Pishkarbasicsummaryof Englishnliterature

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Basic summary of English and American literature
Book · May 2013
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Content
Page
Literary Terms
Literary History
1. Middle Age (-1485)
2. The Sixteen century (1485-1603)
a. Renaissance (1500-1600)
b. Elizabethan (1558-1603)
1. Sir Thomas Wyatt (1503-42)
2. Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)
3. Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)
4. Christopher Marlow (1564-93)
5. William Shalespeare (1564-1616)
6. Sir Thomas More (1474-1535)
3. Seventeen Century (1603-1660)
a. Jacobean Age (1603-25)
b. Caroline Age (1625-1649)
c. Common Wealth (1649-60)
1. John Donne (1572-1631)
2. Ben Jonson (1572-1637)
3. John Milton (1608-74)
۴. Neocalssical Age (1660-1898)
a. Restpration Age (1660-1700)
b. AugustanAge (1700-45)
c. Age of Sensibility (1745-98)
1. John Dryden (1631-1700)
2. John Bunyan (1628-88)
3. William Congreve (1670-1729)
4. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
5. Johnathan Swift (1667-1745)
‫ﻣﻘﺪﻣﮫ‬
‫ﺑﺎ ﻟﻄﻒ ﺣﻀﺮات ﺣﻖ و در ﭘﻨﺎه ﺣﻀﺮت وﻟﯽﻋﺼﺮ ﺑﺎر دﯾﮕﺮ اﯾﻦ ﻓﺮﺻﺖ‬
‫ﺑﮫدﺳﺖ آﻣﺪ ﮐﮫ ﺟﮭﺖ اراﯾﮫ و آﻣـﺎدهﺳـﺎزی ﻣﻨـﺎﺑﻊ درﺳـﯽ دوره‬
‫ﮐﺎرﺷﻨﺎﺳﯽ ارﺷﺪ زﺑﺎن و ادﺑﯿﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺗﻼﺷﯽ ﺻﻮرت ﮔﺮﻓﺘﮫ راه‬
‫و ﻣﺴﯿﺮی ﻧﻮﯾﻦ و روﺷﻦ ﭘﯿﺶ روی داﻧﺸﺠﻮﯾﺎن ﮔﺮانﻗﺪر اﯾﻦ رﺷﺘﮫ‬
‫ھﻤﻮار ﮔﺮدد‪ .‬اﻣﺘﯿﺎز ﻋﻤﺪه اﯾﻦ ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﮔﺮدآوری ﺷﺪه در اﯾـﻦ‬
‫ﻣﯽﺑﺎﺷﺪ ﮐﮫ ﻣﺆﻟﻒ ﭘـﺲ از ﭘﺎﺳـﺦﮔـﻮﯾﯽ ﺑـﮫ ﺑـﯿﺶ از ‪ ٣۵٠٠‬ﺗﺴـﺖ‬
‫داﻧﺸﮕﺎهھﺎی آزاد و ﺳﺮاﺳﺮی ﮐﮫ در ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﺗﺴﺖھﺎی ﮐﺎرﺷﻨﺎﺳـﯽ‬
‫ارﺷﺪ زﺑﺎن و ادﺑﯿﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴـﯽ ﺗﻮﺳـﻂ ﻋﺰﯾـﺰان ﮔـﺮانﻗـﺪر در‬
‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات ﭘﺮدازش ﺑﮫ ﭼﺎپ رﺳﯿﺪه اﺳﺖ ﮐﻠﯿـﮫ ﻣﻨـﺎﺑﻊ و ﻣﻄﺎﻟـﺐ‬
‫ﺑﮫﮐﺎر ﮔﺮﻓﺘﮫ ﺷﺪه ﺑﺮای ﻃﺮاﺣﯽ ﺳﺆاﻻت را ﺟﻤـﻊآوری و ﺑﻌـﺪ از‬
‫ﺗﺠﺮﺑﮫ ﻗﺒﻠﯽ ﮐﮫ از ﭼﺎپ ﮐﺘﺎب آﻣﺎدﮔﯽ ﮐﺎرﺷﻨﺎﺳﯽ ارﺷﺪ زﺑـﺎن و‬
‫ادﺑﯿﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺗﻮﺳﻂ اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات رھﻨﻤﺎ داﺷﺖ آﻧﮭﺎ را در ﮐﻨﺎر‬
‫ﯾﮑﺪﯾﮕﺮ در ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫای ﮐﺎﻣﻞ ﮔﺮدآوری ﻧﻤﺎﯾﺪ‪ .‬اﻣﺘﯿﺎز اﺻﻠﯽ دﯾﮕﺮ‬
‫در اﯾﻦ ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ در اﯾﻦ اﺳﺖ ﮐﮫ ﺟﻮابھﺎی ﮐﻠﯿﮫ ﺗﺴﺖھﺎی ﺑﮫﮐـﺎر‬
‫ﺑﺮده ﺷﺪه در ﺑﯿﺶ از ‪ ١۵‬ﺳﺎل آزﻣﻮنھﺎی ﺗﺤﺼﯿﻼت ﺗﮑﻤﯿﻠﯽ ھﻤﮕـﯽ‬
‫در اﯾﻦ ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﺑﮫ ﻋﻨﻮان دروس و ﻣﻄﺎﻟﺐ اﺻﻠﯽ و ﮐﻠﯿﺪی اراﯾﮫ‬
‫ﺷﺪه ﺗﺎ در ﮐﻨﺎر ﻣﻄﺎﻟﺒﯽ ﮐﮫ ﻣﯽﺑﺎﯾﺴﺖ ﻣﻮرد ﻣﻄﺎﻟﻌﮫ ﻗﺮار ﺑﮕﯿﺮد‬
‫اﯾﻦ ﻧﮑﺎت ﻇﺮﯾﻒ ﻧﯿﺰ ﻣﻮرد ﺗﻮﺟﮫ ﻗﺮار ﮔﯿﺮد‪.‬‬
‫ﺑﮫ داﻧﺸﺠﻮﯾﺎن ﮔﺮاﻣﯽ ﺗﻮﺻﯿﮫ ﻣﯽﺷﻮد ﻗﺒﻞ از ھﺮ ﻣﻄﺎﻟﻌﮫای اﯾـﻦ‬
‫ﺧﻼﺻﮫ ﻣﺒﺎﺣﺚ را ﮐﮫ ﺑﺮاﺳﺎس ﺳﺆاﻻت ﺳﺎلھﺎی ﮔﺬﺷﺘﮫ ﻣﯽﺑﺎﺷﺪ ﺑﮫﻃﻮر‬
‫ﮐﺎﻣﻞ ﻣﻄﺎﻟﻌﮫ ﮐﺮده ‪ ،‬ﺳﭙﺲ ﺗﺴﺖھﺎی اراﯾﮫ ﺷﺪه در ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﺳﺆاﻻت‬
