface, this time signed by Oley.
Like many of his literary contemporaries, Herbert was a collector of proverbs. His Outlandish
Proverbs was published in 1640, listing over 1000 aphorisms in English, but gathered from
many countries (in Herbert’s day, ‘outlandish’ meant foreign). The collection included many
sayings repeated to this day, for example, “His bark is worse than his bite” and “Who is so deaf,
as he that will not hear?” These and an additional 150 proverbs were included in a later
collection entitled Jacula Prudentum (sometimes seen as Jacula Prudentium), dated 1651 and
published in 1652 as part of Oley’s Herbert’s Remains.

A Pale View of Hills (1982) is the first novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Kazuo Ishiguro. It
won the 1982 Winifred Holtby Memorial Prize. A Pale View of Hills is the story of Etsuko, a
middle-aged Japanese woman living alone in England, and opens with discussion between
Etsuko and her younger daughter, Niki, about the recent suicide of Etsuko's older daughter,
Keiko.

The first novel to be published in Australia was a crime novel, Quintus Servinton: A Tale
founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence by Henry Savery published in Hobart in 1830. Early
popular works tended to be the 'ripping yarn' variety, telling tales of derring-do against the
new frontier of the Australian outback. Writers such as Rolf Boldrewood (Robbery Under
Arms), Marcus Clarke (For the Term of His Natural Life), Henry Handel Richardson (The Fortunes
of Richard Mahony) and Joseph Furphy (Such Is Life) embodied these stirring ideals in their tales
and, particularly the latter, tried to accurately record the vernacular language of the common
Australian. These novelists also gave valuable insights into the penal colonies which helped
form the country and also the early rural settlements.

The Mzungu Boy is a novel by Meja Mwangi. It is set in Kenya during the 1950s; during that
time, the country was under British rule. The British colony is facing a Kenyan uprising known as
the Mau Mau Rebellion. The majority of the fertile farmland is under British control, and the
best the Kenyans can hope for is to work the land as tenant farmers, giving the majority of their
yield to the British. While the Kenyans work the land, they live under oppressive conditions and
under constant threat of violence. The Mau Mau rebellion seeks to rid the land of the British
colonizers and give the country back to Kenyans.

Neologisms are literally new words, or words recently created in order to describe something

30
which has never been described. For example, a recent neologism is “spork,” meaning a
combined spoon and fork.

Anagrams are a type of wordplay in which the letters of a word or phrase are rearranged to
create a new word or phrase containing the exact same letters. For example, an anagram of the
word “anagram” would be “nag a ram!”

Life of Pi is a Canadian philosophical novel by Yann Martel published in 2001. The protagonist is
Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian boy from Pondicherry who explores issues
of spirituality and metaphysics from an early age. He survives 227 days after a shipwreck while
stranded on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean with a Bengal tiger which raises questions about the
nature of reality and how it is perceived and told. It was rejected by at least 5 London
publishing houses before being accepted by Knopf Canada, which published it in September
2001. The UK edition won the Man Booker Prize the following year. In 2012 it was adapted
into a feature film directed by Ang Lee with a screenplay by David Magee. In 2022, the novel
was included on the “Big Jubilee Read” list of 70 books by Commonwealth authors, selected to
celebrate the Platinum Jubilee of Elizabeth II.

Harriet Elisabeth Beecher Stowe was an American author and abolitionist. She came from
the Beecher family, a religious family, and became best known for her novel Uncle Tom's
Cabin (1852), which depicts the harsh conditions experienced by enslaved African Americans.
The book reached an audience of millions as a novel and play, and became influential in the
United States and in Great Britain, energizing anti-slavery forces in the American North, while
provoking widespread anger in the South. Stowe wrote 30 books, including novels, three travel
memoirs, and collections of articles and letters. She was influential both for her writings and for
her public stances and debates on social issues of the day.

Women’s Studies is an academic field that draws on feminist and interdisciplinary methods to
place women’s lives and experiences at the center of study, while examining social and cultural
constructs of gender; systems of privilege and oppression; and the relationships between
power and gender as they intersect with other identities and social locations such
as race, sexual orientation, socio-economic class, and disability.
Popular concepts that are related to the field of women’s studies include feminist
theory, standpoint theory, intersectionality, multiculturalism, transnational feminism, social
justice, affect studies, agency, bio-politics, materialism, and embodiment. Research practices
and methodologies associated with women’s studies
include ethnography, autoethnography, focus groups, surveys, community-based research,
discourse analysis, and reading practices associated with critical theory, post-structuralism,
and queer theory. The field researches and critiques different societal norms of gender, race,
class, sexuality, and other social inequalities.
Women’s studies is related to the fields of gender studies, feminist studies, and sexuality
studies, and more broadly related to the fields of cultural studies, ethnic studies, and African-
American studies.

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A national epic is an epic poem or a literary work of epic scope which seeks or is believed to
capture and express the essence or spirit of a particular nation—not necessarily a nation state,
but at least an ethnic or linguistic group with aspirations to independence or autonomy.
National epics frequently recount the origin of a nation, a part of its history, or a crucial event in
the development of national identity such as other national symbols.

Migrant Literature is either written by migrants or tells the stories of migrants and
their migration. It is a topic of growing interest within literary studies since the 1980s. Migrants
are people who have left their homes and cultural settings and who started a new life in
another setting that is, in most cases, initially strange to them. Migrant literature often focuses
on the social contexts in the migrants' country of origin which prompt them to leave, on the
experience of migration itself, on the mixed reception which they may receive in the country of
arrival, on experiences of racism and hostility, and on the sense of rootlessness and the search
for identity which can result from displacement and cultural diversity.

Many of Munro's stories are set in Huron County, Ontario. Her strong regional focus is one of
her fiction's features. Another is an omniscient narrator who serves to make sense of the world.
Many compare Munro's small-town settings to writers from the rural American South. As in the
works of William Faulkner and Flannery O'Connor, Munro's characters often confront deep-
rooted customs and traditions, but her characters' reactions are generally less intense than
their Southern counterparts'. Her male characters tend to capture the essence of
the everyman, while her female characters are more complex. Much of Munro's work
exemplifies the Southern Ontario Gothic literary genre.

A fricative is a consonant produced by forcing air through a narrow channel made by placing
two articulators close together. These may be the lower lip against the upper teeth, in the case
of [f]; the back of the tongue against the soft palate in the case of German [x] (the final
consonant of Bach); or the side of the tongue against the molars, in the case
of Welsh [ɬ] (appearing twice in the name Llanelli). This turbulent airflow is called frication.
A particular subset of fricatives are the sibilants. When forming a sibilant, one still is forcing air
through a narrow channel, but in addition, the tongue is curled lengthwise to direct the air over
the edge of the teeth. English [s], [z], [ʃ], and [ʒ] are examples of sibilants.
The usage of two other terms is less standardized: "Spirant" is an older term for fricatives used
by some American and European phoneticians and phonologists. "Strident" could mean just
"sibilant", but some authors include also labiodental and uvular fricatives in the class.

Paradise is a historical novel by the Nobel Prize-winning Zanzibar-born British

writer Abdulrazak Gurnah, first published in 1994 by Hamish Hamilton in London. The novel
was nominated for both the Booker Prize and the Whitbread Prize for Fiction.
The novel follows the story of Yusuf, a boy born in the fictional town of Kawa in Tanzania at the
turn of the 20th century. Yusuf's father is a hotelier and is in debt to a rich and powerful
Arab merchant named Aziz. Early in the story Yusuf is pawned in exchange for his father's owed
debt to Aziz and must work as an unpaid servant for the merchant. Yusuf joins Aziz's caravan as
they travel into the interior to the lands west of Lake Tanganyika.: 178 Here, Aziz's caravan of

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traders meets hostility from local tribes, wild animals and difficult terrain. As the caravan
returns to East Africa, World War I begins and Yusuf encounters the German Army as they
sweep Tanzania, forcibly conscripting African men as soldiers.

The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club (also known as The Pickwick Papers) was Charles
Dickens’ first novel. Because of his success with Sketches by Boz published in 1836 Dickens was
asked by the publisher Chapman & Hall to supply descriptions to explain a series of comic
“cockney sporting plates” by illustrator Robert Seymour, and to connect them into a novel. The
book became Britain’s first real publishing phenomenon, with bootleg copies, theatrical
performances, Sam Weller joke books, and other merchandise. On its cultural impact, Nicholas
Dames in The Atlantic writes, “Literature” is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined
its own, a new one that we have learned to call “entertainment.” Published in 19 issues over 20
months, the success of The Pickwick Papers popularized serialized fiction and cliffhanger
endings.
Seymour’s widow claimed that the idea for the novel was originally her husband’s, but Dickens
strenuously denied any specific input in his preface to the 1867 edition: “Mr Seymour never
originated or suggested an incident, a phrase, or a word, to be found in the book.”

A Christmas Carol . In Prose. Being a Ghost Story of Christmas, commonly known as A Christmas
Carol, is a novella by Charles Dickens, first published in London by Chapman & Hall in 1843 and
illustrated by John Leech. A Christmas Carol recounts the story of Ebenezer Scrooge, an elderly
miser who is visited by the ghost of his former business partner Jacob Marley and the spirits of
Christmas Past, Present and Yet to Come. After their visits, Scrooge is transformed into a kinder,
gentler man.
Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol during a period when the British were exploring and re-
evaluating past Christmas traditions, including carols, and newer customs such as Christmas
cards and Christmas trees. He was influenced by the experiences of his own youth and by the
Christmas stories of other authors, including Washington Irving and Douglas Jerrold. Dickens
had written three Christmas stories prior to the novella, and was inspired following a visit to the
Field Lane Ragged School, one of several establishments for London's street children. The
treatment of the poor and the ability of a selfish man to redeem himself by transforming into a
more sympathetic character are the key themes of the story. There is discussion among
academics as to whether this is a fully secular story, or if it is a Christian allegory.
Published on 19 December, the first edition sold out by Christmas Eve; by the end of 1844
thirteen editions had been released. Most critics reviewed the novella favorably. The story was
illicitly copied in January 1844; Dickens took legal action against the publishers, who went
bankrupt, further reducing Dickens's small profits from the publication. He went on to write
four other Christmas stories in subsequent years. In 1849 he began public readings of the story,
which proved so successful he undertook 127 further performances until 1870, the year of his
death. A Christmas Carol has never been out of print and has been translated into several
languages; the story has been adapted many times for film, stage, opera and other media.
A Christmas Carol captured the zeitgeist of the mid-Victorian revival of the Christmas holiday.
Dickens had acknowledged the influence of the modern Western observance of Christmas and
later inspired several aspects of Christmas, including family gatherings, seasonal food and drink,

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dancing, games and a festive generosity of spirit.

Utopia
The story is written from the perspective of More himself. This was common at the time, and
More uses his own name and background to create the narrator. The book is written in two
parts: “Book one: Dialogue of Council,” and “Book two: Discourse on Utopia.”
The first book is told from the perspective of More, the narrator, who is introduced by his friend
Peter Giles to a fellow traveller named Raphael Hythloday, whose name translates as “expert of
nonsense” in Greek. In an amical dialogue with More and Giles, Hythloday expresses strong
criticism of then-modern practices in England and other Catholicism-dominated countries, such
as the crime of theft being punishable by death, and the over-willingness of kings to start wars.
Book two has Hythloday tell his interlocutors about Utopia, where he has lived for five years,
with the aim of convincing them about its superior state of affairs. Utopia turns out to be a
socialist state. Interpretations about this important part of the book vary. Gilbert notes that
while some experts believe that More supports socialism, others believe that he shows how
socialism is impractical. The former would argue that More used book two to show how
socialism would work in practice. Individual cities are run by privately elected princes and
families are made up of ten to sixteen adults living in a single household. It is unknown if More
truly believed in socialism, or if he printed Utopia as a way to show that true socialism was
impractical (Gilbert). More printed many writings involving socialism, some seemingly in
defense of the practices, and others seemingly scathing satires against it. Some scholars believe
that More uses this structure to show the perspective of something as an idea against
something put into practice. Hythloday describes the city as perfect and ideal. He believes the
society thrives and is perfect. As such, he is used to represent the more fanatic socialists and
radical reformists of his day. When More arrives he describes the social and cultural norms put
into practice, citing a city thriving and idealistic. While some believe this is More's ideal society,
some believe the book's title, which translates to “Nowhere” from Greek, is a way to describe
that the practices used in Utopia are impractical and could not be used in a modern world
successfully (Gilbert). Either way, Utopia has become one of the most talked about works both
in defense of socialism and against it.

Point of View
The perspective from which the events of a story are reported to the reader or audience. Point
of view can limit or expand the reader’s access to information about the action of the story, as
well as the internal lives of the characters.
In novels, there are three basic types of point of view: first-person, third-person, and less
commonly, second-person. In first-person, the narrator is a witness, participant, and chronicler
of the action. In third-person, the narrator observes and reports on the actions of the
characters, but is not herself a character. This narrator can be omniscient, where they have full
knowledge of all characters and situations, or limited, where they only have knowledge of one
character’s perspective. In second-person, the narrator addresses the reader as “you,”
effectively drawing the reader into the action of the story.

Polysyndeton

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The repetition of conjunctions (and, but, for, etc.) to connect a series of words, clauses, or
sentences. Polysyndeton may emphasize the relationships between the items in the series as
well as add rhythm to a list when reciting. One of the most familiar examples of polysyndeton is
the motto of the United States Postal Service.
“Neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays these couriers from the swift
completion of their appointed rounds.”

Verbal Irony
The use of a statement to express an idea other than (or opposite to) the literal meaning of the
statement.

"Endymion" is a poem by John Keats first published in 1818 by Taylor and Hessey of Fleet
Street in London. John Keats dedicated this poem to the late poet Thomas Chatterton. The
poem begins with the line "A thing of beauty is a joy for ever". Endymion is written in rhyming
couplets in iambic pentameter (also known as heroic couplets). Keats based the poem on the
Greek myth of Endymion, the shepherd beloved of the moon goddess Selene. The poem
elaborates on the original story and renames Selene "Cynthia" (an alternative name for
Artemis).
It starts by painting a rustic scene of trees, rivers, shepherds, and sheep. The shepherds gather
around an altar and pray to Pan, god of shepherds and flocks. As the youths sing and dance, the
elder men sit and talk about what life would be like in the shades of Elysium. However,
Endymion, the "brain-sick shepherd-prince" of Mt. Latmos, is in a trancelike state, and not
participating in their discourse. His sister, Peona, takes him away and brings him to her resting
place where he sleeps. After he wakes, he tells Peona of his encounter with Cynthia, and how
much he loved her.
The poem is divided into four books, each approximately 1,000 lines long. Book I gives
Endymion's account of his dreams and experiences, as related to Peona, which provides the
background for the rest of the poem. In Book II, Endymion ventures into the underworld in
search of his love. He encounters Adonis and Venus—a pairing of mortal and immortal—
apparently foreshadowing a similar destiny for the mortal Endymion and his immortal
paramour. Book III reveals Endymion's enduring love, and he begs the Moon not to torment
him any longer as he journeys through a watery void on the sea floor. There he meets Glaucus,
freeing the god from a thousand years of imprisonment by the witch Circe. Book IV, "And so he
groan'd, as one by beauty slain." Endymion falls in love with a beautiful Indian maiden. Both
ride winged black steeds to Mount Olympus where Cynthia awaits, only for Endymion to
forsake the goddess for his new, mortal, love. Endymion and the Indian girl return to earth, the
latter saying she cannot be his love. He is miserable, 'til quite suddenly he comes upon the
Indian maiden again and she reveals that she is in fact Cynthia. She then tells him of how she
tried to forget him, to move on, but that in the end, "'There is not one,/ No, no, not one/ But
thee.'"

The Drapier's Letters (1724) was a series of pamphlets against the monopoly granted by the
English government to William Wood to mint copper coinage for Ireland. It was widely believed
that Wood would need to flood Ireland with debased coinage in order to make a profit. In these

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"letters" Swift posed as a shop-keeper—a draper—to criticize the plan. Swift's writing was so
effective in undermining opinion in the project that a reward was offered by the government to
anyone disclosing the true identity of the author. Though hardly a secret (on returning to Dublin
after one of his trips to England, Swift was greeted with a banner, "Welcome Home, Drapier")
no one turned Swift in, although there was an unsuccessful attempt to prosecute the publisher
John Harding. Thanks to the general outcry against the coinage, Wood's patent was rescinded
in September 1725 and the coins were kept out of circulation.

Science fiction (sometimes shortened to sci-fi or SF) is a genre of speculative fiction that
typically deals with imaginative and futuristic concepts such as advanced science and
technology, space exploration, time travel, parallel universes, and extraterrestrial life. It has
been called the "literature of ideas", and it often explores the potential consequences of
scientific, social, and technological innovations. Science fiction can trace its roots back to
ancient mythology, and is related to fantasy, horror, and superhero fiction, and contains many
subgenres. Science fiction literature, film, television, and other media have become popular
and influential over much of the world. Besides providing entertainment, it can also criticize
present-day society, and it is often said to inspire a "sense of wonder".
Science fiction elements can include, among others:
1. Temporal settings in the future, or in alternative histories.
2. Spatial settings or scenes in outer space, on other worlds, or in parallel universes.
3. Aspects of biology in fiction such as aliens, mutants, and enhanced humans.
4. Predicted or speculative technology such as brain-computer interface, bio-
engineering, superintelligent computers, robots, and ray guns and other advanced weapons.
5. Undiscovered scientific possibilities such as teleportation, time travel, and faster-than-
light travel or communication.
6. New and different political and social systems and situations,
including Utopian, dystopian, post-apocalyptic, or post-scarcity.
7. Future history and evolution of humans on Earth or on other planets.
8. Paranormal abilities such as mind control, telepathy, and telekinesis.

Paradox derives from the Greek word paradoxon, which means “beyond belief.” It’s a
statement that asks people to think outside the box by providing seemingly illogical — and yet
actually true — premises.
Example: In George Orwell’s 1984, the slogan of the totalitarian government is built on
paradoxes: “War is Peace, Freedom is Slavery, Ignorance is Strength.” While we might read
these statements as obviously contradictory, in the context of Orwell’s novel, these blatantly
corrupt sentiments have become an accepted truth.

The God of Small Things is a family drama novel written by Indian writer Arundhati Roy. It's
Roy's debut novel. It is a story about the childhood experiences of fraternal twins whose lives
are destroyed by the "Love Laws" that lay down "who should be loved, and how. And how
much." The book explores how the small things affect people's behavior and their lives. The
book also reflects its irony against casteism, which is a major discrimination that prevails in
India. It won the Booker Prize in 1997.The God of Small Things was Roy's first book and only

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novel until the 2017 publication of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness twenty years later. She
began writing the manuscript for The God of Small Things in 1992 and finished four years later,
in 1996. It was published the following year. The story is set in Ayemenem, now part of
Kottayam district in Kerala, India. The novel has a disjointed narrative; the temporal setting
shifts back and forth between 1969, when fraternal twins Rahel, a girl, and Esthappen, a boy,
are seven years old, and 1993, when the twins are reunited.

A strophe (/ˈstroʊfiː/) is a poetic term originally referring to the first part of the odein Ancient
Greek tragedy, followed by the antistrophe and epode. The term has been extended to also
mean a structural division of a poem containing stanzas of varying line length. In its original
Greek setting, "strophe, antistrophe and epode were a kind of stanza framed only for the
music", as John Milton wrote in the preface to Samson Agonistes, with the strophe chanted by
a Greek chorus as it moved from right to left across the scene.

A heroic couplet is a traditional form for English poetry, commonly used in epic and narrative
poetry, and consisting of a rhyming pair of lines in iambic pentameter. Use of the heroic couplet
was pioneered by Geoffrey Chaucer in the Legend of Good Women and the Canterbury
Tales, and generally considered to have been perfected by John Dryden and Alexander Pope in
the Restoration Age and early 18th century respectively. A frequently-cited example illustrating
the use of heroic couplets is this passage from Cooper's Hill by John Denham, part of his
description of the Thames:
O could I flow like thee, and make thy stream
My great example, as it is my theme!
Though deep yet clear, though gentle yet not dull;
Strong without rage, without o'erflowing full.

Old English literature, or Anglo-Saxon literature, encompasses the surviving literature written
in Old English in Anglo-Saxon England, from the settlement of the Saxons and other Germanic
tribes in England (Jutes and the Angles) around 450, until "soon after the Norman Conquest" in
1066. These works include genres such as epic poetry, hagiography, sermons, Bible translations,
legal works, chronicles, riddles, and others. In all there are about 400 surviving manuscripts
from the period. Oral tradition was very strong in early English culture and most literary works
were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular, and some, including
Beowulf, have survived to the present day. Beowulf is the most famous work in Old English and
has achieved national epic status in England, despite being set in Scandinavia.
Nearly all Anglo-Saxon authors are anonymous: twelve are known by name from medieval
sources, but only four of those are known by their vernacular works with any certainty:
Cædmon, Bede, Alfred the Great, and Cynewulf. Cædmon is the earliest English poet whose
name is known. Cædmon's only known surviving work is Cædmon's Hymn, which probably
dates from the late 7th century.
Chronicles contained a range of historical and literary accounts, and a notable example is the
Anglo-Saxon Chronicle. The poem Battle of Maldon also deals with history. This is the name
given to a work, of uncertain date, celebrating the real Battle of Maldon of 991, at which the
Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent a Viking invasion.

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Classical antiquity was not forgotten in Anglo-Saxon England, and several Old English poems are
adaptations of late classical philosophical texts. The longest is King Alfred's translation of
Boethius' Consolation of Philosophy.

The Conquest of Granada is a Restoration era stage play, a two-part tragedy written by John
Dryden that was first acted in 1670 and 1671 and published in 1672. It is notable both as a
defining example of the "heroic drama" pioneered by Dryden, and as the subject of later satire.

"Sleep and Poetry" (1816) is a poem by the English Romantic poet John Keats. It was started
late one evening while staying the night at Leigh Hunt's cottage. It is often cited as a clear
example of Keats's bower-centric poetry, yet it contains lines that make such a simplistic
reading problematic, such as: "First the realm I'll pass/Of Flora, and old Pan ... I must pass them
for a nobler life,/Where I may find the agonies, the strife /Of human hearts".
Furthermore, Keats defends his early "bower-centric" subject matter, which harkens back to
the classical poetic tradition of Homer and Virgil. Keats mounts an attack against Alexander
Pope and many of his own fellow Romantic poets by downplaying their poetic departures into
the imaginary: "with a puling infant's force/They sway'd about upon a rocking horse,/And
thought it Pegasus. Ah dismal soul'd!" Although written in simplistic rhyming couplets, the
gradual turn towards inwardness serves as an important anticipation for Keats's later poetry.

"Ode on a Grecian Urn" is organized into ten-line stanzas, beginning with an ABAB rhyme
scheme and ending with a Miltonic sestet (1st and 5th stanzas CDEDCE, 2nd stanza CDECED,
and 3rd and 4th stanzas CDECDE). The same overall pattern is used in "Ode on Indolence", "Ode
on Melancholy", and "Ode to a Nightingale" (though their sestet rhyme schemes vary), which
makes the poems unified in structure as well as theme. The word "ode" itself is of Greek origin,
meaning "sung". While ode-writers from antiquity adhered to rigid patterns of strophe,
antistrophe, and epode, the form by Keats's time had undergone enough transformation that it
represented a manner rather than a set method for writing a certain type of lyric poetry.
Keats's odes seek to find a "classical balance" between two extremes, and in the structure of
"Ode on a Grecian Urn", these extremes are the symmetrical structure of classical literature and
the asymmetry of Romantic poetry. The use of the ABAB structure in the beginning lines of each
stanza represents a clear example of structure found in classical literature, and the remaining
six lines appear to break free of the traditional poetic styles of Greek and Roman odes.

Northrop Frye discussed what he termed a "continuum of allegory", a spectrum that ranges
from what he termed the "naive allegory" of the likes of The Faerie Queene, to the more
private allegories of modern paradox literature. In this perspective, the characters in a "naive"
allegory are not fully three-dimensional, for each aspect of their individual personalities and of
the events that befall them embodies some moral quality or other abstraction; the author has
selected the allegory first, and the details merely flesh it out.

Alexander Pope’s most famous poem is The Rape of the Lock, first published in 1712, with a
revised version in 1714. A mock-epic, it satirizes a high-society quarrel between Arabella
Fermor (the “Belinda” of the poem) and Lord Petre, who had snipped a lock of hair from her

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head without permission. The satirical style is tempered, however, by a genuine, almost
voyeuristic interest in the “beau-monde” (fashionable world) of 18th-century society. The
revised, extended version of the poem focuses more clearly on its true subject – the onset of
acquisitive individualism and a society of conspicuous consumers. In the poem, purchased
artefacts displace human agency and “trivial things” come to dominate.

Light Years, published in 1975, is the fourth novel by American writer James Salter.
Viri and Nedra live with their children, Franca and Danny in an idyllic existence in the
countryside. Viri works as an architect in the city, and the couple enjoy hosting dinner for a
variety of friends. The first set of friends while leaving the house after dinner with the couple
are divided in their opinion of the pair, with Peter admiring their semi-bohemian lifestyle, and
Catherine sees Nedra as selfish. Around this same time, the family misplace their new pet
tortoise. While on the outside it seems like family have the perfect life, both Viri and Nedra
conduct affairs, and imagine themselves travelling to Europe and expanding their circle of
friends.
Nedra's father falls ill and dies, with his daughter travelling back to her small home town to say
goodbye shortly before his death, and to clear out his belongings and sell his house. Nedra
vows to herself to never return to this town. With their children now teenagers, and young
adults, the pair finally travels to England. Though appearing content, Nedra indicates that things
will change for the couple when they return from their holiday. The following year the couple
divorce, and Nedra leaves again for Europe, having a number of encounters with other single
men. Viri is left stunned, remaining in the house with his children that have started to make
lives of their own.
Nedra returns to the USA for Danny's wedding, taking a flat in the city and trying to enter the
arts world, encountering a disciplined theatre troupe that she tries to join, and is rejected for
being too old. She continues to conduct affairs.
Peter falls ill with a rare terminal illness, bringing both Viri and Nedra to see Peter and
Catherine more frequently before he finally dies. Both in their late forties, both reflect on their
lives, separately concluding that the biggest confirmation of their identity and that they have
made their mark, are their children. To everyone's surprise, Viri sells the house.
Nedra dies in the same manner as her father. After her funeral, Viri travels back to where the
house was and in the field adjoining, finds the tortoise lost so long previously, still alive. He
comes to understand his place in his life, and feels ready to face the rest of his life.

Annus Mirabilis is a poem written by John Dryden published in 1667. It commemorated 1665–
1666, the "year of miracles" of London. Despite the poem's name, the year had been one of
great tragedy, including the Great Fire of London. The title was perhaps meant to suggest that
the events of the year could have been worse. Dryden wrote the poem while at
Charlton in Wiltshire, where he went to escape one of the great events of the year: the Great
Plague of London.

Gramsci is best known for his theory of Cultural Hegemony, which describes how the state and
ruling capitalist class – the bourgeoisie – use cultural institutions to maintain power in capitalist
societies. The bourgeoisie, in Gramsci's view, develops a hegemonic culture using ideology,

39
rather than violence, economic force, or coercion. Hegemonic culture propagates its own
values and norms so that they become the "common sense" values of all and thus maintain the
status quo. Cultural hegemony is therefore used to maintain consent to the capitalist order,
rather than the use of force to maintain order. This cultural hegemony is produced and
reproduced by the dominant class through the institutions that form the superstructure.

Postmodern Philosophy is a philosophical movement that arose in the second half of the 20th
century as a critical response to assumptions allegedly present in modernist philosophical
ideas regarding culture, identity, history, or language that were developed during the 18th-
century Enlightenment. Postmodernist thinkers developed concepts like difference,
repetition, trace, and hyperreality to subvert "grand narratives", univocity of being, and
epistemic certainty. Postmodern philosophy questions the importance of power relationships,
personalization, and discourse in the "construction" of truth and world views. Many
postmodernists appear to deny that an objective reality exists, and appear to deny that there
are objective moral values.
Jean-François Lyotard defined philosophical postmodernism in The Postmodern Condition,
writing "Simplifying to the extreme, I define postmodern as incredulity towards meta
narratives...." where what he means by metanarrative is something like a unified, complete,
universal, and epistemically certain story about everything that is. Postmodernists reject
metanarratives because they reject the conceptualization of truth that metanarratives
presuppose. Postmodernist philosophers in general argue that truth is always contingent on
historical and social context rather than being absolute and universal and that truth is always
partial and "at issue" rather than being complete and certain.
Postmodern philosophy is often particularly skeptical about simple binary oppositions
characteristic of structuralism, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher cleanly
distinguishing knowledge from ignorance, social progress from reversion, dominance from
submission, good from bad, and presence from absence. But, for the same reasons,
postmodern philosophy should often be particularly skeptical about the complex spectral
characteristics of things, emphasizing the problem of the philosopher again cleanly
distinguishing concepts, for a concept must be understood in the context of its opposite, such
as existence and nothingness, normality and abnormality, speech and writing, and the like.

The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections is a 1987 novel by Nobel laureate V. S. Naipaul.
Mostly an autobiography, the book is composed of five sections that reflect the growing
familiarity and changing perceptions of Naipaul upon his arrival in various countries after
leaving his native Trinidad and Tobago. Most of the action of the novel takes place in Wiltshire,
England, where Naipaul has rented a cottage in the countryside. On first arriving, he sees the
area surrounding his cottage as a frozen piece of history, unchanged for hundreds of years.
However, as his stay at the cottage where he is working on another book becomes extended, he
begins to see the area for what it is: a constantly changing place with ordinary people simply
living lives away from the rest of the world. This causes Naipaul to reflect upon the nature of
our perceptions of our surroundings and how much these perceptions are affected by our own
pre-conceptions of a place.
He re-examines his own emigration from Trinidad to New York City, and his subsequent

40
removal to England and Oxford. Naipaul's narration illustrates the growing understanding of his
place in this new environment and the intricate relations of the people and the land around
them.

Bama (born 1958), also known as Bama Faustina Soosairaj, is a Tamil Dalit feminist, committed
teacher and novelist. She rose to fame with her autobiographical novel Karukku (1992), which
chronicles the joys and sorrows experienced by Dalit Christian women in Tamil Nadu. She
subsequently wrote two more novels, Sangati (1994) and Vanmam (2002) along with three
collections of short stories: Kusumbukkaran (1996) and Oru Tattvum Erumaiyum (2003),
'Kandattam'(2009). In addition to this she has written twenty short stories.

The World Is Full of Married Men is the debut novel of British author Jackie Collins, first
published in 1968. Set in London in the swinging sixties, middle-aged advertising executive
David Cooper cheats on his wife Linda. When he meets the young and beautiful Claudia Parker,
David wants to marry her. However, Claudia has different ideas; she wants to be a model, an
actress, and a star. When Linda finds out about the affair she ends the marriage and files
for divorce.
At first protesting, David finally relents and moves into an apartment with Claudia. After six
months however, the pair are sick of each other and now that the divorce is finalized, Linda has
started seeing Hollywood film producer Jay Grossman. Realizing his mistake in letting Linda go,
David fails to win her back and falls into an alcoholic stupor that renders him virtually impotent
and only able to perform with his mousy spinster secretary, Miss Fields, who ultimately falls
pregnant with his child.

Historical Fiction is a literary genre in which the plot takes place in a setting located in the past.
Although the term is commonly used as a synonym for the historical romance, it can also be
applied to other types of narrative, including theatre, opera, cinema, and television, as well
as video games and graphic novels.
An essential element of historical fiction is that it is set in the past and pays attention to the
manners, social conditions and other details of the depicted period. Authors also frequently
choose to explore notable historical figures in these settings, allowing readers to better
understand how these individuals might have responded to their environments. Works of
historical fiction are sometimes criticized for lack of authenticity because of readerly
criticism or genre expectations for accurate period details. This tension between historical
authenticity, or historicity, and fiction frequently becomes a point of comment for readers and
popular critics, while scholarly criticism frequently goes beyond this commentary, investigating
the genre for its other thematic and critical interests.
Historical fiction as a contemporary Western literary genre has its foundations in the early-
19th-century works of Sir Walter Scott and his contemporaries in other national literatures such
as the Frenchman Honoré de Balzac, the American James Fenimore Cooper, and later the
Russian Leo Tolstoy. However, the melding of "historical" and "fiction" in individual works of
literature has a long tradition in most cultures; both western traditions (as early as Ancient
Greek and Latin literature) as well as Eastern, in the form of oral and folk traditions, which
produced epics, novels, plays and other fictional works describing history for contemporary

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audiences.

The Better Man is a 2000 novel by Anita Nair. It is set in the northern part of Kerala, India, a
region known as Malabar under the British Raj.
Mukundan, retired from government service, returns to the village of Kaikurussi where he was
born. He is upset, viewing his life as a failure. He meets "One-screw-loose-Bhasi", a local
eccentric, a housepainter and an inventor of an odd system of alternative medicine. He helps
Mukundan transform himself.
Then Power House Ramakrishnan, a locally important man, decides to build a Community hall,
and selects Bhasi's land. He threatens to destroy Bhasi's business if he refuses to sell the land.
Mukundan intends to save Bhasi's land but is flattered into accepting membership on the
project committee. Then Mukundan's father dies, and he undergoes a deeper transformation.

Tagore's experiences with drama began when he was sixteen, with his brother Jyotirindranath.
He wrote his first original dramatic piece when he was twenty — Valmiki Pratibha which was
shown at the Tagore's mansion. Tagore stated that his works sought to articulate "the play of
feeling and not of action". In 1890 he wrote Visarjan (an adaptation of his novella Rajarshi),
which has been regarded as his finest drama. In the original Bengali language, such works
included intricate subplots and extended monologues. Later, Tagore's dramas used more
philosophical and allegorical themes. The play Dak Ghar (The Post Office; 1912), describes the
child Amal defying his stuffy and puerile confines by ultimately "fall[ing] asleep", hinting his
physical death. A story with borderless appeal—gleaning rave reviews in Europe—Dak
Ghar dealt with death as, in Tagore's words, "spiritual freedom" from "the world of hoarded
wealth and certified creeds". Another is Tagore's Chandalika (Untouchable Girl), which was
modelled on an ancient Buddhist legend describing how Ananda, the Gautama Buddha's
disciple, asks a tribal girl for water. Raktakarabi ("Red" or "Blood Oleanders") is an allegorical
struggle against a kleptocrat king who rules over the residents of Yaksha puri.
Chitrangada, Chandalika, and Shyama are other key plays that have dance-drama adaptations,
which together are known as Rabindra Nritya Natya.

Taledanda (Hindi: रक्त कल्याण , literally: Death by Beheading) is a 1990 Kannada-language

play written by Girish Karnad, an eminent person in Kannada literature, about the rise of the
radical protest and reform movement, Lingaytism, in 12th century Karnataka. He was awarded
the Karnataka Sahitya Academy Award (1993) and the Sahitya Akademi Award in Kannada
language for the play in 1994, and later awarded the Jnanpith Award for his literature work in
1998.
The play was written in 1989 in the backdrop of mandir-mandal conflict, the drama draws
parallel between the Socio-Religious, Political and Economic condition of existing times and
southern India in the 12th century A.D. during Bhakti Movement. Eight hundred years ago in
the city of Kalyan a man called Basavanna assembled a congregation of poets,
mystics, social revolutionaries and philosophers, unmatched for their creativity and social
commitment in the history of Karnataka, even perhaps of India itself. They opposed idolatry,
rejected temple worship, upheld equality of sexes, and condemned the caste system.
Basavanna was leading the movement to remove gender inequality and caste system. But the

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event took a violent turn when they acted on their beliefs and a Brahmin girl married a
cobbler's son, so called a 'low caste' boy. The movement ended in bloodshed so does the hopes
of Basavanna died in despair. People too forgot the movement.
Rakt Kalyan (Tale-Danda) deals with few weeks during which a vibrant, prosperous society
plunged into anarchy and terror.

Tughlaq is a 1964 Indian Kannada language play written by Girish Karnad. The thirteen-scene
play is set during the reign of Muhammad bin Tughlaq. It was first staged in Urdu in 1966, as a
student production at National School of Drama. Most famously, it was staged at Purana Qila,
Delhi in 1972. In 1970, it was enacted in English in Mumbai. Tughlaq, a 13-scene play been
written by Girish Karnad focusing on the 14th century Turko-Indian ruler is both a historical play
as well as a commentary on the contemporary politics of the 1960s. The Times of India
comments: "In the play, the protagonist, Tughlaq, is portrayed as having great ideas and a
grand vision, but his reign was an abject failure. He started his rule with great ideals of a unified
India, but his degenerated into anarchy and his kingdom."

Ethnic Studies, in the United States, is the interdisciplinary study of difference—chiefly race,
ethnicity, and nation, but also sexuality, gender, and other such markings—and power, as
expressed by the state, by civil society, and by individuals. “The unhyphenated-American
phenomenon tends to have colonial characteristics,” notes Jeffrey Herlihy-Mera in After
American Studies: Rethinking the Legacies of Transnational Exceptionalism: “English-language
texts and their authors are promoted as representative; a piece of cultural material may be
understood as unhyphenated—and thus archetypal—only when authors meet certain
demographic criteria; any deviation from these demographic or cultural prescriptions are
subordinated to hyphenated status.” As opposed to International studies, which was originally
created to focus on the relations between the United States and Third World Countries, Ethnic
studies was created to challenge the already existing curriculum and focus on the history of
people of different minority ethnicity in the United States. Ethnic studies is an academic field
that spans the humanities and the social sciences; it emerged as an academic field in the
second half of the 20th century partly in response to charges that traditional social science and
humanities disciplines such as anthropology, history, literature, sociology, political
science, cultural studies, and area studies were conceived from an
inherently Eurocentric perspective. During this time, educator and historian W. E. B. Du
Bois expressed the need for teaching black history. However, Ethnic Studies became widely
known as a secondary issue that arose after the civil rights era. Ethnic studies was originally
conceived to re-frame the way that specific disciplines had told the stories, histories, struggles
and triumphs of people of color on what was seen to be their own terms. In recent years, it has
broadened its focus to include questions of representation, racialization, racial formation
theory, and more determinedly interdisciplinary topics and approaches.

In The Stars Change, author Mary Anne Mohanraj presents a multi-layered, thought-provoking,
and far-reaching work on sexuality and the connections between people - whether male or
female, human or alien. The Stars Change is part space opera, part literary mosaic of story,
poem, and art. It is fitting that a book that emphasizes the power of community was funded
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through Kickstarter. Begun as a project entitled "Demi Monde", The Stars Change is the result
of the money raised by supporters that went to pay for not only the art and illustrations in the
book, but the author's time, allowing her to focus on writing for that crucial interval.

Historiography is the study of the methods of historians in developing history as an academic

discipline, and by extension is any body of historical work on a particular subject. The
historiography of a specific topic covers how historians have studied that topic using particular
sources, techniques, and theoretical approaches. Beginning in the nineteenth century, with the
development of academic history, there developed a body of historiographic literature. The
extent to which historians are influenced by their own groups and loyalties—such as to their
nation state—remains a debated question.

IMPORTANT TERMS
1. Alliteration. The repetition of consonance in the beginning of a sentence.
2. Assonance. The repetition of vowels in the beginning of a sentence.
3. Allusion: references fr0m historic events, pers0nality or place.
4. Dialect: the different pronounciati0n of the word.
5. Free verse: a poem having no regular meter and no rhyming scheme.
6. Blank verse. A poem having regular meter but n0 rhyming scheme.
7.Poetry. Best words in best orders
8. Ballad. A narrative poem compose of quatrains. OR a narrative poem having a story of hero
and events.
9. Sonnet. A poem of 14 lines with rhyming scheme ABAB.
10.Hymn. A poem in which we praise God.
11. Couplet. Two lines having same rhyming scheme.
12. Wit. the act of loosing senses.
13. Paradox. Self contradictory statement.
14. Conceit. It is a figure of speech in two vastly different objects are linked together with the
help of simile or metaphor.
15. Allegory. A literary term that is used to reveal hidden meanings.
16. Lyric. A poetry which used for music.
17. Epic. A l0ng narrative poem which describe the st0ry of hero. Like Rape Of The Lock,
Paradise Lost.
18. Acrostic Poem. A poem in which first letter of each line form a word.
19. Cinquin. A poem which has five lines stanza. It has no rhyming scheme.
20. Classicism. A poetry which includes Greek And Latin civilizations.
21.Ode. A poem that can be sung like a s0ng.
22. Elegy. A poem of sorrows.
23. Pastoral. Song of shepherd.
24. Metaphysical. A spiritual and imaginary poetry. Beyond imagination.
25. Metaphor. Comparison without using like, as.
26. Simile. Comparison using words like, as
27. Accent. The tone of the speaker.
28. Protagonist. The hero of the novel or drama.

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29. Antagonist. Villain of drama.
30. Irony. A speech having intended meanings different from actuality.
31. Hubris. Excessive pride.
32. Satire. to criticize someone's traits, behavior etc
33. Renaissance. Era of 14th century to 17th century. Rebirth of knowledge, literature etc.
34. Mock Epic. A long narrative poem based on criticism in a humored way like Rape Of The
Lock.
35. Hyperbole. Extreme exaggeration to increase the influence.
36. Paradox. Self contradictory statement.
37. Oxymoron. Two opposite words or ideas that are joined together, like OPEN SECRET,
TRAGIC C0MEDY.
38. Dactylic. A word of three syllables one long & two short.
39. Etymology. The devel0pment of any w0rd in respect to its historical background meanings.
40. Iambic Pentameter. A line of verse with five metrical feet , each consisting of one short
syllable followed by one long syllable. For example: Two household.

Comparative Literature is an academic field dealing with the study of literature and cultural
expression across linguistic, national, geographic, and disciplinary boundaries. Comparative
literature “performs a role similar to that of the study of international relations but works with
languages and artistic traditions, so as to understand cultures ‘from the inside'". While most
frequently practiced with works of different languages, comparative literature may also be
performed on works of the same language if the works originate from different nations or
cultures in which that language is spoken. The characteristically intercultural and transnational
field of comparative literature concerns itself with the relation between literature, broadly
defined, and other spheres of human activity, including history, politics, philosophy, art,
and science. Unlike other forms of literary study, comparative literature places its emphasis on
the interdisciplinary analysis of social and cultural production within the “economy, political
dynamics, cultural movements, historical shifts, religious differences, the urban environment,
international relations, public policy, and the sciences”.

Alexander Pope (21 May 1688 – 30 May 1744) was an English poet and satirist of the
Augustan period and one of its greatest artistic exponents. Considered the foremost English
poet of the early 18th century and a master of the heroic couplet, he is best known for satirical
and discursive poetry, including The Rape of the Lock, The Dunciad, and An Essay on
Criticism, and for his translation of Homer. After Shakespeare, he is the second-most quoted
author in The Oxford Dictionary of Quotations, some of his verses having entered common
parlance (e.g. "damning with faint praise" or "to err is human; to forgive, divine").

Sonnet 154
As the last in the famed collection of sonnets written by English poet and playwright William
Shakespeare from 1592 to 1598, Sonnet 154 is most often thought of in a pair with the
previous sonnet, number 153. As A. L. Rowse states in Shakespeare's Sonnets: The Problems
Solved, Sonnets 153 and 154 "are not unsuitably placed as a kind of coda to the Dark Lady
Sonnets, to which they relate."

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Rowse calls attention to the fact that Sonnets 153 and 154 "serve quite well to round off the
affair Shakespeare had with Emilia, the woman characterized as the Dark Lady, and the section
of the Dark Lady sonnets". Shakespeare used Greek mythology to address love and despair in
relationships. The material in Sonnets 153 and 154 has been shown to relate to the six-line
epigram by the Byzantine poet known as Marianus Scholasticus, who published a collection of
3,500 poems called The Greek Anthology. When translated, the epigram resembles Sonnets 153
and 154, addressing love and the story of Cupid, the torch, and the Nymph's attempt to
extinguish the torch.

Shakespeare’s Sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that swept
through the Renaissance from Petrarchan 14th-century Italy and was finally introduced in 16th-
century England by Thomas Wyatt and was given its rhyming meter and division into quatrains
by Henry Howard. With few exceptions, Shakespeare’s sonnets observe the stylistic form of the
English sonnet—the rhyme scheme, the 14 lines, and the meter. Instead of expressing
worshipful love for an almost goddess-like yet unobtainable female love-object, as
Petrarch, Dante, and Philip Sidney had done, Shakespeare introduces a young man. He also
introduces the Dark Lady, who is no goddess. Shakespeare explores themes such as lust,
homoeroticism, misogyny, infidelity, and acrimony in ways that may challenge, but which also
open new terrain for the sonnet form.

Auden published about four hundred poems, including seven long poems (two of them book-
length). His poetry was encyclopedic in scope and method, ranging in style from obscure
twentieth-century modernism to the lucid traditional forms such as ballads and limericks,
from doggerel through haiku and villanelles to a "Christmas Oratorio" and a baroque eclogue in
Anglo-Saxon meters. The tone and content of his poems ranged from pop-song clichés to
complex philosophical meditations, from the corns on his toes to atoms and stars, from
contemporary crises to the evolution of society.
He also wrote more than four hundred essays and reviews about literature, history, politics,
music, religion, and many other subjects. He collaborated on plays with Christopher
Isherwood and on opera libretti with Chester Kallman.
Auden controversially rewrote or discarded some of his most famous poems when he prepared
his later collected editions. He wrote that he rejected poems that he found “boring” or
“dishonest” in the sense that they expressed views he had never held but had used only
because he felt they would be rhetorically effective. His rejected poems include “Spain” and
“September 1, 1939”. His literary executor, Edward Mendelson, argues in his introduction
to Selected Poems that Auden’s practice reflected his sense of the persuasive power of poetry
and his reluctance to misuse it. (Selected Poems includes some poems that Auden rejected and
early texts of poems that he revised.)

The Cocktail Party

Edward and Lavinia Chamberlayne are separated after five years of marriage. She has left
Edward just as they are about to host a cocktail party at their London home, and he has to
come up with an explanation for why Lavinia is not present, in order to keep up social
appearances. Lavinia is brought back by a mysterious Unidentified Guest at the party, who

46
turns out to be a psychiatrist whom Edward and Lavinia both consult. They each learn that they
have been deceiving themselves and must face life’s realities. They learn that their life together,
though hollow and superficial, is preferable to life apart. This message is difficult for the play’s
third main character, Celia, Edward’s mistress, to accept. She, with the psychiatrist’s urging,
also moves on towards a life of greater honesty and salvation and becomes a Christian martyr
in Africa. Two years later, Edward and Lavinia, now better adjusted, host another cocktail party.

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", commonly known as "Prufrock", is the first
professionally published poem by American-born British poet T. S. Eliot. Eliot began writing
"Prufrock" in February 1910, and it was first published in the June 1915 issue of Poetry: A
Magazine of Verse at the instigation of Ezra Pound. It was later printed as part of a twelve-
poem pamphlet (or chapbook) titled Prufrock and Other Observations in 1917. At the time of its
publication, Prufrock was considered outlandish, but is now seen as heralding a paradigmatic
cultural shift from late 19th-century Romantic verse and Georgian lyrics to Modernism.

Agnes Grey, A Novel is the debut novel of English author Anne Brontë (writing under the pen
name of "Acton Bell"), first published in December 1847, and republished in a second edition in
1850. The novel follows Agnes Grey, a governess, as she works within families of the English
gentry. Scholarship and comments by Anne's sister Charlotte Brontë suggest the novel is largely
based on Anne Brontë's own experiences as a governess for five years. Like her sister
Charlotte's 1847 novel Jane Eyre, it addresses what the precarious position of governess
entailed and how it affected a young woman.

Under the Greenwood Tree: A Rural Painting of the Dutch School is a novel by the English
writer Thomas Hardy, published anonymously in 1872. It was Hardy's second published novel,
and the first of what was to become his series of Wessex novels. Critics recognize it as an
important precursor to his later tragic works, setting the scene for the Wessex that the author
would return to again and again. Hardy himself called the story of the Mellstock Quire and
its west-gallery musicians "a fairly true picture, at first hand, of the personages, ways, and
customs which were common among such orchestral bodies in the villages of [the 1850s]."

Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights was first published in London in 1847 by Thomas Cautley
Newby, appearing as the first two volumes of a three-volume set that included Anne
Brontë's Agnes Grey. The authors were printed as being Ellis and Acton Bell; Emily's real name
did not appear until 1850, when it was printed on the title page of an edited commercial
edition. The novel's innovative structure somewhat puzzled critics.
Wuthering Heights's violence and passion led the Victorian public and many early reviewers to
think that it had been written by a man. According to Juliet Gardiner, "the vivid sexual passion
and power of its language and imagery impressed, bewildered and appalled reviewers." Literary
critic Thomas Joudrey further contextualizes this reaction: "Expecting in the wake of Charlotte
Brontë's Jane Eyre to be swept up in an earnest Bildungsroman, they were instead shocked and
confounded by a tale of unchecked primal passions, replete with savage cruelty and outright
barbarism." Even though the novel received mixed reviews when it first came out, and was
often condemned for its portrayal of amoral passion, the book subsequently became an English

47
literary classic. Emily Brontë never knew the extent of fame she achieved with her only novel,
as she died a year after its publication, aged 30. Although a letter from her publisher indicates
that Emily had begun to write a second novel, the manuscript has never been found. Perhaps
Emily or a member of her family eventually destroyed the manuscript, if it existed, when she
was prevented by illness from completing it. It has also been suggested that, though less likely,
the letter could have been intended for Anne Brontë, who was already writing The Tenant of
Wildfell Hall, her second novel.

Brontë's first manuscript, 'The Professor', did not secure a publisher, although she was
heartened by an encouraging response from Smith, Elder & Co. of Cornhill, who expressed an
interest in any longer works Currer Bell might wish to send. Brontë responded by finishing and
sending a second manuscript in August 1847. Six weeks later, Jane Eyre was published. It tells
the story of a plain governess, Jane, who, after difficulties in her early life, falls in love with her
employer, Mr Rochester. They marry, but only after Rochester's insane first wife, of whom Jane
initially has no knowledge, dies in a dramatic house fire. The book's style was innovative,
combining Romanticism, naturalism with gothic melodrama, and broke new ground in being
written from an intensely evoked first-person female perspective. Brontë believed art was most
convincing when based on personal experience; in Jane Eyre she transformed the experience
into a novel with universal appeal.
Jane Eyre had immediate commercial success and initially received favourable reviews. G. H.
Lewes wrote that it was "an utterance from the depths of a struggling, suffering, much-
enduring spirit", and declared that it consisted of "suspiria de profundis!" (sighs from the
depths). Speculation about the identity and gender of the mysterious Currer Bell heightened
with the publication of Wuthering Heights by Ellis Bell (Emily) and Agnes Grey by Acton Bell
(Anne). Accompanying the speculation was a change in the critical reaction to Brontë's work, as
accusations were made that the writing was "coarse", a judgement more readily made once it
was suspected that Currer Bell was a woman. However, sales of Jane Eyre continued to be
strong and may even have increased as a result of the novel developing a reputation as an
"improper" book. A talented amateur artist, Brontë personally did the drawings for the second
edition of Jane Eyre and in the summer of 1834 two of her paintings were shown at an
exhibition by the Royal Northern Society for the Encouragement of the Fine Arts in Leeds.

The Shepheard’s Calender was Edmund Spenser's first major poetic work, published in 1579. In
emulation of Virgil's first work, the Eclogues, Spenser wrote this series of pastorals at the
commencement of his career. However, Spenser's models were rather the Renaissance
eclogues of Mantuanus. The title, like the entire work, is written using deliberately archaic
spellings, in order to suggest a connection to medieval literature, and to Geoffrey Chaucer in
particular. The poem introduces Colin Clout, a folk character originated by John Skelton, and
depicts his life as a shepherd through the twelve months of the year.
The Calendar encompasses considerable formal innovations, anticipating the even more
virtuosic Countess of Pembroke's Arcadia (The "Old" Arcadia, 1580), the classic pastoral
romance by Sir Philip Sidney, with whom Spenser was acquainted. It is also remarkable for the
extensive commentary included with the work in its first publication, ascribed to an "E.K." E.K. is
an intelligent, very subtle, and often deeply ironic commentator, who is sometimes assumed to

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be an alias of Spenser himself. The term sarcasm is first recorded in English in Spenser's poem.

Alexander's Feast, or the Power of Music (1697) is an ode by John Dryden. It was written to
celebrate Saint Cecilia's Day. Jeremiah Clarke set the original ode to music, but the score is now
lost.
The main body of the poem describes the feast given by Alexander the Great at the Persian
capital Persepolis, after his defeat of Darius. Alexander's bard Timotheus sings praises of him.
Alexander's emotions are manipulated by the singer's poetry and music. Timotheus glorifies
him as a god, puffing up Alexander's pride. He then sings of the pleasures of wine, encouraging
Alexander to drink. Seeing Alexander becoming too boisterous, he sings of the sad death of
Darius; the king becomes quiet. He then lauds the beauty of Thaïs, Alexander's lover, making
the king's heart melt. Finally, he encourages feelings of anger and vengeance, causing Thaïs and
Alexander to burn down the Persian palace in revenge for Persia's previous outrages against
Greece.
The poem then moves ahead in time to describe Saint Cecilia, "inventress of the vocal frame",
who is traditionally supposed to have created the first organ and to have institutedChristian
sacred music. The poem concludes that while Timotheus "Raised a mortal to the skies, / She
drew an angel down".
George Frideric Handel composed a choralwork, also called Alexander's Feast, set to a libretto
by Newburgh Hamilton which was closely based on the ode by Dryden.

The Ur-Hamlet (the German prefix Ur- means "original") is a play by an unknown author,
thought to be either Thomas Kyd or William Shakespeare. No copy of the play, dated by
scholars to the second half of 1587, survives today. The play was staged in London, more
specifically at The Burbages' Shoreditch Playhouse as recalled by Elizabethan author Thomas
Lodge. It includes a character named Hamlet; the only other known character from the play is a
ghost who, according to Thomas Lodge in his 1596 publication Wits Misery and the Worlds
Madnesse, cries, "Hamlet, revenge!"

Abdulrazak Gurnah (born 20 Dec. 1948) is a Zanzibar-born novelist who is based in the United
Kingdom. He was born in the Sultanate of Zanzibar and came to the UK as a refugee in the
1960s during the Zanzibar Revolution. His novels include Paradise (1994), which
was shortlisted for both the Booker and the Whitbread Prize; Desertion (2005); and By the
Sea (2001), which was longlisted for the Booker and shortlisted for the Los Angeles Times Book
Prize. Gurnah was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2021 “for his uncompromising and
compassionate penetration of the effects of colonialism and the fates of the refugee in the gulf
between cultures and continents”.
He has published ten novels and a number of short stories. The theme of the refugee’s
disruption runs throughout his work. He began writing as a 21-year-old in English exile, and
even though Swahili was his first language, English became his literary tool. He has said that in
Zanzibar, his access to literature in Swahili was virtually nil and his earliest writing could not
strictly be counted as literature. Arabic and Persian poetry, especially The Arabian Nights, were
an early and significant wellspring for him, as were the Quran’s surahs. But the English-language
tradition, from Shakespeare to V. S. Naipaul, would especially mark his work. That said, it must
49
be stressed that he consciously breaks with convention, upending the colonial perspective to
highlight that of the indigenous populations. Thus, his novel Desertion (2005) about a love affair
becomes a blunt contradiction to what he has called “the imperial romance”, where a
conventionally European hero returns home from romantic escapades abroad, upon which the
story reaches its inevitable, tragic resolution. In Gurnah, the tale continues on African soil and
never actually ends.

Transcendentalism is a philosophical movement that developed in the late 1820s and 1830s in
the eastern United States. A core belief is in the inherent goodness of people and nature, and
while society and its institutions have corrupted the purity of the individual, people are at their
best when truly "self-reliant" and independent. Transcendentalists saw divine experience
inherent in the everyday, rather than believing in a distant heaven. Transcendentalists saw
physical and spiritual phenomena as part of dynamic processes rather than discrete entities.
Transcendentalism emphasizes subjective intuition over objective empiricism. Adherents
believe that individuals are capable of generating completely original insights with little
attention and deference to past masters. It arose as a reaction, to protest against the general
state of intellectualism and spirituality at the time.
Transcendentalism emerged from "English and German Romanticism, the Biblical criticism
of Johann Gottfried Herder and Friedrich Schleiermacher, the skepticism of David Hume", and
the transcendental philosophy of Immanuel Kant and German Idealism. It was also strongly
influenced by Hindu texts on philosophy of the mind and spirituality, especially the Upanishads.

The Solitary Reaper is one of Wordsworth's most famous post-Lyrical Ballads lyrics. The words
of the reaper's song are incomprehensible to the speaker, so his attention is free to focus on
the tone, expressive beauty and the blissful mood it creates in him. The poem functions to
"praise the beauty of music and its fluid expressive beauty", the "spontaneous overflow of
powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility" that Wordsworth
identified at the heart of poetry. The poet orders or requests his listeners to behold a young
maiden reaping and singing to herself. The poet says that anyone passing by should either stop
or gently pass as not to disturb her. There is a controversy however over the importance of the
reaper along with Nature. It was published in Poems, in Two Volumes in 1807.

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

The speaker says that, wandering like a cloud floating above hills and valleys, he encountered a
field of daffodils beside a lake. The dancing, fluttering flowers stretched endlessly along the
shore, and though the waves of the lake danced beside the flowers, the daffodils outdid the
water in glee. The speaker says that a poet could not help but be happy in such a joyful
company of flowers. He says that he stared and stared, but did not realize what wealth the
scene would bring him. For now, whenever he feels “vacant” or “pensive,” the memory flashes
upon “that inward eye / That is the bliss of solitude,” and his heart fills with pleasure, “and
dances with the daffodils.”

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is a collection of illustrated poems by William Blake. It

appeared in two phases: a few first copies were printed and illuminated by Blake himself in

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1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs
of Innocence and of Experience Shewing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. Blake was
also a painter before the creation of Songs of Innocence and Experience and had painted such
subjects as Oberon, Titania, and Puck dancing with fairies.
"Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-
mythic states of "Paradise" and "Fall". Often, interpretations of this collection center around a
mythical dualism, where "Innocence" represents the "unfallen world" and "Experience"
represents the "fallen world". Blake categorizes our modes of perception that tend to
coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a state
of protected innocence rather than original sin, but not immune to the fallen world and its
institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes
known through "experience", a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear
and inhibition, by social and political corruption and by the manifold oppression of Church,
State and the ruling classes. The volumes' "Contrary States" are sometimes signaled by patently
repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow;
in Innocence, The Lamb, The Fly and The Tyger. The stark simplicity of poems such as The
Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boy display Blake's acute sensibility to the realities of
poverty and exploitation that accompanied the "Dark Satanic Mills" of the Industrial Revolution.

A Sonnet is a poetic form which originated in the Italian poetry composed at the Court of
the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick II in Palermo, Sicily. The 13th-century poet
and notary Giacomo da Lentini is credited with the sonnet's invention for expressing courtly
love. The Sicilian School of poets who surrounded him at the Emperor's Court are credited with
its spread. The earliest sonnets, however, no longer survive in the original Sicilian language, but
only after being translated into Tuscan dialect.
The term sonnet is derived from the Italian word sonetto (lit. "little song", derived from the
Latin word sonus, meaning a sound). By the 13th century it signified a poem of fourteen lines
that follows a very strict rhyme scheme and structure.
According to Christopher Blum, during the Renaissance, the sonnet was the "choice mode of
expressing romantic love." As the sonnet form has spread to languages other than Italian,
however, conventions have changed considerably and any subject is now considered
acceptable for writers of sonnets, who are sometimes called "sonneteers," although the term
can be used derisively.

The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (First Folio title: The Tragedie of Ivlivs Cæsar) is a history play
and tragedy by William Shakespeare first performed in 1599. Although the play is named Julius
Caesar, Brutus speaks more than four times as many lines as the title character, and the central
psychological drama of the play focuses on Brutus. Brutus joins a conspiracy led by Cassius to
murder Julius Caesar, to prevent Caesar becoming a tyrant. Antony stirs up hostility against the
conspirators. Rome becomes embroiled in civil war.

Annus Mirabilis is a poem written by John Dryden published in 1667. It commemorated 1665–
1666, the "year of miracles" of London. Despite the poem's name, the year had been one of
great tragedy, including the Great Fire of London. The title was perhaps meant to suggest that

51
the events of the year could have been worse. Dryden wrote the poem while
at Charlton in Wiltshire, where he went to escape one of the great events of the year: the Great
Plague of London.
The poem contains 1216 lines of verse, arranged in 304 quatrains. Each line consists of ten
syllables, and each quatrain follows an ABAB rhyme scheme, a pattern referred to as
a decasyllabic quatrain. Rather than write in the heroic couplets found in his earlier works,
Dryden used the decasyllabic quatrain exemplified in Sir John Davies' poem Nosce Teipsum in
1599. The style was revived by William Davenant in his poem Gondibert, which was published
in 1651 and influenced Dryden's composition of Annus Mirabilis. This particular style dictates
that each quatrain should contain a full stop, which A. W. Ward believes causes the verse to
become "prosy".

Shakespeare’s sonnets are considered a continuation of the sonnet tradition that swept
through the Renaissance from Petrarchin 14th-century Italy and was finally introduced in 16th-
century England byThomas Wyatt and was given its rhyming metre and division into quatrains
by Henry Howard. With few exceptions, Shakespeare’s sonnets observe the stylistic form of the
English sonnet—the rhyme scheme, the 14 lines, and the metre. But Shakespeare’s sonnets
introduce such significant departures of content that they seem to be rebelling against well-
worn 200-year-old traditions.

Instead of expressing worshipful love for an almost goddess-like yet unobtainable female love-
object, as Petrarch, Dante, and Philip Sidney had done, Shakespeare introduces a young man.
He also introduces the Dark Lady, who is no goddess. Shakespeare explores themes such as lust,
homoeroticism, misogyny, infidelity, and acrimony in ways that may challenge, but which also
open new terrain for the sonnet form.

There are many different ways of understanding Dryden's poem Absalom and Achitophel. The
most common reading compares "the connections between fatherhood and kingship". Through
biblical allusions Dryden connects ancient fatherhood with current events not only to show a
precedent, but also to show how it connects with a royal's responsibilities. Dryden uses the
fatherly indulgence of David (lines 31-33) to explore the legitimacy of Absalom's succession.
Dryden uses an old story, The Prodigal Son, to create a clear picture of how self-indulgent love
creates unfair conflict. Throughout the poem the relationship of fatherhood and kingship is
united.
Another way of reading Dryden's poem is through a "mother plot." Susan Greenfield proposes
that the mentions of maternity and women are an important part of the poem's royalist
resolution. In this reading the blame is transferred to the females, saying that only the female
power of life threatens the political order and should be hindered. It is due to female desires
and a female's ability to create life that the whole mess is created.

Narrative Poetry is a form of poetry that tells a story, often making the voices of a narrator and
characters as well; the entire story is usually written in metered verse. Narrative poems do not
need rhyme. The poems that make up this genre may be short or long, and the story it relates
to may be complex. It is normally dramatic, with objectives, diverse and meter. Narrative

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poems include epics, ballads, idylls, and lays. Some narrative poetry takes the form of a novel in
verse. An example of this is The Ring and the Book by Robert Browning. In the terms of
narrative poetry, a romance is a narrative poem that tells a story of chivalry. Examples include
the Romance of the Rose or Tennyson’s Idylls of the King. Although those examples
use medieval and Arthurian materials, romances may also tell stories from classical mythology.
Sometimes, these short narratives are collected into interrelated groups, as with Chaucer’s The
Canterbury Tales.

"Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood" (also known as

"Ode", "Immortality Ode" or "Great Ode") is a poem by William Wordsworth, completed in
1804 and published in Poems, in Two Volumes (1807). The poem was completed in two parts,
with the first four stanzas written among a series of poems composed in 1802 about childhood.
The first part of the poem was completed on 27 March 1802 and a copy was provided to
Wordsworth's friend and fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who responded with his own
poem, "Dejection: An Ode", in April. The fourth stanza of the ode ends with a question, and
Wordsworth was finally able to answer it with seven additional stanzas completed in early
1804. It was first printed as "Ode" in 1807, and it was not until 1815 that it was edited and
reworked to the version that is currently known, "Ode: Intimations of Immortality".
The poem is an irregular Pindaric ode in 11 stanzas that combines aspects of Coleridge's
Conversation poems, the religious sentiments of the Bible and the works of Saint Augustine,
and aspects of the elegiac and apocalyptic traditions. It is split into three movements: the first
four stanzas discuss death, and the loss of youth and innocence; the second four stanzas
describes how age causes man to lose sight of the divine, and the final three stanzas express
hope that the memory of the divine allow us to sympathies with our fellow man. The poem
relies on the concept of pre-existence, the idea that the soul existed before the body, to
connect children with the ability to witness the divine within nature. As children mature, they
become more worldly and lose this divine vision, and the ode reveals Wordsworth's
understanding of psychological development that is also found in his poems The
Prelude and Tintern Abbey. Wordsworth's praise of the child as the "best philosopher" was
criticized by Coleridge and became the source of later critical discussion.
Modern critics sometimes have referred to Wordsworth's poem as the "Great Ode" and ranked
it among his best poems, but this wasn't always the case. Contemporary reviews of the poem
were mixed, with many reviewers attacking the work or, like Lord Byron, dismissing the work
without analysis. The critics felt that Wordsworth's subject matter was too "low" and some felt
that the emphasis on childhood was misplaced. Among the Romantic poets, most praised
various aspects of the poem however. By the Victorian period, most reviews of the ode were
positive with only John Ruskin taking a strong negative stance against the poem. The poem
continued to be well received into the 20th century, with few exceptions. The majority ranked it
as one of Wordsworth's greatest poems.

Symbolism's style of the static and hieratic adapted less well to narrative fiction than it did to
poetry. Joris-Karl Huysmans' 1884 novel À rebours (English title: Against Nature or Against the
Grain) explored many themes that became associated with the symbolist aesthetic. This novel,
in which very little happens, catalogues the psychology of Des Esseintes, an eccentric,

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reclusive antihero. Oscar Wilde was influenced by the novel as he wrote Salome, and
Huysman's book appears in The Picture of Dorian Gray: the titular character becomes corrupted
after reading the book.
Paul Adam was the most prolific and representative author of symbolist novels. Les Demoiselles
Goubert (1886), co-written with Jean Moréas, is an important transitional work
between naturalism and symbolism. Few symbolists used this form. One exception was Gustave
Kahn, who published Le Roi fou in 1896. In 1892, Georges Rodenbach wrote the short
novel Bruges-la-morte, set in the Flemish town of Bruges, which Rodenbach described as a
dying, medieval city of mourning and quiet contemplation: in a typically symbolist juxtaposition,
the dead city contrasts with the diabolical re-awakening of sexual desire. The cynical,
misanthropic, misogynistic fiction of Jules Barbey d'Aurevilly is sometimes considered
symbolist, as well. Gabriele d'Annunzio wrote his first novels in the symbolist manner.

Surrealism was a cultural movement which developed in Europe in the aftermath of World War
I and was largely influenced by Dada. The movement is best known for its visual
artworks and writings and the juxtaposition of distant realities to activate the unconscious mind
through the imagery. Artists painted unnerving, illogical scenes, sometimes with photographic
precision, creating strange creatures from everyday objects, and developing painting
techniques that allowed the unconscious to express itself. Its aim was, according to
leader André Breton, to “resolve the previously contradictory conditions of dream and reality
into an absolute reality, a super-reality”, or surreality.

Existential Crisis
In the 19th century, Kierkegaard considered that angst and existential despair would appear
when an inherited or borrowed world-view (often of a collective nature) proved unable to
handle unexpected and extreme life-experiences. Nietzsche extended his views to suggest that
the Death of God—the loss of collective faith in religion and traditional morality—created a
more widespread existential crisis for the philosophically aware.
Existential crisis has indeed been seen as the inevitable accompaniment of modernism (c.1890–
1945). Whereas Durkheim saw individual crisis as the by-product of social pathology and a
(partial) lack of collective norms, others have seen existentialism as arising more broadly from
the modernist crisis of the loss of meaning throughout the modern world. Its twin answers
were either a religion revivified by the experience of anomie (as with Martin Buber), or an
individualistic existentialism based on facing directly the absurd contingency of human fate
within a meaningless and alien universe, as with Sartre and Camus.
Fredric Jameson has suggested that postmodernism, with its saturation of social space by a
visual consumer culture, has replaced the modernist angst of the traditional subject, and with it
the existential crisis of old, by a new social pathology of flattened affect and a fragmented
subject.