‫ﮐﺎرﺷﻨﺎﺳﯽ ارﺷﺪ ادﺑﯿﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ را ﻧﯿﺰ ﮐـﮫ ﭼـﺎپ اﻧﺘﺸـﺎرات‬
‫ﭘﺮدازش ﺑﻮده و ﻣﻄﺎﻟﺐ اراﯾﮫ ﺷﺪه در ﺟﻮابھﺎی ﺗﺸﺮﯾﺤﯽ آن ﻧﯿﺰ‬
‫ﺑﮫ ﻧﻮﺑﮫ ﺧﻮد ﺧﻼﺻﮫ ﻣﺒﺎﺣﺜﯽ ﮐﺎﻣﻞ ﻣﯽﺑﺎﺷﺪ را ﻣﻄﺎﻟﻌﮫ ﻧﻤﺎﯾﻨﺪ‪.‬‬
‫ﻓﺼﻞ اول اﯾﻦ ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ اراﯾﮫ ﮐﻨﻨﺪه ﻣﮭﻢﺗﺮﯾﻦ ﻋﻨﺎﺻﺮ ادﺑﯽ ﻣﺸﺘﺮک‬
‫ﮐﻠﯿﮫ دروس ﻣﯽ ﺑﺎﺷﺪ‪ .‬ﻓﺼﻞ دوم ﺑﺎ اراﯾﮫ ﺧﻼﺻﮫ ھﺮ دوره ادﺑﯽ‪،‬‬
‫ﻣﮭﻢ ﺗﺮﯾﻦ ﻧﻮﯾﺴﻨﺪﮔﺎن‪ ،‬آﺛـﺎر‪ ،‬ﺷـﺎھﮑﺎرھﺎی ادﺑـﯽ ھـﺮ دوره را‬
‫ﺑﮫﻃﻮر ﮐﺎﻣﻞ ﺑﯿﺎن ﻧﻤﻮده اﺳﺖ‪ .‬ﻓﺼﻞ ﺳﻮم اﻧﻮاع روﯾﮑﺮدھﺎی ﻧﻘﺪ‬
‫ادﺑﯽ‪ ،‬ﻣﮭﻢﺗﺮﯾﻦ ﻣﻨﺘﻘﺪﯾﻦ ﺻﺎﺣﺐ ﻧﻈﺮ و دﯾﺪﮔﺎهھﺎی ﻣﺨﺘﻠـﻒ ﻧﻘـﺪ‬
‫ادﺑﯽ را ﺑﮫﻃﻮر ﮐﺎﻣﻞ اراﯾﮫ ﻧﻤﻮده اﺳﺖ‪.‬‬
‫ﻓﺼﻞ ﭼﮭﺎرم و ﭘﻨﺠﻢ اراﯾـﮫ ﮐﻨﻨـﺪه ﺧﻼﺻـﮫ و ﻧﻘـﺪی ﮐﻮﺗـﺎه از‬
‫ﻧﻤﺎﯾﺸﻨﺎﻣﮫھﺎ و رﻣﺎنھﺎی ﻣﻌﺮوف و ﺑﺮﺟﺴﺘﮫ آﻣﺮﯾﮑﺎ و اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ‪،‬‬
‫ھﻤﺮاه ﺑﺎ اراﯾﮫ اﺳﺎﺳﯽ ﺷﺨﺼﯿﺖھﺎی ھﺮ اﺛﺮ و در ﺑﺮﺧـﯽ ﻣـﻮارد‬
‫ھﻤﺮاه ﺑﺎ دﯾﮕﺮ آﺛﺎر ﻧﻮﯾﺴﻨﺪه اﺛﺮ ادﺑﯽ ﻣﯽﺑﺎﺷﺪ ﮐﮫ در اﺑﺘﺪای‬
‫ھﺮ ﻓﺼﻞ ﻋﻨﺎﺻﺮ ادﺑﯽ ﻣﺮﺗﺒﻂ ﺑﺎ آن ﻧﯿﺰ ﺑـﮫﻃـﻮر ﮐﺎﻣـﻞ اراﯾـﮫ‬
‫ﮔﺮدﯾﺪه اﺳﺖ‪.‬‬
‫در ﻓﺼﻞ ﺷﺸﻢ ﻋﻨﺎﺻﺮ ﻣﮑﺘﺐھﺎی ادﺑﯽ‪ ،‬اﻋﻤﺎلﮐﻨﻨﺬﮔﺎن اﯾﻦ ﻋﻨﺎﺻـﺮ‬
‫در آﺛﺎر ﺑﺮﺟﺴﺘﮫ آن ﻣﮑﺘﺐ ﺑﮫﻃﻮر ﮐﺎﻣﻞ ﺑﯿﺎن ﮔﺮدﯾﺪه اﺳـﺖ‪ .‬در‬
‫ﻓﺼﻞ ھﻔﺘﻢ اﻧﻮاع ﺷﻌ ﺮ و ﻋﻨﺎﺻﺮ آن و در ﺑﺮﺧﯽ ﻣﻮارد ﻣﺜﺎلھﺎﯾﯽ‬
‫ﻣﻌﺮوف و ﺷﻨﺎﺧﺘﮫ ﺷﺪه ﺑﺮای ھﺮ ﮐﺪام ﺑﺮای آﺷﻨﺎﯾﯽ ﺑﯿﺸﺘﺮ اراﯾﮫ‬
‫ﺷﺪه اﺳﺖ‪.‬‬
‫ﻓﺼﻞ ھﺸﺘﻢ ﻓﮭﺮﺳﺘﯽ از ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ اﺳﺎﻣﯽ اﺳﻄﻮرهای ﻣﮭﻤﯽ ﻣﯽﺑﺎﺷﺪ ﮐﮫ‬
‫داﻧﺸﺠﻮﯾﺎن ﮔﺮاﻣﯽ ﻣﯽﺑﺎﯾﺴﺖ در ﮐﻠﯿﮫ ﻣﻄﺎﻟﺒﺎت ادﺑﯽ ﺑﺮای درک و‬
‫ﺗﻔﺴﯿﺮ ﺑﮫ آﻧﮭﺎ رﺟﻮع ﻧﻤﺎﯾﻨﺪ ﺑﻨﺎﺑﺮاﯾﻦ ﺗﻼش ﮔﺮدﯾﺪه ﻣﮭﻢﺗـﺮﯾﻦ‬
‫اﺳﺎﻣﯽ ﺑﺎ دﻗﺖ ﺗﻤﺎم و ﺑﺎ ﺗﻮﺟﮫ ﺑﮫ ﻣﻮارد ﺗﮑﺮار آﻧﮭﺎ ﺟﻤﻊآوری‬
‫و اراﯾﮫ ﺷﻮد‪ .‬ھﻤﭽﻨﯿﻦ ﺗﺴﺖھﺎی اراﯾـﮫ ﺷـﺪه در ﻓﺼـﻞ ﻧﮭـﻢ در‬
‫ﺑﺮﮔﯿﺮﻧﺪه ﮐﻠﯿﮫ ﻣﻄﺎﻟﺐ ﻣﻮﺟﻮد در درسھﺎی ﻧﻘـﺪ ادﺑـﯽ ‪ ١‬و ‪ ٢‬و‬
‫ھﻤﭽﻨﯿﻦ ﺗﺎرﯾﺦ ادﺑﯿﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺲ ﻣﯽﺑﺎﺷﺪ ﮐﮫ ﻣﯽﺗﻮاﻧﺪ ﮐﻤﮏ ﺑﺴﯿﺎر‬
‫ﻣﻔﯿﺪی ﺟﮭﺖ ﺧﻮدآزﻣ ﺎﯾﯽ داﻧﺸﺠﻮﯾﺎن ﮔﺮاﻣﯽ ﺑﻌﺪ از ﻣﻄﺎﻟﻌﮫ ﮐﺎﻣﻞ‬
‫اﯾﻦ ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﺑﺎﺷﺪ‪.‬‬
‫ﮐﻠﯿﮫ ﻣﻨﺎﺑﻊ ﻣﻮرد اﺳﺘﻔﺎده در اﻧﺘﮭﺎی ﮐﺘﺎب اراﯾﮫ ﺷﺪه ﺗﺎ در‬
‫ﺻﻮرﺗﯽ ﮐﮫ داﻧﺸﺠﻮﯾﺎن ﮔﺮان ﻗﺪر ﻣﺎﯾﻞ ﺑﮫ ﻣﻄﺎﻟﻌﮫ ﮐﺎﻣـﻞ ﻣﻨـﺎﺑﻊ‬
‫ﺑﺎﺷﻨﺪ ﺑﺘﻮاﻧﻨﺪ از آﻧﮭﺎ اﺳﺘﻔﺎده ﻧﻤﺎﯾﻨﺪ‪ .‬در ﮔـﺮدآوری اﯾـﻦ‬
‫ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﮐﮫ در ﻣﮑﺎن و زﻣﺎﻧﯽ اﻧﺠﺎم ﺷﺪه ﮐـﮫ ﺑـﮫ ﻋﻠـﺖ ﻧﺒـﻮد‬
‫ﻣﻨﺎﺑﻊ‪ ،‬دوری از ﻣﺮﮐﺰ‪ ,‬ﻋﺪم ھﻤﮑـﺎری و ﻧـﺎﺗﻮاﻧﯽ ﺑﺴـﯿﺎری از‬
‫ھﻤﮑﺎران در ﯾﺎری رﺳﺎﻧﺪن ﺟﮭﺖ ﺗﮑﻤﯿﻞ اﯾﻦ ﮐﺘﺎب‪ ،‬ھﻤﮑﺎراﻧﯽ ﮐﮫ‬
‫ﻻزم ﺑﮫ ﻗﺪرداﻧﯽ ﻣﯽ ﺑﺎﺷﻨﺪ ﻧﯿﺰ ﺑﺎ اراﯾﮫ ﻣﻨﺎﺑﻊ و ﮐﺘﺐ ارزﺷﻤﻨﺪ‬
‫و ﮔﺮاﻧﺒﮭﺎی ﺧﻮد ﺳﮭﻢ ارزﺷﻤﻨﺪی در ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﺑﺮای ﺧـﻮد اﯾﺠـﺎد‬
‫ﻧﻤﻮدهاﻧﺪ‪ .‬ھﻤﭽﻨـﯿﻦ ﻻزم اﺳـﺖ از ﮐﻠﯿـﮫ ھﻤﮑـﺎران اﻧﺘﺸـﺎرات‬
‫ﭘﺮدازش ﮐﮫ درﺣﻘﯿﻘﺖ آﻧﮭﺎ ﺑﺎ ﺗﻼش ﺧﻮد اﯾﻦ ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ را ﺑﮫ ﺛﻤﺮ‬
‫رﺳﺎﻧﺪهاﻧﺪ ﻗﺪرداﻧﯽ و ﺗﺸﮑﺮ ﻧﻤﺎﯾﻢ‪.‬‬
‫ﮐﯿﺎن ﭘﯿﺸﮑﺎر‬
‫_‪Kian@yahoo.com Pishkar‬‬
‫‪Kian . Pishkar @ gmail.com‬‬
‫‪WWW. Kian pishkar. Blogfa.com‬‬
‫‪3‬‬
‫از ھﻤﯿﻦ ﻧﻮﯾﺴﻨﺪه‪:‬‬
‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات ﺳﯿﺐ ﺳﺮخ ‪1. Lion King‬‬

‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات ﺳﯿﺐ ﺳﺮخ ‪2. Guid To English literature‬‬
‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات رھﻨﻤﺎ‪ ،‬ﭼﺎپ دوم ‪3. Guid To English literature‬‬
‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات رھﻨﻤﺎ )‪4. The Preparation Course for M.A (E.L. L.‬‬
‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات رھﻨﻤﺎ ‪5. Oral Translation‬‬
‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات رھﻨﻤﺎ‪ ،‬ﭼﺎپ ﺷﺸﻢ ‪6. A Touch with English‬‬
‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات داﻧﺸﮕﺎه آزاد اﺳﻼﻣﯽ واﺣﺪ ﺟﯿﺮﻓﺖ ‪7. Love and Death in‬‬
‫‪Shakespeare's Major Plays‬‬
‫‪ .٨‬ﭘﺪران ﻏﺎﯾﺐ ﭘﺴﺮان ﮔﻢ ﺷﺪه‪ ،‬در ﺟﺴﺘﺠﻮی ھﻮﯾﺖ ﻣﺮداﻧﮕﯽ‬
‫‪ .٩‬ﺗﺮﺟﻤﮫ ﻓﻨﻮن و ﺻـﻨﺎﻋﺎت ادﺑـﯽ‪ ,‬اﻧﺘﺸـﺎرات داﻧﺸـﮕﺎه آزاد‬
‫اﺳﻼﻣﯽ واﺟﺪ ﺟﯿﺮﻓﺖ‬
‫‪ .١٠‬ﭘﺴﺖ ﻣﺪرﻧﯿﺴﻢ ﻓﺮ اﯾﻨﺪ ﺟﮭﺎﻧﯽ ﺷﺪن ادﺑﯿﺎت اﯾﺮان‬
‫‪ .١١‬دﯾﮑﺸﻨﺮی ﻓﺎرﺳﯽ ﺑﮫ اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ و اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ ﺑﮫ ﻓﺎرﺳﯽ ﮐﺸﺎورزی‬
‫)زراﻋﺖ‪ ،‬ﺑﺎﻏﺒﺎﻧﯽ‪ ،‬ﺗﻮﻟﯿﺪات(‬
‫‪ .١٢‬ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﺳﺆاﻻت ﮐﺎرﺷﻨﺎﺳﯽ ارﺷﺪ زﺑﺎن و ادﺑﯿـﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴـﯽ‬
‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات ﭘﺮدازش‬
‫‪ .١٣‬ﺧﻼﺻﮫ ﻣﺒﺎﺣـﺚ اﺳﺎﺳـﯽ ﮐﺎرﺷﻨﺎﺳـﯽ ارﺷـﺪ زﺑـﺎن و ادﺑﯿـﺎت‬
‫اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات ﭘﺮدازش‬
‫‪ .١۴‬راھﻨﻤﺎی ﻧﻘﺪ ﻋﻤﻠﯽ و ﺗﺤﻠﯿﻠﯽ ادﺑﯿـﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴـﯽ )زﺑـﺎن –‬
‫ﺷﻌﺮ – ﻧﻤﺎﯾﺸﻨﺎﻣﮫ( اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات داﻧﺸﮕﺎه آزاد اﺳﻼﻣﯽ واﺣﺪ ﺟﯿﺮﻓﺖ‬
‫‪ .١۵‬راھﻨﻤﺎی ﮐﺎﻣﻞ ادﺑﯿﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ »ﺑﺮﯾﻦ« )داﺳﺘﺎن ﮐﻮﺗـﺎه –‬
‫ﺷﻌﺮ – ﻧﻤﺎﯾﺸﻨﺎﻣﮫ( اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات رھﻨﻤﺎ‬
‫‪ .١۶‬ﻧﻘﺪ ﻋﻤﻠﯽ داﺳﺘﺎن ﮐﻮﺗﺎه اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات داﻧﺸﮕﺎه آزاد‬
‫اﺳﻼﻣﯽ واﺣﺪ ﺟﯿﺮﻓﺖ‬
‫‪ .١٧‬ﻧﻘﺪ ﻋﻤﻠﯽ ﻧﻤﺎﯾﺸﻨﺎﻣﮫھﺎی اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات داﻧﺸﮕﺎه آزاد‬
‫اﺳﻼﻣﯽ واﺣﺪ ﮐﮭﻨﻮج‬
‫‪ .١٨‬ﻧﻘﺪ ﻋﻤﻠﯽ ﺷﻌﺮھﺎی اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات داﻧﺸﮕﺎه آزاد اﺳﻼﻣﯽ‬
‫واﺣﺪ ﮐﮭﻨﻮج‬
‫‪ .١٩‬ﻣﺠﻤﻮﻋﮫ ﺳﺆاﻻت دﮐﺘﺮی ادﺑﯿﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات ﭘﺮدازش‬
‫‪ .٢٠‬زﺑﺎن ﺗﺨﺼﺼﯽ ﻓﻘﮫ و ﻣﺒﺎﻧﯽ ﺣﻘﻮق داﻧﺸﮕﺎه آزاد اﺳﻼﻣﯽ واﺣﺪ‬
‫ﺟﯿﺮﻓﺖ‬
CHAPTER 1
Literay Terms
Absurd, Literature (Theatre)