The Vienna School of Fantastic Realism (German: Wiener Schule des Phantastischen Realismus)
is a group of artists founded in Vienna in 1946. It includes Ernst Fuchs, Arik Brauer, Wolfgang
Hutter and Anton Lehmden, all students of Professor Albert Paris Gütersloh at the Vienna
Academy of Fine Arts where also Zeev Kun studied in Gütersloh's class. It was Gütersloh's

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emphasis on the techniques of the Old Masters that gave the fantastic realist painters a
grounding in realism (expressed with a clarity and detail some have compared to early Flemish
painting) combined with religious and esoteric symbolism. Older members of the group
were Rudolf Hausner, Kurt Regschek and Fritz Janschka who emigrated to the US in 1949. Kurt
Regschek, who had helped organize the early exhibitions of the group left the group in 1965.
Hausner, Fuchs, Hutter, Brauer and Lehmden were referred to as "The Big Five" who
subsequently held successful exhibitions worldwide with international recognition from 1965
onward.

Naturalism in American literature traces to Frank Norris, whose theories were markedly
different from Zola's, particularly to the status of naturalism within the loci of realism and
Romanticism; Norris thought of naturalism as being Romantic, and thought Zola as being "a
realist of realists". To Link, while American naturalism had trends, its definition had no unified
critical consensus. Link's examples include Stephen Crane, Jack London, Theodore Dreiser, and
Frank Norris, with William Dean Howells and Henry James being clear markers on the other side
of the naturalist/realist divide.
The center of Crane's naturalism is recognized as The Open Boat, which portrayed a naturalistic
view of man with his depiction of a group of survivors adrift in a boat. The humans with their
creation confronted the sea and the world of nature. In the experiences of these men, Crane
articulated the illusion of gods and the realization of the universe's indifference.
William Faulkner's A Rose for Emily, a story about a woman who killed her lover, is considered
an example of a narrative within the naturalism category. This story, which also
used Gothic elements, presented a tale that highlighted the extraordinary and excessive
features in human nature and the social environment that influences them. The protagonist,
Miss Emily, was forced to lead an isolated life, and that - combined with her mental illness -
made insanity her inevitable fate. The environment in the forms of a class structure based on
slavery and social change, together with heredity, represented the forces beyond her control.

Aestheticism
European literary movement, with its roots in France, that was predominant in the 1890’s. It
denied that art needed to have any utilitarian purpose and focused on the slogan “art for art’s
sake.” The doctrines of aestheticism were introduced to England by Walter Pater and can be
found in the plays of Oscar Wilde and the short stories of Arthur Symons. In American
literature, the ideas underlying the aesthetic movement can be found in the short fiction of
Edgar Allan Poe.

Alfred, Lord Tennyson

THE PRINCESS (1847)
• The Princess: A Medley
• Serio-comic attempt to handle the theme that was then known as ‘the new woman.’
• Tennyson wrote of it to his friend FitzGerald - “I hate it and so will you”
• It formed the basis of the satirical Gilbert and Sullivan opera PRINCESS IDA
IN MEMORIAM (1850)
• In Memoriam A.H.H

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• A long series of meditations upon the death of Arthur Henry Hallam who died at Vienna aged
22
• Elegiac theme
• Written in stanzas of four octosyllabic lines rhyming abba
• Divided into 132 sections of varying length
• A series of poems written over a considerable period, inspired by the changing moods of the
author's regret for his lost friend, and expressing his own anxieties about change, evolution,
and immortality
• The epilogue is a marriage song on the occasion of the wedding of the poet's sister Cecilia to
Edward Lushington
• Hallam had himself been engaged to his sister Emily
• Lewes - “the solace and delight of every house where poetry is loved”
• T. S. Eliot – “In Memoriam is a poem of despair, but of despair of a religious kind”
ODE ON THE DEATH OF WELLINGTON (1852)
THE CHARGE OF THE LIGHT BRIGADE (1854)
• First published in the Examiner in 1854
MAUD AND OTHER POEMS (1855)
• Chief poem is called a ‘monodrama’
• Series of lyrics which reflect the love and hatred, the hope and despair.
IDYLLS OF THE KING (1859, 1869 AND 1889)
• A series of 12 connected poems
• Swinburne – “our Laureate should find in the ideal cuckold his type of the ideal man”
ENOCH ARDEN (1864)
Shorter Poems
LOCKSLEY HALL SIXTY YEARS AFTER (1886)
THE DEATH OF THE AENONE (1892)
Plays
3 historical plays:
QUEEN MARY (1875)
HAROLD (1876)
BECKET (1884)
THE FALCON (1879)
• Comedy
• Based on a story from Boccaccio
THE CUP (1881)
• Based on a story from Plutarch
THE FORESTERS (1892)
• Robin Hood theme
Poet Laureate: 1850
Austin - Tennyson's work as “poetry of the drawing room”
Auden - “his genius was lyrical”
T. S. Eliot - “the great master of metric as well as of melancholia”, who has “the finest ear of
any English poet since Milton”
POEMS BY TWO BROTHERS (1827)

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• Collaborated with his elder brother Charles
TIMBUCTOO (1829)
• Prize poem
• Won the chancellor's medal for English verse
• blank verse
POEMS, CHIEFLY LYRICAL (1830)
• Immature
• ISABEL
• MADELINE
POEMS (1833)
• THE LADY OF SHALLOT
• AENENE
• THE LOTOS EATERS
• THE PALACE OF ART
MORTE D’ ARTHUR (1842)
• Incorporated in The Passing of Arthur (1869)
• Preceded by 169 lines and followed by 29
• Tennyson's first major Arthurian work
• Describes the last moments of Arthur after the battle with Mordred's forces
• Includes his elegy on the Round Table
o Delivered to Sir Bedivere
o 'The old order changeth, yielding place to new . . .'
ULLYSSES (1842)
• Composed in1833, published 1842
• A dramatic monologue
• Ulysses describes how he plans to set forth again from Ithaca after his safe return from his
wanderings after the Trojan War, 'to sail beyond the sunset'.
• The episode is based not on Homer but on Dante (Inferno, xxvi), which Tennyson probably
read in the translation of Cary
• Expresses the poet's sense of 'the need of going forward and braving the struggle of life' after
the death of Hallam
LOCKSLEY HALL (1842)
• A poem in trochaics
• Probably written 1837-8
• It consists of a monologue spoken by a disappointed lover

Cultural materialism emerged as a theoretical movement in the early 1980s along with new
historicism, an American approach to early modern literature, with which it shares common
ground. The term was coined by Williams, who used it to describe a theoretical blending of
leftist culturalism and Marxist analysis. Cultural materialists deal with specific historical
documents and attempt to analyze and recreate the zeitgeist of a particular moment in history.
Williams viewed culture as a "productive process", part of the means of production, and
cultural materialism often identifies what he called "residual", "emergent" and "oppositional"
cultural elements. Following in the tradition of Herbert Marcuse, Antonio Gramsci and others,

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cultural materialists extend the class-based analysis of traditional Marxism (Neo-Marxism) by
means of an additional focus on the marginalized.
Cultural materialists analyze the processes by which hegemonic forces in society appropriate
canonical and historically important texts, such as Shakespeare and Austen, and utilize them in
an attempt to validate or inscribe certain values on the cultural imaginary. Jonathan Dollimore
and Alan Sinfield, authors of Political Shakespeare, have had considerable influence in the
development of this movement and their book is considered to be a seminal text. They have
identified four defining characteristics of cultural materialism as a theoretical device:
Historical context, Close textual analysis, Political commitment and Theoretical method.
Cultural materialists seek to draw attention to the processes being employed by contemporary
power structures, such as the church, the state or the academy, to disseminate ideology. To do
this they explore a text’s historical context and its political implications, and then through close
textual analysis note the dominant hegemonic position. They identify possibilities for the
rejection and/or subversion of that position. British critic Graham Holderness defines cultural
materialism as a "politicized form of historiography".
Through its insistence on the importance of an engagement with issues of gender, sexuality,
race and class, cultural materialism has had a significant impact on the field of literary studies,
especially in Britain. Cultural materialists have found the area of Renaissance studies
particularly receptive to this type of analysis. Traditional humanist readings often eschewed
consideration of the oppressed and marginalized in textual readings, whereas cultural
materialists routinely consider such groups in their engagement with literary texts, thus
opening new avenues of approach to issues of representation in the field of literary criticism.
Cultural materialism, a term coined by Raymond Williams and popularized by Jonathan
Dollimore and Alan Sinfield (in their collection of essays Political Shakespeare), Cultural
Materialism refers to a Marxist orientation of New Historicism, characterized by the analysis of
any historical material within a politicized framework, in a radical and subversive manner.
Cultural Materialism emphasizes studying the historical context, looking at those historical
aspects that have been discarded or silenced in other narratives of history, through an eclectic
theoretical approach, backed by the political commitment arising from the influence of Marxist
and Feminist perspective and thus executing a textual analysis—close reading that critiques
traditional approaches, especially on canonical texts.

Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and
imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized
people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture,
literature, and discourse of (usually European) imperial power.
Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and theoreticians may not always
agree on a common set of definitions. On a simple level, through anthropological study, it may
seek to build a better understanding of colonial life—based on the assumption that the colonial
rulers are unreliable narrators—from the point of view of the colonized people. On a deeper
level, postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain
colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives
surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with studies of
contemporary history, and may also draw examples from anthropology, historiography, political
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science, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies
examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature, and
Christian thought.
At times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the ambiguous
term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or world view
underlying that system. However, postcolonialism (i.e., postcolonial studies) generally
represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a
system that comes after colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest. As such, postcolonialism
may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way
postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the term postcolonialism itself is modeled on
postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods.

Frantz Omar Fanon also known as Ibrahim Frantz Fanon, was a French West
Indian[ psychiatrist and political philosopher from the French colony of Martinique (today a
French department). His works have become influential in the fields of post-colonial studies,
critical theory and Marxism. As well as being an intellectual, Fanon was a political radical, Pan-
Africanist, and Marxist humanist concerned with the psychopathology of colonization and the
human, social, and cultural consequences of decolonization.
Fanon published numerous books, including
Black Skin, White Masks was published in 1952 in which Fanon psychoanalyzes the oppressed
Black person who is perceived to have to be a lesser creature in the White world that they live
in, and studies how they navigate the world through a performance of White-ness.
Fanon's writings:
Black Skin, White Masks (1952),
A Dying Colonialism (1959),
The Wretched of the Earth (1961),
Toward the African Revolution (1964),
Alienation and Freedom (2018),
The preface of Wretched of Earth was written by Jean Paul Sartre.

“To His Coy Mistress” is a metaphysical poem written by the English author and
politician Andrew Marvell (1621–1678) either during or just before the English
Interregnum (1649–60). It was published posthumously in 1681.
This poem is considered one of Marvell’s finest and is possibly the best recognized carpe
diem poem in English. Although the date of its composition is not known, it may have been
written in the early 1650s. At that time, Marvell was serving as a tutor to the daughter of the
retired commander of the New Model Army, Sir Thomas Fairfax.
The speaker of the poem starts by addressing a woman who has been slow to respond to his
romantic advances. In the first stanza he describes how he would pay court to her if he were to
be unencumbered by the constraints of a normal lifespan. He could spend centuries admiring
each part of her body and her resistance to his advances (i.e., coyness) would not discourage
him. In the second stanza, he laments how short human life is. Once life is over, the speaker
contends, the opportunity to enjoy one another is gone, as no one embraces in death. In the

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last stanza, the speaker urges the woman to requite his efforts, and argues that in loving one
another with passion they will both make the most of the brief time they have to live.

Kazuo Ishiguro is a British novelist, screenwriter, musician, and short-story writer. He was born
in Nagasaki and moved to Britain in 1960 with his parents when he was five. His first two
novels, A Pale View of Hills and An Artist of the Floating World, were noted for their
explorations of Japanese identity and elegiac tone. Subsequently, he explored other genres,
including science fiction and historical fiction. He has received four Man Booker Prize
nominations and won the award in 1989 for his novel The Remains of the Day, which was
adapted into a film of the same name in 1993. In 2017, the Swedish Academy awarded Ishiguro
the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Novels:
A Pale View of Hills (1982)
An Artist of the Floating World (1986)
The Remains of the Day (1989)
The Unconsoled (1995)
When We Were Orphans (2000)
Never Let Me Go (2005)
The Buried Giant (2015)
Klara and the Sun (2021)
Short-story collections:
Nocturnes: Five Stories of Music and Nightfall

Ozymandias is a sonnet written by the English Romantic poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. It was first
published in the 11 January 1818 issue of The Examiner of London. The poem was included the
following year in Shelley's collection Rosalind and Helen, A Modern Eclogue; with Other Poems,
and in a posthumous compilation of his poems published in 1826.
Shelley wrote the poem in friendly competition with his friend and fellow poet Horace Smith
(1779–1849), who also wrote a sonnet on the same topic with the same title. The poem
explores the fate of history and the ravages of time: even the greatest men and the empires
they forge are impermanent, their legacies fated to decay into oblivion.
Two themes of the "Ozymandias" poems are the inevitable decline of rulers and their
pretensions to greatness.

William Holman Hunt OM was an English painter and one of the founders of the Pre-Raphaelite
Brotherhood. His paintings were notable for their great attention to detail, vivid color, and
elaborate symbolism. These features were influenced by the writings of John
Ruskin and Thomas Carlyle, according to whom the world itself should be read as a system of
visual signs. For Hunt it was the duty of the artist to reveal the correspondence between sign
and fact. Of all the members of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, Hunt remained most true to
their ideals throughout his career. He was always keen to maximize the popular appeal and
public visibility of his works.

Jungian Archetypes are defined as universal, primal symbols and images that derive from the

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collective unconscious, as proposed by Carl Jung. They are the psychic counterpart of instinct. It
is described as a kind of innate unspecific knowledge, derived from the sum total of human
history, which prefigures and directs conscious behavior. They are underlying base forms, or the
archetypes-as-such, from which emerge images and motifs such as the mother, the child, the
trickster, and the flood among others. History, culture and personal context shape these
manifest representations thereby giving them their specific content. These images and motifs
are more precisely called archetypal images. However it is common for the term archetype to
be used interchangeably to refer to both the base archetypes-as-such and the culturally specific
archetypal images.

Many members of the ‘inner’ Pre-Raphaelite circle (Dante Gabriel Rossetti, John Everett
Millais, William Holman Hunt, Ford Madox Brown, Edward Burne-Jones) and ‘outer’ circle
(Frederick Sandys, Arthur Hughes, Simeon Solomon, Henry Hugh Armstead, Joseph Noel
Paton, Frederic Shields, Matthew James Lawless) were working concurrently in painting,
illustration, and sometimes poetry. Victorian morality judged literature as superior to painting,
because of its “noble grounds for noble emotion.” Robert Buchanan (a writer and opponent of
the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood) felt so strongly about this artistic hierarchy that he wrote:
“The truth is that literature, and more particularly poetry, is in a very bad way when one art
gets hold of another, and imposes upon it its conditions and limitations." This was the hostile
environment in which Pre-Raphaelites were defiantly working in various media. The Pre-
Raphaelites attempted to revitalize subject painting, which had been dismissed as artificial.
Their belief that each picture should tell a story was an important step for the unification of
painting and literature (eventually deemed the Sister Arts), or at least a break in the rigid
hierarchy promoted by writers like Robert Buchanan.
The Pre-Raphaelite desire for more extensive affiliation between painting and literature also
manifested in illustration. Illustration is a more direct unification of these media and, like
subject painting, can assert a narrative of its own. Pre-Raphaelite illustrations go beyond
depicting an episode from a poem, but rather function like subject paintings within a text.

Ontology is the branch of philosophy that studies concepts such as existence, being, becoming,
and reality. It includes the questions of how entities are grouped into basic categories and
which of these entities exist on the most fundamental level. Ontology is sometimes referred to
as the science of being. It has been characterized as general metaphysics in contrast to special
metaphysics, which is concerned with more particular aspects of being. Ontologists often try to
determine what the categories or highest kinds are and how they form a system of
categories that provides an encompassing classification of all entities. Commonly proposed
categories include substances, properties, relations, states of affairs and events. These
categories are characterized by fundamental ontological concepts,
like particularity and universality, abstractness and concreteness or possibility and necessity. Of
special interest is the concept of ontological dependence, which determines whether the
entities of a category exist on the most fundamental level. Disagreements within ontology are
often about whether entities belonging to a certain category exist and, if so, how they are
related to other entities.

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Raja Rao (8 November 1908 – 8 July 2006) was an Indian writer of English-language novels and
short stories, whose works are deeply rooted in metaphysics. The Serpent and the Rope (1960),
a semi-autobiographical novel recounting a search for spiritual truth in Europe and India,
established him as one of the finest Indian prose stylists and won him the Sahitya Akademi
Award in 1964. For the entire body of his work, Rao was awarded the Neustadt International
Prize for Literature in 1988. Rao's wide-ranging body of work, spanning a number of genres, is
seen as a varied and significant contribution to Indian English literature, as well as World
literature as a whole.

Raja Rao's first and best-known novel, Kanthapura (1938), is the story of a south Indian village
named Kanthapura. The novel is narrated in the form of a Sthala Purana by an old woman of
the village, Achakka. Dominant castes like Brahmins are privileged to get the best region of the
village, while lower castes such as Pariahs are marginalized. Despite this classist system, the
village retains its long-cherished traditions of festivals in which all castes interact and the
villagers are united. The village is believed to be protected by a local deity named Kenchamma.
The main character of the novel, Moorthy, is a young Brahmin who leaves for the city to study,
where he becomes familiar with Gandhian philosophy. He begins living a Gandhian lifestyle,
wearing home-spun khaddar and discarded foreign clothes and speaking out against the caste
system. This causes the village priest to turn against Moorthy and excommunicate him.
Heartbroken to hear this, Moorthy's mother Narasamma dies. After this, Moorthy starts living
with an educated widow, Rangamma, who is active in India’s independence movement.
Moorthy is then invited by Brahmin clerks at the Skeffington coffee estate to create an
awareness of Gandhian teachings among the pariah coolies. When Moorthy arrives, he is
beaten by the policeman Bade Khan, but the coolies stand up for Moorthy and beat Bade Khan
- an action for which they are thrown out of the estate. Moorthy continues his fight against
injustice and social inequality and becomes a staunch ally of Gandhi. Although he is depressed
over violence at the estate, he takes responsibility and goes on a three-day fast and emerges
morally elated. A unit of the independence committee is formed in Kanthapura, with office
bearers vowing to follow Gandhi’s teachings under Moorthy's leadership.
The British government accuses Moorthy of provoking the townspeople to inflict violence and
arrests him. Though the committee is willing to pay his bail, Moorthy refuses their money.
While Moorthy spends the next three months in prison, the women of Kanthapura take charge,
forming a volunteer corps under Rangamma's leadership. Rangamma instills a sense of
patriotism among the women by telling them stories of notable women from Indian history.
They face police brutality, including assault and rape, when the village is attacked and burned.
Upon Moorthy's release from prison, he is greeted by the loyal townspeople, who are now
united regardless of caste. The novel ends with Moorthy and the town looking to the future and
planning to continue their fight for independence.

Shakespeare introduced approximately 2000 words to the English language (estimations are
anywhere close to 1700 and above). The Oxford dictionary credits him with having introduced
3000 words to the English language including Addiction, Belongings, Swagger, Uncomfortable,
Dishearten, Bedazzled and more.

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The Cenci, A Tragedy, in Five Acts (1819) is a verse drama in five acts by PB Shelley written in
the summer of 1819, and inspired by a real Italian family, the House of Cenci (in particular,
Beatrice Cenci, pronounced CHEN-chee). Shelley composed the play in Rome.
A second edition appeared in 1821, his only published work to go into a second edition during
his lifetime.
The play was not considered stageable in its day due to its themes of incest and parricide, and
was not performed in public in England until 1922, when it was staged in London.
In 1886 the Shelley Society had sponsored a private production at the Grand Theatre, Islington,
before an audience that included Oscar Wilde, Robert Browning, and George Bernard Shaw.
The horrific tragedy, set in 1599 in Rome, of a young woman executed for pre-meditated
murder of her tyrannical father, was a well-known true story handed down orally and
documented in the Annali d'Italia, a twelve-volume chronicle of Italian history written by
Ludovico Antonio Muratori in 1749. Shelley was first drawn to dramatize the tale after viewing
Guido Reni's portrait of Beatrice Cenci, a painting that intrigued Shelley's poetic imagination.

Between 1795–1797, Wordsworth wrote his only play, The Borderers, a verse tragedy set
during the reign of King Henry III of England, when Englishmen in the North Country came into
conflict with Scottish border reivers. He attempted to get the play staged in November 1797,
but it was rejected by Thomas Harris, the manager of the Covent Garden Theatre, who
proclaimed it "impossible that the play should succeed in the representation". The rebuff was
not received lightly by Wordsworth and the play was not published until 1842, after substantial
revision.

Sardanapalus (1821)is a historical tragedy in blank verse by Lord Byron, set in ancient Nineveh
and recounting the fall of the Assyrian monarchy and its supposed last king. It draws its story
mainly from the Historical Library of Diodorus Siculus and from William Mitford's History of
Greece. Byron wrote the play during his stay in Ravenna, and dedicated it to Goethe. It has had
an extensive influence on European culture, inspiring a painting by Delacroix and musical works
by Berlioz, Liszt and Ravel, among others.
In a prefatory note to Sardanapalus Byron acknowledged the Historical Library of Diodorus
Siculus (a work he had known since he was 12) as the major source of the plot.

The Theatre of the Oppressed (TO) describes theatrical forms that the Brazilian theatre
practitioner Augusto Boal first elaborated in the 1970s, initially in Brazil and later in Europe.
Boal was influenced by the work of the educator and theorist Paulo Freire. Boal's techniques
use theatre as means of promoting social and political change in alignment originally with
radical-left politics and later with center-left ideology. In the Theatre of the Oppressed, the
audience becomes active, such that as "spect-actors" they explore, show, analyze and
transform the reality in which they are living. Although it was first officially adopted in the
1970s, Theatre of the Oppressed, a term coined by Augusto Boal, is a series of theatrical
analyses and critiques was first developed in the 1950s.

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Macaulay wrote his famous Minute on Feb. 2,1835 in which he vehemently criticized almost
everything Indian: astronomy, culture, history, philosophy, religion, etc., and praised everything
western.
His famous proposal of promoting the English language is called the Macaulay Minute. In 1835
he suggested English should be taught in place to Arabic, Sanskrit, and Persian in colonial
schools in India. Lord Macaulay is known to introduce British education system in India .
English should be used as the medium of instruction in schools of India .Science and Western
literature should be taught in Indian schools to Indians. Primary education was must for the
people for better understanding .
Thomas Babington Macaulay, who is generally regarded as the architect of the system of
education in India during the British rule, was a great essayist, historian, linguist, orator,
politician, statesman and thinker. He was regarded as one of the first rate literary figure of his
times.
The first objective was to form a class of interpreters between the British rulers and the millions
of Indians they governed. The second objective was to create a class of persons, Indians in
blood and color but British in taste, opinion, morals, and intellect.

The Garrison Mentality is a common theme in regards to Canadian literature and Canadian
cinema. The term was first coined by literary critic Northrop Frye and further explored by
author Margaret Atwood, who discussed Canada's preoccupation with the theme of survival in
her book Survival: A Thematic Guide to Canadian Literature. This mentality is assumed to come
from part of the Canadian identity that fears the emptiness of the Canadian landscape and fears
the oppressiveness of other nations.
In texts with the garrison mentality, characters are always looking outwards and building
metaphorical walls against the outside world.

Posthumanism is a philosophical perspective of how change is enacted in the world. As a

conceptualization and historicization of both agency and the “human,” it is different from those
conceived through humanism. Whereas a humanist perspective frequently assumes the human
is autonomous, conscious, intentional, and exceptional in acts of change, a posthumanist
perspective assumes agency is distributed through dynamic forces of which the human
participates but does not completely intend or control. Posthumanist philosophy constitutes
the human as: (a) physically, chemically, and biologically enmeshed and dependent on the
environment; (b) moved to action through interactions that generate affects, habits, and
reason; and (c) possessing no attribute that is uniquely human but is instead made up of a
larger evolving ecosystem. There is little consensus in posthumanist scholarship about the
degree to which a conscious human subject can actively create change, but the human does
participate in change.
As distinguished from posthumanism, humanism is credited with attributing the conscious and
intentional human subject as the dominant source of agency most worthy of scholarly
attention. Since its inception during the Renaissance, humanism has been constituted in various
ways throughout history, but as a collective body of literature, the human is typically
constituted through humanism as: (a) autonomous from nature given the intellectual faculties
of the mind that controls the body, (b) uniquely capable of and motivated by speech and

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reason, and (c) an exceptional animal that is superior to other creatures. Humanist assumptions
concerning the human are infused throughout Western philosophy and reinforce a
nature/culture dualism where human culture is distinct from nature. In contrast, a
posthumanist scholar rejects this dichotomy through understanding the human as entangled
with its environment. A posthumanist scholar of communication typically integrates scholarship
from a variety of other disciplines including, but not limited to: art, architecture, cybernetics,
ecology, ethology, geology, music, psychoanalysis, and quantum physics.

Ecofeminist thinkers draw on the concept of gender to analyze the relationships between
humans and the natural world. The term was coined by the French writer Françoise d'Eaubonne
in her book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974). Ecofeminist theory asserts a feminist perspective
of Green politics that calls for an egalitarian, collaborative society in which there is no one
dominant group. Today, there are several branches of ecofeminism, with varying approaches
and analyses, including liberal ecofeminism, spiritual/cultural ecofeminism, and social/socialist
ecofeminism (or materialist ecofeminism).Interpretations of ecofeminism and how it might be
applied to social thought include ecofeminist art, social justice and political philosophy, religion,
contemporary feminism, and poetry.
Major theorists:
Françoise d'Eaubonne
Judi Bari
Greta Gaard
Sallie McFague
Carolyn Merchant
Mary Mies
Val Plumwood
Vandana Shiva

Old English Literature, or Anglo-Saxon Literature, encompasses literature written in Old

English, in Anglo-Saxon England from the 7th century to the decades after the Norman
Conquest of 1066. According to Bede, the 7th century work Cædmon's Hymn is considered as
the oldest surviving poem in English. Poetry written in the mid-12th century represents some of
the latest post-Norman examples of Old English.
The poem Beowulf, which often begins the traditional canon of English literature, is the most
famous work of Old English literature. The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle has also proven significant for
historical study, preserving a chronology of early English history.
In descending order of quantity, Old English literature consists of: sermons and saints' lives;
biblical translations; translated Latin works of the early Church Fathers; Anglo-Saxon chronicles
and narrative history works; laws, wills and other legal works; practical works on grammar,
medicine, and geography; and poetry. In all, there are over 400 surviving manuscripts from the
period, of which about 189 are considered major.

James William Johnson argues that A Modest Proposal was largely influenced and inspired
by Tertullian's Apology: a satirical attack against early Roman persecution of Christianity.
Johnson believes that Swift saw major similarities between the two situations. Johnson notes
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Swift's obvious affinity for Tertullian and the bold stylistic and structural similarities between
the works A Modest Proposal and Apology. In structure, Johnson points out the same central
theme, that of cannibalism and the eating of babies as well as the same final argument, that
"human depravity is such that men will attempt to justify their own cruelty by accusing their
victims of being lower than human". Stylistically, Swift and Tertullian share the same command
of sarcasm and language. In agreement with Johnson, Donald C. Baker points out the similarity
between both authors' tones and use of irony. Baker notes the uncanny way that both authors
imply an ironic "justification by ownership" over the subject of sacrificing children—Tertullian
while attacking pagan parents, and Swift while attacking the English mistreatment of the Irish
poor.

News from Nowhere (1890) is a classic work combining utopian socialism and soft science
fiction written by the artist, designer and socialist pioneer William Morris. It was first published
in serial form in the Commonweal journal beginning on 11 January 1890.
In the novel, the narrator, William Guest, falls asleep after returning from a meeting of the
Socialist League and awakes to find himself in a future society based on common ownership
and democratic control of the means of production.
The novel explores a number of aspects of this society, including its organization and the
relationships which it engenders between people. Morris fuses Marxism and the romance
tradition when he presents himself as an enchanted figure in a time and place different from
Victoriasocialism.
News From Nowhere was written as a libertarian socialist response to an earlier book called
Looking Backward, a book that epitomizes a kind of state socialism that Morris abhorred. It was
also meant to directly influence various currents of thought at the time regarding the tactics to
bring about socialism.

"In A Station of the Metro" is an Imagist poem by Ezra Pound published in April 1913 in the
literary magazine Poetry. In the poem, Pound describes a moment in the underground metro
station in Paris in 1912; he suggested that the faces of the individuals in the metro were best
put into a poem not with a description but with an "equation". Because of the treatment of the
subject's appearance by way of the poem's own visuality, it is considered a quintessential
Imagist text.
It is sometimes considered to be the first haiku published in English,though it lacks the
traditional 3-line, 17-syllable structure of haiku. The poem was reprinted in Pound's collection
Lustra in 1917.The poem contains only fourteen words without a verb therein—making it a
good example of the verbless poetry form
Poem:
In a Station of the Metro
The apparition of these faces in the crowd:
Petals on a wet, black bough.

The Nova Trilogy or The Cut-up Trilogy is a name commonly given by critics to a series of three
experimental novels by William S. Burroughs.
The trilogy of experimental novels is composed of The Soft Machine (1961, revised 1966 and

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1968), The Ticket That Exploded (1962, revised 1967) and Nova Express (1964). All three novels
use the cut-up technique that Burroughs invented in cooperation with painter and poet Brion
Gysin and computer programmer Ian Sommerville. Commenting on the trilogy in an interview,
Burroughs said that he was "attempting to create a new mythology for the space age"
In 2014, restored editions of the three novels were published, edited by Burroughs scholar
Oliver Harris. The new editions made a number of changes to the texts and included notes and
previously unpublished materials that showed the complexity of the books' manuscript
histories and the precision with which Burroughs used his methods.

Scottish writer Douglas Stuart has won the 2020 Booker Prize for fiction with his debut novel
Shuggie Bain, which described a boy growing up in Glasgow in the 1980s with a mother battling
addiction.
The awards ceremony saw six short listed authors joining virtually and included messages from
former US President Barack Obama, the Duchess of Cornwall and former Booker winners Kazuo
Ishiguro, Margaret Atwood and Bernardine Evaristo.
Stuart, 44, who won the 50,000 Pound prize after being announced the winner by chair of the
judges Margaret Busby, delivered an acceptance speech.
Based on his own childhood, Stuart’s book is described as a searing account of the boy growing
up in Thatcher’s Glasgow. He dedicated the book to his own mother, who died of alcoholism
when he was 16. The Booker Prize shortlist also included Indian-origin writer Avni Doshi’s novel
‘Burnt Sugar’.

Romanticism in Literature in France

In 1802 François-René de Chateaubriand, at the age of thirty-four, published The Genius of
Christianity, describing the role that religion should play in politics, literature, and the arts.
Following its success, Napoleon named him secretary of his Embassy in Rome. He achieved
another literary success in 1809 with his novel Les Martyrs. His work had a major influence on
the generation of writers who followed him.
In 1848 romantic literature reached a high point with the publication of the novel La Dame aux
Camélias by Alexandre Dumas fils. The novel became an immensely successful play, and then
was transformed into one of the most successful operas of all time, La Traviata, by Giuseppe
Verdi (1853).
Prosper Mérimée was another important figure in the romantic movement. His romantic
novella, Carmen, published in 1845, was transformed by Bizet into a highly successful opera.
Romantic poetry was dominated by the work of four poets; Alphonse de Lamartine, Alfred de
Vigny, Victor Hugo, and Alfred de Musset. The period of romantic poetry reached its peak in the
1840s, and the death of Victor Hugo in 1885 is often considered the end of the movement in
poetry. However, it was carried on by others, particularly Charles Baudelaire, Théophile
Gautier, Gérard de Nerval, and Paul Verlaine until the end of the century.
The poet Alfred de Musset gave a characteristically romantic definition of romanticism:
“Romanticism is the star which weeps, the wind which cries out, the night which shivers, the
flower which gives its scent, the bird which flies…It is the infinite and the starry, the warmth,

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the broken, the sober, and yet at the same time the plain and the round, the diamond-shaped,
the pyramidal, the vivid, the restrained, the embraced, the turbulent.”

Capt. John Yossarian is a fictional character, the protagonist of Joseph Heller's satirical 1961
novel Catch-22 and its 1994 sequel Closing Time. In Catch-22, Yossarian is a 28-year-
old captain in the 256th Squadron of the Army Air Forces where he serves as a B-
25 bombardier stationed on the small island of Pianosa off the Italian mainland during World
War II. Yossarian's exploits have previously been thought to be based on the experiences of the
author. Heller was also a bombardier in the Army Air Corps, stationed on an island off the coast
of Italy during the war. Heller later documented in his autobiography "Now & Then" the
elements of Yossarian which came from his experiences (specifically the episodes where
Yossarian attends to Snowden during the Avignon mission). Heller noted that he derived the
name Yossarian from a wartime friend and fellow bombardier, Francis Yohannan. Yohannan
made the military his career, continuing to serve through the Vietnam War, placing him at odds
with Yossarian's feelings towards the military and as noted in his obituary "(Yohannan) turned
aside calls from reporters who asked if he was the real-life Yossarian." A possible source for
Yossarian's narrative adventure and efforts to be relieved of his combat duties is Lt. Julius Fish,
another bombardier and wartime friend to both Francis Yohannan and Joseph Heller.

The Spectator, a periodical published in London by the essayists Sir Richard Steele and Joseph
Addison from March 1, 1711, to Dec. 6, 1712 (appearing daily), and subsequently revived by
Addison in 1714 (for 80 numbers). It succeeded The Tatler, which Steele had launched in 1709.
In its aim to “enliven morality with wit, and to temper wit with morality,” The
Spectator adopted a fictional method of presentation through a “Spectator Club,” whose
imaginary members extolled the authors’ own ideas about society. These “members” included
representatives of commerce, the army, the town (respectively, Sir Andrew Freeport, Captain
Sentry, and Will Honeycomb), and of the country gentry (Sir Roger de Coverley). The papers
were ostensibly written by Mr. Spectator, an “observer” of the London scene. The
conversations that The Spectator reported were often imagined to take place in coffeehouses,
which was also where many copies of the publication were distributed and read.