The philosophy of Existentialism tends to depict man as isolated in a purposeless universe
of space and time. The term is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction
which have in common the sense that the human condition is adequately absurd. Lacking
any essential motive or guiding principles or any inherent sense of trurh or meaning, man's
existence is characterized by anguished anxiety and absurdity. The plays project the
irrationalism, helplessness, and absurdity of life.
Major Practicioners
1. Alfred Jarry : Ubo roi
2. Franz Kafka : The Teail, Metamorphosis
3. J. P. Sartre :
4. A. Camus : The Myth of Sisyphus
5. E. lonesci : The Chairs, (1952), Rhinoceros (1960)
6. S, Becket (1906-89) : Waiting for Godot (1955), Malone Dies (1958), The
Unnamable (1960)
7. E. Albee : Who is Afraid of Virgina Woolf
8. J. Heller : Catch - 22 (1961)
Aestheticism
A European movement in arts, including literature, flourishing in the second half of 19th
century which stressed the paramount value and self-sufficiency of art. In opposition to the
dominance of scientific thinking and in defiance of widespread indifference or hostility of
the society of their time to any art that was not useful or did not teach moral values, French
writers developed the view that a work of art is the supreme value among human products,
because it is self sufficient. The end of a work is simply to existe in its formal perfection.
Art for Art Sake is the catch phrase of Aesthetism. The views of French Aesthetism were
introduced into Victorion England by W. Pater. Aesthetieism in poetry is closely
indentified with Pre-Raphaelit and show a tendency to withdrawl or oversion.
Major Proticioners:
1. Immanuel Kant
2. Th. Gautier
3. E.A.Poe : Poetic Principle (1850)
4. Flaubert
5. Mallarme
6. T.S.Eliot
‫ﺧﻼﺻﮫ ﻣﺒﺎﺣﺚ اﺳﺎﺳﯽ ﮐﺎرﺷﻨﺎﺳﯽ ارﺷﺪ زﺑﺎن و‬
‫ادﺑﯿﺎت اﻧﮕﻠﯿﺴﯽ‬
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7. O.Wilde
8. Aubrey
9. Beardsley
Affective Fallacy
The title of an essay by the contemporary American critics W.U.Wimsatt and M.C.
Beardsley, printed in Wimsatt's, The Verbal Icon (1954). They argue that judging a poem
by its effect or emotional impact on the readers is a fallacious method of criticism resulting
only in impressionistic criticism.
Alienation Effect
Brecht the German playwright noted that in dramatic peformances where actors indentified
with parts the spectators were liable to swept away by the illusion of reality created,
allowing their sympathies for the characters to be manipulated in a way that led only to
vague emotional satisfaction, excitement or confusion rather than critical judgment of play's
subject matter. His view was that both audience and actors should preserve a stale of
detachment from the play and its presentation in performance.
Allegory
The term derives from Greek allegorial "speeking otherwise". As a rule an allegory is a
story in very in verse or prose with a double meaning. It is closely related to the fable and
parable. An allegory is a narrative fiction in which the agents and actions and sometimes
the setting as well one contrived to make a coherent sense on the literal or primary level of
signification and at the same time to signify a second, correlated order of agents, concepts
and events. It is narration or description in which each of main elements stands for
something else. It is seldom used in short poems. An allegory tells a story that contains one
or more other. The central device in the sustained allegory of ideas is the personification of
abstract entities.
Sustained allegory was a favorite form in the Middle Ages, especially in the mode of dream
vision. Parable, Fable and Exemplum are different types of allegory.
Majoe Wors
1. Pilgrim's Progress (1678) by J. Bunyan (The best known allegory)
2. Timaeus, Phaedrus, and Symposium, by Plato.
3. De Republica by Cicero
4. The Golden Ass by Apuleius
5. About Gods and the World by Sallustius
6. Divine Comedy by Dannte
7. House of Fame by Chaucer
8. Everyman
9. Prometheus Unbound by Shelly
10. The Dynasts by T.Hardy
11. Absalom and Achitophel by J. Dryden
12. MacFlecknoe by J. Dryden
13. Tale of a Tub by Swift
14. Animal Farm by G. Orwell
Allusion
An implicit reference perhaps to another work of literature or art, to a person or an event. It
is a passing reference in a work of literature or something outside itself A writer may allude
to legends, historical facts or personages to other works of literature. Most allusions serve
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Literary Terms
9
to illustrate or clarify or enhance a subject by some are used to undercut it ironically by the
discrepancy between the subject and the illusion
Ambiguoty
The capacity of words and sentences to have double, multiple or uncertain meanings. In
ordinary usage it is applied to a fault in style ever since. W. Empson published Seven Types
of Ambiguity (1930). A special typical of multiple meaning is conveyed by the
portmanteau word. The term was introduced in to literary criticism by Humpty Dumpty, the
expert on semantics in lewis Carroll's Through the Looking Glass (1879).
Amplification
A rhetorical term used to describe passage in prose or verse in which statement is extended
as to add to its effect:
Ch. Dickens: Bleak House / Our Mutual Friend.
Antithesis
It is a contrast or opposition in the meanings of contiguous phrases or clauses that is
emphasized by parallelism, that is, a similar order and structure in the syntax.
"Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasure".
Apochalypse
A vague British literary movement of 1940s un opposition to the political commitment of
1930s writers. The Apocalyptical poets valued myth and were Surrealistic in technique and
subject matter.
Major Writers:
1. G. D. Fraser
2. H. Treece
3. D. Thomas
Apology
Autobiographical, confessional, critical or philosophical literature in which the author
argues a case for his beliefs, opinion or actions.
Major Works:
1. J. H. Newmans Apologia Pro Vito Sua
2. Plato Apology
3. Sir Philip Sidney Apology for Poetrie
Aptronym
In Literature a character's name that explain or gives a clue to one's personality, morality
and, purpose in the story.
Example:
1. Allworthy H. Fielding's Tome Jones (1749)
2. Mr. Knightley L. Austen's Emma (1816)
Archaism
The deliberate retention of imitation of obsolete words or syntax which may have been the
characteristic usage of an earlier period.
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10
Archetype
A surprisingly old word which having been taken up as a technical or jargon term in
anthropology, psychology and literary criticism, has passed into everyday usage; used in its
in its weakest from "archetypal" means not much more than "typical". The recurrent
themes, images, patterns and characters which occur in all literatures as well as in myths
and perhaps even dreams may be called archetype. C. G. Jung says archetypes are our
"collective unconsciousness".
Avant - Garde
A military expression: the vanguard or foremost part of army. Avant gard is now commonly
used to describe modern artists whose works are deliberately and self consciously
experimental, who set out discover new forms, techniques and subject matter in the arts.
Baroque
Chiefly an architectural term, meaning irregular, odd and whimsical with specific
application to the florid, ornamental style of late Renaissance architecture. It often used in
the late Middle Ages to describe any form of grotesque pedantry. It is a term more
commonly used of the visual arts.
Major Work and Writers:

1. Sir T. Browne Urn Burial (1658)
2. Crashaw
3. Cleveland
Beat Generations
A group of American writers of 1950s. Beat living singnifies the rejection of American
middle class society, embracing poverty and searching for truth through drugs, sexuality,
Zen Buddhism and mysticism. Beat poetry is loose in structure, sensational and
autobiographical, full of hyperbole and surrealism.
Major Works and Writers

1. Allen Ginsberg Howl and Other Poems (1956)
2. J. Kerouac On the Road (1957), Big Sur (1962)
3. H. Corso
4. L. Ferlinghetti
Burlesque
Burlesque has been defined as an incongruous imitation; that is, it imitates the manner or
else the matter of a serious literary work or of a literary genre, but makes the imitation
amusing by a ridiculous disparity between the manner and the subject matter. Burlesque,
parody and travesty are sometimes applied interchangeably.
Varieties of High Burlesque:

1. Mock epic or mock heroic poem imitates the elaborate form and ceremonious style of
epic genre, but applies it to a commonplace or trivial matter.
A. Pope Rape of the Lock (1714)
Ode on the Death of a Favorite Cal (1748) T. Gray
2. A parody imitates the serious manner and charactitic features of a particular literary work
or the distinctive style of a particular auther or the typical stylistic.
1. J. Philips The Splendid Shilling (1705) → Paradise Lost
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Literary Terms
11
2. H. Fielding Joseph Andrews (1742) → Pamela (1740)

3. J. Gay The Beggar's Opera
Varieties of Low Burlesque:

1. The Hudibrastic poem takes its name from S. Butler's Hudibras (1663)
2. The travesty mocks a particular work by treating its lofty subject in a jocular and
grotesquely undignified manner and style.
Celtic Revival
Also known as the Irish Literary Renassance, identifies the very creative period in Irish
literature from about 1885 to the death of W.B. Years in 1939. The aim of Yeats was to
create a distinctively national literature.
W. B. Yeats
AE (George Russell)
O. St. J. Gogarty
Lady Gregory
J. M. Synge
S. O'Casey
Chicago Critics
A group of critics associated with the University of Chicago whose ideas one represented in
the collection of essays "critics at Criticism: Ancient and Modern (1952) edited their leader
R.S. Crane. Developing concepts about form based on Aristotle's Poetics.
Chivalric Romance (Medival Romance) th

It is a narrative form which developed in 12 century France spread to the literatures of
other countries and displaced the various epic and heroic forms of narrative. Rommances
were at first written in verse but later in prose as well. The romance is distinguished from
the epic in that it represents not a heroic age of tribal wars but a courtly and chivalric.
Comedy
In the most common literary application, a comedy is a work in which the materials are
selected and managed primarily interest, involve and amuse use. The characters and their
discomfitures enagage our pleasurable attention rather than our profound concern, we are
made to feel confident that no great disaster will occur and usually the action turn out
happily for the chief characters.
1. Romantic Comedy
It was developed by Shakespeare on model of contemporary prose romances such as T.
Lodge's Rosalynde (1590) the source of shakespeare's As You Like It (1599).
2. Satire Comedy (Corrective comedy)
It ridicules political policies or philosophical doctrines or else attacks deviations from the
social order by making ridiculous the social order by making ridiculous the violaters of its
standards of moral or manners.
Ben Jonson Valpone
The Alchemist
3. Comedy of Manners (Restoration Comedy and Sentimental Comedy)
It originated in the New Comedy of the Greek Menander, distinguished from the Old
Comedy represented by Aristophanes, and was developed by Platus and Terence.
The English comedy of manners was early exemplified by Shakespeare's Love's Labour's
Lost and Much Ado About Nothing. The Restoration form owes much to the brilliant
dramas of the French writer Moliere (1622-73).
1. W. Congreve The way of the World
2. W. Wycherley The Country Wife
3. O. Goldsmith She Stoopes to Conquer
11
12
4. O. Wild The Importance of Being Earnest

5. R. B. Sheridon The Rivals
A School for Scandal
4. Farce
It is a type of comedy designed to provoke the audience to simple, hearty laughter, belly
laughy
Noah
The Second Shepherd's Play
Taming of the shrew W.Shakespeare
Charley's Aunt B.Thomas
5. Comedy of Humours
A type of comedy developed by B. Johnson the Elizabethan playwright, based on the
ancient physiological theory of four humours.
Every Man in His Humour
Connotation and Denotation

In literary usage the denotation of a word is its primary significance or reference such as a
dictionary mainly specifies; its connotation it is range of secondary or associated
significances and feeling which it commonly suggests or implies.
Decadence
In the latter 19th century in France some proponents of the doctrine of Aestheticism
especially Charles Baudelair also espoused view and values which developed into a
movement called the Decadence. This term was based on qualities attributed to the
literature of Hellenistic Greece in the last three centuries B. C. These literatures were said
to possess the high refinements and subtle beauties of culture and art which have passed
their vigoroius prime.
1. Baudlair Flowers of Evil
2. J. K. Huysmans Against the Grain (1884)
3. A. Ch. Swinburne
4. O. Wild The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891)
Salome (1893)
5. Ernest Dowson
6. Arthur Symons
7. Lionel Johnson
8. Aubery Beardsley
Decorum
As a term in literary criticism, designates the should be propriety in the way that literary
genre, its subject matter, characters, actions, the style of its narration and its dialogue are
marched to one another. The doctrine had its roots in classical theory especially in Horace's
"Art of poetry" and it achieved an elaborace from in criticism in the Renaissance and the
Neodassical age.
Didactic Literature
It is applied to works of literature which are desiged to expound a branch of theoretical or
practical knowledge.
1. A. Pope Essay on Criticism
Essay on Man
2. Dante Divine Comedy
3. Milton Paradise Lost
4. H. B. Stowe Uncle Tom's Cabin (1852)
5. C. Odets Waiting for Lefty (1953)
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Literary Terms
13
Dissociation of Sensibility
It is a phrase introduced by T. S. Eliot in his essay "The Metaphysical Poets" (1921). Eliot's
was that the Metaphisical poets of the earlier 17th century, like the Elizabethan and
Jacobean dramatists possessed a mechanism of sensibility which could devour any kind of
experience.
Distance and Involvement

In recent literary criticism the term aesthetic distance or simply distance is often used not
only to define the nature of literary and aesthetic experience in general, but also to analyze
the many devices by which authors control the degree of a reader's distance or detachment
in inverse relationship to the degree of a reader's involvement or concern with the action.
Disinterestedenss:
It is an partant term in M. Arnold's essay "The Function of Criticism at the Present Time."
He spoke of the need to see the object as in itself it really is. This depended on the attitude
of the critic. A kind of involved detachment.
Empathy and Sympathy

Empathy signifies an identification with perceived person or object which is so close that
observer seems to participate in the posture, motion and sensations that he or she perceives.
Empathy is often described as, "an involuntary projection of ourselves into an object", and
is commonly explained as the result of an "inner mimicry on the part of the observer.
Sympathy denotes fellow-feeling not feeling into the physical store, but feeling along with
the mental state and emotions of another human being or of nonhuman being to whom we
attribute human emotion.
Epiphany
A manifestation of God's presence in the world was called an epiphany by Christians. J.
Joyce (1882-1941) uses the word to describe moments of sudden meaning or insight.
Essay
Any short composition in prose that undertakes to discuss a matter, express a point of view
or persuade us to accept a thesis on any subject.
Major Eassists
1. F. Bacon late in 16th C.
2. A. Pope (1688-1744) Eassy on Man (1733)
Eassy on Criticism
3. J. Addison and Sir Richard Steele
4. W. Hazlitt.
5. T.D. Quincy
6. Ch. Lamb
Euphemism
An inoffensive expression used in place of a blunt one that is felt to be disagreeable or
embrassing.
die → pass away
toile → comfort station
to have intercourse with → to sleep with
Euphony and Cacophony

Euphony is a term applied to language which strikes the ear as smooth pleasant and
musical: Keat's The Eve of St. Agnes (1820)
13
14
Cacophony or dissonance, language which seem harsh, rough and unmusical.

M. Arnod's Dover Beach (1867) and R. Browing's Pied Piper (1842)
Fancy and Imagination

The distinction between fancy and imagination was a key element in S. T. Coleridge's
theory of poetry. In his Biographia Literia (1817), he attributes this recording function of
the sensory images to the lower faculty he calls fancy: Fancy has no other counters to play
with fixities and definites. The Imagination that produces a higher order of poetry however:
"dissolves, diffuse, dissipates in order to recreate. It is essentially vital, even as all objects
are essentially fixed and dead".
Coleridge's imagination is able to create rather than merely mechanical.
Creat Chain of Being