Jonathan Culler believes that the linguistic-structuralist model can help "formulate the rules of
particular systems of convention rather than simply affirm their existence." He posits language
and human culture as similar.
In Structuralist Poetics Culler warns against applying the technique of linguistics directly to
literature. Rather, the "'grammar' of literature" is converted into literary structures and
meaning. Structuralism is defined as a theory resting on the realization that if human actions or
productions have meaning there must be an underlying system that makes this meaning
possible, since an utterance has meaning only in the context of a preexistent system of rules
and conventions.
Culler proposes that we use literary theory not to try to understand a text but rather to
investigate the activity of interpretation. In several of his works, he speaks of a reader who is
particularly "competent." In order to understand how we make sense of a text, Culler identifies
common elements that different readers treat differently in different texts. He suggests there

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are two classes of readers, "the readers as field of experience for the critic (himself a reader)"
and the future readers who will benefit from the work the critic and previous readers have
done.
Culler's critics complain of his lack of distinction between literature and the institution of
writing in general. John R. Searle has described Culler's presentation of deconstruction as
making "Derrida look both better and worse than he really is;" better in glossing over some of
the more intellectually murky aspects of deconstruction and worse in largely ignoring the major
philosophical progenitors of Derrida's thought, namely Husserl and Heidegger.

The Preface to Lyrical Ballads is an essay, composed by William Wordsworth, for the second
edition (published in January 1801, and often referred to as the "1800 Edition") of the poetry
collection Lyrical Ballads, and then greatly expanded in the third edition of 1802. It has come to
be seen as a de facto manifesto of the Romantic movement.
The four guidelines of the manifesto include:
• Ordinary life is the best subject for poetry. (Wordsworth uses common man's language.)
• Everyday language is best suited for poetry.
• Expression of feeling is more important than action or plot.
• "Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of emotion" that "takes its origin from emotion,
recollected in tranquility." - William Wordsworth

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems is a collection of poems by William

Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, first published in 1798 and generally considered to
have marked the beginning of the English Romantic movement in literature. The immediate
effect on critics was modest, but it became and remains a landmark, changing the course
of English literature and poetry.
Most of the poems in the 1798 edition were written by Wordsworth, with Coleridge
contributing only four poems to the collection (although these made about a third of the book
in length), including one of his most famous works, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner.
A second edition was published in 1800, in which Wordsworth included additional poems and
a preface detailing the pair's avowed poetical principles. For another edition, published in 1802,
Wordsworth added an appendix titled Poetic Diction in which he expanded the ideas set forth
in the preface. A third edition was published in 1802, with substantial additions made to its
"Preface," and a fourth edition was published in 1805.

The Hind and the Panther: A Poem, in Three Parts (1687) is an allegory in heroic
couplets by John Dryden. At some 2600 lines it is much the longest of Dryden's poems,
translations excepted, and perhaps the most controversial. The critic Margaret Doody has
called it "the great, the undeniable, sui generis poem of the Restoration era…It is its own kind of
poem, it cannot be repeated (and no one has repeated it)."

Troilus and Criseyde is an epic poem by Geoffrey Chaucer which re-tells in Middle English the
tragic story of the lovers Troilus and Criseyde set against a backdrop of war during the siege of
Troy. It was written in rime royale and probably completed during the mid-1380s. Many
Chaucer scholars regard it as the poet's finest work. As a finished long poem it is more self-
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contained than the better known but ultimately unfinished The Canterbury Tales. This poem is
often considered the source of the phrase: "all good things must come to an end.”
Although Troilus is a character from Ancient Greek literature, the expanded story of him as a
lover was of Medieval origin. The first known version is from Benoît de Sainte-Maure's
poem Roman de Troie, but Chaucer's principal source appears to have been Boccaccio, who re-
wrote the tale in his Il Filostrato. Chaucer attributes the story to a "Lollius" (whom he also
mentions in The House of Fame), although no writer with this name is known. Chaucer's version
can be said to reflect a less cynical and less misogynistic world-view than Boccaccio's, casting
Criseyde as fearful and sincere rather than simply fickle and having been led astray by the
eloquent and perfidious Pandarus. It also inflects the sorrow of the story with humor.
Shakespeare's tragedy Troilus and Cressida, although much blacker in tone, was also based in
part on the material.
Troilus and Criseyde is usually considered to be a courtly romance, although the generic
classification is an area of significant debate in most Middle English literature. It is part of
the Matter of Rome cycle, a fact which Chaucer emphasizes.

The Dionysia was a large festival in ancient Athens in honor of the god Dionysus, the central
events of which were the theatrical performances of dramatic tragedies and, from
487 BC, comedies. It was the second-most important festival after thePanathenaia. The
Dionysia actually consisted of two related festivals, the Rural Dionysiaand the City Dionysia,
which took place in different parts of the year. They were also an essential part of the Dionysian
Mysteries.

Gynocriticism or gynocritics is the term coined in the seventies by Elaine Showalter to describe
a new literary project intended to construct "a female framework for the analysis of women's
literature".
By expanding the historical study of women writers as a distinct literary tradition, gynocritics
sought to develop new models based on the study of female experience to replace male models
of literary creation, and so "map the territory" left unexplored in earlier literary criticisms.

Canadian Literature is the literature of a multicultural country, created by Indigenous

people and by people of other ancestral backgrounds, in languages including Canadian
English, Canadian French, Indigenous languages, and many others such as Canadian Gaelic.
Influences on Canadian writers are broad both geographically and historically, representing
Canada's diversity in culture and region.
While mostly written in English, Indigenous literature has flourished in recent years and is based
upon many distinct oral traditions, languages, and cultural practices. Dominant European
cultures in Canada were originally English, French, and Gaelic. However, in recent decades
Canada's literature has been strongly influenced by immigrants from other countries. Since the
1980s Canada's ethnic and cultural diversity has been openly reflected in its literature, with
many of its most prominent writers focusing on ethnic minority identity, duality and cultural
differences.

The Mahabharata and the Ramayana are the two main epics of India. They are both written in

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Sanskrit, and together form the canon of Hindu scripture: Itihasa, Writer has himself witnessed
the story, or Mahakavya, the "Great Compositions". They are both extremely famous in India
and, over the centuries, have inspired writers from all over the world.

Epic
The primary form of epic, is the heroic epic, including such works as the Iliad and Mahabharata.
Ancient sources also recognized didactic epic as a category, represented by such works
as Hesiod's Works and Days and Lucretius's De Rerum Natura.
A related type of poetry is the epyllion (plural: epyllia), a brief narrative poem with
a romantic or mythological theme. The term, which means "little epic," came into use in the
nineteenth century. It refers primarily to the erudite, shorter hexameter poems of
the Hellenistic period and the similar works composed at Rome from the age of the neoterics;
to a lesser degree, the term includes some poems of the English Renaissance, particularly those
influenced by Ovid. The most famous example of classical epyllion is perhaps Catullus 64.
Epyllion is to be understood as distinct from mock epic, another light form.
Romantic Epic is a term used to designate works such as Morgante, Orlando
Innamorato, Orlando Furioso and Gerusalemme Liberata, which freely lift characters, themes,
plots and narrative devices from the world of prose chivalric romance.

The Prague School or Prague Linguistic Circle is a language and literature society. It started in
1926 as a group of linguists, philologists and literary critics in Prague. Its proponents developed
methods of structuralist literary analysis and a theory of the standard language and of language
cultivation from 1928 to 1939. The linguistic circle was founded in the Café Derby in Prague,
which is also where meetings took place during its first years.
The Prague School has had a significant continuing influence on linguistics and semiotics. After
the Czechoslovak coup d'état of 1948, the circle was disbanded in 1952, but the Prague School
continued as a major force in linguistic functionalism (distinct from the Copenhagen school or
English Firthian – later Hallidean – linguistics). The American scholar Dell Hymes cites his 1962
paper, "The Ethnography of Speaking," as the formal introduction of Prague functionalism to
American linguistic anthropology. The Prague structuralists also had a significant influence
on structuralist film theory, especially through the introduction of the ostensive sign.
Today the Prague linguistic circle is a scholarly society which aims to contribute to the
knowledge of language and related sign systems according to functionally structural principles.
To this end, it organizes regular meetings with lectures and debates, publishes professional
publications, and organizes international meetings.
History
The Prague linguistic circle included the Russian émigrés Roman Jakobson, Nikolai Trubetzkoy,
and Sergei Karcevskiy, as well as the famous Czech literary scholars René Wellek and Jan
Mukařovský. The instigator of the circle, and its first president until his death in 1945, was
the Czech linguist Vilém Mathesius.
In 1929 the Circle promulgated its theses in a paper submitted to the First Congress of Slavists.
"The programmatic 1929 Prague Theses, surely one of the most imposing linguistic edifices of
the 20th century, encapsulated [sic] the functionalist credo." In the late 20th century, English
translations of the Circle's seminal works were published by the Czech linguist Josef Vachek in

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several collections.
Also in 1929, the group launched a journal, Travaux du Cercle Linguistique de Prague. World
War II brought an end to it. The Travaux was briefly resurrected in 1966–1971. The inaugural
issue was devoted to the political science concept of center and periphery. It was resurrected
yet again in 1995. The group's Czech language work is published in Slovo a slovesnost (Word
and Literature).

An Essay on Criticism was first published anonymously on 15 May 1711. Pope began writing the
poem early in his career and took about three years to finish it.
At the time the poem was published, the heroic couplet style in which it was written was a
moderately new poetic form, and Pope's work was an ambitious attempt to identify and refine
his own positions as a poet and critic. The poem was said to be a response to an ongoing
debate on the question of whether poetry should be natural, or written according to
predetermined artificial rules inherited from the classical past.
The 'essay' begins with a discussion of the standard rules that govern poetry by which a critic
passes judgment. Pope comments on the classical authors who dealt with such standards and
the authority that he believed should be accredited to them. He discusses the laws to which a
critic should adhere while critiquing poetry, and points out that critics serve an important
function in aiding poets with their works, as opposed to the practice of attacking them. The final
section of An Essay on Criticism discusses the moral qualities and virtues inherent in the ideal
critic, who, Pope claims, is also the ideal man.

English Literature In Jacobean Era

In literature, some of Shakespeare's most prominent plays, including King
Lear (1605), Macbeth (1606), and The Tempest (1610), were written during the reign of James I.
Patronage came not just from James, but from James' wife Anne of Denmark. Also during this
period were powerful works by John Webster, Thomas Middleton, John Ford and Ben Jonson.
Ben Jonson also contributed to some of the era's best poetry, together with the Cavalier
poets and John Donne. In prose, the most representative works are found in those of Francis
Bacon and the King James Bible.
In 1617 George Chapman completed his monumental translation
of Homer's Iliad and Odyssey into English verse, which were the first ever complete translations
of either poem, both central to the Western Canon, into the English language. The wildly
popular tale of the Trojan War had until then been available to readers of English only in
medieval epic retellings such as Caxton's Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye.
Jonson was also an important innovator in the specialized literary subgenre of the masque,
which went through an intense development in the Jacobean era. His name is linked with that
of Inigo Jones as co-developers of the literary and visual/technical aspects of this hybrid art. The
high costs of these spectacles, however, positioned the Stuarts far from the relative frugality of
Elizabeth's reign, and alienated the middle classes and the Puritans with a prospect of waste
and self-indulgent excess.

New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary
criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of

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poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential
aesthetic object. The movement derived its name from John Crowe Ransom’s 1941 book The
New Criticism. Also very influential were the critical essays of T. S. Eliot, such as “Tradition and
the Individual Talent” and “Hamlet and His Problems,” in which Eliot developed his notion of
the “objective correlative.” Eliot’s evaluative judgments, such as his condemnation of Milton
and Shelley, his liking for the so-called metaphysical poets and his insistence that poetry must
be impersonal, greatly influenced the formation of the New Critical canon.

The Color Purple is a 1982 epistolary novel by American author Alice Walker which won the
1983 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and the National Book Award for Fiction. It was later adapted into
a film and musical of the same name.
The novel has been the frequent target of censors and appears on the American Library
Association list of the 100 Most Frequently Challenged Books of 2000–2009 at number
seventeen because of the sometimes explicit content, particularly in terms of violence. In 2003,
the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's "best-loved novels."
Celie is a poor, uneducated 14-year-old girl living in the Southern United States in the early
1900s. She writes letters to God because her father, Alphonso, beats and rapes her. Alphonso
has already impregnated Celie once, which resulted in the birth of a boy named Adam, whom
Alphonso abducted. Celie thinks Alphonso killed Adam. Celie then has a second child, and
Celie's ailing mother dies after cursing Celie on her deathbed. The second child is a girl named
Olivia, but Alphonso takes the baby away shortly after birth.
Celie and her younger sister, 12-year-old Nettie, learn a man identified only as Mister wants to
marry Nettie. Alphonso refuses to let Nettie marry, instead arranging for Mister to marry Celie.
Mister, a widower, needing someone to care for his children and keep his house, eventually
accepts the offer. Mister physically, sexually, and verbally abuses Celie, and all his children
mistreat her as well.
Shortly thereafter, Nettie runs away from Alphonso and takes refuge at Celie's house, where
Mister makes sexual advances toward her. Celie then advises Nettie to seek assistance from a
well-dressed Black woman that she saw in the general store a while back; the woman has
unknowingly adopted Olivia and is the only Black woman Celie has ever seen with money of her
own. Nettie is forced to leave after promising to write. Celie, however, never receives any
letters and concludes her sister is dead.
Time passes, and Harpo, Mister's son, falls in love with an assertive girl named Sofia, who
becomes pregnant with Harpo's baby and, despite initial resistance from Mister, marries Harpo.
Harpo and Sofia have five more children in short order. Celie is amazed by Sofia's defiant refusal
to submit to Harpo's attempts to control her. As Harpo is kinder and gentler than his father,
Celie advises him not to dominate Sofia. Harpo temporarily follows Celie's advice but falls back
under Mister's sway. Celie, momentarily jealous of Harpo's genuine love of Sofia, then advises
Harpo to beat her. Sofia fights back, however, and confronts Celie. A guilty Celie apologizes and
confides in Sofia about all the abuse she suffers at Mister's hands. She also begins to consider
Sofia's advice about defending herself against further abuse from Mister.
Shug Avery, a jazz and blues singer and Mister's long-time mistress falls ill, and Mister takes her
into his house. Celie, who has been fascinated by photos of Shug she found in Mister's
belongings, is thrilled to have her there. Mister's father expresses disapproval of the

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arrangement, reminding Mister that Shug has three out-of-wedlock children, though Mister
implies to him he is those children's father. Mister's father then leaves in disgust. While Shug is
initially rude to Celie, who has taken charge of nursing her, the two women become friends,
and Celie soon finds herself infatuated with Shug.
Frustrated by Harpo's domineering behavior, Sofia moves out, taking her children with her.
Several months later, Harpo opens a juke joint where a fully recovered Shug performs nightly.
Shug decides to stay when she learns Mister beats Celie when she is away. Shug and Celie grow
closer.
Sofia returns for a visit and promptly gets into a fight with Harpo's new girlfriend, Squeak,
knocking Squeak's teeth out.
In town one day, while Sofia is enjoying a day out with her new boyfriend, a prizefighter, and
their respective children, she gets into a physical fight with the mayor after his wife, Miss Millie,
insults Sofia and her children. The police arrive and brutally beat Sofia, leaving her with a
cracked skull, broken ribs, her face rendered nearly unrecognizable, and blind in one eye. She is
subsequently sentenced to 12 years in prison.
Squeak, mixed-race and Sheriff Hodges' illegitimate niece, attempts to blackmail the sheriff into
releasing Sofia, resulting in her being raped by her uncle. Squeak cares for Sofia's children while
she is incarcerated, and the two women develop a friendship. Sofia is eventually released and
begins working for Miss Millie, which she detests.
Despite being newly married to a man called Grady, Shug instigates a sexual relationship with
Celie on her next visit. One night Shug asks Celie about her sister, and Shug helps Celie recover
letters from Nettie that Mister has been hiding from her for decades. The letters indicate Nettie
befriended a missionary couple, Samuel and Corrine, the well-dressed woman Celie saw in the
store. Nettie eventually accompanied them to Africa to do missionary work. Samuel and Corrine
have unwittingly adopted both Adam and Olivia. Corrine, noticing her adopted children
resemble Nettie, wonders if Samuel fathered the children with her. Increasingly suspicious,
Corrine tries to limit Nettie's role in her family.
Through her letters, Nettie reveals she has become disillusioned with her missionary work.
Corrine became ill with a fever, and Nettie asked Samuel to tell her how he adopted Olivia and
Adam. Realizing Adam and Olivia are Celie's children, Nettie then learned Alphonso is actually
her and Celie's stepfather. Their actual father was a store owner that white men lynched
because they resented his success. She also learned their mother suffered a mental collapse
after her husband's death and that Alphonso exploited the situation to control their mother's
considerable wealth.
Nettie confessed to Samuel and Corrine she is the children's biological aunt. The gravely ill
Corrine refused to believe her until Nettie reminds her of her previous encounter with Celie in
the store. Later, Corrine died, finally having accepted Nettie's story. Meanwhile, Celie visits
Alphonso, who confirms Nettie's story. Celie begins to lose some of her faith in God, which she
confides to Shug, who explains to Celie her own unique religious philosophy. Shug helps Celie
realize God is not someone who has power over her like the rest of the men in Celie's life.
Rather, God is an “it” and not a “who."
Having had enough of her husband's abuse, Celie decides to leave Mister along with Shug and
Squeak, who is considering a singing career of her own. Celie puts a curse on Mister before
leaving him for good, settling in Tennessee and supporting herself as a seamstress.

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Alphonso dies, Celie inherits his land and moves back into her childhood home. Around this
time, Shug falls in love with Germaine, a member of her band, and this news crushes Celie.
Shug travels with Germaine, all the while writing postcards to Celie. Celie pledges to love Shug
even if Shug does not love her back.
Celie learns that Mister, suffering from a considerable decline in fortunes after Celie left him,
has changed dramatically, and Celie begins to call him by his first name, Albert. Albert proposes
that they marry "in the spirit as well as in the flesh," but Celie declines.
Meanwhile, Nettie and Samuel marry and prepare to return to America. Before they leave,
Adam marries Tashi, an African girl. Following an African tradition, Tashi undergoes the painful
rituals of female circumcision and facial scarring. In solidarity, Adam undergoes the same facial
scarring ritual.
As Celie realizes that she is content in her life without Shug, Shug returns, having ended her
relationship with Germaine. Nettie, Samuel, Olivia, Adam, and Tashi all arrive at Celie's house.
Nettie and Celie reunite after 30 years and introduce one another to their respective families.

The Vedas are a large body of religious texts originating in ancient India. Composed in Vedic
Sanskrit, the texts constitute the oldest layer of Sanskrit literature and the
oldest scriptures of Hinduism.
There are four Vedas: the Rigveda, the Yajurveda, the Samaveda and the Atharvaveda. Each
Veda has four subdivisions – the Samhitas (mantras and benedictions), the Aranyakas (text on
rituals, ceremonies, sacrifices and symbolic-sacrifices), the Brahmanas (commentaries on
rituals, ceremonies and sacrifices), and the Upanishads (texts discussing meditation, philosophy
and spiritual knowledge). Some scholars add a fifth category – the Upasanas (worship). The
texts of the Upanishads discuss ideas akin to the heterodox sramana-traditions.
Vedas are śruti (“what is heard”), distinguishing them from other religious texts, which are
called smṛti (“what is remembered"). Hindus consider the Vedas to be apauruṣeya, which
means “not of a man, superhuman” and “impersonal, authorless,” revelations of sacred sounds
and texts heard by ancient sages after intense meditation.
The Vedas have been orally transmitted since the 2nd millennium BCE with the help of
elaborate mnemonic techniques. The mantras, the oldest part of the Vedas, are recited in the
modern age for their phonology rather than the semantics, and are considered to be
”primordial rhythms of creation”, preceding the forms to which they refer. By reciting them the
cosmos is regenerated, “by enlivening and nourishing the forms of creation at their base.”
The various Indian philosophies and Hindu denominations have taken differing positions on the
Vedas; schools of Indian philosophy which acknowledge the primal authority of the Vedas are
classified as ”orthodox” (āstika). Other śramaṇa traditions, such
as Lokayata, Carvaka, Ajivika, Buddhism and Jainism, which did not regard the Vedas as
authorities, are referred to as “heterodox” or “non-orthodox” (nāstika) schools.

Kavya Literature
Kavya is the literary style used by court poets in a movement that flourished between c. 200
BCE and 1100 CE.[o] While the Rāmāyaṇa forms the chief source and basis of the Kāvyas, and
while in the former, form is subordinated to matter, form takes on centrestage in Kāvya. Kāvya
works are thus full of alliteration, similes, metaphors and other figures of speech.

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The Buddhist poet and philosopher Aśvaghoṣa's Buddhacarita is among the oldest surviving
examples of Kāvya literature, and the work calls itself a mahākāvya and is composed no later
than 400 CE. The most important of the Kāvyas are Kālidāsa's Raghuvaṃśa and
Kumārasambhava.

Kālidāsa
Kālidāsa, called by many the Shakespeare of India, is said to have been the finest master of the
Sanskrit poetic style, possessing qualities, as ascribed to his favorite style, the Vidarbha, by
Danḍin, such as, in Arthur Macdonell's words, "firmness and evenness of sound, avoiding harsh
transitions and preferring gentle harmonies; the use of words in their ordinary sense and
clearness of meaning; the power to convey sentiment; beauty, elevation, and the employment
of metaphorical expressions".

Raghu·vaṃśa
This Raghu·vaṃśa chronicles the life of Rāma alongside his forefathers and successors, with the
story of Rāma agreeing quite closely that in the Rāmāyaṇa.
The narrative moves at a rapid pace, is packed with apt and striking similes and has much
genuine poetry, while the style is simpler than what is typical of a Kāvya. The Raghuvaṃśa is
seen to meet all the criteria of a mahākāvya, such as that the central figure should be noble and
clever, and triumphant, that the work should abound in rasa and bhāva, and so on. There are
more than 20 commentaries of this work that are known.

The Kumāra·sambhava narrates the story of the courtship and wedding of the god Śiva and of
Pārvatī, Himālaya's daughter, and the birth of their son, Kumāra. The poem finishes with the
slaying of the demon Tāraka, the very purpose of the birth of the warrior-god.
The Kumāra·sambhava showcases the poet's rich and original imaginative powers making for
abundant poetic imagery and wealth of illustration. Again, more than 20 commentaries on the
Kumāra·sambhava have survived.

Dark Romanticism is a literary subgenre of Romanticism, reflecting popular fascination with the
irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Often conflated with Gothicism, it has shadowed the
euphoric Romantic movement ever since its 18th-century beginnings. Edgar Allan Poe is often
celebrated as one of the supreme exponents of the tradition.

Many poets of the Harlem Renaissance were inspired to tie in threads of African-American
culture into their poems; as a result, jazz poetry was heavily developed during this time. "The
Weary Blues" was a notable jazz poem written by Langston Hughes.
Also known as : New Negro Movement
Outcome : Mainstream recognition of cultural developments and idea of New Negro
Location : Harlem, New York City, United States and influences from Paris, France

Abbey Theatre: The Dublin home of the Irish National Theatre Company, where some of the
most celebrated plays of the 20th century first appeared. On its opening night, December 26,
1904, the Abbey presented four short plays: William Butler Yeats’s Cathleen Ni Houlihan and On

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Baile’s Strand, Lady Augusta Gregory’s Spreading the News, and John Millington Synge’s In the
Shadow of the Glen. This premiere set a standard that the company was to maintain for
the next two decades. The company presented Synge’s The Playboy of the Western World
(greeted by rioters protesting the play as “a libel of the Irish character”) in 1907 and his
powerful tragedy Deirdre of the Sorrows in 1910. The twenties saw the presentation of Sean
O’Casey’s great tragicomic achievements: The Shadow of a Gunman (1923), Juno and the
Paycock (1924), and The Plough and the Stars (1926), the latter causing another riot at the
theater. Although never matching the great achievements of its early years, the Abbey, which
burned down in 1951 and reopened in 1966, continues to produce plays and players of
unusually high quality, maintaining its status as one of the premier theaters in Europe.

EPICENE OR THE SILENT WOMAN (1609)

• Written entirely in prose
• Acted by the Children of the Queen's Revels
Morose, an egotistic old bachelor with a pathological aversion to noise, proposes to disinherit
his nephew Sir Dauphine Eugenie, whom he suspects of ridiculing him, by marrying and
producing children, provided he can find a silent woman. Cutbeard, his barber, has found such a
one in Epicene. Immediately after the wedding Epicene proceeds to torment her husband by
turning into a loquacious shrew, and his agony is increased when Dauphine and his friends
Truewit and Clerimont arrive with a rowdy party of guests and musicians to celebrate the
marriage. Among the guests are a henpecked bearward, Captain Otter, and his Amazonian wife,
the Collegiate Ladies, and two boastful knights, Amorous La Foole and John Daw, whose
cowardice is exposed when Truewit tricks them into fighting a duel. Driven frantic by the
hubbub, and having unsuccessfully sought grounds for divorce from a parson and canon lawyer
(in fact impostors planted by Dauphine, who chatter interminably to no purpose), Morose
accepts Dauphine's offer to rid him of Epicene for £500 a year and the reversion of his property.
Whereupon Dauphine pulls off Epicene's wig and reveals that, unknown to everyone else,
including the audience, she is a boy whom he had trained for the part.
Dryden - the most perfectly plotted of all comedies.

The Theatre of the Absurd is a post–World War II designation for particular plays of absurdist
fiction written by a number of primarily European playwrights in the late 1950s. It is also a term
for the style of theatre the plays represent. The plays focus largely on ideas of existentialism
and express what happens when human existence lacks meaning or purpose and
communication breaks down. The structure of the plays is typically a round shape, with the
finishing point the same as the starting point. Logical construction and argument give way to
irrational and illogical speech and to the ultimate conclusion—silence.

Renaissance Humanism was a revival in the study of classical antiquity, at first in Italy and then
spreading across Western Europe in the 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries. During the period, the
term humanist referred to teachers and students of the studia humanitatis—meaning
the humanities including grammar, rhetoric, history, poetry, and moral philosophy. It was not
until the 19th century that this began to be called humanism instead of the original humanities,
and later by the retronym Renaissance humanism to distinguish it from later humanist

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developments. During the Renaissance period most humanists were religious, so their concern
was to “purify and renew Christianity”, not to do away with it. Their vision was to return ad
fontes (“to the sources”) to the simplicity of the New Testament, bypassing the complexities of
medieval theology. Today, by contrast, the term humanism has come to signify “a worldview
which denies the existence or relevance of God, or which is committed to a purely secular
outlook”.
Renaissance humanism was a response to what came to be depicted by later whig historians as
the “narrow pedantry” associated with medieval scholasticism. Humanists sought to create
a citizenry able to speak and write with eloquence and clarity and thus capable of engaging in
the civic life of their communities and persuading others to virtuous and prudent actions.
Humanism, whilst set up by a small elite who had access to books and education, was intended
as a cultural mode to influence all of society. It was a program to revive the cultural legacy,
literary legacy, and moral philosophy of classical antiquity. There were important centres of
humanism in Florence, Naples, Rome, Venice, Genoa, Mantua, Ferrara, and Urbino.

Dante is known for establishing the use of the vernacular in literature at a time when most
poetry was written in Latin, making it accessible only to the most educated readers. His De
vulgari eloquentia (On Eloquence in the Vernacular) was one of the first scholarly defenses of
the vernacular. His use of the Tuscan dialect for works such as The New Life (1295) and Divine
Comedy helped establish the modern-day standardized Italian language, and set a precedent
that important Italian writers such as Petrarch and Boccaccio would later follow.
Dante was instrumental in establishing the literature of Italy, and his depictions
of Hell, Purgatory and Heaven provided inspiration for the larger body of Western art. He is
cited as an influence on Geoffrey Chaucer, John Milton and Alfred Tennyson, among many
others. In addition, the first use of the interlocking three-line rhyme scheme, or the terza rima,
is attributed to him. He is described as the “father” of the Italian language, and in Italy he is
often referred to as il Sommo Poeta (“the Supreme Poet”). Dante, Petrarch, and Boccaccio are
also called the tre corone (“three crowns”) of Italian literature.

Négritude (from French "Nègre" and "-itude" to denote a condition that can be translated as
"Blackness") is a framework of critique and literary theory, developed mainly
by francophone intellectuals, writers, and politicians of the African diaspora during the 1930s,
aimed at raising and cultivating "Black consciousness" across Africa and its diaspora. Négritude
was founded by Martinican poet Aimé Césaire, Léopold Sédar Senghor (the
first President of Senegal), and Léon Damas of French Guiana. Négritude intellectuals
disavowed colonialism, and argued for the importance of a Pan-African sense of being among
people of African descent worldwide. The intellectuals employed Marxist political philosophy, in
the Black radical tradition. The writers drew heavily on a surrealist literary style, and some say
they were also influenced somewhat by the Surrealist stylistics, and in their work often
explored the experience of diasporic being, asserting ones' self and identity, and ideas of home,
home-going and belonging.
Négritude inspired the birth of many movements across the Afro-Diasporic world,
including Afro-Surrealism, Creolite in the Caribbean, and black is beautiful in the United
States. Frantz Fanon often made reference to Négritude in his writing.

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Literary Institutions
Original literature continues to be promoted by institutions such as the Eisteddfod in Wales and
the Welsh Books Council. The Royal Society of Edinburgh includes literature within its sphere of
activity. Literature Wales is the Welsh national literature promotion agency and society of
writers, which administers the Wales Book of the Year award. The imported eisteddfod
tradition in the Channel Islands encouraged recitation and performance, a tradition that
continues today.
Formed in 1949, the Cheltenham Literature Festival is the longest-running festival of its kind in
the world. The Hay Festival in Wales attracts wide interest, and the Edinburgh International
Book Festival is the largest festival of its kind in the world.
The Poetry Society publishes and promotes poetry, notably through an annual National Poetry
Day. World Book Day is observed in Britain and the Crown Dependencies on the first Thursday
in March annually.

The Great Gatsby is a 1925 novel by American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald. Set in the Jazz
Ageon Long Island, the novel depicts narrator Nick Carraway's interactions with mysterious
millionaire Jay Gatsby and Gatsby's obsession to reunite with his former lover, Daisy Buchanan.
The novel was inspired by a youthful romance Fitzgerald had with socialite Ginevra King and the
riotous parties he attended on Long Island's North Shore in 1922. Following a move to
the French Riviera, Fitzgerald completed a rough draft in 1924. He submitted the draft to
editor Maxwell Perkins, who persuaded Fitzgerald to revise the work over the following winter.
After making revisions, Fitzgerald was satisfied with the text, but remained ambivalent about
the book's title and considered several alternatives. Painter Francis Cugat's final cover design
impressed Fitzgerald who incorporated a visual element from the art into the novel.
After its publication by Scribner's in April 1925, The Great Gatsby received generally favorable
reviews; some literary critics believed it did not equal Fitzgerald's previous efforts and signaled
the end of his literary achievements. Gatsby was a commercial failure, selling fewer than 20,000
copies by October, and Fitzgerald's hopes of a monetary windfall from the novel were
unrealized. When the author died in 1940, he believed himself to be a failure and his work
forgotten. After his death, the novel faced a critical and scholarly re-examination amid World
War II, and it soon became a core part of most American high school curricula and a part of
American popular culture. Numerous stage and film adaptations followed in the subsequent
decades.
Gatsby continues to attract popular and scholarly attention. Contemporary scholars emphasize
the novel's treatment of social class, its portrayal of inherited versus self-made
wealth, race, environmentalism, and its cynical attitude towards the American dream. As with
other works by Fitzgerald, criticisms include allegations of antisemitism. The Great Gatsby is
widely considered to be a literary masterwork and a contender for the title of the Great
American Novel.

Postcolonialism is the critical academic study of the cultural legacy of colonialism and
imperialism, focusing on the human consequences of the control and exploitation of colonized

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people and their lands. More specifically, it is a critical theory analysis of the history, culture,
literature, and discourse of (usually European) imperial power.
Postcolonialism encompasses a wide variety of approaches, and theoreticians may not always
agree on a common set of definitions. On a simple level, through anthropological study, it may
seek to build a better understanding of colonial life—based on the assumption that the colonial
rulers are unreliable narrators—from the point of view of the colonized people. On a deeper
level, postcolonialism examines the social and political power relationships that sustain
colonialism and neocolonialism, including the social, political and cultural narratives
surrounding the colonizer and the colonized. This approach may overlap with studies of
contemporary history, and may also draw examples from anthropology, historiography, political
science, philosophy, sociology, and human geography. Sub-disciplines of postcolonial studies
examine the effects of colonial rule on the practice of feminism, anarchism, literature, and
Christian thought.
At times, the term postcolonial studies may be preferred to postcolonialism, as the ambiguous
term colonialism could refer either to a system of government, or to an ideology or world view
underlying that system. However, postcolonialism (i.e., postcolonial studies) generally
represents an ideological response to colonialist thought, rather than simply describing a
system that comes after colonialism, as the prefix post- may suggest. As such, postcolonialism
may be thought of as a reaction to or departure from colonialism in the same way
postmodernism is a reaction to modernism; the term postcolonialism itself is modeled on
postmodernism, with which it shares certain concepts and methods.

The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary
Imagination is a 1979 book by Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar, in which they
examine Victorian literature from a feminist perspective. Gilbert and Gubar draw their title
from Charlotte Brontë's Jane Eyre, in which Rochester's wife (née Bertha Mason) is kept
secretly locked in an attic apartment by her husband.

Transcendentalism became a coherent movement and a sacred organization with the founding
of the Transcendental Club in Cambridge, Massachusetts, on September 12, 1836, by prominent
New England intellectuals, including George Putnam (Unitarian minister), Ralph Waldo
Emerson, and Frederic Henry Hedge. Other members of the club included Amos Bronson
Alcott, Orestes Brownson, Theodore Parker, Henry David Thoreau, William Henry
Channing, James Freeman Clarke, Christopher Pearse Cranch, Convers Francis, Sylvester Judd,
and Jones Very. Female members included Sophia Ripley, Margaret Fuller, Elizabeth
Peabody, Ellen Sturgis Hooper, and Caroline Sturgis Tappan. From 1840, the group frequently
published in their journal The Dial, along with other venues.