The term is the ladder – like hierarchy of life on earth extending from the lowest animal up
to thGod with man somewhere in the middle; it became a central aspect of a view of life for
18 century philosophy who regarded the universe as a vast proof of God's creativity and
bountifulness. Their philosophical optimism (everything is for the best is this best of all
possible world's) was mocked by Voltaire in Candide (1757)
1. Shakespeare Troilus and Cressida (1601) (I,iii)
2. Pope Essay on Man (1733) Epistle I, Section 8.
Grotesque
The term came to be applied to painting which depicted the intermingling of human,
animal, and vegetable themes and forms.
Grub Street
The name of a London street which during the 18th century was populated by poor authors
prepared to write anything for money.
Hagiography
Pious literature concerning the lives of Christian saints and martyrs. A common form of
literature in the Middle Ages.
Heresy of Paraphrase
A term introduced and examined by Cleanth Brooks in "The Well Wrought Urn" (1947).
His thesis is that if paraphrase means to say the same thing in other words, then it is not
possible to paraphrase a poem, because a poem means more than merely what it says.
Humanism
At the time of Renaisance, 16th c European intellectuals devoted themselves to the
rediscovery of first Roman and Greek literature and culture in particular works of Cicero,
Aristotle and Plato. At the Renaissance there was a great revival of interest in Classical
literature and thought. Humanism, a European phonemon, was a more worldly and thus
move secular philosophy; it was anthropocentric. It sought to dignify and ennable man.
1. Sir T. More
2. Ficino
3. Erasmos
4. Sideny
5. Spenser
6. Milton
7. Dr. Johnson
8. Arnold
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Literary Terms
15
9. I. Babit
10. P. More
Hyperbole
A figure of speech: emphasis by exaggeration. Common in everyday speech. In
Shakespeare's Macbeth (1605), Macbeth expresses in hyperbole his guilt at murdering
Duncan (II.2.59-62) or Iago says gloatingly of Othello (III. Iii, 330) and Hotspur's rant in
Henry IV Pt.I. (I.iii.201)
Imagery
Image/ imagery is a word – picture, a description of some visible scene or object.
More commonly, imagery refers to the figurative language in a piece of literature; or all the
words which refer to objects and qualities which appeal to the senses and feelings, Types of
Imagory:
1. Visual pertaining to the eye
2. Olfactory smell
3. Tactile touch
4. Auditory hearing
5. Gustatory taste
6. Abstract intellect
7. Kinesthetic movement
Intentional Fallacy
The term signifies what is claimed to be the error of interpreting and evaluating a literary
work by reference to evidence outside the text itself for the intention – the design and
purpose- of the author. An author's intended aims and meanings in writing a literary work
are irrelevant to the literary critic, because the meaning, structure and value of a text are
inherent within the finished, freestanding and public work of literature itself. The American
New Critics W.K. Wimsatt and M.C. Beardsley introduced this term for what they regard
as the mistaken critical method of judging a literary work according to the author's
intentions.
Irony
A manner of speaking or writing that is dispecsed through all kinds of literature; irony
consists of saying onething while it means another. In most of the modern critical, uses of
the term irony there remains the root sense of dissembling or hiding what is actually the
case; not, however, in order to deceive, but to achieve special rhetotical or artistic effects.
Sacrasm: is an ironical statement intended to hurt or insult. It is a common form of mockery
in ordinary day to day speech.
Dramatic Irony: occurs when the audience of a play knows more than the characters and
can therefore foresee the tragic or comic circumstances which will befall.
Cosmic Irony: is used of works in which God or Destiny is shown manipulating events so
to frustrate the lives of the characters. T. Hardy's novels, such as Tess of the d'Urbervilles
(1891) are often demonstrations of this view of life.
Verbal Irony: is a statement in which the meaning that a speaker implies differs sharply
from the meaning that is ostensibly expressed.
Romantic Irony: An 18th and 19th.C. German term for the kind of narrative in which auther
constantly breaks the illusion he is creating in order to comment on his characters.
1. L. Sterne Tristrom Shandy (1759-67)
2. H. Fielding Tome Jones, Joseph Andrews
3. T. Mann Joseph and His Brothers, The Magic Mountain
15
16
Litotes
A figure of speech akin to understatement in which an affirmative is expressed by its
contrary denied by a negative. The common everyday use of "not bad" to mean "good" is
an example. Not uncommon in poetry or prose.
Myth
Myths are stories concerning superhumans or gods which are related to accompany or to
explain religious beliefs; the originate far back in the culture of oral socioties. A mythology
is a system of mystical stories which are not true and which involves supernatural beings. It
embodies feeling and concept. Many myths or quasi-myths are primitive exaplanations of
the natural order and cosmic forces.
Negative Capability
The poet J. Keats (1795-1821) introduced the term to define a literary quality "which
Shakespeare possessed so enormously, I mean negative capability, that is when man is
capable of being in uncertainties mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact
and reason".
Objective Correlative
The term comes from an essay on "Hamlet and His Problems" written in 1919 by T. S.
Eliot:
The only way of expressing in the form of art is by finding an
objective correlative; in other words, a set of objects a situation, a
chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion
such that when the external facts which must terminate in sensory
experience are given the emotion is immediately evoked.
Eliot went on to say that Hamlet's feelings were in excess of the facts provided and this
unbalances the play. The term became extremely fashionable amongs critics as did the idea
stressed by Eliot that poetry should always be objective, and impersonal.
Oxford Movement
Also called the Tractarian Movement after Tracts for the Times (1833-41) through which
the ideas of J. Keble. Newman and E. B. Pusey were spread. The purpose of these men was
to revitalise the role of the Church of England. So called High Church views of Sacrament
led some members of the movement in to the Roman Catholic Church, notably Newman,
Whose famous Apologia pro Vita Sua (1864) was a reply to an attack on his character by
Ch. Kingsley.
Pre-Raphaelites
th
(The Fleshy School)
A mid 9 C. self – styled brotherhood of London artists, all young who united to resist
current artistic conventions and create or re-create, art forms in use before the period of
Raphael (1483-1520). Their aim was a return to the truthfulness and simplicity of medival
art (Raphael was a Renaisance artist).
Pseudo Statement
A term invented by I. A. Richards (1839-1979) to denote the kind of truth expressed by
poetry which is neither logical nor accurate, unlike statement of scientific truth. It
represents an ordering of feeling, ideas and are thus to be valued.
Pun
Usually defined as a play on words: two widely different meanings are dream out of single
word, usually for comic, playful, witty purposes. Puns are comman in jokes.
16
Literary Terms
17
Elizabethen and metaphysical poees liked to pun.
Satanic School
The poet Southey coined this description of second generation of Romantic poets,
especially Byron, but also probably Shelley.
Satire
Literature which exhibits or examines vice and folly and makes them appear ridiculous or
contemptible. It is directed against person or a type and censorious. It uses laughter to
attack its objects, thrather than for thmore evocation of mirth or pleasure. Its greatest age was
during the late 17 . And early 18 .C. Three kind of satire are to be distinguished. Horation
Satire is urban, witty informal and tends to enjoy rather than loathe human follies.
Juvenalian Satireadopts dignified public stance. It is self consciously and seriously and
seriously moral. The Menppean or Varronian Satire goes back to the derivation of word and
is not satirical in the usual sense. It is a rag – bag of prose and verse loosely relating to
some topic.
1. Dryden Absalom and Achitophel (1681)
Mac Flecknoe (1682)
2. A. Pope Epistle (1729-35) (Formal Horatian satire)
3. B. Jonson Valpone (1606)
4. Byron Don Juan (1824)
Vision of Judgement (1729)
5. Swift A Modest Proposal
Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Self- Consciousness
Self- Conscious narrators refer continually to the fact that they are creating a work of art for
the purpose of explaining the convention of narrative, like J. Fowels in the French
Lieutenant's Woman (1977) or to moke them, like Byron in Don Juan (1824). W.
Wordswarth's Prelude (1805) explores the nature of the self, and is a study of intense self-
consciousness.
Stream of Consciousness
A common narrative technique in the modern novel: the attempt to convey all the contents
of a character's mind, memory, sense perceptions feelings, thoughts in relaion to the stream
of experience as it passes by often at random. Much of J. Joyce's Ulysses (1922) is narrated
through the stream of consciousness of its hero Bloom. The term was coined by W. James.
1. Coleridge Forst at Midnight (1798)
2. D. Richardson Pilgrimage (1915-38)
3. Proust A La recherch du temps perdu (1913-27)
4. V. Woolf To the Lighthouse (1913-28)
5. Sterne Tristram Shandy (1760-7)
6. J. Joyce A Portrait of the Aritst as a Young Man (1916)
7. W. Faulkner The Sound and the Fury (1913)
Synecdoche
Figure of speech in which a part is used to describe the whole of something or vice versa.
Common in everyday speech as in the use of the word "hand" in the phrase "all hands on
the deck" to refer to sailors.
Understatement
A species of Irony where the true magnitude of an idea, event or fact is minimized or not
stated.
17
18
Unities
Aristotle in his Poetic made certain observation about Greek tragedies: they concentrated
on one complete action or events which took place within a single day and night and in a
single place. These descriptive comments became know as the dramatic unities of action,
time and from late 16th. C. onwards scholars came to regard them as rules for the proper
construction of tragedies.
Utopia
Sir T. More's Utopia (1515-6) is a decription of an imaginary and perfect commonwealth.
The name now refers to all fictional, philosophical or political works depicting imaginary
worlds better than our own.
1. Plato Republic
2. St. Augustin City of God
3. Swift Gulliver's Travels (Book Four) (1726)
4. W. Morris News from Nowhere (1891)
5. H. G. Wells A Modern Utopia (1905)
Versimilitude
Having the appearance of truth or reality. A difficult quality to explain or prove, but non the
less an essential element in many different kinds of literature.
Zeugma
A figure of speech in which words or phrases with widely different meanings are "yoked
together" with comic effect by being made syntactically dependent on the same word often
a verb as in the following example from Dickens's The Pickwick Papers (1836-7)
Miss Blolo rose from the table and went straight home in a flood of
tears and a sedan-chair.
18
Literary Terms
19
Writer Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

/Work School works
1. Becket, - 1811- Humorist English Comic
Gilbert 56 History of
England
(1852)
2. Aaron's Rod D. H. 1922 Novel English -
Lawerance
3. - 1881- Poet English Idea of
Abercrombic, 1938 Great
Lascelles Poetry
4. Abinger E.M. 1936 Essay English -
Harvest Foster
5. Absalom, W. 1936 Novel American -
Absalom Faulkner
6. Abdalom I. Dryden 1681 Poem English -
and Achitophel
7. Abse, - 1923- Poet English White
Dannie Coat
(1989),
8. Absentee, M. 1812 Novel English -
the Edgeworth
9. Abt Vogler R. 1864 Poem English -
Browning
10. Adam Bede G.Eliot 1859 Novel English -
11. Adams, - 1859- Novelist American The log of
Andy 1935 a Cowboy
(1903)
12. Adam, A. - 1872- Novelist New Tussock
H. 1936 Zealand Land
(1904)
13. Addison, J. - 1672- Essayist English The
1719 Campaign
(1704)
14. Ade, - 1866- Humorist- short American Fables in
George 1944 story writer Slang
(1899)
15. Agnes Grey A. Bronte 1847 Novel English -
16. Albee, E. - 1928 Playwright American The
Sandboy
(1960),
Tiny
Alice
(1964)
17. Alchemist Ben 1610 Comedy (Play) English -
Jonson
18. Aldington, - 1892- Poet- Novelist – English Death of a
R. 1962 Imgist Hero
(1929)
19
20
Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

School works
19. Aldiss, B. - 1925 Science Fiction English Non-stop
W. (1958)
Greybread
(1964)
20. Aldrich, T. - 1836- Novelist American The Story
B. 1907 of a Bad
Boy
(1870)
21. Ager, - 1832- Novelist American Ragged
Horatio 99 Dick
(1867)
22. Algerine Royall 1797 Novel English -
Captive Tyler
23. Alice's Lewis 1865 Novel English -
Advantures in Carroll
Wonderland
24. Allen, J. L. 1849- Novelist American The Bride
1925 of
Mistletoe
(1909)
25. Alton Ch. 1850 Novel English -
Locke (Tailor Kingsley
and Poet)
26. Amazing G. 1895 Novel English -
Marriage Meredith
27. Amelia H. 1751 Novel English -
Fielding
28. American H. James 1875 Novel American -
29. American A. 1875 Novel English -
Senator Trollope
30. American T. Dreiser 1925 Novel American -
Tragedy
31. Amis, - 1922 Novelist English That
Kingsley Uncertain
Feeling
(1955)
Ending
Up (1974)
33. Amis and - 13th C. Verse Romance English -
Amiloun
20
Literary Terms
21

School works
34. Anderson, - 1888- Palywright American What
Maxwell 1959 Price
Gloey
(1924),
Mary of
Scotland
(1933)
35. Anderson, - 1876- Novelist American Death in
Sherwood 1941 woods
(1933),
Beyond
Desire
(1932)
36. Adrea del R. 1855 Dramatic English -
Sarto Browning Monologue
37. Andreas - Old - English -
English
38. Anna of the A. Bennet 1902 Novel English -
Five Towns
39. Antiquary Sir W. 1816 Novel English -
Scott
40. Arrow of Ch. 1964 Novel Nigerion -
Gad Achebe
41. Arthur Ch. B. 1799 Gothic Novel English -
Mervyn Brown
42. Ashbery, - 1927 Poet American Shadow
John Train
(1981), the
Ice Storm
43. Asimov, - 1920- Science Fiction American The Cares
Isac 92 of steel
(1954),
The Naked
Sun
(1956)
44. Aspern H. James 1888 Novel American -
Papers
45. Atalanta in A. Ch. 1865 Verse Drama English -
Calydon Swinburne
46. Athelston - 14th c. Verse Romance English -
47. Atwood, M. - 1939- Novel Canadion Life befor
E. Man
(1979),
Lady
Oracle
(1976)
48. Audelay, J. - 15th c Poet English -
21
22

School works
49. Auden. W. - 1907- Poet English -
H. 73
50. Augie S. Bellow 1953 Novelish American -
March, the
Adventure of
51. Aureng- J. Dryden 1675 Heroic Tragedy English -
Zebe
52. Aurora E. B. 1856 Novel English -
Leigh Browning
53. Austen, - 1775- Novelist English Mansfielf
Jane 1817 Park (1811-
14), Emma
(1814-16)
54. Austin, - 1835- Poet English -
Alfred 1913
55. Ave atque A. Ch. 1868 Elegy English Elegy for
Vale Swinburne Bandelaire
56. Awkward H. James 1898-9 Novel American -
Age
57. Ayala's A. 1881 Novel English -
Angel Trollope
58. Babbitt S. Lewis 1922 Novel American -
59. Babbitt, - 1865- Critic American -
Irving 1933
60. Back to G. B. 1921 Play English -
Methuselah Shaw
61. Bacon, F. - 1561- Philosopher English -
1626
62. Baldwin, J. - 1924- Novelist American Going to
87 Meet Man
(1965)
63. Barchester A. 1857 Novel English -
Towers Trollope
64. Baring, - 1874- Novelist English Cat's
Maurice 1945 Cradle
(1925) The
Black
Prinre
(1902)
65. Barker, - 1913- Poet English The Golden
George 91 Vhains
(1968)
66. Barker, J. - 1784- Playwright American The Battle
Neloson 1858 of Flodden
Field
(1812)
67. Barn field, - 1574- Pooet English The
Richard 1627 Passionate
Pilgrim
(1599)
22
Literary Terms
23

School works
68. Barrack – R. Kipling 1892 Poems English -
Room Ballads
and Other
Verses
69. Barry, - 1896 – Playwright American Liberty
Philip 1949 Jones
(1941), the
Folish
Notion
(1945)
70. Barry W. M. 1844 Novel English -
Lyndon Thackery
71. Barsetshire A. 1855 Novel English -
Novels Trollope
72. Ben 1631 Comedy English -
Bartholomew Jonson
Fair
73. Battle of - Old Poem English 73 Lines
Brunanbwh English
74. Battle of - Old Poem English -
Maldon English
75. Battle H. 1866 Poem American -
Pieces and Melville
Aspects of the
War
76. Beau G. 1874-5 Novel English -
champ's Career Meredith
77. Beau mont, - 1584- Playwright English The Maid's
Francis 1616 Tragedy
(1610)
78. Becket, - 1906- Playwright Irish Murphy
Samuel 89 (1938), the
unnameable
(1961)
79. Bede - 673- Historian English -
735
80. Beggar's J. Gay 1728 Ballad Opera English -
Opera
81. Bellow, - 1640- Playwright English -
Aphra 89
82. Bellow, - 1915- Novelist American Herzog
Saul (1964), A
wen (1965)
83. Belotn A. 1865 Novel English -
Estate Trollope
84. Ben- Hur L. Eallace 1880 Historical Novel English -
23
24

School works
85. Bennett, - 1867- Novelist English A Man
Arnold 1931 From
North
(1898)
86. Beowulf - 1000/old Poem English -
English
87. Beppo Byron 1818 Poem English Ottovq
Rima
88. Ber trams A. 1859 Novel English -
Trollope
89. Bestiary - 12-13th Poem English -
c.
90. Between V. Woolf 1941 Novel English -
the Acts
91. Bevis of - 13th c. Verse Ronance English Tail
Hanpton Rhyme
Stanza
92. - 1886-91 Novel English Comic
Brckestaffe, pera. The
Isaoc Maid of the
Mill (1765)
93. Billy Budd, H. 1886-91 Novel America -
Sailor Melville
94. Birthday H. Pinter 1957 Play English -
Party
95. Bishop, - 1911-79 Poet American
Elrzabeth
96. Bishop R. 1855 Dramatic English -
Blougram's Brawing Monolgue
Apology
97. Black R. L. 1883 Novel English -
Arrow Stevenson
98. Black A. Sewell 1877 Novel English -
Beaaty
99. Blake, W. - 1757- Poep English -
1825
100. Blicking Unknown Old Sermon Old -
Homilies English English
101. Blind - 1440- Epic-12books English Wallace
Harry 92 (1477)
102. Blithedale N. Haw 1852 Novel American -
Romance thorne
103. Bluden, - 1896- Poet English The
Edmund 1974 waggoner-
The
Shepherd
24
Literary Terms
25

School works
104. Bodkin, 1875- Critic English Archetypal
Amy Maud 1967 Patterns in
Poetry
105. Boker. G. - 1823-90 Playwright American The lesson
Henry of Life
106. Book of Unknown 1400 Verse English -
St Albans
107. Book of W.M. 1848 Satirical English -
Snobs Thackery
108. Book of G. 1368 Poem English -
the Duchess Chaucer
109. Booth, - 1840 – Critic English People in
Charles 1916 London
110. Borough G. Crabbe 1810 Poem English -
111. Borrow, - 1803-81 Linguist English Wild
G. H. Wales –
Romany
Rye
112. H. James 1885-6 Novel American -
Bostonians
113. Bose - 1775- Poet English -
well, 1822
Alexander
114. Boswell, - 1740-95 Journelist English -
James
115. Bown, - 1899- Novelist English -
Elizabeth 1973
116. Braddon, - 1835- Novelist English Heary
Mary Elizabeth 1915 Dunbar;
the story of
an Outcast
117. - 1612-72 First Poet American Four Ages
Bradstreet, of Man
Anne
118. Brautigan, 1935-84 Novel American Big Sur-
Rivhard Revenge of
Lawn
119. Breton, - 1555- Poet English England
Nicholas 1626 Helicon
120. Bride of Sir W. 1813 Poem English -
Triermain Scott
121. Bride of Lord 1813 Poem English -
Abydos (A Byron
Turkish Tale)
122. Bride of Sir W. 1818 Novel English -
Lammermoor Scoh
25
26
Writer Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

/Work School
123. H. Crane 1930-2 Poem English -
Brighouse,
Harold
124. Brighton, - 1882- Playwright English The Odd Man
Harold 1958 Out.
125. Brighton G. Green 1938 Novel American -
Rock
126. Broken John 1629 Trogedy English -
Heart Ford
127. Bronte, - 1816- Novel English -
Charlotte 55
128. Bronte. - 1818- Novel English Wuthering
Emily 48 Heights
129. Bronte, - 1820- Novel English Agnes Grey –
Anne 49 Tenant of wild
fell Hall
130. Brooke, - 1703- Poet-Playwright Irish Design and
Henry 83 Beauty: An
epistle
131. Brooks, - 1906- Critic American The well-
cleanth wrought urn-
Hrdden God
132. - 1810- Playwright American Dombey and
Brougham, 80 Son-Dred
John
133. - 1840- Novelist English Not wisely but
Broughton, 1920 too well
Rhoda
134. Brown, - 1771- Novel English Arthur
charles B. 1810 Mervyn
135. Brown, - 1765- Novel American Ira and
Willibm H. 93 Isabella: or the
Natural
children
136. - 1806- Poet English Battle of
Browning. 61 Marathon
Englizabeth
B.
137. Browing, - 1812- Poet English My last
Robert 89 Duchess
138. - 1803- Novelist American The Spirit
Brownson, 76 Rapper: An
Orestes Autobiography
139. Brut Layamon 12th. C. Alliterative ver English -
140. Buck, - 1892- Novelist American This Proud H
Pear 1973
26
Literary Terms
27