Bharati Mukherjee ( 1940 -2017) was an Indian American-Canadian writer and professor
emerita in the department of English at the University of California, Berkeley. She was the
author of a number of novels and short story collections, as well as works of nonfiction. She
was born Of Indian Hindu Bengali Brahmin origin, Mukherjee was born in present-day Kolkata,
West Bengal, India during British rule. She was awarded with National Book Critics Circle Award
in 1988 for The Middleman and Other Stories.

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Major works:
📌Novels
The Tiger's Daughter (1971), Wife (1975), Jasmine (1989), The Holder of the World (1993),
Leave It to Me (1997), Desirable Daughters (2002), The Tree Bride (2004), Miss New India
(2011)
📌Short story collections
Darkness (1985), The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), A Father, The Management of Grief
📌Memoir
Days and Nights in Calcutta (1977, with Clark Blaise)
📌Non-fiction
The Sorrow and the Terror: The Haunting Legacy of the Air India Tragedy (1987, with Clark
Blaise), Political Culture and Leadership in India (1991), Regionalism in Indian Perspective (1992)

Fasting, Feasting is a novel by Indian writer Anita Desai, first published in 1999 in Great Britain
by Chatto and Windus. It was shortlisted for the Booker Prize for fiction in 1999.
Anita Desai's novel of intricate family relations plays out in two countries, India and the United
States. The core characters comprise a family living in a small town in India, where provincial
customs and attitudes dictate the future of all children: girls are to be married off and boys are
to become as educated as possible. The story focuses on the life of the unmarried and main
character, Uma, a spinster, the family's older daughter, with Arun, the boy and baby of the
family. Uma spends her life in subservience to her older demanding parents, while massive
effort and energy is expended to ensure Arun's education and placement in a university in
Massachusetts. Aruna gets married. In part two the reader is introduced to Arun in America.
Therefore, we can compare and contrast between the Indian and the American culture.
Rather a series of events from life than a complexly plotted work, we follow the fortunes of
Uma and Arun as they engage with family and strangers and the intricacy of day-to-day living.
The novel is in two parts. The first part is set in India and is focused on the life of Uma who is
the overworked daughter of Mama and Papa. She is put upon by them at every turn, preparing
food, running errands. In the early part of the novel we see her struggling at school. She is not
very bright but loves the sisters who teach and appreciate her. Finally, she is made to leave
school and serve her parent.
For Salon, Sylvia Brownrigg wrote, "Fasting, Feasting" is a novel not of plot but of comparison.
In beautifully detailed prose Desai draws the foods and textures of an Indian small town and of
an American suburb. In both, she suggests, family life is a complex mixture of generosity and
meanness, license and restriction: The novel's subtle revelation is in the unlikely similarities."

Nectar in a Sieve is a 1954 novel by Kamala Markandaya. The book is set in India during a
period of intense urban development and is the chronicle of the marriage between Rukmani,
youngest daughter of a village headman, and Nathan, a tenant farmer. The story is told in the
first person by Rukmani, beginning from her arranged marriage to Nathan at the age of 12 to
his death many years later.
The title of the novel is taken from the 1825 poem "Work Without Hope", by Samuel Taylor
Coleridge. An excerpt from the poem is the epigraph of the novel:
'Work without hope draws nectar in a sieve, And hope without an object cannot live.’
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In the novel, Rukmani comments, "Change I had known before, and it had been gradual. But the
change that now came into my life, into all our lives, blasting its way into our village, seemed
wrought in the twinkling of an eye."

Diaspora, populations, such as members of an ethnic or religious group, that originated from
the same place but dispersed to different locations. The word diaspora comes from the ancient
Greek dia speiro, meaning “to sow over.” The concept of diaspora has long been used to refer
to the Greeks in the Hellenic world and to the Jews after the fall of Jerusalem in the early 6th
century BCE. Beginning in the 1950s and 1960s, scholars began to use it with reference to the
African diaspora, and the use of the term was extended further in the following decades.
The chief characteristic features of the diasporic writings are the quest for identity, uprooting
and re-rooting, insider and outsider syndrome, nostalgia, nagging sense of guilt etc. The
diasporic writers turn to their homeland for various reasons.
Generally, diasporic literature deals with alienation, displacement, existential rootlessness,
nostalgia, quest of identity. It also addresses issues related to amalgamation or disintegration of
cultures. It reflects the immigrant experience that comes out of the immigrant settlement.
diasporic literature influenced world literature. Generally, it deals with loss of habitat, change
of nativity, removal of identity, emergence of new set of traditions, replacement of the mother
tongue and regeneration of mixed culture. It also addresses the rebirth of new culture from
multiple cultures.
Major diasporic writers
Indian-English writers like Anitha Desai, Bharati Mukherjee, Shashi Tharoor, Amitav Ghosh,
Vikram Seth, Sunetra Gupta, Rohinton Mistry, Jhumpa Lahiri, and Hari Kunzru have established
themselves as fine writers in the tradition of Indian Diasporic writing.

Sentimental Comedy is an 18th-century dramatic genre which sprang up as a reaction to the

immoral tone of English Restoration plays. In sentimental comedies, middle-class protagonists
triumphantly overcome a series of moral trials. These plays aimed to produce tears rather than
laughter and reflected contemporary philosophical conceptions of humans as inherently good
but capable of being led astray by bad example. By appealing to his noble sentiments, a man
could be reformed and set back on the path of virtue. While the plays contained characters
whose natures seemed overly virtuous and whose problems were too easily resolved, they
were accepted by audiences as truthful representations of the human predicament.
📌Major works
Love's Last Shift by Colley Cibber (1696), The Constant Couple by George Farquhar (1699), The
Lying Lover by Richard Steele (1703), The Tender Husband by Richard Steele (1705), The
Conscious Lovers by Richard Steele (1722), The Foundling by Edward Moore (1748), The School
for Lovers by William Whitehead (1762)
Le Préjugé à la mode by Pierre-Claude Nivelle de La Chaussée (1735) – a good example of the
French genre similar to sentimental comedy, comédie larmoyante
Sentimental comedies continued to coexist with more conventional laughing comedies such as
Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer (1773) and Richard Brinsley Sheridan's The Rivals
(1775) until the sentimental genre waned in the early 19th century.

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Sylvia Plath was one of the most dynamic and admired poets of the 20th century. By the time
she took her life at the age of 30, Plath already had a following in the literary community. In the
ensuing years her work attracted the attention of a multitude of readers, who saw in her
singular verse an attempt to catalogue despair, violent emotion, and obsession with death. In
the New York Times Book Review, Joyce Carol Oates described Plath as “one of the most
celebrated and controversial of postwar poets writing in English.” Intensely autobiographical,
Plath’s poems explore her own mental anguish, her troubled marriage to fellow poet Ted
Hughes, her unresolved conflicts with her parents, and her own vision of herself. On the World
Socialist web site, Margaret Rees observed, “Whether Plath wrote about nature, or about the
social restrictions on individuals, she stripped away the polite veneer. She let her writing
express elemental forces and primeval fears. In doing so, she laid bare the contradictions that
tore apart appearance and hinted at some of the tensions hovering just beneath the surface of
the American way of life in the post war period.” Oates put it more simply when she wrote that
Plath’s best-known poems, “many of them written during the final, turbulent weeks of her life,
read as if they’ve been chiseled, with a fine surgical instrument, out of arctic ice.” Plath has
inspired countless readers and influenced many poets since her death in 1963.
The Bell Jar is the only novel written by the American writer and poet Sylvia Plath. Originally
published under the pseudonym "Victoria Lucas" in 1963, the novel is semi-autobiographical
with the names of places and people changed. The book is often regarded as a roman à
clef because the protagonist's descent into mental illness parallels Plath's own experiences with
what may have been clinical depression or bipolar II disorder. Plath died by suicide a month
after its first United Kingdom publication. The novel was published under Plath's name for the
first time in 1967 and was not published in the United States until 1971, in accordance with the
wishes of both Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, and her mother. The novel has been translated
into nearly a dozen languages.

Introduction To Beat Generation Poets

In the 1940s and 50s, a new generation of poets rebelled against the conventions of
mainstream American life and writing. They became known as the Beat Poets––a name that
evokes weariness, down-and-outness, the beat under a piece of music, and beatific spirituality.
At first, they organized in New York City, Los Angeles, and San Francisco. By the 1950s, poets at
the heart of the movement had settled in the Bay Area, especially in neighborhoods near Beat
poet and publisher Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s bookstore, City Lights.
Beat poets sought to write in an authentic, unfettered style. “First thought, best thought” was
how central Beat poet Allen Ginsberg described their method of spontaneous writing. Poetically
experimental and politically dissident, the Beat poets expanded their consciousnesses through
explorations of hallucinogenic drugs, sexual freedom, Eastern religion, and the natural world.
They took inspiration from jazz musicians, surrealists, metaphysical poets, visionary poets such
as William Blake, and haiku and Zen poetry. In his article “Driving the Beat Road,” Jeff Weiss
explains, “More than a half-century after their emergence, the Beats still offer up wild style, a
sense of freedom and wonder for the natural world almost unrivaled in postwar literature.”
Beat poetry emerged from the disillusionment that followed World War II, a period of
unimaginable atrocities including the Holocaust and the use of nuclear weapons against Japan.
Following the end of the war, the United States and the Soviet Union quickly entered a Cold

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War, a period of geopolitical hostility that created paranoia and cultural and political repression
at home.
By the mid-1950s, the Beats helped to spearhead a cultural vanguard reacting against
institutionalized American values, materialism, and conformity. On October 7, 1955, the Beats
gave their first major public poetry reading, a seminal event held at Six Gallery in San Francisco.
Among the five poets to perform their work was Allen Ginsberg, who first read “Howl,” a poem
in the tradition of Walt Whitman that Ginsberg described as “an emotional time bomb that
would continue exploding… the military-industrial-nationalistic complex.”

Stein is credited with bringing the term "Lost Generation" into use.
In his memoir A Moveable Feast (1964), published after Hemingway's and Stein's deaths, Ernest
Hemingway writes that Gertrude Stein heard the phrase from a French garage owner who
serviced Stein's car. When a young mechanic failed to repair the car quickly enough, the garage
owner shouted at the young man, "You are all a "génération perdue."" While telling Hemingway
the story, Stein added: "That is what you are. That's what you all are ... all of you young people
who served in the war. You are a lost generation." Hemingway thus credits the phrase to Stein,
who was then his mentor and patron.
The 1926 publication of Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises popularized the term; that novel
serves to epitomize the post-war expatriate generation. However, Hemingway later wrote to
his editor Max Perkins that the "point of the book" was not so much about a generation being
lost, but that "the earth abideth forever". Hemingway believed the characters in The Sun Also
Rises may have been "battered" but were not lost.
Consistent with this ambivalence, Hemingway employs "Lost Generation" as one of two
contrasting epigraphs for his novel. In A Moveable Feast, Hemingway writes, "I tried to balance
Miss Stein's quotation from the garage owner with one from Ecclesiastes." A few lines later,
recalling the risks and losses of the war, he adds: "I thought of Miss Stein and Sherwood
Anderson and egotism and mental laziness versus discipline and I thought 'who is calling who a
lost generation?'"

Confessional poetry or "Confessionalism" is a style of poetry that emerged in the United States
during the late 1950s and early 1960s. It is sometimes also classified as a form
of Postmodernism. It has been described as poetry of the personal or "I", focusing on extreme
moments of individual experience, the psyche, and personal trauma, including previously and
occasionally stilltaboo matters such as mental illness, sexuality, and suicide, often set in relation
to broader social themes.
The confessional poet's engagement with personal experience has been explained by literary
critics as an effort to distance oneself from the horrifying social realities of the twentieth
century. Events like the Holocaust, the Cold War, and existential threat brought by
the proliferation of nuclear weapons had made public matters daunting for both confessional
poets and their readers. The confessional poets also worked in opposition to the idealization of
domesticity in the 1950s, by revealing unhappiness in their own homes.
The school of "confessional poetry" was associated with several poets who redefined American
poetry in the 1950s and 1960s, including Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, John Berryman, Anne
Sexton, Allen Ginsberg, and W. D. Snodgrass.

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Christopher Marlowe was the first English author to achieve critical notoriety for his use of
blank verse. The major achievements in English blank verse were made by William
Shakespeare, who wrote much of the content of his plays in unrhymed iambic pentameter,
and John Milton, whose Paradise Lost is written in blank verse. Miltonic blank verse was widely
imitated in the 18th century by such poets as James Thomson (in The Seasons) and William
Cowper (in The Task). Romantic English poets such as William Wordsworth, Percy Bysshe
Shelley, and John Keats used blank verse as a major form. Shortly afterwards, Alfred, Lord
Tennyson became particularly devoted to blank verse, using it for example in his long narrative
poem "The Princess", as well as for one of his most famous poems: "Ulysses". Among American
poets, Hart Crane and Wallace Stevens are notable for using blank verse in extended
compositions at a time when many other poets were turning to free verse.

The Vulgate is a late-4th-century Latin translation of the Bible. It was to become the Catholic
Church’s officially promulgated Latin version of the Bible during the 16th century as the Sixtine
Vulgate then as the Clementine Vulgate; the Vulgate is still presently used in the Latin Church.

The Romantic Period

The period which extends from 1798 to 1837 is known as “Romantic Age”. The term “romantic“
was used in England for the first time in the 16th century to indicate the unreal and fanciful
elements. During the 18th century it was used with a negative connotation to indicate
something in contrast with reason but linked with emotions. It was used for the first time with a
positive connotation in Germany.
The Romantic Age is marked by three important historical events:
- the American Revolution (1775 – 1783);
- the French Revolution (1789 – 1799);
- the Napoleonic War (1796 – 1815).
The first literary movement in Europe was known as the “Strum und Drang” and was conceived
in Germany. Imagination became the source of knowledge and the Romantic poet escapes from
reality and looks for something new. The Romantic poet recognize the great modification
occurred after the Industrial Revolution (discovery and development of the steam engine), they
realize their inadequacy in representing the society to which they belong and so they become
aware of man’s unhappiness.
The Romantic Movement in Britain started in 1798 when the Lyrical Ballads(by Wordsworth and
Coleridge) appeared. The most important British poets of this period are Wordsworth,
Coleridge, Byron, Shelley and Keats. The most important character in the Romantic Age is
landscape both in art and poetry. The most important romantic painters are Turner and
Constable.

William Wordsworth was born in the English Lake District in 1770 and he was educated in
Cambridge. In 1790 he went on a walking tour of France and the Alps where he had been
influenced by the ideas of French Revolution. The development of the Revolution and the war
between France and England brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. In 1795 he
went to live with his sister, his most faithful friend. Then he moved to Somerset to be near to

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Samuel Taylor Coleridge. The development of their friendship brought them to write a
collection of poems called Lyrical Ballads, published in 1798 anonymously and in 1800
containing Wordsworth’s Preface (the Manifesto of English Romanticism). In 1799 he went to
live in the Lake District and he got married. In 1805 he had finished The Prelude, a long
autobiographical poem in 14 books. His reputation grew in 1843 when he was made Poet
Laureate. He died in 1850.
The main topic of Wordsworth’s poetry are everyday situations and common people. He uses
simple language. The most important theme of his poetry is nature, he shared Rousseau’s faith
in the goodness of nature and he believed in a deep link between man and nature. He thought
the man and nature are inseparable, nature comforts man in sorrow and helps him to love, so
he had a pantheistic view. Wordsworth believed that memory was very important because it
allows the poet to give poetry its life and power. The importance of memory influences poetry
because it take origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. The poet is a teacher who shows
men how to understand their feelings and improve their moral being.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in 1772, he was sent first to Christ’s Hospital School and
then to Cambridge were he never graduated. He was influenced by French revolutionary ideals
but after the disillusionment, he and the poet Southey planned to establish a utopian
community in Pennsylvania under the name of “Pantisocracy”, but the project came to nothing.
In 1797 he met William Wordsworth and he settled in Somerset. In these year he wrote: The
Rime of the Ancient Mariner (first poem of the Lyrical Ballads), Christabel (unfinished) and
Kubla Khan (unfinished). In 1799 he moved to the Lake District and then he spent a period of
solitude in Malta. In 1817 he settled in London were he produced Biographia Literaria. He died
in 1834.
Imagination for Coleridge is very important and he divided it in two kinds:
- Primary imagination: everybody use it unconsciously and is connected with human
perception;
- Secondary imagination: it is voluntary and used consciously, with that men perceive the world
around them and have the faculty to use the data of reality to build new worlds.
Fancy is the mechanical ability the poet have to use device in order to express his ideas, it is the
way the poet can communicate his ideas and vision to everybody.
Coleridge didn’t view nature as a moral guide or a source of consolation and happiness. He saw
nature and the material world as the reflection of the perfect world of “ideas” (neoplatonic
interpretation). In his poems Coleridge used archaic language, alliteration, repetition and
onomatopoeias.
The Rime of the Ancient Mariner is a poem is made up of 7 parts and is set in a boundless sea. It
is introduced by an “Argument” containing a short summary of the poem. The atmosphere is
full of mystery, due to the presence of the supernatural and the common place. The characters
are the mariner, who is both a spectator and an actor, and his mates whose sorrow represent
the human one. The poem contains many of the feature associated to ballads as the use of
dialogue and narration, the four-line stanzas, the repetitions, the alliterations and the internal
rhyme and the themes of travel, wandering and supernatural elements. There are different
interpretation of the poem:
- Description of a dream;

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- Allegory of the life of the soul;
- Description of the poetic journey of Romanticism (the mariner is the poet who feels guilty for
the loss of innocence caused by the industrial revolution and tries to fill it with poetry).

Percy Shelley was born in 1792 by a wealthy family. In 1810 he was expelled from Oxford
University because of his pamphlet The Necessity of Atheism. At the age of 19 he got marry and
he moved to Ireland. He was a free spirit, refused social conventions and tyranny and he
believed in a better future. He died in Italy in 1822. His best works are: Ode to the West Wind,
To a Skylark, Prometheus Unbound, Adonais and A Defence of Poetry.
The main themes of Shelley’s poetry are freedom and love because they are the solution to the
evils of society. The poetry is the expression of imagination and it is able to change the material
world unable to change, in this way the poet can only suffer isolate from the world, finding
comfort in hope. The poet is both a prophet and a hero who has to help mankind to reach an
ideal world full of freedom, love and beauty. The nature is the place where to escape from the
ordinary world, it is a veil that hides the eternal truth of the Divine Spirit. Shelley, in his poetry,
used a wide range of styles but he is remembered for his short lyric poem.

A Closet Drama is a play that is not intended to be performed on stage, but read by a solitary
reader to a small group. The contrast between closet drama and classic "stage" dramas dates
back to the late eighteenth century. Although non-performative in nature, closet drama is,
according to Henry A. Beers, "a quite legitimate product of literary art."
Closet Drama has also been used as a mode of dramatic writing for those without access to the
commercial playhouse, and in this context has become closely associated with early modern
women's writing.
Closet Dramas were published in manuscript form, including names of the character and
elaborate stage directions, allowing readers to imagine the text as if it was being performed.
The playwrights did not have to worry about the pressure to impress an audience due to their
audience being who they chose. Thus, it was considered to be a free style of writing. In the
early modern period, women writers who were unable to "use their voice" in public were able
to emphasize their opinions using the form of Closet Drama. This outlet for communication
provided a woman the ability to engage in political discourse without exposing her views to an
indiscriminate public, since she could choose to restrict her readership.
Swinburne's "Atalanta in Calydon" is an example of Closet Drama. Other examples are Milton's
"Samson Agonistes"(1671), Byron's "Manfred" (1817), Shelley's "Prometheus Unbound" (1820)
and Hardy's "The Dynasts" (1904 -08) Closet Plays are more successful as literature than acted
drama.

List of Elegies
1. Adonais - Shelley (death of Keats)
2. Astrophel - Sidney (death of Spencer)
3.In Memoriam - Tennyson ( death of Arthur Henry Hallam)
4. Thyrsis - Matthew Arnold ( death of
Arthur Hugh Clough)
5. On my first sonne - Ben Johnson ( death of his son)

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6. When Licas lost in the doria bloomed- Walt Whitman ( death of Lincoln)
7. In Memory of W. B Yeats - W. H Auden
8. Rugby Chapel - Matthew Arnold ( death of his father)
9. Memorial verses - Mathew Arnold
10. Wordsworth's grave - William Watson
11. Heine's grave - Matthew Arnold
12. Elegy written in the country churchyard - Thomas Gray ( loss of faith)
13. Meditation upon death ( Thanatopsis )- William Cullen Bryant
14. O Captain My captain - Walt Whitman ( death of Lincoln )
15. Elegy on his Cat - Joachim Du Belly.

1. Structuralism:
Structuralism was a literary theory which is based on "a system of ideas used in the
study of language, literature, art, anthropology and sociology that emphasizes the
importance of the basic structure and relationship of that particular subject. It is
primarily concerned with understanding how language works as a system of meaning
production. How does language function as a kind of meaning machine. It is a 20th
century intellectual approach. Ferdinand desassure was the founder of structuralism.
According to De Saussure, Every language has different signs and these signs are
composite of Signifier and signified. These Signs give the meaning to the text. We
cannot study Text in Isolation.He gave the concept of Langue and parole. Langue is the
grammar rules, system and structure of the language.
Parole is the act of utterances.

2. Post structuralism:
It is a late 20th century approach in philosophy and literary criticism. It is opposition to
the structuralism. Jacques derrida and Michael Foucault are the founder of post
structuralism. It denies the existence of universal principles which create meanings and
coherence. It rejects the theory of Ferdinand Desaussure of Signifier and Signified. It
examines the other sources of meanings I.e reader, cultural norms and other literature
etc. Here readers replace the author. It is simultaneously rejection of Structuralism.
Here no meaning and sign are stable. There is nothing outside the text.

3. Russian Formalism:
Russian Formalism was developed in 1910 in Russia .its official beginning was marked by
an establishment of two organization, the moscow linguistic circle and the society for
the study of poetic language (OPOYAZ).
For formalists, literary criticism is separate from other forms of analysis. It focuses on
how language works. Formalists study how literature works not what literature is about.
They were primarily interested in the way the literary text achieve their effects and in
establishing a scientific bases for study of literature. I can say that Formalism is a critical
approach that analyze, interpret and evaluate the inherent features of a text. These
Features include not only grammar and syntax but also literary devices such as meter
and figure of speech.

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 In the first half of the 20th century , Russian and Czech literary theorists worked to
develop a theory of literariness: what made literary text different from , for instance,
govt. reports, newspapers articles etc. Formalist says that literature distinguishes itself
from non literary language because it employs a range of devices that have a
defamiliarization effect. Here we can study text in isolation. There is nothing extra
textual. The text is the most authentic itself. We pay utmost attention on the forms of
the text. We focus on language and study linguistic devices in order to get maximum
meaning of the text.

4. Reader Response Criticism:

Reader response criticism analyzes the reader's role in the production of the meaning.
the text itself has no meanings until it is read by a reader. Here reader is a producer
rather than a consumer of meanings.
It is a school of criticism which emerged in 1970,focused on finding meaning in the act
of reading itself and examining the ways individual readers or community of readers
experience texts.
Reader-response criticism is a school of literary theory that focuses on the reader and
their experience of a literary work, in contrast to other schools and theories that focus
attention primarily on the author or the content and form of the work. It argues that a
text has no meaning before a reader experiences and—reads—it.
Practitioners: I-A-Richards, Louise Rosenblatt ,Walter Gibson ,Norman Holland .

5. Psychoanalytical Criticism:
Sigmund Freud developed the psychoanalytic theory of personality development, which
argued that personality is formed through conflicts among three fundamental structures of
the human mind: the id, ego, and superego.
This theory works on the psychology. It adopts the methods of reading employed by Freud
and later theorists to interpret texts, like dreams, express the secret unconscious desires
and anxieties of the author ,that a leterary work is a manifestation of the author's own
neuroses. Psychoanalysis attempts to understand the workings and source of unconscious
desires, needs, anxieties and behavior of writers, readers and specific cultural phenomena.
They want to understand human behavioral patterns and cultural behavior patterns.
Through the scope of a psychoanalytic lens, humans are described as having sexual and
aggressive drives. Psychoanalytic theorists believe that human behavior is deterministic. It is
governed by irrational forces, and the unconscious, as well as instinctual and biological
drives. Due to this deterministic nature, psychoanalytic theorists do not believe in free will.
Practitioner: Sigmund Freud ,Ernest Jones .

6. Deconstruction:
Deconstruction is a philosophical critical approach to textual analysis that is most closely
related with the work of Jacques Derrida. He gives the concept of binary opposition. The
deconstructive method is used to show that the meaning of a literary text is not fixed or
stable. Jacques Derrida says that all communication is characterized by uncertainty because
there is no definitive link between a signifier(a word)and signified(object). once a text is

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 written it ceases to have a meaning until a reader reads it. There is no solid meaning to the
text. There is no possibility of absolute truth. Deconstruction is an approach to
understanding the relationship between text and meaning. Derrida's approach consisted of
conducting readings of texts with an ear to what runs counter to the intended meaning or
structural unity of a particular text.

7. Feminism:
The concept of feminism in general has been concerned to an analysis of the trend of male
domination of the society ; the general attitude of male towards female, the ways of
improving the condition of women. In literature, It emerged in 1960. It was the movement
in favor of women.
''Jane Austin, Francis Burney, Virginia Woolf, George Eliot " were the famous Feminist
writers. Feminism is a belief that women should have equal rights to men.
First Wave: Kate Millet was concerned mainly to the treatment of women at the hands of
male.
Marry Ellman's Thinking About Women.
Kate Millet’s Sexual Politics. Feminine(1840-80) in which women wrote in an effort to equal
the intellectual achievements of the male culture and internalized its assumptions about
female nature. The distinguishing sign of this period is the male pseudonym. Women chose
male pseudonyms as a way of coping with a double literary standard.
Second Wave: Feminist(1880-1920)in which women protest male values, advocate
separatist 'sisterhoods’. They used literature to dramatize the ordeals of wronged
womanhood.
It shows the direct analysis of women to literature. Female writers and their significance
was studied. It is also called Gynocriticism.
Elaine Showalter’s A Literature of their Own(1920).
Third Wave: Female (1920) in which women create 'female writing' in self-discovery.

8. New Historicism:
New Historicism is a literary theory based on the idea that literature should be studied and
interpret within the context of both the history of the author and the history of the critic. It
is based on literary criticism of Stephan Greenblatt and influenced by the philosophy of
Michel Foucault , new historicism acknowledges not only that a work of literature is
influenced by its author's times and circumstances but that the critic's response to that
work is also influenced by his environment, beliefs and prejudice. It examines both how the
writer's times affected the work and how the work reflects the writer's times.

Acoustic Phonetics is the study of sound waves made by the human vocal organs for
communication.

Prevarication :
The ability to make sentences knowing that they are false and with the purpose of
misleading the receiver of the information.

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 Allophone
In phonology, an allophone is one of a set of multiple possible spoken sounds, or phones, or
signs used to pronounce a single phoneme in a particular language.

Allomorph
In linguistics, an allomorph is a variant form of a morpheme, that is, when a unit of meaning
varies in sound without changing the meaning. The term allomorph explains the
comprehension of phonological variations for specific morphemes.

The study of religious language is known as TheoLinguistics.

Approximant Sounds are speech sounds that involve the articulators approaching each
other but not narrowly enough nor with enough articulatory precision to create turbulent
airflow. Therefore, approximants fall between fricatives, which do produce a turbulent
airstream, and vowels, which produce no turbulence.

A Neologism is a relatively recent or isolated term, word, or phrase that may be in the
process of entering common use, but that has not yet been fully accepted into mainstream
language. Neologisms are often directly attributable to a specific person, publication,
period, or event. In the process of language formation, neologisms are more mature than
protologisms.

A Phoneme is one of the units of sound that distinguish one word from another in a
particular language.

Diachronic and Synchronic Linguistics

A synchronic approach considers a language at a moment in time without taking its history
into account. Synchronic linguistics aims at describing a language at a specific point of time,
usually the present. By contrast, a diachronic approach considers the development and
evolution of a language through history. Historical linguistics is typically a diachronic study.

Deep Structure
In transformational-generative grammar the underlying semantic or syntactic
representation of a sentence, from which the surface structure may be derived.

A Tone Language or tonal language is a language in which saying words with different
"tones" (which are like pitches in music but with a smaller number) changes the meaning of
a word even if the pronunciation of the word is otherwise the same.

Stress
In linguistics, and particularly phonology, stress or accent is relative emphasis or
prominence given to a certain syllable in a word, or to a certain word in a phrase or
sentence.

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 Forensic Linguistics, legal linguistics, or language and the law, is the application of linguistic
knowledge, methods and insights to the forensic context of law, language, crime
investigation, trial, and judicial procedure. It is a branch of applied linguistics.

Hyponymy
The state or quality of being a hyponym, a term that denotes a subcategory of a more
general class

Hyponym

A word of more specific meaning than a general or superordinate term applicable to it. For
example, spoon is a hyponym of cutlery.

Pragmatics

Pragmatics is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies the ways in which context
contributes to meaning.

Displacement in Language

In linguistics, displacement is the capability of language to communicate about things that

are not immediately present (spatially or temporally); i.e., things that are either not here or
are not here now.

Form and Function

‘Form’ refers to the category labels we use for the building blocks of grammar, i.e. word
classes, phrases, and clauses.

when we use the word ‘function’ when talking about language and grammar. It’s important
to make clear whether we are talking about general functions, such as ‘disapproving’,
‘commenting’, ‘intensifying’, and the like, or about grammatical functions, such as Subject,
Object and Adverbial.

Infix and adfix

An infix is an affix inserted inside a word stem (an existing word, or the core of a family of
words). It contrasts with adfix

📖New Criticism📖
👉 The term new criticism was first used by Joel E. Swingarm in an address at Columbia
University on the ‘The New Criticism’.
👉The address itself may be regarded as the manifesto of the new criticism.

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 👉 The term into general use after John Crowe Ransom, a great American critic, published his
‘The New Criticism’ in 1941. In it, he studied great contemporary critics and made a forceful
plea for ‘Ontological Criticism’.
👉Ransom, William Empson, T. S. Eliot, I. A. Richards, R. R. Blackmur, Allen Tate, Cleanth
Brooks, Robert Penn Warren are brilliant practitioners of this School of criticism.
👉Factors for rising the New Criticism:-
i) There was widespread dissatisfaction, both in England and America with
contemporary literary situation.
ii) Imagism and it’s critical defenders prepared the way for the rise of the New
Criticism.
iii) The psychologists contributed their own bit to its rise.
👉T. E. Hulme’s ‘Speculations’ is regarded as is the most important prose document in the
formation of modern critics. Hulme stressed close study of the text which is basic tenet of
the school.
👉Doctrines and Principals of New Criticism School:-
1. To the new critics, a poem or a work of art is the thing itself. The critic must concentrate
all attention on it and illuminate it.
2. The function of a critic is to analyse, interpret and evaluate a work of art. The critic must
devote himself to close texual study.
3. The critic must approach the work with an open mind, ready to study it., “as it is in itself.”
4. The critic must not allow himself to be hampered and prejudiced by any literary theories.
5. A poem has both form and content and both should be closely studied and analysed
before a true understanding of its meaning that becomes possible.
6. Words, images, rhythm, metre etc. constitute the form of poetry and are to be closely
studied.
7. The study of words, their Arrangement, the way in which they act and react on each
other is all important.
8. Poetry is communication an language is the means of communication. So new critics seek
to understand the full meaning of a poem through a study of poetic language.
9. The new critics are opposed both to the historical and comparative method of criticism.
10. The new critics are anti-impressionistic.
11. The new critics concentrate on close texual study, on the study of form, design and the
texture of poetry.
🌹William Empson;:-
👉Literary critic and poet.
👉His work is largely concerned with early and pre-modern works in the English literary
canon.
👉He was a significant scholar of Milton (see below), Shakespeare (Essays on Shakespeare)
and Elizabethan drama (Essays on Renaissance Literature, Volume 2: The Drama).
👉He published a monograph, Faustus and the Censor, on the subject of censorship and the
authoritative version of Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus.
👉He was also an important scholar of the metaphysical poets John Donne (Essays on
Renaissance Literature, Volume 1: Donne and the New Philosophy) and Andrew Marvell.

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 👉Empson brought his critical genius to bear on modern writers; Using Biography, for
instance, contains papers on Henry Fielding’s Tom Jones as well as the poems of W. B. Yeats
and T. S. Eliot, and Joyce’s Ulysses.
👉Frank Kermode- “Empson is the critic of genius”.
👉Harold Bloom- “Empson is among a handful of critics who matter most to him because of
their force and eccentricity.”
👉 “licensed buffoon” – phrase by Empson
👉Empson’s poems are clever, learned, dry, aethereal and technically virtuosic, not wholly
dissimilar to his critical work. His high regard for the metaphysical poet John Donne is to be
seen in many places within his work, tempered with his appreciation of Buddhist thinking,
an occasional tendency to satire and a larger awareness of intellectual trends. 👉He wrote
very few poems after 1940.
👉Frank Kermode commended that Empson is a “most noteworthy poet”.

SOME LITERARY FIGURES TO REMEMBER

📗Dante Alighieri (1265–1321): Italian poet of the Middle Ages. His Divine Comedy, is one of
most influential European works of literature. Dante is also called the “Father of the Italian
language”.

📗Geoffrey Chaucer (1343 – 1400): considered the Father of English Literature Best known
for Canterbury Tales (1475).

📗John Milton (1608 – 1674): English poet Best known for his epic poem Paradise Lost
(1667), written in blank verse – telling the Biblical story of man’s fall. Also wrote
Areopagitica (1644) in defense of free speech.

📗William Blake (1757 –1827): English mystic and romantic poet, wrote Songs of Innocence
and Songs of Experience Also hand-painted many of his works.

📗William Wordsworth (1770 – 1850): English romantic poet from Lake District, many poems
related to natures, such as his Lyrical Ballads Samuel.

📗Taylor Coleridge (1772 – 1834): English romantic poet. Author of The Rime of the Ancient
Mariner and Kublai Khan.

📗Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 – 1822): English romantic poet Famous works include Queen
Mab and Prometheus Unbound.

📗John Keats (1795 – 1821): English Romantic Poet, best known for his Odes, such as Ode to
a Nightingale, Ode to Grecian urn, Ode to Melancholy.

📗Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803 – 1882): American Transcendentalist poet and writer.

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 📗Alfred Tennyson (1809 – 1892): Popular Victorian poet, wrote Charge of the Light Brigade,
Ulysses, and In Memoriam A.H.H.

📗Walt Whitman (1819 – 1892): American poet Wrote Leaves of Grass, a ground breaking
new style of poetry.

📗Emily Dickinson (1830 – 1886): American female poet Led secluded lifestyle, and left
legacy of many short vivid poems, often on themes of death and immortality.

📗Rabindranath Tagore (1861 – 1941): Indian poet Awarded Nobel Prize for Literature for his
work – Gitanjali.

📗Robert Frost (1874 – 1963): Influential American poet, one of most highly regarded of the
Twentieth Century. Most famous work ‘The Road Not Taken’ (1916).

Baroque literature is a 17th century prose genre that has several distinctive characteristics
when compared to literary styles of earlier centuries. The baroque era is known for the use
of dramatic elements in all art forms, and works of baroque literature are generally no
exception. Writers of this time period expanded and perfected the uses of allegories with
multiple layers of meaning. Smaller-scale metaphors are also frequent trademarks of this
genre, and many works of baroque literature focus on humanity's struggle to find deep
meaning in existence.

*Active audience* The concept of the active audience indicates the capability of ‘readers’
To be dynamic creators of significance rather than being understood as simple
Receptors of textual meaning. This paradigm emerged in reaction to
Communications research that studied audiences as if they simply absorbed the
Meanings and messages of popular media (as identified by critics) in a passive way.
This was colloquially known as the ‘hypodermic model’ of audiences because the
Meanings of texts appear to be injected directly into the minds of readers without
Modification. Overall, the active audience paradigm represented a shift of interest
From numbers to meanings and from the general audience to particular audiences.
The active audience paradigm was theoretically informed by the
Encoding–decoding model of communications and by hermeneutic theory.
Subsequent empirical studies by David Morley and Ien Ang in the 1980s argued that
The cultural context in which reading took place provided the framework and
Cultural resources for differential understandings of texts. Consequently, meaning
Was not to be located in the text per se, but in the interplay of the text and the
Audience. Thus Ang’s study of women viewers of Dallas found that they held a
Range of understandings and attitudes. Her central argument is that Dallas viewers
Are actively involved in the production of a range of meanings and pleasures that
Are not reducible to the structure of the text, an ‘ideological effect’ or a political
Project.

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 *Desire NET JRF*

*Semantics* is the study of meaning, reference, or truth. The term can be used to refer to
subfields of several distinct disciplines, including philosophy, linguistics and computer
science.

Semantics, also called semiotics, semology, or semasiology, the philosophical and scientific
study of meaning in natural and artificial languages. The term is one of a group of English
words formed from the various derivatives of the Greek verb sēmainō (“to mean” or “to
signify”).

Semantics is the study of meaning. There are two types of meaning: conceptual meaning
and associative meaning.

Semantics can also refer to the branch of study within linguistics that deals with language
and how we understand meaning.

*A semantic theory* —is a theory which assigns semantic contents to expressions of a

language.

*Examples of Semantics* : A toy block could be called a block, a cube, a toy. A child could be
called a child, kid, boy, girl, son, daughter. The word "run" has many meanings-physically
running, depart or go (I have to run, spent (it has run its course), or even a snag in a pair of
hose (a run in my hose).

Robert Southey
(1774 – 1843)
 He was an English poet of the Romantic school and one among three lake poets.
 He was Poet Laureate of England from 1813 to 1843 (till his death), and succeeded by
William Wordsworth.
He became Poet Laureate after Walter Scott refused the post.
 His biographies includes the life and work of:
- John Bunyan
- John Wesley
- William Cowper
- Oliver Cromwell
- Horatio Nelson
 He was also a renowned scholar of Portuguese and Spanish literature.
 His most enduring contribution to literary history is the children’s classic “The Story of
Three Bears”, the
Original Goldilocks story first published in his prose collection “The Doctor”.

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  He was born in Wine Street, Bristol, England.
 Along with S.T. Coleridge he wrote “The Fall of Robespierre” in which he wrote his first
collection of poems
In 1794.
 He used pseudonym ‘Don Manuel Alvarez Espriella’ to write “Letters from England”.
 His famous Fairy Tale is Goldilocks and The Three Bears. Southy and Coleridge were
involved with early experiments with Nitrous Oxide (laughing gas) conducted by
The scientist Humphry Davy.
 He married Edith Fricker who was sister of Sara Fricker (wife of Coleridge).
 He became Poet Laureate in 1813 after refused by Walter Scott.
 From 1809, Southy contributed to “The Quarterly”.
 About Charlotte Bronte, he said- “Literature can’t be the business of a woman’s life.”
 The epitaph of Southy is written by William Wordsworth.
 William Hazlitt was most savage critic of Southy. Southy replied his critics in a radical play
“Wat Tyler”.
 He is also famous for writing children’s nursery rhymes-
“What are little boys made of?
What are little boys made of?
Snips and snails
And puppy-dogs tails”
 While he was in university he wrote “All I learnt was a little swimming… and a little
beating.”
Major Works of Southy
1. The Fall of Robespierre (1794) (It is written in collaboration with ST Coleridge)
2. Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem (1796);
 Joan of Arc is also written by G.B. Shaw and Mark Twain.
3. Thalaba, The Destroyer (1801)
4. The Life of Nelson (1813)
5. Roderic, the Last of the Goths (1814)
6. The Doctor (1837)
7. Madoc
8. The Curse of Kehama (1810)
9. A Tale of Paraguay
10. A Vision of Judgment
Thalaba, The Destroyer (1801)
 It is an epic poem. It was completed while Southy travelled Portugal.
 The story describes how a group of Sorcerers work to destroy the Hodeirah family in an
attempt to
Prevent a prophecy of their future doom from coming true.
The Curse of Kehama (1810)
 It is an epic poem composed by Southy.
 The origin of the poem can be traced to Southy’s school days when he suffered from
insomnia along

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 With his memories of dark and mysterious schoolmate that later formed the basis for one
of the poem’s
Villains.
Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem (1796)
 It is an epic poem by Robert Southy.
 Coleridge also helped him writing this poem of 1798 edition but in later editions
Coleridge’s collections
Was deleted.
 The poem is divided into two-halves.
 First describing Joan’s quest to meet Charles, the Dauphin of France. Finally, she got the
Dauphin support
And begins to lead the French military.
 The secondary half describes the French defeat of the British army at ‘Orleans’.
 The poem ends with Charles crowned as King of France.Curse of Kehama
 The poem is divided into 12 books. Half part of the book describes how the evil priest
Kehama is able to
Gain significant amounts of demonic power on a quest of becoming a god.
 The poem describes Hindu Myth. It is heavily influenced by Zorastrian trilogy.
 It focuses on India stems from the recent British colonial expansion into India and the
increasing interest
By British citizens in Indian culture.

The concept of culture

The notion of culture (from the Latin verb colere, “grow”) belongs to Western history. The
use of this term was then extended to those behaviors that imposed a “cure to the gods,” is
how the term “cult.”

The modern concept of culture can be understood as the body of knowledge considered
essential and which are transmitted from generation to generation. However, the term
culture in the Italian language denotes two main meanings differ considerably:

Or a humanistic conception of classical culture as individual training, an activity that allows

you to “cultivate” the human soul, and in this sense it is a fundamental quantity for which a
person may be more or less educated.

An anthropological conception or modern presents culture as the diverse range of customs,

beliefs, attitudes, values, ideals and habits of different populations or societies in the world.
Regards both the individual and the community to which he belongs. In this sense, the
concept is obviously declinable the plural, assuming the existence of different cultures, and
is typically assumed the existence of a culture of each ethnic group or social grouping
significant, and the membership of such groups is closely related to sharing of cultural
identity.

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 According to a classical conception of culture is in the process of development and
mobilization of human faculties which is facilitated by the assimilation of the work of
authors and artists and important progress related to the character of the modern age.

According to the anthropological concept of culture – or civilization – taken in its broadest

sense ethnological is “that complex whole which includes knowledge, belief, art, morals,
law, custom, and any other powers and habit acquired by man as a member of society,
“according to the famous definition English anthropologist Edward Tylor (from Primitive
Culture, 1871).

Over the years, the anthropological definition of culture has changed, according to the
anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, “a culture is a structure of meaning that travels on
communication networks that are not localized in individual territories.”

The definition of UNESCO considers culture as “a set of specific characteristics of a society

or a social group in a spiritual, material, intellectual and emotional.”

The popular use of the word culture in many Western societies may simply reflect the
layered character of these societies, many people use this word to refer to consumer goods,
and activities such as cooking, art or music. Others use the term “high culture” to
distinguish it from an alleged “low” culture, meaning the latter set of consumer goods that
do not belong to the elite.

The culture in the anthropological sense consists of:

Systems of norms and beliefs explicit, elaborated in more or less formalized.

Customs and habits acquired by humans for the simple fact of living in certain communities,
thus including ordinary shares of everyday life.

Artifacts of human activity, from art to real everyday items and everything related to
material culture, knowledge necessary for life.

The characteristics that define the culture in the conception descriptive anthropology are
mainly three:

Culture is learned and can not be reduced to the biological dimension of man. For example,
the skin color is not a cultural trait but a genetic trait.

Culture is the totality of social and physical which is the work of man.

Culture is shared within a group or society. It is distributed evenly within those groups or
companies.

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 Why action or trait can be defined as “cultural” must therefore be shared by a group. This
does not mean that a phenomenon “cultural” must necessarily be shared by the whole
population: it is necessary to leave space for the normal individual variability.

Also with regard to changes in behavior between individual and individual in a society,
however, it is possible to identify its limits circumscribed by social norms that govern that
particular group.

Frequently, individuals belonging to a particular culture do not perceive their behavior

governed by these rules requiring what behavior is allowed and what is not.

In anthropology, the set of social rules (commonly called “ideal”) are defined cultural
models ideal.

Culture is: A set of models (ideas, symbols, actions, provisions) FOR and WITH:

In all cultures there is a model (eg, cleaning, decoration, law), a model through which you
think something. The models of models to generate, guiding models to different way of
acting

Operating permits an approach to the world in a practical sense and intellectual and a
related environmental adaptation. Therefore allows to pass from the ideal operations.

Selective: it performs a selection of functional models in this

Dynamics: is maintained over time, but is not fixed. Interacting with other cultures there are
cambiamiamenti each other.

Stratified and diversified within the same company you notice cultural differences based on
age, gender, income, etc.., and these differences affect social behavior. Depending on the
society there is also a different distribution of culture.

The culture has inside of the gradients. Gramsci, schematizing spoke of hegemonic culture
(which has the power to define its borders) and subordinate culture that not having such
power, has no chance to define themselves. For example, the division between Hutu and
Tutsi was born after the Belgian colonization. In modern society, while being present on the
language and cultural differences and ethnic origin, they are tolerated because it is favored
cultural integration through compulsory education and social class do not have rigid
boundaries: Baumann even speaks of “liquid modernity.”

Based on communication: the culture originated through a constant exchange

Holistic: (from Olos, integer) and is then formed by interdependent elements between
them. For example there is a link between religion and the power of a country and as a

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 result the economy. According to some anthropologists, some cultures are more holistic
because they realize most of this interdependence between elements (eg the division in the
Indian caste and the close link between them).

Porous: there are continuous incursions between cultures and it is difficult to establish a
true limit, a real boundary between cultures.

Culture is not external apparatus of life. And ‘practical knowledge related to individual
experience (nihil in intellectu quod non fuerit in sensu), also became a theoretical
conceptual network through increasingly complex according to the contribution of the
external world, the experience of others, than the authors-enhancers sent them and their
world (of their time). It is done both individual and social. Social but also in the negative
patterns that come from outside, precisely because they pose as models, make us passive if
you give us the illusion of having found the meaning and even the goal to attain. Rather
than imitation, dynamic search of improvement, it is often mere seduction. In the social
aspects of the culture apparatus there is more outward stimulus to the personality of each,
plus paternalism and padreternismo that true liberation. More competition that stimulus at
best: we are the first, we are unique, we are the best. In other words there is more
authenticity and self-importance that development. (Lucia degli Scalzi) Fritjof Capra is the
culture of a social network as a cell with a more defined core cultural and porous borders.
Depending on their values a culture can be opened or closed, as well as a cell accepts some
elements and not others.

*What is Genre?*
*Genre*
*Definition of Genre*

Genre means a type of art, literature, or music characterized by a specific form, content,
and style
.

_For example_ ,
Literature has four main genres:

*Poetry,*
*Drama*,
*Fiction, and*
*Non-fiction.*

All of these genres have particular features and functions that distinguish them from one
another.

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 Hence, it is necessary on the part of readers to know which category of genre they are
reading in order to understand the message it conveys, as they may have certain
expectations prior to the reading concerned.

*Types of Genre*

There are five types of genres in literature, which include:

*Poetry*

_Poetry is the first major literary genre_

. All types of poetry share specific characteristics. In fact, poetry is a form of text that
follows a meter and rhythm, with each line and syllable. It is further subdivided into
different genres, such an epic poem, narrative, romantic, dramatic, and lyric.
*Dramatic poetry* includes melodrama, tragedy, and comedy, while other poems includes
ode, sonnet, elegy, ballad, song, and epic.

*Popular examples of epic poems include Paradise Lost, by John Milton,* The Iliad and The
Odyssey, by Homer. Examples of romantic poems include Red Red Rose, by Robert Burns.
All these poetic forms share specific features, such as they do not follow paragraphs or
sentences; they use stanzas and lines instead. Some forms follow very strict rules of length,
and number of stanzas and lines, such as villanelle, sonnet, and haiku. Others may be free-
form, like Feelings, Now, by Katherine Foreman, which is devoid of any regular meter and
rhyme scheme. Besides that, often poetry uses figurative language, such as metaphor,
simile, onomatopoeia, hyperbole, and alliteration to create heightened effect.

*Drama*

Drama is a form of text that is performed in front of an audience. It is also called a play. Its
written text contains dialogues, and stage directions. This genre has further categories such
as comedy, tragedy, and tragicomedy. William Shakespeare is known as the father of
English drama. His well-known plays include Taming of the Shrew, Romeo & Juliet, and
Hamlet. Greek playwrights were the pioneers in this field, such as Sophocles’ masterpiece
Oedipus Rex, and Antigone, while modern dramas include Death of a Salesman, by Arthur
Miller.

*Prose*

This type of written text is different from poetry in that it has complete sentences organized
into paragraphs. Unlike poetry, prose focuses on characters and plot, rather than focusing
on sounds. It includes short stories and novels, while fiction and non-fiction are its sub
genres. Prose is further categorized into essays, speeches, sermons, and interpretations.

*Fiction*

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 Fiction has three categories that are, realistic, non-realistic, and semi-fiction. Usually, fiction
work is not real and therefore, authors can use complex figurative language to touch
readers’ imaginations. Unlike poetry, it is more structured, follows proper grammatical
pattern, and correct mechanics. A fictional work may incorporate fantastical and imaginary
ideas from everyday life. It comprises some important elements such as plot, exposition,
foreshadowing, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Popular examples of
literary fiction include, James Joyce’s novel A Portrait of an Artist as a Young Man, Charles
Dickens’ A Tale of Two Cities, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, and Harper Lee’s To Kill a
Mockingbird.

*Non-Fiction*
Non-fiction is a vast category that also has sub-genres; it could be creative like a personal
essay, or factual, like a scientific paper. It may also use figurative language, however, not
unlike poetry, or fiction has. Sometimes, non-fiction may tell a story, like an autobiography,
or sometimes it may convey information to readers.

*Other examples of non-fiction include* biographies, diaries, memoirs, journals, fantasies,

mysteries, and romances. A popular example of non-fiction genre is Michael Pollan’s highly
celebrated book, The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural

Ecocriticism is a term used for the observation and study of the relationship between the
literature and the earth’s environment. It takes an interdisciplinary point of view by
analysing the works of authors, researchers, and poets in the context of environmental
issues and nature. Since the purpose, scope, and methodology of this theory are a bit
confusing, it is difficult to have all ecocritics agreed to this. However, some of them also
propose the solutions to the current environmental issues.

In the context of scope, the critics call this term as a broad approach that is also by several
other names, i.e. Environmental literary criticism, green studies, and ecopoetics. It is also
referred to by some other fields such as ecology, social ecology, biopolitics, sustainable
design, environmental history, environmentalism, and others.

Ecocriticism was first defined by Cheryll Glotfelty in simple words making it clear for the
other critics and writers. Considering the definition, it can be called an “increasingly
heterogeneous movement” that takes an entirely earth-centered approach. It is mainly
about the literature on the environment. So, it is mostly seen in association with the
“Association for the Study of Literature and Environment” this is also referred to as ASLE
and it holds biennial meetings for the scholars writing about the environmental issues in
their literature.

Definition of Ecocriticism

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 This form of criticism has been relatively successful keeping itself away from the moral and
philosophical disputes compared to the other forms of criticism. The work and efforts of
Glotfelty played a significant role in convincing other scholars for using this term to refer to
the line of studies known as green studies previously. Due to her efforts, this field of
criticism gained a recognition and popularity as a theory. Therefore, scholars acknowledge
her as a major contributor to the emergence of this name as a theory with a broad scope.

It is especially notable that the scope of this theory is not limited to the books and essays on
nature, romantic poetry or canonical literature and have a great impact on the other areas
of the physical world. It has spread in the other mediums like film, television, and theatre,
stories, and narratives of animal life, science, and architecture in addition to the range of
other literary forms. It has also made itself rich by adopting the proven methodologies
approaches the fields of studies like literary, scientific and sociology.

Ecocriticism as a literary theory

Generally, the traditional theory considers the linguistics or the cultural background or the
social background as an important factor, eco-critics takes nature as a dominant factor as
they believe that our evolution as a society is largely dependent on the forces of nature.
Because, according to them, the world in which we live is not made only with the language
and social elements.

It is only one of the many factors responsible for the existence and development of humans.
Life including the human life is heavily affected by the role nature and environment plays
and thus nature is the most important consideration of this theory.

After converting into the field of theory, the green criticism was split into parts and one part
developed itself as a branch dedicated to rereading and analyzing the role of nature,
representation and the natural elements in the literary works produced by the scholars
from the worldwide. Green studies are merely the regional literature as it takes into
consideration the differences of nature in different places. But the central source of
thoughts, research, and findings in this field will always be the authors and poets well-
known and established in the world of literature.

Approaches and tropes of literature

There are several approaches and literary tropes proposed by the scholars to understand
the theory and works of ecocritics and the relationship between nature and literature
created by many famous writers and thinkers. Some of them are discussed in detail below.
Definition of Ecofeminism

This approach combines the ecology and feminism and explains the feminist nature to help
understand the ecology. Feminists have given the concept of gender theory to analyze the

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 relationship between the human and nature. So, it can be considered a branch of
ecocriticism and is the field of studying the interconnection between the oppression of
women and nature.

The land is often considered as a feminine in nature because of its fertility that nurtures the
life and is owned by the man as a property. So, the feminists draw the lines of comparison
to understand the similarity of dominant nature of man over women and the domination of
land in the context of gender relationships.

The term was originally coined in the book Le Féminisme ou la Mort (1974) written by the
French author Françoise d’Eaubonne. But the term is being used in different ways and
meanings in the modern time, they are ecofeminist theory, ecofeminist art, social and
political philosophy, social justice, religion, poetry and contemporary feminism. Because of
different types and beliefs of feminism among the feminists, different versions of
ecofeminism is available in the current literature.

There are two sections of this approach where first is referred to as a radical camp which is
largely focused on reversing the domination of man over woman and uncontrolled use of
nature. This is because nature and women are close to each other biologically, emotionally
and spiritually. The second section of the field follows the first which refuses to accept the
concept of feminine essence that is considered responsible for the assumption that women
and nature are connected to a great extent.

Modern science is evaluated in the book by Vandana Shiva and Maria Mies in their book
Ecofeminism. According to them, the modern science is largely dominated by men and this
has, to a great extent, affected the natural childbirth process by the use of birth control
medicines.

It has made the birth process and ultimately the health and life of women dependent on the
specialized medical technologies that are controlled by men. This can be seen as one of
many ecofeminism examples in the literature that are created as an effort to contributing
towards improving the situations of women in a natural context.

Pastoral

This is basically a lifestyle of shepherds and strongly states the duality of urban and rural life
and is deep-rooted in the western culture. This trope has presented itself in the genres of
literature, art, and music which shows the rural life in such an idealized manner that can
attract the attention of urban audiences. The author displays The complex life or
pastoralism of the rural areas in a simple way in the literature by using various techniques.

Since the pastoral literature maintains a firm view towards nature, authors like Paul Alpers
describes it as a mode instead of a genre. It is apparent in different types of literature like
poetry, drama as a mode and pastoral elegy as a genre.

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 Well-known literary theorist Terry Gifford in his book Pastoral has defined the pastoral in
three ways. The first way is the historical literary perspective which recognizes the lifestyle
of shepherds and discusses their hardship. The second way is about the literature that
explains the country life in an opposite context to the urban life explicitly or implicitly. The
third way is about the way of classification of the country life that can be said as that of
derogative manner.

Greg Gerrard, a best seller author of ecocriticism, has divided the pastoral theory into three
branches. The first branch is Classic Pastoral which takes into consideration nature as a
place where human gets peace of mind and identifies the self. The second branch is
Romantic Pastoral that describes the post-industrial revolution period that signifies the
importance of rural independence which is more desirable instead of the urbanization.
And the third is American Pastoral which explains the farmland as a boundary between the
wilderness and urban area. This considers the land as a resource which can be used for
farming. Many authors including Greg has worked to define pastoral in literature that is very
helpful for the aspiring students of ecology and nature.

Wilderness

Wilderness is the environment naturally existing around us on the Earth that is not affected
by the human activities yet. In a more comprehensive meaning, they are the areas which
humans does not control and where they have not created any disturbance by making
roads and installing pipelines or developing infrastructures for the industries and are still
intact as there were. In recent times, the marine wilderness has also gained attention as its
area is continuously being affected by human activities.

However, efforts are also being done to maintain them and protect from the intervention,
and some governments have already started paying attention to them. Governments and
global organizations are actively working to restrict the motorized activities of human on
the lands that are not yet modified for the use of cultivation or transportation or industrial
production.

Literature has paid enough attention to develop and define trope to understand the
wilderness. How the wilderness is developed and plays a valuable role in nature and life on
the Earth is the subject of examination in this approach. This has also successfully attracted
the attention of ecocritics.

However, it is also seen with two different beliefs in the American and the British cultures.
According to the first belief, wilderness is considered as a threat. This is evident in the early
British culture and Biblical tales of creation. According to the early American pieces of
literature, wild-land is mentioned as the place for demonic activities.

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 But in the modern literature, it is seen as a sanctuary where animals can be kept safe and in
their natural way of life. People of the modern world has documented the encounters with
the wilderness to help understand it from a more positive perspective. Many novels have
described the life in the wild which has changed the way the world used to see the wild-
land and its environment.

We have tried here to describe and discuss the ecocriticism as an approach to seeing and
interpreting the cultural attitude towards nature and environment in the literature. We
hope this article will be useful for those curious about this theory and the students of the
literature covering ecology and green studies.

🟥*Jacobean Drama & Theatre*🟥

🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁

🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁🍁
Jacobean drama is, quite simply defined, the drama that was written and performed during
the reign of Elizabeth’s successor, James I. But, as with Elizabethan theatre, it is more than
just the plays written during the reign of a particular monarch: like Elizabethan drama,
Jacobean drama has its particular characteristics.

The comic dramas of the Elizabethan theatre give way to harsh satire, led by Ben Jonson:
the Elizabethan tragic dramas give way to an obsession with moral corruption and violent
stories of revenge. In both forms the dramas of the time show a cynical and pessimistic
outlook on life.

Some of the most prominent of the Jacobean playwrights, apart from Shakespeare, are
Jonson, Webster, Tourneur, Beaumont, Fletcher, Middleton, Rowley, Marston, Heyward,
Ford and Dekker.

*A Detailed Exploration of Jacobean Drama*

James inherited a whole English drama culture. The English theatre was thriving as well as
any industry of the time, complete with about twenty London theatres and scores of
playwrights feeding them with new material every week.

By the time James came to the throne, the theatre had become a favourite leisure activity in
London, but the appetites of the theatre-going public were changing. Audiences loved the
humour and the many human situations – the tragic and comic dramas – that were
unfolding before them on the stage. But as time went on the playwrights, reading the
audience’s changing appetite, felt the need to give them even more realistic
representations of the society of which they were a part.

Towards the end of Elizabeth’s reign the plays were becoming more edgy and human
situations were becoming more exaggerated. Extreme violence was being portrayed on the

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 stage. The playwrights were focusing on the human being’s capacity for selfishness, and
exaggerating such Renaissance forces as human ambition, and its effects. They were
exploring the nature of evil, pushing things to the extremes of human behaviour. Audiences
flocked in to see those representations of the society in which they lived, dramatised in
exciting titillating stories, full of sex and violence.

And so we have such plays as John Webster’s The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi,
with their highly intelligent characters perpetrating crimes and acts of violence in the
pursuit of their ambitions. We have Thomas Middleton and William Rowley collaborating on
a play that is still regarded as a model of Jacobean drama, The Changeling, in which we see
a murderer cutting off the finger of his victim because the ring he wants to steal won’t come
off. That is mild, though, compared with Shakespeare’s King Lear, where Lear’s daughter,
Regan, tearing the old Gloucester’s eyes out, with the cry ‘Out, vile jelly!’

Shakespeare, the most gentle and sensitive of Elizabethan playwrights, with his moving
human dramas, his comedies, and his ever-ready memorable quotes, but always with the
lurking threat of violence, threw himself into the spirit of the Jacobean theatre, applying his
talent for characterisation and plot to the new tastes. Iago, for example, the villain of
Othello, a psychopath who limits his own violent acts but manipulates those around him to
commit extreme violence, culminating in Othello strangling Desdemona, is the arch
Jacobean protagonist – ambitious, intelligent, clever and manipulative. And, of course, Iago
survives as one of the most notorious villains of both the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods
– and of the whole of dramatic literature too.

A final, almost separate feature of Jacobean theatre sprang from a passion of the king and
queen – the musical drama, and so the Jacobean theatre is full of masques – dramas with
music and elaborate sets. And here again, the finest example of a Jacobean masque is
Shakespeare’s The Tempest.

🟥*Comedy of Menace*🟥
📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚

📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚📚
A comedy of menace is a play in which the laughter of the audience in some or all situations
is immediately followed by a feeling of some impending disaster. The audience is made
aware of some menace in the very midst of its laughter. The menace is produced
throughout the play from potential or actual violence or from an underline sense of
violence throughout the play. The actual cause of menace is difficult to define: it may be
because, the audience feels an uncertainty and insecurity throughout the play.

Harold Pinter's *The Birthday Party* is a comedy of menace. The play is actually the
mingling of comedy with a perception of danger that pervade the whole play. Stanley, the
central protagonist always finds his life beset with danger. Meg is the owner of the boarding
house away from the society where Stanley stays temporarily as a tenant. Meg arranges a

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 birthday party in Stanley's honour though Stanley denies it being his birthday. Two
gentlemen called Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Mc Cann come to stay in the same boarding house
for a couple of nights. Their appearance fills Stanley's mind with unexplained fear and
tension. Stanley attempts to disturb the strangers so that they will be forced to go away.
The feeling of menace is reinforced when Stanley scares Meg by saying that some people
would be coming that very day in a van. They would bring a wheelbarrow with them to take
someone away. Eventually no one comes but Mr. Goldberg and Mr. Mc Cann take stanley
with them. In fact Goldberg and Mc Cann represents parts of Stanley's own subconscious
mind. Nothing is stated or hinted about Goldberg and Mc Cann and about their attitude
towards Stanley. At best they seem to be agents of some organisation which has sent them
to track down Stanley.

*The Birthday Party and Look Back in Anger* perfectly reveal the individual and social
problems and doubts that great Britain was moving through during the post-war era. Both
this two famous plays indicate the spirit of times and become vehicle or instrument for
dramatic action.

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William Caxton

In March 1469 he had begun to translate Raoul Le Fèvre’s Recueil des histoires de Troye,
which he laid aside and did not finish until September 19, 1471. In Cologne, where he lived
from 1470 to the end of 1472, he learned printing. In the epilogue of Book III of the
completed translation, entitled The Recuyell of the Historyes of Troye, he tells how his “pen
became worn, his hand weary, his eye dimmed” with copying the book; so he “practised
and learnt” at great personal cost how to print it. He set up a press in Brugge about 1474,
and the Recuyell, the first book printed in English, was published there in 1475. Caxton’s
translation from the French of The Game and Playe of the Chesse (in which chess is treated
as an allegory of life) was published in 1476. Caxton printed two or three other works in
Brugge in French, but toward the end of 1476 he returned to England and established his
press at Westminster. From then on he devoted himself to writing and printing. The first
dated book printed in English, Dictes and Sayenges of the Phylosophers, appeared on
November 18, 1477.

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*Pragmatics* is a subfield of linguistics and semiotics that studies how context contributes
to meaning. Pragmatics encompasses speech act theory, conversational implicature talk in
interaction and other approaches to language behavior in philosophy, sociology, linguistics
and anthropology.

Pragmatics is the study of meaning in language in a particular context. This includes the

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 place where the thing is said, who says it, and the things that you have already said. Also,
pragmatics studies how people speak when they both know something.

*Pragmatic communication* is the use of a set of sociolinguistic rules related to language

within a communicative context; that is, pragmatics is the way language is used to
communicate rather than the way language is structured.

For *example* , words that attempt to explain abstract concepts-freedom, beauty-have no

meaning in and of themselves. Instead, someone who looks at pragmatics would attempt to
understand how they are being used in a given, concrete, practical situation.

*Speech acts; rhetorical structure; conversational implicature;* and the *management of

reference in discourse* , are it's aspects.

*A pragmatist* is a person who deals with problems or situations by focusing on practical

approaches and solutions—ones that will work in practice, as opposed to being ideal in
theory.

🟥*What is Narrative Theory?*

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸

🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸🌸
Narrative theory is currently enjoying a major burgeoning of interest in North America and
throughout the world, with especially strong activity in the U.S., Canada, the U.K., France,
Germany, Scandinavia, Belgium, Israel, and China. Narrative theory starts from the
assumption that narrative is a basic human strategy for coming to terms with fundamental
elements of our experience, such as time, process, and change, and it proceeds from this
assumption to study the distinctive nature of narrative and its various structures, elements,
uses, and effects.

More specifically, narrative theorists study what is distinctive about narrative (how it is
different from other kinds of discourse, such as lyric poems, arguments, lists, descriptions,
statistical analyses, and so on), and how accounts of what happened to particular people in
particular circumstances with particular consequences can be at once so common and so
powerful. Thus a key concern is whether narrative as a way of thinking about or explaining
human experience contrasts with scientific modes of explanation that characterize
phenomena as instances of general covering laws. Narrative theorists, in short, study how
stories help people make sense of the world, while also studying how people make sense of
stories.

To this end, narrative theorists draw not only on literary studies but also on ideas from such
fields as rhetoric, (socio)linguistics, philosophical ethics, cognitive science (including
cognitive and social psychology), folklore, and gender theory to explore how narratives
work both as kinds of texts and as strategies for navigating experience. Narratives of all

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 kinds are relevant to the field: literary fictions and nonfictions, film narratives, comics and
graphic novels, hypertexts and other computer-mediated narratives, oral narratives
occurring during the give and take of everyday conversation, as well as narratives told in
courtrooms, doctors' offices, business conference rooms—indeed, anywhere. Because of
the pervasiveness of narrative in our culture and the diversity of the texts, media, and
communicative situations narrative theory examines, narrative theory constitutes an
exciting new frontier of English Studies, one that promises to bring English Department
faculty and students into closer contact with their counterparts in a variety of social-
scientific, humanistic, and other disciplines.

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Dialectology

Dialectology is the scientific study of linguistic dialect, a sub-field of sociolinguistics. It

studies variations in language based primarily on geographic distribution and their
associated features. Dialectology treats such topics as divergence of two local dialects from
a common ancestor and synchronic variation.

Dialectology would be the investigation of problems arising when different systems are
treated together because of their partial similarity. A specifically structural dialectology
would look for the structural consequences of partial differences within a framework of
partial similarity.

Traditional studies in Dialectology were generally aimed at producing dialect maps,

whereby imaginary lines were drawn over a map to indicate different dialect areas. The
move away from traditional methods of language study, however, caused linguists to
become more concerned with social factors.

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Rabindranath Tagore was born in Calcutta on May 7, 1861.

He was also referred to as ‘Gurudev’, ‘Kabiguru’, and ‘Biswakabi’.

Regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India and hailed by W.B Yeats,
Rabindranath Tagore was a Bengali poet, novelist, and painter, who was highly influential in
introducing Indian culture to the west.

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 In 1913 Rabindranath Tagore was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his work on
Gitanjali.
He was the first non-European to receive the Nobel Prize.

He not only gave the national anthems for two countries, India and Bangladesh, but also
inspired a Ceylonese student of his, to pen and compose the national anthem of Sri Lanka.
Rabindranath Tagore composed nearly 2,230 songs which are known as 'Rabindrasangit'.
Tagore was highly influenced by the thumri style of Hindustani music. In 1971, Rabindranath
Tagore wrote a poem ' Amar Sonar Bangla'(National Anthem of Bangladesh), to protest the
Partition of Bengal in 1905 on communal lines. The Bengal partition made cut off the
Muslim majority East Bengal from the Hindu majority West Bengal. Tagore wrote 'Jana Gana
Mana' (National Anthem of India) which was first composed as 'Bharat Bhagyo Bidhata'. In
1911, 'Jana Gana Mana' was first at Calcutta (present-day Kolkata) session of INC and was
adopted as National Anthem of India in 1950. 'Sri Lanka Matha' is the National Anthem of
Sri Lanka and was inspired by Tagore's work. Sitar maestro Vilayat Khan and sarodiyas
Buddhadev Dasgupta and Amjad Ali Khan are all inspired by Rabindranath Tagore's work.
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Poet Rabindranath Tagore won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1913 for his
collection Gitanjali published in London in 1912. The prize gained even more significance by
being given to an Indian for the first time. This honour established Tagore’s literary
reputation worldwide.

Tagore returned his Knighthood for Services to Literature, which he was awarded in 1915, in
protest against the 1919 Amritsar Massacre.

Tagore was also well known as an artist and educational theorist. His school at Santiniketan
and Viswa-Bharati University focused on developing the child’s imagination and had a
lasting impact on pedagogy. Santiniketan engaged many scholars from across the world,
including his English friends, Oxford professor E J Thompson, missionary C F Andrews and
Lord Elmhirst, who emulated Tagore’s learning and teaching style at Dartington Hall, Devon.

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Critical race theory (CRT) is an academic movement made up of civil-rights scholars and
activists in the United States who seek to critically examine the law as it intersects with
issues of race, and to challenge mainstream liberal approaches to racial justice. CRT

112
 examines social and cultural issues as they relate to race, law, and social and political
power.

CRT originated in the mid-1970s in the writings of several American legal scholars
including Derrick Bell, Alan Freeman, Kimberlé Crenshaw, Richard Delgado, Cheryl
Harris, Charles R. Lawrence III, Mari Matsuda, and Patricia J. Williams. CRT emerged as a
movement by the 1980s, reworking theories of critical legal studies (CLS) with more focus
on race. As the word "critical" suggests, both theoretical frameworks are rooted in critical
theory, a Marxist social philosophy which argues that social problems are influenced and
created more by societal structures and cultural assumptions than by individual and
psychological factors.

CRT is loosely unified by two common themes:

First, that white supremacy (societal racism) exists and maintains power through the law.

Second, that transforming the relationship between law and racial power, and also
achieving racial emancipation and anti-subordination more broadly, are possible.

Critics of CRT argue that it relies on social constructionism, elevates storytelling over
evidence and reason, rejects the concepts of truth and merit, and opposes liberalism.

Miracle play, also called Saint’s Play, one of three principal kinds of vernacular drama of the
European Middle Ages (along with the mystery play and the morality play). A miracle play
presents a real or fictitious account of the life, miracles, or martyrdom of a saint.
The genre evolved from liturgical offices developed during the 10th and 11th centuries
to enhance calendar festivals. By the 13th century they had become vernacularized and
filled with unecclesiastical elements. They had been divorced from church services and were
performed at public festivals. Almost all surviving miracle plays concern either the
Virgin Mary or St. Nicholas, the 4th-century bishop of Myra in Asia Minor. Both Mary and
Nicholas had active cults during the Middle Ages, and belief in the healing powers of saintly
relics was widespread. In this climate, miracle plays flourished.

Applied linguistics is an interdisciplinary field. Major branches of applied linguistics include

bilingualism and multilingualism, conversation analysis, contrastive linguistics, sign
linguistics, language assessment, literacies, discourse analysis, language pedagogy, second
language acquisition, language planning and policy, interlinguistics, stylistics, language
teacher education, pragmatics, forensic linguistics and translation.

The Canterbury Tales The Knight's Tale Summary

by Geoffrey Chaucer

The Knight’s Tale is the story of Palamon and Arcite. They are captured by Theseus, the king

113
 of Thebes, and imprisoned in a tower together. The tower has one window, which the
knights spend their days looking out of.

One day, they see Emilye, the queen’s young sister, walking in her garden. Both Palamon
and Arcite fall in love with her instantly; while they fight over her at first, they soon realize
there is no point in fighting, since they’re both trapped in a tower and therefore equally
unlikely ever to meet her, let alone marry her.

Several years later, however, Arcite managers to escape the tower with the help of a friend.
He becomes a page in Emilye’s household, but does not confess his love to her. Meanwhile,
Palamon spends several more years in prison before escaping.

The two knights meet and fight over Emilye, but the fight is broken up by Theseus, who
insists that they hold a proper tournament. Palamon and Arcite are each given one year to
build an army and return to Thebes. The tournament will be a fight to the death, and the
winner of the tournament will receive Emilye’s hand in marriage.

The evening before the tournament, Palamon, Arcite, and Emilye each visit one of the three
shrines built into the walls of the tournament arena. Arcite visits the shrine of the Roman
god of war, Mars, where he prays to win the tournament. Palamon visits the shrine of the
Roman goddess of love, Venus, where he prays to win Emilye’s hand. Emilye, meanwhile,
visits the shrine of the Roman goddess of chastity, Diana. There, she prays that Diana will
allow her to remain unmarried, but she states she is willing to accept whatever Diana’s will
is for her.

The next day, the tournament begins. After much fighting, Arcite emerges as the winner of
the tournament, but he is thrown from his horse and suffers a fatal injury. On his deathbed,
he announces his wish for Palamon to marry Emilye.

Michel Foucault's theories primarily address the relationship between power and
knowledge, and how they are used as a form of social control through societal institutions.
Though often cited as a post-structuralist and postmodernist, Foucault rejected these
labels.His thought has influenced academics, especially those working in communication
studies, anthropology, sociology, criminology, cultural studies, literary theory, feminism,
and critical theory.

Notable work
Madness and Civilization (1961)
The Order of Things (1966)

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 Discipline and Punish (1975)
The History of Sexuality (1976)

Foucault's discussions of the relationship between power and knowledge has influenced
postcolonial critiques in explaining the discursive formation of colonialism, particularly in
Edward Said's work Orientalism.

The 44 S’unds

There are a
Total of 44 sounds in english.
With every sound, our mouth is
Doing something special. Our
Tonge, teeth, lips and breath
Work in flawless harmony with
Each other.these sounds are given here:-

5 Short-Vowel Sounds

Short /a/ in apple

Short /e/ in elephant
Short /i/ in igloo
Short /o/ in octopus
Short /u/ in umbrella

6 Long-Vowel Sounds

Long /a/ in cake

Long /e/ in feet
Long /i/ in pie
Long /o/ in boat
Long /u/ (yoo) in mule
Long /oo/ in flew
18 Consonant Sounds
/b/ in bat
/k/ in cat and kite
/d/ in dog
/f/ in fan
/g/ in goat
/h/ in hat
/j/ in jam
/l/ in lip
/m/ in map
/n/ in nest

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 /p/ in pig
/r/ in rat
/s/ in sun
/t/ in top
/v/ in van
/w/ in wig
/y/ in yell
/z/ in zip

7 Digraphs (Two consonants,

When
Combined make a certain sound
And one sound is heard.)

/ch/ in chin
/sh/ in ship
Unvoiced /th/ in thin
Voiced /th/ in this
/hw/ in whip
/ng/ in sing
/nk/ in sink

3 r-Controlled Vowels

/ur/ in fern, bird, and hurt

/ar/ in park
/or/ in fork

3 Diphthongs (Two vowels, when

Combined
Make a certain sound and not
Necessarily the sound of either
Vowel present.)

/oi/ in oil and boy

/ow/ in owl and ouch
Short/oo/ in cook and pull.
Long/oo/ in food and mood

2 Special Sounds

/aw/ in jaw and haul

/zh/ in television

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 Blends
(Two or more consonants, when
Combined make a certain sound
And two sounds are heard.)

Blends List
Bl- in blue and black
cl- in clap and close
fl- in fly and flip
gl- in glue and glove
pl- in play and please
br- in brown and break
cr- in cry and crust
dr- in dry and drag
fr- in fry and freeze
gr- in great and grand
pr- in prize and prank
tr- in tree and try
sk- in skate and sky
sl- in slip and slap
sp- in spot and speed
st- in street and stop
sw- in sweet and sweater
spr- in spray and spring
str- in stripe and strap

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Full Title Beowulf

Author Unknown

Type Of Work Poem

Genre Alliterative verse; elegy; resembles heroic epic, though smaller in scope than most
classical epics

Language Anglo-Saxon (also called Old English)

Time And Place Written Estimates of the date of composition range between 700 and
1000 a.d.; written in England

Date Of First Publication The only manuscript in which Beowulf is preserved is thought to
have been written around 1000 a.d.

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 Publisher The original poem exists only in manuscript form.

Narrator A Christian narrator telling a story of pagan times

Point Of View The narrator recounts the story in the third person, from a generally
objective standpoint—detailing the action that occurs. The narrator does, however, have
access to every character’s depths. We see into the minds of most of the characters (even
Grendel) at one point or another, and the narrative also moves forward and backward in
time with considerable freedom.

Tone The poet is generally enthusiastic about Beowulf’s feats, but he often surrounds the
events he narrates with a sense of doom.

Tense Past, but with digressions into the distant past and predictions of the future

Setting (Time) The main action of the story is set around 500 a.d.; the narrative also
recounts historical events that happened much earlier.

Setting (Place) Denmark and Geatland (a region in what is now southern Sweden)

Protagonist Beowulf

Major Conflict The poem essentially consists of three parts. There are three central
conflicts: Grendel’s domination of Heorot Hall; the vengeance of Grendel’s mother after
Grendel is slain; and the rage of the dragon after a thief steals a treasure that it has been
guarding. The poem’s overarching conflict is between close-knit warrior societies and the
various menaces that threaten their boundaries.

Rising Action Grendel’s attack on Heorot, Beowulf’s defeat of Grendel, and Grendel’s
mother’s vengeful killing of Aeschere lead to the climactic encounter between Beowulf and
Grendel’s mother.

Climax Beowulf’s encounter with Grendel’s mother constitutes the moment at which good
and evil are in greatest tension.

Falling Action Beowulf’s glorious victory over Grendel’s mother leads King Hrothgar to
praise him as a worthy hero and to advise him about becoming king. It also helps Beowulf to
transform from a brazen warrior into a reliable king.

Themes The importance of establishing identity; tensions between the heroic code and
other value systems; the difference between a good warrior and a good king

Motifs Monsters; the oral tradition; the mead-hall

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 Symbols The golden torque; the banquet

Foreshadowing The funeral of Shield Sheafson, with which the poem opens, foreshadows
Beowulf’s funeral at the poem’s end; the story of Sigemund told by the scop, or bard,
foreshadows Beowulf’s fight with the dragon; the story of King Heremod foreshadows
Beowulf’s eventual ascendancy to kingship.

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T. S. Eliot Criticism

Eliot made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism, strongly influencing the
school of New Criticism. He was somewhat self-deprecating and minimising of his work and
once said his criticism was merely a "by-product" of his "private poetry-workshop", but the
critic William Empson once said, "I do not know for certain how much of my own mind
[Eliot] invented, let alone how much of it is a reaction against him or indeed a consequence
of misreading him. He is a very penetrating influence, perhaps not unlike the east wind."

In his critical essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent", Eliot argues that art must be
understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces of art. "In a peculiar
sense [an artist or poet] ... must inevitably be judged by the standards of the past." This
essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by introducing the idea that the
value of a work of art must be viewed in the context of the artist's previous works, a
"simultaneous order" of works (i.e., "tradition"). Eliot himself employed this concept on
many of his works, especially on his long-poem The Waste Land.

Also important to New Criticism was the idea—as articulated in Eliot's essay "Hamlet and
His Problems"—of an "objective correlative", which posits a connection among the words of
the text and events, states of mind, and experiences. This notion concedes that a poem
means what it says, but suggests that there can be a non-subjective judgment based on
different readers' different—but perhaps corollary—interpretations of a work.

More generally, New Critics took a cue from Eliot in regard to his "'classical' ideals and his
religious thought; his attention to the poetry and drama of the early seventeenth century;
his deprecation of the Romantics, especially Shelley; his proposition that good poems
constitute 'not a turning loose of emotion but an escape from emotion'; and his insistence
that 'poets... at present must be difficult'."

Eliot's essays were a major factor in the revival of interest in the metaphysical poets. Eliot
particularly praised the metaphysical poets' ability to show experience as both psychological
and sensual, while at the same time infusing this portrayal with—in Eliot's view—wit and
uniqueness. Eliot's essay "The Metaphysical Poets", along with giving new significance and

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 attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of "unified
sensibility", which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term
"metaphysical".

His 1922 poem The Waste Land also can be better understood in light of his work as a critic.
He had argued that a poet must write "programmatic criticism", that is, a poet should write
to advance his own interests rather than to advance "historical scholarship". Viewed from
Eliot's critical lens, The Waste Land likely shows his personal despair about World War
I rather than an objective historical understanding of it.

Late in his career, Eliot focused much of his creative energy on writing for the theatre; some
of his earlier critical writing, in essays such as "Poetry and Drama", "Hamlet and his
Problems", and "The Possibility of a Poetic Drama",focused on the aesthetics of writing
drama in verse.

PSYCHOANALYTIC CRITICISM: IMPORTANT POINTS TO REMEMBER

📙 Psychoanalytic criticism adopts the methods of “reading” employed by Freud and later
theorists to interpret texts. It argues that literary texts, like dreams, express the secret
unconscious desires and anxieties of the author, that a literary work is a manifestation of
the author’s own neuroses.

📙 Theorists analyze a particular character within a literary work, but it is usually assumed
that all such characters are projections of the author’s psyche.

📙 One interesting facet of this approach is that it validates the importance of literature, as it
is built on a literary key for the decoding. Freud himself wrote, “The dream-thoughts which
we first come across as we proceed with our analysis often strike us by the unusual form in
which they are expressed; they are not clothed in the prosaic language usually employed by
our thoughts, but are on the contrary represented symbolically by means of similes and
metaphors, in images resembling those of poetic speech”.

📙 Like psychoanalysis itself, this critical endeavor seeks evidence of unresolved emotions,
psychological conflicts, guilts, ambivalences, and so forth within what may well be a
disunified literary work.

📙 The author’s own childhood traumas, family life, sexual conflicts, fixations, and such will
be traceable within the behavior of the characters in the literary work. But psychological
material will be expressed indirectly, disguised, or encoded (as in dreams) through
principles such as “symbolism” (the repressed object represented in disguise),
“condensation” (several thoughts or persons represented in a single image), and
“displacement” (anxiety located onto another image by means of association).

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 📙 Despite the importance of the author here, psychoanalytic criticism is similar to New
Criticism in not concerning itself with “what the author intended.” But what the author
never intended (that is, repressed) is sought. The unconscious material has been distorted
by the censoring conscious mind.

“To the Lighthouse” (1927) is set on two days ten years apart. The plot centres on the
Ramsay family’s anticipation of and reflection upon a visit to a lighthouse and the
connected familial tensions. One of the primary themes of the novel is the struggle in the
creative process that beset painter Lily Briscoe while she struggles to paint in the midst of
the family drama. The novel is also a meditation upon the lives of a nation’s inhabitants in
the midst of war, and of the people left behind.”[] It also explores the passage of time, and
how women are forced by society to allow men to take emotional strength from them.

❤️”Orlando: A Biography “(1928) is one of Virginia Woolf’s lightest novels. A parodic

biography of a young nobleman who lives for three centuries without ageing much past
thirty (but who does abruptly turn into a woman), the book is in part a portrait of Woolf’s
lover Vita Sackville-West. It was meant to console Vita for the loss of her ancestral
home, Knole House, though it is also a satirical treatment of Vita and her work. In Orlando,
the techniques of historical biographers are being ridiculed; the character of a pompous
biographer is being assumed in order for it to be mocked.

“The Waves (1931) presents a group of six friends whose reflections, which are closer to
recitatives than to interior monologues proper, create a wave-like atmosphere that is more
akin to a prose poem than to a plot-centred novel”.

Flush: A Biography (1933)[] is a part-fiction, part-biography of the cocker spaniel owned by

Victorian poet Elizabeth Barrett Browning. The book is written from the dog’s point of view.
Woolf was inspired to write this book from the success of the Rudolf Besier play The
Barretts of Wimpole Street. In the play, Flush is on stage for much of the action. The play
was produced for the first time in 1932 by the actress Katharine Cornell.

PHONOLOGY

Phonology is the study of the sound system of languages. It is a huge area of language
theory. On one hand, phonology is concerned with anatomy and physiology – the organs of
speech and how we learn to use them. On the other hand, phonology shades into socio-
linguistics as we consider social attitudes to features of sound such as accent and
intonation.
Language scientists have a very detailed understanding of how the human body produces
the sounds of speech. Leaving to one side the vast subject of how we choose particular
utterances and identify the sounds we need, we can think rather simply of how we use our
lungs to breathe out air, produce vibrations in the larynx and then use our tongue, teeth
and lips to modify the sounds. The diagram below shows some of the more important

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 speech organs.
Speech therapists have a very detailed working knowledge of the physiology of human
speech, and of exercises and remedies to overcome difficulties some of us encounter in
speaking, where these have physical causes. An understanding of the anatomy is also useful
to various kinds of expert who train people to use their voices in special or unusual ways.
These would include singing teachers and voice coaches for actors, as well as the even more
specialized coaches who train actors to produce the speech sounds of hitherto unfamiliar
varieties of English or other languages.
Mostly we use air that is moving out of our lungs (pulmonic regressive air) to speak. We
may pause while breathing in, or try to use the ingressive air – but this is likely to produce
quiet speech, which is unclear to our listeners. (David Crystal notes how the normally
balanced respiratory cycle is altered by speech, so that we breathe out slowly, using the air
for speech, and breathe in swiftly, in order to keep talking). In languages other than English,
speakers may also use non-pulmonic sound, such as clicks (found in southern Africa) or
glottalic sounds (found worldwide). In the larynx, the vocal folds set up vibrations in the
egressive air. The vibrating air passes through further cavities which can modify the sound
and finally are articulated by the passive (immobile) articulators – the hard palate, the
alveolar ridge and the upper teeth – and the active (mobile) articulators. These are the
pharynx, the velum (or soft palate), the jaw and lower teeth, the lips and, above all, the
tongue. This is so important and so flexible an organ, that language scientists identify
different regions of the tongue by name, as these are associated with particular sounds.
Working outwards these are:
• the back – opposite the soft palate
• the centre – opposite the meeting point of hard and soft palate
• the front – opposite the hard palate
• the blade – the tapering area facing the ridge of teeth
• the tip – the extreme end of the tongue
The first three of these (back, centre and front) are known together as the dorsum (which is
Latin for backbone or spine).
The first people to write in English used an existing alphabet – the Roman alphabet, which
was itself adapted from the Greek alphabet for writing in Latin. (In the Roman Empire, Latin
was the official language of government and administration, and especially of the army but
in the eastern parts of the empire Greek was the official language, and in Rome Greek was
spoken as widely as Latin. Because these first writers of English (Latin-speaking Roman
monks) had more sounds than letters, they used the same letters to represent different
sounds – perhaps making the assumption that the reader would recognize the word, and
supply the appropriate sounds. It would be many years before anyone would think it
possible to have more consistent spelling, and this has never been a realistic option for
writers of English, though spelling has changed over time. And, in any case, the sounds of
Old English are not exactly the same as the sounds of modern English.
A phoneme is a speech sound that helps us construct meaning. That is, if we replace it with
another sound (where this is possible) we get a new meaning or no meaning at all. If I
replace the initial consonant (/r/) from rubble, I can get double or Hubble or meaningless

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 forms like fubble and wubble. The same thing happens if I change the vowel and get rabble,
rebel, Ribble and the nonsense form robble.
But what happens when a phoneme is adapted to the spoken context in which it occurs, in
ways that do not alter the meaning either for speaker or hearer. Rather than say these are
different phonemes that share the same meaning we use the model of allophones, which
are variants of a phoneme. Thus if we isolate the l sound in the initial position in “lick” and
in the terminal position in “ball”, we should be able to hear that the sound is (physically)
different as is the way our speech organs produce it. Technically, in the second case, the
back of the tongue is raised towards the velum or soft palate. The initial l sound is called
clear l, while the terminal l sound is sometimes called a dark l.
Consonant and vowel each have two related but distinct meanings in English. In writing of
phonology, you need to make the distinction clear. When you were younger you may have
learned that b,c,d,f and so on are consonants while a,e,i,o,u are vowels – and you may have
wondered about “y”. In this case consonants and vowels denote the letters that commonly
represent the relevant sounds. Phonologists are interested in vowel and consonant sounds
and the phonetic symbols that represent these.
The sounds of English
a) Vowels:
English has twelve vowel sounds. This scheme shows the following arrangement:
Front vowels:
• /iː/ - cream, seen (long high front spread vowel)
• /ɪ /- bit, silly (short high front spread vowel)
• /ɛ/ - bet, head (short mid front spread vowel); this may also be shown by the symbol /e/
• /æ/ . cat, dad (short low front spread vowel); this may also be shown by /a/
Central vowels:
• /ʒː/- burn, firm (long mid central spread vowel); this may also be shown by the symbol
/əː/
• /ə/ - about, clever (short mid central spread vowel); this is sometimes known as schwa, or
the neutral vowel sound – it never occurs in a stressed position.
• /ʌ/ - cut, nut (short low front spread vowel); this vowel is quite uncommon among
speakers in the Midlands and further north in Britain
Back vowels:
• /uː/ - boob, glue (long high back rounded vowel)
• /ʊ/ - put, soot (short high back rounded vowel); also shown by /u/
• /ɔː/ - corn, faun (long mid back rounded vowel) also shown by /oː/
• /ɒ/- dog, rotten (short low back rounded vowel) also shown by /o/
• /ɑː/ - hard, far (long low back spread vowel)
b) Diphthongs:
Diphthongs are sounds that begin as one vowel and end as another, while gliding between
them. For this reason they are sometimes described as glide vowels.
c) Consonants:
We form consonants by controlling or impeding the egressive (outward) flow of air. We do
this with the articulators – from the glottis, past the velum, the hard palate and alveolar
ridge and the tongue, to the teeth and lips. The sound results from three things:

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 • voicing – causing the vocal cords to vibrate.
• where the articulation happens.
• how the articulation happens – how the airflow is controlled.
Syllables
When you think of individual sounds, you may think of them in terms of syllables. These are
units of phonological organization and smaller than words. Alternatively, think of them as
units of rhythm. Although they may contain several sounds, they combine them in ways
that create the effect of unity.
Some words have a single syllable – so they are monosyllables or monosyllabic. Others have
more than one syllable and are polysyllables or polysyllabic.
Suprasegmentals
In written English we use punctuation to signal some things like emphasis, and the speed
with which we want our readers to move at certain points. In spoken English we use sounds
in ways that do not apply to individual segments but to stretches of spoken discourse from
words to phrases, clauses and sentences. Such effects are described as non-segmental or
suprasegmental – or, using the adjective in a plural nominal (noun) form, simply
suprasegmentals.
Among these effects are such things as stress, intonation, tempo and rhythm – which
collectively are known as prosodic features. Other effects arise from altering the quality of
the voice, making it breathy or husky and changing what is sometimes called the timbre –
and these are paralinguistic features. Both of these kinds of effect may signal meaning.
Prosodic features
• Stress or loudness – increasing volume is a simple way of giving emphasis, and this is a
crude measure of stress. But it is usually combined with other things like changes in tone
and tempo. We use stress to convey some kinds of meaning (semantic and pragmatic) such
as urgency or anger or for such things as imperatives.
• Intonation – you may be familiar in a loose sense with the notion of tone of voice. We use
varying levels of pitch in sequences (contours or tunes) to convey particular meanings.
Falling and rising intonation in English may signal a difference between statement and
question. Younger speakers of English may use rising (question) intonation without
intending to make the utterance a question.
• Tempo – we speak more or less quickly for many different reasons and purposes.
Occasionally it may be that we are adapting our speech to the time we have in which to
utter it (as, for example, in a horse-racing commentary). But mostly tempo reflects some
kinds of meaning or attitude – so we give a truthful answer to a question, but do so rapidly
to convey our distraction or irritation.
• Rhythm – patterns of stress, tempo and pitch together create a rhythm. Some kinds of
formal and repetitive rhythm are familiar from music, rap, poetry and even chants of soccer
fans. But all speech has rhythm – it is just that in spontaneous utterances we are less likely
to hear regular or repeating patterns.
Paralinguistic features
How many voices do we have? We are used to “putting on” silly voices for comic effects or
in play. We may adapt our voices for speaking to babies, or to suggest emotion, excitement
or desire. These effects are familiar in drama, where the use of a stage whisper may suggest

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 something clandestine and conspiratorial. Nasal speech may suggest disdain, though it is
easily exaggerated for comic effect.
Such effects are sometimes described as timbre or voice quality. We all may use them
sometimes but they are particularly common among entertainers such as actors or
comedians. This is not surprising, as they practise using their voices in unusual ways, to
represent different characters.
Accent
Everyone’s use of the sound system is unique and personal. And few of us use sounds
consistently in all contexts – we adapt to different situations. (We rarely adapt our sounds
alone – more likely we mind our language in the popular sense, by attending to our lexical
choices, grammar and phonology). Most human beings adjust their speech to resemble that
of those around them. This is very easy to demonstrate, as when some vogue words from
broadcasting surf a wave of popularity before settling down in the language more modestly
or passing out of use again.

Types of Poems

(i) Define poetry.

Ans. Poetry is a form of literature that uses aesthetic and rhythmic qualities of language ---
such as phonaesthetics, sound symbolism, and metre – to evoke meanings in addition to, or
in place of, the prosaic ostensible meaning.

(ii) What is an aubade?

Ans. Aubade is a love poem welcoming or lamenting the arrival of the dawn. One of the
finest aubades in literature occurs in Act II, Scene III, of Shakespeare’s play Cymbeline. It
begins with the famous words, “Hark, hark! The lark at heaven's gate sings”. Donne’s “The
Sun Rising” is also an aubade.

(iii) What is a ballad?

Ans. A narrative poem, often of folk origin and intended to be sung, consisting of simple
stanzas and usually having a refrain. The Anonymous medieval ballad, “Barbara Allan”,
exemplifies the genre.

(iv) What is a folk ballad?

Ans.Folk ballad is a song that it traditionally sung by the common people or a region and
forms part of their culture. Folk ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic
stories with emphasis on a central dramatic event. Examples include “Barbara Allan” and
“John Henry”.

(v) Define a carol?

Ans. A carol is a hymn or poem often sung by a group, with an individual taking the changing
stanzas and the group taking the burden or refrain. Examples include “The Burning Babe”
and “The Twelve Days of Christmas”

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 (vi) What is a dramatic monologue?
Ans. A dramatic monologue is a poem in which an imagined speaker addresses a silent
listener. It is a ‘mono-drama in verse’. Examples include Robert Browning’s “My Last
Duchess” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”.

(vii) Define elegy.

Ans. An elegy is a mournful, melancholic or plaintive poem, especially a funeral song of a
lament for the dead. It usually ends in consolation. Examples include John Milton’s “Lycidas”
and W.H. Auden’s “In Memory of W.B. Yeats”.

(viii) Define an epic.

Ans. An epic is a lengthy narrative poem, ordinarily concerning a serious subject containing
details of heroic deeds and events significant to a culture or nation narrated in elevated
style. For example, Homer’s “Iliad” is an epic.

(ix) What is a mock epic?

Ans. A mock epic is a satire or parody that mocks common classical stereotypes or heroes
and heroic literature. Typically, a mock epic either puts a fool in the role of the hero or
exaggerates the heroic qualities to such a point that they become absurd. Examples include
John Dryden’s “Mac Flecknoe” and Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock”.

(x) What is an epigram?

Ans. An epigram is a short, satirical and witty poem (statement) usually written as a couplet
or quatrain but can also be a one lined phrase. It is a brief and forceful remark with a funny
ending. Examples include Walter Savage Landor’s “Dirce” and Ben Jonson’s “On Gut”.

(xi) What is an epithalamion?

Ans. An epithalamion is a lyric ode in honour of a bride and bridegroom usually containing
suggestive language and innuendo. Examples include Theocritus’ “The 18 th Idyll” and
Edmund Spenser’s “Epithalamion”.

(xii) What is a hymn?

Ans. A hymn is a religious poem praising God or the divine, often sung. In English, the most
popular hymns were written between the 17th and 19th centuries. Examples include Isaac
Walts’ “Our God, Our Help” and Charles Welsey’s “My God! I Know, I Feel Thee Mine”.

(xiii) What is a lyric?

Ans. A lyric is a short poem which expresses personal emotions or feelings, often in a song-
like style or form. It is typically written in the first person. Examples include John Clare’s “I
Hid My Love” and Louise Bogan’s “Song for the Last Act”.

(xiv) Define an ode.

Ans. An ode is a long, often elaborate stanzaic poem of varying line lengths and sometimes
intricate rhyme schemes devoted to the praise of a person, animal, place, thing or idea.

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 Examples include P.B. Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind" and John Keats’ “Ode on a Grecian
Urn”.

(xv) What is a sonnet?

Ans. A sonnet is a poem of fourteen lines using any of a number of formal rhyme schemes.
In English, a sonnet has 3 quatrains followed by a couplet

Pathetic Fallacy:

A phrase invented by John Ruskin in 1856 to signify any representation of inanimate natural
objects that ascribes to them human capabilities, sensations and emotions.

New Criticism:

This term made current by the publication of John Crowe Ransom’s The New Criticism in
1941. It opposed a prevailing interest of scholars, critics and teachers of that era in the
biographies of the authors.

Negative Capability:

The poet John Keats introduced this term in a letter written in December 1817 to define a
literary quality. He describes the poet’s capacity to negate oneself in order to enter into and
become one with his or her subject.

Metaphysical Poets:

John Dryden said in his Discourse Concerning Satire (1693) that John Donne is his poetry
“affects the metaphysics. In 1779 Samuel Johnson extended the term metaphysical. Donne
was the first preeminent metaphysical poet. Later followers included George Herbert, Henry
Vaughan, Andrew Marvell, Richard Crashaw, Abraham Cowley and Thomas Traherne

*_Reception theory_ is a version of reader response literary theory that emphasizes each
particular reader’s reception or interpretation in making meaning from a literary text.
Reception theory is generally referred to as audience reception in the analysis
of communications models. In literary studies, reception theory originated from the work
of Hans-Robert Jauss in the late 1960s, and the most influential work was produced during
the 1970s and early 1980s in Germany and the US (Fortier 132), with some notable work

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 done in other Western European countries. A form of reception theory has also been
applied to the study of historiography.*

The cultural theorist Stuart Hall has been one of the main proponents of reception theory,
first developed in his 1973 essay ‘Encoding and Decoding in the Television Discourse’. His
approach, called the encoding/decoding model of communication, is a form of textual
analysis that focuses on the scope of “negotiation” and “opposition” by the audience. This
means that a “text”—be it a book, movie, or other creative work—is not simply passively
accepted by the audience, but that the reader/viewer interprets the meanings of the text
based on her or his individual cultural background and life experiences. In essence, the
meaning of a text is not inherent within the text itself, but is created within the relationship
between the text and the reader.

Hall also developed a theory of encoding and decoding, Hall’s theory, which focuses on the
communication processes at play in texts that are in televisual form.

Reception theory has since been extended to the spectators of performative events,
focusing predominantly on the theatre. Susan Bennett is often credited with beginning this
discourse. Reception theory has also been applied to the history and analysis of landscapes,
through the work of the landscape historian John Dixon Hunt, as Hunt recognized that the
survival of gardens and landscapes is largely related to their public reception.

Chicago school (literary criticism)

*The Chicago School of literary criticism was a form of criticism of English literature begun
at the University of Chicago in the 1930s, which lasted until the 1950s. It was also called
Neo-Aristotelianism*, due to its strong emphasis on Aristotle’s concepts of plot, character
and genre. It was partly a reaction to New Criticism, a then highly popular form of literary
criticism, which the Chicago critics accused of being too subjective and placing too much
importance on irony and figurative language. They aimed instead for total objectivity and a
strong classical basis of evidence for criticism. The New Critics regarded the language and
poetic diction as most important, but the Chicago School considered such things merely the
building material of poetry. Like Aristotle, they valued the structure or form of a literary
work as a whole, rather than the complexities of the language. Despite this, the Chicago
School is considered by some to be a part of the New Criticism movement.

Beginnings

Ronald Salmon Crane (1886–1967) is considered the founder of the Chicago Aristotelians*.
He began teaching at the University of Chicago in 1924, was made a professor in 1925, and
chaired the English department there from 1935–1947. *In 1935, he wrote “History versus
Criticism in the Study of Literature”* (published in English Journal 24 [1935]:645-67), in
which he defined literary criticism as “simply the disciplined consideration, at once
analytical and evaluative, of literary works as works of art.” Crane was greatly influenced by

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 Richard McKeon, a professor of philosophy at the University, who stressed Aristotle’s idea
of “pluralism,” which says that many systems of criticism are necessary to completely
understand literature, specifically poetry, or in the case of philosophy, the world. Crane said
that “the only rational ground for adhering to one [form of criticism] rather than to any of
the others is its superior capacity to give us the special kind of understanding and
evaluation of literature we want to get, at least for the time being.”

Works

Great works in the Chicago School includeCritics and Criticism

(Crane, ed. Chicago, 1952), The Languages of Criticism and the Structure of Poetry (Crane,
Toronto, 1953), and The Rhetoric of Fiction (Booth. Chicago, 1983)*.

Desire NET JRF

AMERICAN LITERATURE

American literature is literature predominantly written or produced in English in the United

States of America and its preceding colonies. Before the founding of the United States,
the Thirteen Colonies on the eastern coast of the present-day United States were heavily
influenced by British literature. The American literary tradition thus began as part of the
broader tradition of English-language literature. However, a small amount of literature
exists in other immigrant languages and Native American tribes have a rich tradition of oral
storytelling.

The American Revolutionary Period (1775–83) is notable for the political writings
of Benjamin Franklin, Alexander Hamilton, Thomas Paine, and Thomas Jefferson. An early
novel is William Hill Brown's The Power of Sympathy published in 1791.

Writer and critic John Neal in the early-mid nineteenth century helped advance America's
progress toward a unique literature and culture, by criticizing predecessors like Washington
Irving for imitating their British counterparts and influencing others like Edgar Allan
Poe. Ralph Waldo Emerson pioneered the influential Transcendentalism movement; Henry
David Thoreau, author of Walden, was influenced by this movement. The political conflict
surrounding abolitionism inspired the writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe. These efforts were
supported by the continuation of slave narratives.

Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850) is an early American classic novel and
Hawthorne influenced Herman Melville, author of Moby-Dick (1851). Major American poets
of the nineteenth century include Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Edgar Allan Poe was
another significant writer who greatly influenced later authors. Mark Twain was the first
major American writer to be born away from the East Coast. Henry James achieved
international recognition with novels like The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

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 American writers expressed both disillusionment and nostalgia following World War I. The
short stories and novels of F. Scott Fitzgerald captured the mood of the 1920s, and John Dos
Passos wrote about the war. Ernest Hemingway became famous with The Sun Also
Rises and A Farewell to Arms; in 1954, he won the Nobel Prize in Literature. William
Faulkner was another major novelist. American poets also included international
figures: Wallace Stevens, T. S. Eliot, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, and E. E. Cummings.
Playwright Eugene O'Neill won the Nobel Prize. In the mid-twentieth century, drama was
dominated by Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller, as well as the musical theatre.

Depression era writers included John Steinbeck, author of The Grapes of Wrath (1939).
America's involvement in World War II influenced works such as Norman Mailer's The
Naked and the Dead (1948), Joseph Heller's Catch-22 (1961) and Kurt Vonnegut
Jr.'s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969).

One of the developments in late 20th century and early 21st century has been an increase
in the literature written by ethnic, Native American, and LGBT writers; Postmodernism has
also been important during the same period.

The term feminism describes political, cultural, and economic movements that aim to
establish equal rights and legal protections for women. Over time, feminist activists have
campaigned for issues such as women’s legal rights, especially in regard to contracts,
property, and voting; body integrity and autonomy; abortion and reproductive rights,
including contraception and prenatal care; protection from domestic violence, sexual
harassment, and rape; workplace rights, including maternity leave and equal pay; and
against all forms of discrimination women encounter.

Feminist history can be divided into three waves. The first wave, occurring in the 19th and
early 20th century, was mainly concerned with women’s right to vote. The second wave, at
its height in the 1960s and 1970s, refers to the women’s liberation movement for equal
legal and social rights. The third wave, beginning in the 1990s, refers to a continuation of,
and a reaction to, second-wave feminism.

First-wave feminism promoted equal contract and property rights for women, opposing
ownership of married women by their husbands. By the late 19th century, feminist activism
was primarily focused on the right to vote. American first-wave feminism ended with
passage of the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution in 1919, granting women voting
rights.

Second-wave feminism of the 1960s-1980s focused on issues of equality and discrimination.

The second-wave slogan, “The Personal is Political,” identified women’s cultural and
political inequalities as inextricably linked and encouraged women to understand how their
personal lives reflected sexist power structures. Betty Friedan was a key player in second-
wave feminism. In 1963, her book The Feminine Mystique criticized the idea that women
could find fulfillment only through childrearing and homemaking. According to

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 Friedan’s New York Times obituary, her book “ignited the contemporary women’s
movement in 1963 and as a result permanently transformed the social fabric of the United
States and countries around the world” and “is widely regarded as one of the most
influential nonfiction books of the 20th century.” Friedan hypothesizes that women are
victims of false beliefs requiring them to find identity in their lives through husbands and
children. This causes women to lose their own identities in that of their family.

Third-wave feminism began in the early 1990s, responding to perceived failures of the
second wave and to the backlash against second-wave initiatives. This ideology seeks to
challenge the definitions of femininity that grew out of the ideas of the second-wave,
arguing that the second-wave over-emphasized experiences of upper middle-class white
women. The third-wave sees women’s lives as intersectional, demonstrating how race,
ethnicity, class, religion, gender, and nationality are all significant factors when discussing
feminism. It examines issues related to women’s lives on an international basis.

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Neoclassicism (also spelled Neo-classicism; from Greek νέος nèos, "new"

and Greek κλασικός klasikόs, "of the highest rank")[1] was a Western cultural movement in
the decorative and visual arts, literature, theatre, music, and architecture that drew
inspiration from the art and culture of classical antiquity. Neoclassicism was born
in Rome largely thanks to the writings of Johann Joachim Winckelmann, at the time of the
rediscovery of Pompeii and Herculaneum, but its popularity spread all over Europe as a
generation of European art students finished their Grand Tour and returned from Italy to
their home countries with newly rediscovered Greco-Roman ideals.[2][3] The main
Neoclassical movement coincided with the 18th-century Age of Enlightenment, and
continued into the early 19th century, laterally competing with Romanticism. In
architecture, the style continued throughout the 19th, 20th and up to the 21st century.

European Neoclassicism in the visual arts began c. 1760 in opposition to the then-
dominant Rococo style. Rococo architecture emphasizes grace, ornamentation and
asymmetry; Neoclassical architecture is based on the principles of simplicity and symmetry,
which were seen as virtues of the arts of Rome and Ancient Greece, and were more
immediately drawn from 16th-century Renaissance Classicism. Each "neo"-classicism selects
some models among the range of possible classics that are available to it, and ignores
others. The Neoclassical writers and talkers, patrons and collectors, artists and sculptors of
1765–1830 paid homage to an idea of the generation of Phidias, but the sculpture examples
they actually embraced were more likely to be Roman copies of Hellenistic sculptures. They
ignored both Archaic Greek art and the works of Late Antiquity. The "Rococo" art of
ancient Palmyra came as a revelation, through engravings in Wood's The Ruins of Palmyra.
Even Greece was all-but-unvisited, a rough backwater of the Ottoman Empire, dangerous to
explore, so Neoclassicists' appreciation of Greek architecture was mediated through
drawings and engravings, which subtly smoothed and regularized, "corrected" and
"restored" the monuments of Greece, not always consciously.

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 The Empire style, a second phase of Neoclassicism in architecture and the decorative arts,
had its cultural centre in Paris in the Napoleonic era.

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Magic Realism In Literature

Literary magic realism originated in Latin America. Writers often traveled between their
home country and European cultural hubs, such as Paris or Berlin, and were influenced by
the art movement of the time. Cuban writer Alejo Carpentier and Venezuelan Arturo Uslar-
Pietri, for example, were strongly influenced by European artistic movements, such
as Surrealism, during their stays in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s. One major event that
linked painterly and literary magic realisms was the translation and publication of Franz
Roh’s book into Spanish by Spain’sRevista de Occidente in 1927, headed by major literary
figure José Ortega y Gasset. “Within a year, Magic Realism was being applied to the prose of
European authors in the literary circles of Buenos Aires.”

Jorge Luis Borges inspired and encouraged other Latin American writers in the development
of magical realism – particularly with his first magical realist publication,Historia universal
de la infamia in 1935. Between 1940 and 1950, magical realism in Latin America reached its
peak, with prominent writers appearing mainly in Argentina. Alejo Carpentier’s novel The
Kingdom of This World, published in 1949, is often characterised as an important harbinger
of magic realism, which reached its most canonical incarnation in Gabriel García Marquez’s
novel One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967).

The theoretical implications of visual art’s magic realism greatly influenced European and
Latin American literature. Italian Massimo Bontempelli, for instance, claimed
thatliterature could be a means to create a collective consciousness by “opening new
mythical and magical perspectives on reality”, and used his writings to inspire an Italian
nation governed by Fascism. Pietri was closely associated with Roh’s form of magic realism
and knew Bontempelli in Paris. Rather than follow Carpentier’s developing versions of “the
(Latin) American marvelous real”, Uslar-Pietri’s writings emphasize “the mystery of human
living amongst the reality of life”. He believed magic realism was “a continuation of
the vanguardia [or avant-garde] modernist experimental writings of Latin America”

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Russian formalism was a school of literary criticism in Russia from the 1910s to the 1930s. It
includes the work of a number of highly influential Russian and Soviet scholars such
as Viktor Shklovsky, Yuri Tynianov, Vladimir Propp, Boris Eichenbaum, Roman
Jakobson, Boris Tomashevsky, Grigory Gukovsky who revolutionised literary criticism
between 1914 and the 1930s by establishing the specificity and autonomy of poetic

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 language and literature. Russian formalism exerted a major influence on thinkers
like Mikhail Bakhtin and Yuri Lotman, and on structuralism as a whole. The movement's
members had a relevant influence on modern literary criticism, as it developed in the
structuralist and post-structuralist periods. Under Stalin it became a pejorative term for
elitist art.

Russian formalism was a diverse movement, producing no unified doctrine, and no

consensus amongst its proponents on a central aim to their endeavours. In fact, "Russian
Formalism" describes two distinct movements: the OPOJAZ (Obshchestvo Izucheniia
Poeticheskogo Yazyka, Society for the Study of Poetic Language) in St. Petersburg and
the Moscow Linguistic Circle. Therefore, it is more precise to refer to the "Russian
Formalists", rather than to use the more encompassing and abstract term of "Formalism".

The term "formalism" was first used by the adversaries of the movement, and as such it
conveys a meaning explicitly rejected by the Formalists themselves. In the words of one of
the foremost Formalists, Boris Eichenbaum: "It is difficult to recall who coined this name,
but it was not a very felicitous coinage. It might have been convenient as a simplified battle
cry but it fails, as an objective term, to delimit the activities of the "Society for the Study of
Poetic Language."

Mac Flecknoe Summary: The poem identifies itself as a satire of which the subject is “the
True-blue Protestant Poet T.S.” referring to the poet Thomas Shadwell. The first line of the
poem creates the illusion of its being an epic poem about a historical hero. The next lines
talk about Mac Flecknoe, a monarch who instead of ruling an empire, rules over the realm
of Nonsense. The king is old and thus must choose a successor to his throne. Dryden
wonders whether the king will chose a poet who has talent and wit or if he will choose
someone like him, a man with no literary talent.

Flecknoe decides upon his son Shadwell, a man with no talent and who is tedious, stupid,
and always at war with wit. Shadwell is also described as a very corpulent man. Through
Flecknoe’s words, the poet continues to insult Shadwell in a mock-heroic tone, calling him a
dunce, the “last great prophet of tautology,” and “for anointed dullness he was made.”
Shadwell arrives in London, outfitted like a king and lauded by the people. Flecknoe chooses
for his son’s throne a neighborhood of brothels and theaters birthing bad actors. Inside
those places, real drama does not exist; only simple plays are welcome. Dryden also alludes
to some of the historical Shadwell’s plays, like Epsom Wells and Psyche, and mocks another
contemporary writer, Singleton, who is envious that he wasn’t chosen as successor to the
throne. It is clear that in this environment, Shadwell will rule over those who have no
literary talent. The descriptions Dryden offers only serve the purpose of highlighting the
incompetency of Shadwell and create the image of a fool ruling over peasants.

As the coronation begins, Dryden describes the streets as filled with the limbs of other
poets, suggesting that Shadwell managed to get a hold on his position at the expense of
talented writers. Once more, the poet mentions human waste and links it with Shadwell’s

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 writing and compares him with a historical figure, Hannibal, to suggest that Shadwell’s
purpose is to destroy wit and replace it with dullness.

During his coronation, the oil used to anoint a new king is replaced by ale, signifying the
poet’s dullness. After the crown is placed on his head, Shadwell sits on the throne and the
former king prepares to give the cheering crowd a speech.

The former king begins by presenting the land over which the new king will rule, a territory
where no one lives. Flecknoe urges his son to remain true to his writing and to not let
anyone make any changes in his work. Flecknoe praises Shadwell’s abilities and then ends
his speech by telling Shadwell to continue to remain dull and to avoid trying to be like
Jonson.

Flecknoe concludes by exhorting his son not to focus on real plays but rather to work on
acrostics or anagrams. His last words are cut Off and he sinks below the stage. His mantle
falls on Shadwell, which is appropriate because he has twice as much “talent” as his father.

List of Literary Movements in English Literature

Generally Literary movement are some piece of literature done by various authors over
same period of time usually which carries some similar ideas among them. There are many
literary movements present and here is some of the important ones are listed mostly above
19th century.

1. Amatory fiction – 17 th and 18 th century, romance fictions

2. Cavalier Poets – They are called son of Ben, Ben Jonson. 17th c royalist poets write about
courtly love

3. Metaphysical poets – Often write about religion or love, but not always

4. The Augustans – 18th c works based on satire, skepticism or classic ideals

5. Romanticism – 19th c , imaginary and emotional works

6. Gothic novel – supernatural and violence

7. Lake Poets – Poets from Lake district write about nature

8. American Romanticism – Majorly about American history

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 9. Pre-Raphaelitism – 19th c poets who mostly skilled in painting too

10. Transcendentalism – 19th c American movements independent from modern technology

self- reliance poetry and philosophy.

11. Dark romanticism – Reaction to transcendentalism, man inherently sinful and self
destructive.

12. Realism – An everyday concern, simplification of image & style of 19th c.

13. Naturalism – 19th c, works that believe in heredity

14. Symbolism - Basically a French movement, structure of thought rather than image or
poetic form

15. Stream of consciousness – Quotidian thought without authorial presence.

16. Modernism – Reaction to science and technology, 20th century.

17. The Lost Generation – Impact of post World war I

18. Dada – Against artistic norms

19. First World War Poets – Horrors of the war during the world wars.

20. Stridentism – Speaks about social revolution and urban life. Mexican movements.

21. Los Contemporáneos - Mexican movements, served as a group’s mouthpiece

22. Imagism – Depends on the theme natural objects are always adequate symbol.

23. Harlem Renaissance – Elements of blues and folklore. African – American poets.

24. Surrealism – written in unconscious tone

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 25. Southern Agrarians – Metrical verse and narratives

26. Oulipo – Based on arbitrary rules for the sake of challenges in addition.

27. Pargatiwadi Dhara – Marxist sloganistic tone

28.Paryogsheel Lehar – Panjabi poetry, mapping new direction to the future generation.

28. Postmodernism – Post war movements

30.Black Mountain Poets – Based on the poets of the Black Mountain College.

31. Beat poets – Counter culture and youthful alienation, an American movement.

32. Hungryalist Poets – A literary movement in postcolonial India, Kolkata.

33. Confessional poetry – Brutally exposed poetry, beauty and power of human frailty.

34. New York School – Gay or Gay- friendly poets of 1960’s.

35. Magical Realism – Consist of magical elements, Latin American literary boom of 20 th
century.

36. Postcolonialism – Loosely connected movements of writers of colonies of European

countries.

37. Prakalpana Movement* - Chetanavyasism philosophy, Indian writers in Bengali

literature

38. Spiralism – Level of relations and historical connections.

39. Spoken Word – Monologue, speaking voice to present fictions.

40. New Formalism – American poetry advocating a return to traditional accentual-syllabic

verse.

Types of Characters:-

1)Protagonist and Antagonist:- A story needs a central character, or hero, or protagonist.

Often this main character must oppose a villain or antagonist. Both are major characters in
the story. The fiction writer must spend a great deal of time developing these types of
characters by using the techniques of characters description, action by the character, and
dialogue.

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 2)Major and Minor Characters:- Stories include major characters, such as the protagonist
and antagonist. Stories often include minor characters. These are characters who the fiction
writer defines by a single idea or quality. These types of characters are necessary for the
story, but they are not important. These are secondary characters to the story.

3) Flat and Round Characters:- A character can also be identified in terms of flat or round
characters. A flat character is a minor character in the story. This type of character doesn’t
change as the story progresses.
Round characters, on the other hand, must deal with conflict in the story and are change by
it. The writer develops these types of characters by using character descriptions and
dialogue. Round characters are all the major characters of the story, including the hero and
villain.

4) Static and Dynamic Characters:- Another way of defining a character is in terms of “static
character” or “dynamic character.” A static character is a minor character in the story and
plays a supporting role to the main character. Static characters don’t change as the story
progresses. The fiction writer spends little time developing static characters.
In contrast, a dynamic character is a round character. This type of character grows and
develops as the story advances. The fiction writer spends a great deal of time developing
these types of characters. They are believable and can be memorable.

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HUMORISM

Even though humorism theory had several models that used 2, 3 and 5 components, the
most famous model consists of the four humors described by Hippocrates and then
developed further by Galen. The four humors of Hippocratic medicine are black bile (Greek:
μέλαινα χολή, melaina chole), yellow bile (Greek: ξανθη χολή, xanthe chole), phlegm
(Greek: φλέγμα, phlegma), and blood (Greek: αἷμα, haima). Each corresponds to one of the
traditional four temperaments. Based on Hippocratic medicine, it was believed that the four
humors were to be in balanced proportions with regard to amount and strength of each
humor for a body to be healthy. The proper blending and balance of the four humors was
known as ‘eukrasia’. Imbalance and separation of humors leads to diseases.

Galen recalls the correspondence between humors and seasons in his On the Doctrines of
Hippocrates and Plato, and says that, “As for ages and the seasons, the child (παῖς)
corresponds to spring, the young man (νεανίσκος) to summer, the mature man
(παρακµάζων) to autumn, and the old man (γέρων) to winter”. Galen also believed that the
characteristics of the soul follow the mixtures of the body but he does not apply this idea to
the hippocratic humours. He believed that the phlegm did not influence character. Here is
what he says in his On Hippocrates’ The Nature of Man: “Sharpness and intelligence (ὀξὺ
καὶ συνετόν) are caused by yellow bile in the soul, perseverance and consistency (ἑδραῖον

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 καὶ βέβαιον) by the melancholic humour, and simplicity and naivety (ἁπλοῦν καὶ
ἠλιθιώτερον) by blood. But the nature of phlegm has no effect on the character of the soul
(τοῦ δὲ φλέγµατος ἡ φύσις εἰς µὲν ἠθοποιῗαν ἄχρηστος).” He further said that blood is a
mixture of four elements: water, air, fire, earth.

These terms only partly correspond to the modern medical terminology, in which there is
no distinction between black and yellow bile and phlegm has a very different meaning. It
was believed that these were the basic substances from which all liquids in the body were
made. Robin Fåhræus (1921), a Swedish physician who devised the erythrocyte
sedimentation rate, suggested that the four humours were based upon the observation of
blood clotting in a transparent container. When blood is drawn in a glass container and left
undisturbed for about an hour, four different layers can be seen. A dark clot forms at the
bottom (the “black bile”). Above the clot is a layer of red blood cells (the “blood”). Above
this is a whitish layer of white blood cells (the “phlegm”). The top layer is clear yellow serum
(the “yellow bile”).

Many Greek texts were written during the golden age of the theory of the four humors in
Greek medicine after Galen. One of those texts was an anonymous treatise called On the
Constitution of the Universe and of Man, published in the mid-nineteenth century by J.L.
Ideler. In this text the author establishes the relationship between elements of the universe
(air, water, earth, fire) and elements of the man (blood, yellow bile, black bile, phlegm).

He said that:

The people who have red blood are friendly, they joke and laugh around about their bodies
and for their appearance they are rose tinted, slightly red, and have pretty skin.

The people who have yellow bile are bitter, short tempered, daring. They appear greenish
and have yellow skin.

The people who are composed of black bile are lazy, fearful, and sickly. They have black hair
and black eyes.

Those who have phlegm are low spirited, forgetful, and have white hair.

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Bacon’s essay “Of Studies” shows his abilities of persuasion. He creates a metaphor between
literature and medicine, stating that as medicine can cure the problems of the body, literature
can heal the defects of the mind. The essay has a clear structure, and it groups elements in
groups of three. Indeed, Bacon exposes his opinion, but with structure and a formal
philosophical language make it appear as the truth in order to convince the audience of what
he is saying. Studying different genres helps to cure different defects of the mind.

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Charlotte, Emily and Anne Brontë were sisters and writers whose novels have become classics.

Charlotte was born on 21 April 1816, Emily on 30 July 1818 and Anne on 17 January 1820 all in
Thornton, Yorkshire. They had two sisters, both of whom died in childhood and a brother,
Branwell. Their father, Patrick, was an Anglican clergyman who was appointed as the rector of
the village of Haworth, on the Yorkshire moors. After the death of their mother in 1821, their
Aunt Elizabeth came to look after the family.

All three sisters attended different schools at various times as well as being taught at home. The
Brontë children were often left alone together in their isolated home and all began to write
stories at an early age.

All three sisters were employed at various times as teachers and governesses. In 1842,
Charlotte and Emily went to Brussels to improve their French, but had to return home early
after the death of their aunt Elizabeth. Charlotte returned to Brussels an English teacher in
1843-1844. By 1845, the family were back together at Haworth. By this stage, Branwell was
addicted to drink and drugs.

In May 1846, the sisters published at their own expense a volume of poetry. This was the first
use of their pseudonyms Currer (Charlotte), Ellis (Emily) and Acton (Anne) Bell. They all went on
to publish novels, with differing levels of success.

Anne’s ‘Agnes Grey’ and Charlotte’s ‘Jane Eyre’ were published in 1847. ‘Jane Eyre’ was one of
the year’s best sellers. Anne’s second novel, ‘The Tenant of Wildfell Hall’ and Emily’s
‘Wuthering Heights’ were both published in 1848. ‘The Tenant’ sold well, but ‘Wuthering
Heights’ did not.

Branwell died of tuberculosis in September 1848. Emily died of the same disease on 19
December 1848 and Anne on 28 May 1849.

Left alone with her father, Charlotte continued to write. She was by now a well-known author
and visited London a number of times. ‘Shirley’ was published in 1849 and ‘Villette’ in 1853. In
1854, Charlotte married her father’s curate, Arthur Nicholls. She died of tuberculosis on 31
March 1855.

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Gower’s three major works are in French, English, and Latin, and he also wrote a series of
French balades intended for the English court. The Speculum meditantis, or Mirour de
l’omme, in French, is composed of 12-line stanzas and opens impressively with a description of
the devil’s marriage to the seven daughters of sin; continuing with the marriage of reason and
the seven virtues, it ends with a searing examination of the sins of English society just before

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the Peasants’ Revolt of 1381: the denunciatory tone is relieved at the very end by a long hymn
to the Virgin.

Gower’s major Latin poem, the Vox clamantis, owes much to Ovid; it is essentially a homily,
being in part a criticism of the three estates of society, in part a mirror for a prince, in elegiac
form. The poet’s political doctrines are traditional, but he uses the Latin language with fluency
and elegance.

Gower’s English poems include In Praise of Peace, in which he pleads urgently with the king to
avoid the horrors of war, but his greatest English work is the Confessio amantis, essentially a
collection of exemplary tales of love, whereby Venus’ priest, Genius, instructs the poet, Amans,
in the art of both courtly and Christian love. The stories are chiefly adapted from classical and
medieval sources and are told with a tenderness and the restrained narrative art
that constitute Gower’s main appeal today.

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New Atlantis is an incomplete utopian novel by Sir Francis Bacon, published posthumously in
1626. It appeared unheralded and tucked into the back of a longer work of natural history,
Sylva sylvarum (forest of materials). In New Atlantis, Bacon portrayed a vision of the future of
human discovery and knowledge, expressing his aspirations and ideals for humankind. The
novel depicts the creation of a utopian land where “generosity and enlightenment, dignity and
splendour, piety and public spirit” are the commonly held qualities of the inhabitants of the
mythical Bensalem. The plan and organisation of his ideal college, Salomon’s House (or
Solomon’s House), envisioned the modern research university in both applied and pure
sciences.

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Francis Bacon’s philosophy is displayed in the vast and varied writings he left, which might be
divided into three great branches:

Scientific works – in which his ideas for a universal reform of knowledge into scientific
methodology and the improvement of mankind’s state using the Scientific method are
presented.

Religious and literary works – in which he presents his moral philosophy and theological
meditations.

Juridical works – in which his reforms in English Law are proposed.

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The Blind Assassin is a novel by the Canadian writer Margaret Atwood. It was first published
by McClelland and Stewart in 2000. Set in Canada, it is narrated from the present day, referring
to previous events that span the twentieth century.

The novel's protagonist – Iris Chase

The book includes a novel within a novel, a roman à clef attributed to Laura but published by
Iris. It is about Alex Thomas, a politically radical author of pulp science fiction who has an
ambiguous relationship with the sisters. That embedded story itself contains a third tale, the
eponymous Blind Assassin, a science fiction story.

Six elements of Romantic Literature.

Element 1

Belief in the individual and common man.

Element 2

Love of (reverence for) nature.

Element 3

Interest in the bizarre, supernatural and gothic.

Element 4

Interest in the past.

Element 5

Looks at the world with more than reasonable optimism (rose-colored glasses).

Element 6

Faith in inner experience and the power of the imagination.

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The Tatler was a British literary and society journal begun by Richard Steele in 1709 and
published for two years. It represented a new approach to journalism, featuring cultivated
essays on contemporary manners, and established the pattern that would be copied in such
British classics as Addison and Steele’s Spectator, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler and Idler,
and Goldsmith’s Citizen of the World. The Tatler would also influence essayists as late
as Charles Lamb and William Hazlitt. Addison and Steele liquidated The Tatler in order to make
a fresh start with the similar Spectator, and the collected issues of Tatler are usually published
in the same volume as the collected Spectator.

The Spectator was a daily publication founded by Joseph Addison and Richard Steele in England,
lasting from 1711 to 1712. Each “paper”, or “number”, was approximately 2,500 words long,
and the original run consisted of 555 numbers, beginning on 1 March 1711. These were
collected into seven volumes. The paper was revived without the involvement of Steele in 1714,
appearing thrice weekly for six months, and these papers when collected formed the eighth
volume. Eustace Budgell, a cousin of Addison’s, and the poet John Hughes also contributed to
the publication.

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The Blue Stockings Society was an informal women’s social and educational movement in
England in the mid-18th century, emphasizing education and mutual cooperation. It was
founded in the early 1750s by Elizabeth Montagu, Elizabeth Vesey and others as a literary
discussion group, a step away from traditional, non-intellectual women’s activities. Both men
and women were invited to attend, including the botanist, translator and publisher Benjamin
Stillingfleet, who was not rich enough to dress properly for the occasion and appeared in
everyday blue worsted stockings. The term came to refer to the informal quality of the
gatherings and the emphasis on conversation over fashion.

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Nineteen Eighty-Four: A Novel, often published as 1984, is a dystopian social science

fiction novel by English novelist George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker &
Warburg as Orwell’s ninth and final book completed in his lifetime. Thematically, Nineteen
Eighty-Four centres on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and repressive
regimentation of persons and behaviours within society. Orwell, himself a democratic socialist,
modelled the authoritarian government in the novel after Stalinist Russia. More broadly, the
novel examines the role of truth and facts within politics and the ways in which they are
manipulated.

The story takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world has fallen
victim to perpetual war, omnipresent government surveillance, historical negationism,
and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One, has become a province of a

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totalitarian superstate named Oceania that is ruled by the Party who employ the Thought
Police to persecute individuality and independent thinking. Big Brother, the leader of the Party,
enjoys an intense cult of personality despite the fact that he may not even exist. The
protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker and Outer Party
member who secretly hates the Party and dreams of rebellion. He enters into a forbidden
relationship with a colleague, Julia, and starts to remember what life was like before the Party
came to power.

Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It
also popularised the term “Orwellian” as an adjective, with many terms used in the novel
entering common usage, including “Big Brother”, “doublethink”, “thoughtcrime”, “Newspeak”,
“memory hole”, “2 + 2 = 5”, “proles”, “Two Minutes Hate”, “telescreen”, and “Room
101”. Time included it on its 100 best English-language novels from 1923 to 2005. It was placed
on the Modern Library’s 100 Best Novels, reaching No. 13 on the editors’ list and No. 6 on the
readers' list. In 2003, the novel was listed at No. 8 on The Big Read survey by the BBC. Parallels
have been drawn between the novel’s subject matter and real life instances
of totalitarianism, mass surveillance, and violations of freedom of expression among other
themes.

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The Way of the World, comedy of manners in five acts by William Congreve, performed and
published in 1700. The play, which is considered Congreve’s masterpiece, ridicules the
assumptions that governed the society of his time, especially those concerning love and
marriage. The plot concerns the efforts of the lovers Millamant and Mirabell to obtain the
permission of Millamant’s aunt for their marriage. Despite a scheme that goes awry and after
several misunderstandings and other complications are cleared up, the two finally obtain
her consent.

Orwell's main message in Animal Farm is that power corrupts, even when idealism is at play.
The events of the story are an allegory for the Russian Revolution of 1917, where the bolsheviks
overthrew the tsar in order to establish a communist regime. While the ideals of this new order
were meant to foster equality for the oppressed masses, instead the Soviet Union became a
totalitarian state in which propaganda was commonplace, so-called enemies of the state
punished brutally, and only a privileged few were allowed comfort and power.

Orwell's story shows in detail how ideals can become corrupted by power. At first, the animals
believe they are all living equally, but when the pigs become more power-hungry and create
excuses for giving themselves special privileges, a new hierarchy is created, in many ways
replicating the old one (note how the pigs come to resemble the humans they overthrew). The
novel allows Orwell to point out the dangers of such radical forms of ideology, the way a

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brainwashed populace can be willing to excuse the most horrific behavior from the state, and
the way in which tyrants hold onto their power through propaganda and crafty rhetoric.
Though he was specifically reacting to the Soviet Union, Orwell's warning can be applied to any
totalitarian state.

Gordimer’s novels of the 1990’s cover the years from the closing days of apartheid to the new
democracy in South Africa. In My Son’s Story the struggle for freedom is ongoing. Gordimer’s
recurrent theme of the balance between public and private life is again central. In this novel,
the private is sacrificed to the political. Sonny initially seems destined to live under the
restrictions of apartheid, but he changes and sacrifices his teaching career to align his life with,
and help, those he thinks of as the “real blacks.” Sonny moves his family illegally to a white
suburb of Johannesburg, one poor enough to ignore the settling of a family of mixed ancestry.

The movement claims first Sonny, then his daughter Baby, and finally his wife Aila. Will, the son
named for William Shakespeare, remains aloof from political involvement but chronicles the
struggle by narrating the disintegration of his family. Before detention and exile claim the three
family members and a bomb destroys their home, the family is already disintegrating from
Sonny’s liaison with Hannah Plowman, a white human rights worker who visited Sonny the first
time he was jailed.

Although Gordimer has used such narrators in her short stories, this is her first novel narrated
by a young male character from one of the disenfranchised groups in South Africa. The novel
fluctuates between the firstperson narration by Will and a seemingly third-person account of
information the young Will could not possibly know, such as Sonny’s thoughts and the details of
his intimacy with Hannah. The last chapter of the novel unites the dual point of view, with Will
claiming authorship of the whole. He has created—out of his own frustration, experience, and
knowledge of the participants— the scenes and thoughts he could not know firsthand. Thrust
by the times and by his family into the role of a writer, Will plans to hone his writing skills by
chronicling the struggle for freedom in South Africa.

Baroque literature is a 17th century prose genre that has several distinctive characteristics when
compared to literary styles of earlier centuries. The baroque era is known for the use of
dramatic elements in all art forms, and works of baroque literature are generally no exception.

The Baroque style is characterized by exaggerated motion and clear detail used to produce
drama, exuberance, and grandeur in sculpture, painting, architecture, literature, dance, and
music. Baroque iconography was direct, obvious, and dramatic, intending to appeal above all to
the senses and the emotions.

Baroque came to English from a French word meaning “irregularly shaped.” At first, the word in
French was used mostly to refer to pearls. Eventually, it came to describe an extravagant style
of art characterized by curving lines, gilt, and gold.

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The Bloomsbury Group—or Bloomsbury Set—was a group of associated English writers,
intellectuals, philosophers and artists in the first half of the 20th century, including Virginia
Woolf, John Maynard Keynes, E. M. Forster and Lytton Strachey. This loose collective of friends
and relatives was closely associated with the University of Cambridge for the men and King’s
College London for the women, and they lived, worked or studied together near Bloomsbury,
London. According to Ian Ousby, “although its members denied being a group in any formal
sense, they were united by an abiding belief in the importance of the arts.” Their works and
outlook deeply influenced literature, aesthetics, criticism, and economics as well as modern
attitudes towards feminism, pacifism, and sexuality. A well-known quote, attributed to Dorothy
Parker, is “they lived in squares, painted in circles and loved in triangles”.

*The Beat Generation* was a literary movement started by a group of authors whose work
explored and influenced American culture and politics in the post-war era. The bulk of their
work was published and popularized throughout the 1950s. The central elements of Beat
culture are the rejection of standard narrative values, making a spiritual quest, the exploration
of American and Eastern religions, the rejection of economic materialism, explicit portrayals of
the human condition, experimentation with psychedelic drugs, and sexual liberation and
exploration.[1][2]

Allen Ginsberg’s Howl (1956), William S. Burroughs’ Naked Lunch (1959), and Jack Kerouac’s On
the Road (1957) are among the best known examples of Beat literature.[3] Both Howl and
Naked Lunch were the focus of obscenity trials that ultimately helped to liberalize publishing in
the United States.[4][5] The members of the Beat Generation developed a reputation as new
bohemian hedonists, who celebrated non-conformity and spontaneous creativity.

The core group of Beat Generation authors — Herbert Huncke, Ginsberg, Burroughs, Lucien
Carr, and Kerouac — met in 1944 in and around the Columbia University campus in New York
City. Later, in the mid-1950s, the central figures, with the exception of Burroughs and Carr,
ended up together in San Francisco, where they met and became friends of figures associated
with the San Francisco Renaissance.

In the 1960s, elements of the expanding Beat movement were incorporated into the hippie
and larger counterculture movements. Neal Cassady, as the driver for Ken Kesey’s bus Furthur,
was the primary bridge between these two generations. Ginsberg’s work also became an
integral element of early 1960s hippie culture.

The Hobbit, or There and Back Again is a children’s fantasy novel by English author J. R. R.
Tolkien. It was published on 21 September 1937 to wide critical acclaim, being nominated for
the Carnegie Medal and awarded a prize from the New York Herald Tribune for best juvenile
fiction. The book remains popular and is recognized as a classic in children’s literature.

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John Fowles. It
was his third published novel, after The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1965). The novel

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explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist Charles Smithson and
Sarah Woodruff, the former governess and independent woman with whom he falls in love.

The heroic couplet was first used by Chaucer,who probably derived it from older french verse.

The Terza Rima is a tercet where the first and third lines rhyme , and the middle with the first
and third line line of the succeeding tercet .

Spenser used a nine line stanza which has borne his name ever since.
Melodrama came into prominence in the eighteenth century and was amazingly popular.

Jonathan swift was a satirist of a leSs urbane order. A pamphleteer rather than an essayist . The
next in succession Dr. Johnson .

The death -rebirth theme is considered to be the archetype of archetypes to be found in

primitive rituals.
Grand style has become associated with Matthew Arnold.

*The theory of Forms* or *theory of Ideas*

Is a philosophical theory, concept, attributed to Plato, that *the physical world is not as real or
true* as timeless, absolute, unchangeable ideas.

According to this theory, *ideas* in this sense, often capitalized and translated as “Ideas” or
“Forms”, are the *non-physical essences of all things*, of which objects and matter in the
physical world are merely imitations.

It is these ideal forms that gives shape to our physical world. And the physical world is merely a
shadow or copy of the absolute forms found in the ‘spiritual realm’.(Idea in the mind)

Spiritual realm= Ideas

So because of spiritual realm the physical world has Meaning.

Without the actual idea the physical world losses its meaning.

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