/Work School
141. Burke, - 1729- Political English On American
Edmand 97 Philospher TaTaxation
142. Burke, - 1897- Critic American Towards a
Kenneth 1997 Better Life
143. Burnett, - 1849- Novelist American The Secret
Frances 1924 Garden
144. Burney, - 1752- Novelist English Memories of
Fanny 1840 Burney
145. Buns, - 1759- Poet Scottish -
Robert 96
146. Burton, - 1577- Critic English The Anatomy
Robert 1640 of Melancholy
147. Bussy G. 1604 Tragedy English -
D'Ambois Chapman
148. Butler, - 1612- Satirist English Hudobras
Samuel 80
148. Buter, - 1835- Novelist English Luck or
Samuel 1902 Cunning
149. Byrd, - 1674- Diarist American Another
Willam 1744 Secret Diary
150. Byrom, - 1692- Poet English Anapaests
John 1763
151. Byron, - 1788- Poet English The vision of
G.G. 1824 Judgement
152. Bryon, - 1834- Playwright English The Maid and
H. Jomes 84 Magpie
153. Cabell, - 1879- Novelist American Jurgen-The
James B. 1958 Eagel's
Shadow
154. Cabel, G. - 1844- Novelist American Madame
W. 1925 Delphine-
Bylow Hill
155. Cadenus J. Swift 1713 Poem English -
Vanessa
156. Bede 670-80 Poem English -
Caedmon
157. Cahan, - 1860- Novelist American New Yourk
Abraham 1951 Ghetto
158. Caiin Byron 1821 Closet Drama English -
159. Cain, - 1892- Novel American The Postman
James M. 1977 Always Rings
Twice
160. Caine, - 1853- Novelist English The Shadow
Hall (Sir T. 1931 of a Crime
Henry)
161. - 1903- Novelist American Trouble in
Caldwell, 87 July- Callt,
Erskine Experience
27
28

/Work School
162. Caleb, William 1794 Novel English -
Williams, the Gradwin
Adventure
(Things as
They Are)
163. Caliban R 1864 Dramatic English -
Upon Setebos Browing Monologue
(Netueal
theylogy in
Island)
164. Calisher, - 1911- Novelist American Eagle Eye-
Hortense Boby- Soxer
165. Calisto Joh 1530 Comedy- English -
and Melibea Rastell Interlude
166. Call of Jack 1903 Novel American -
the wild, the London
167. T. Preston 1569 Play English -
Cambises,
King of Persia
168. Camden, - 1569 Play English -
Willian
169. Camilla F. Burney 1796 Novel English -
(A Picture of
Youvh)
170. John Lyly 1584 Prose Comedy English -
Campaspe
171. - 1777- Poet English -
Campbell, 1814
Thomas
172. Can you Artrollope 1874 Novel English -
Forgive He?
173. Cantos, Ezra 1970 Poem American -
The Pound
174. - 1908- Novelist American Laugh and Lie
Cantwell, 78 Down
Robert
175. Cante, King Cnut 1167 Poem English -
The Song of
176. Captoe, - 1924- Novelist American A Tree of
Truman 84 Night
177. Cardinal, J. Shirley 1641 Tragedy English -
the
178. H. Pinter 1960 Comedy English -
Caretaker, the
179. Carew, - 1595- Cavalier Poet English -
Thomas 1639
180. Carey, - 1681- Poet English Poems on
Henry 1743 Several
Occations
28
Literary Terms
29

/Work School
181. Carey, - 1943- Novelist Australian The Fat Man
Peter in History
182. Carleton, - 1794- Novelist Irish EvilEye-
William 1869 Fardorougha
the Miser
183. Carlyle, - 1795- Philosopher English -
Thomas 1881 Historian
184. Carter, - 1940- Novelist English Heroes and
Angela 92 Villians-
Nightsot
Circuit
185. - 1958- Playwright English Road-To-The
Cartwright, Rise and Fall
Jim of little Voice
186. - 1611- Poet-Playwright Eng. The Lady
Cartwright, 43 Errant- The
William Royal Slove
187. Carver, - 1939- Poet – Short Am. At Night the
Raymond 88 Story salmon Move
188. Cary, - 1772- Poet Eng. Translation of
Henry Francis 1844 Dante's
Divinq
Commdia
189. Cary, A. - 1888- Novelist Eng. Assia Saved –
Joyre L. 1957 An American
Vistor
190. Cary, - 1623- Poet Eng. -
Patrick 57
191. Caste T. William 1867 Comedy-Play Eng. -
192. Castle of J. 1748 Poem Eng. Spenserian
Indolence Thomson Stanza
193. Castle of H. 1764 Gothic Novel Eng. -
Otranto Wallopole
194. Castle of ? 1405- Morality Play Eng. -
Perserverance 25
195. Castle Maria 1801 Novel Eng. -
Rakrent Edgeworth
196. Castle A. 1860 Novel Eng. -
Richmond Trollope
197. Cat on a T. 1955 Play Am. -
Hot Tin Roof Williams
198. Catch 22 J. Heller 1961 Novel Am. Anti-
worNovel
199. Catcher J. D. 1951 Novel American -
in the Rye Salinger
200. Catcher, - 1873- Novelist Am. The Troll
Willa S. 1947 Garden
29
30
Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

School
201.Catherine W. M. 1840 Novel Eng. -
Thackeray
202. Catiline Ben 1611 Tragedy Eng. -
His Jonson
Conspiracy
203. Cato J. Assison 1713 Tragedy Eng. Blank Verse
204. Caudwell, - 1901- Critic-Poet Eng. Dying Culture
Chrisropher 73
205. Causley, - 1917- Poet Eng. Farewell,
Charles Aggie Weston
206. Cavalier Group of Peot : Lovelace - Sucking - Carew-
Poets Lyrica Herrick -
Wakker
207. Caxton, Printer- 1415- Eng. -
William Translater 92
208. Cecilia Fanny 1782 Novel Eng. -
(Memories of Burney
an Heriess)
209. Mark 1867 Novel Am. -
Celebrated Twain
Jumping Frog
of Calaveras
County
210. Cenci P. B. 1819 Play Eng. -
Shelley
211.Centliver, - 1669- Playwright Eng. The Wonder:
Susannah 1723 A Woman
keeps a secret
212. - 1619- Poet Eng. -
Chamberlayne, 89
William
213. Chance J.Conrad 1913 Novelist Eng. -
214. Chamces J. Fletcher 1617 Play-Comedy Eng. -
215. Chandler, 1888- Detective writer Eng. The Lady in
Raymond T. 1959 the lake – The
Little Sister
216. T. 1622 Tragedy Eng. -
Changeling Middleton
217. Chapman, - 1560- Poet Eng. Correction
George 1634 and
Completion of
Mordow's
Hero and
Leander
218. Chapone, - 1727- Morality- History of Sir
Hester 1801 Bluestocking Charles
Grandison
30
Literary Terms
31

School
219. Charless, G. 1608 Double Play Eng. -
Duke of Chapman
Byron,
Marshal of
France, the
Conspiracy
and Tragedy
220. Charley's B. 1892 Farce Play Eng.
Aunt Thomas
221. Charlotte S. Rowson 1794 Novel Eng. -
Temple (A tale
of truth)
222. - 1752- Poet Eng
Chatterton, 70
Thomas
223. Chatwin, - 1940- Novelist Eng. In Patagonia-
Bruce 89 The viceroy
of Ouidahry
224. Chesney, - 1858- Novelist Black House Behind
Charles W. 1932 American the Cedars
225. Chesney, - 1830- Novelist Eng. The New
Sir G. 95 ordeal –The
Tamkyns private
secretary
226. Chesnutt, - 1858- Novelist Black Marrow of
Ch. W. 1932 American Tradition
227. - 1874- Poet Eng. The Innocen
Chesterton, G. 1936 of Gather
K. Brown
228. Chettle, - 1560- Play wright Eng. The Downfall
Heny 1607 of Robert
229. Child, - 1802- Novelist American Hobomok
LydiaM. 80
230. Child of A. 1896 Novel Eng. -
the Jago Morrison
231.Child Lord 1812-6 Poem Eng. Spenserian
Harold's Byron Stanza
Pilgrimage
232. Childers, - 1870- Novelist Eng. The Riddle of
R. English 1922 Robert
233. Chimes Ch. 1844 Novel Eng. A Christmas
Dickens story
234. Chopin, - 1851- Novelist Am. Bayou Folk
Kate 1904
235. Christ -? Old Poem Eng. Nativity-
English Ascension-
Doomsday
31
32

School
236. S.T. 1798 Poem Eng. Unfinished
Christable Coleridge Poem
237. Christie, - 1890- Detective Eng. The ABC
D. A. (M. 1976 Murders
Clarissa)
238. Ch. 1843 Novella Eng. -
Christmas Dickens
Carol
239. W. Scott 1827 Novel Eng. -The
Chronicles of inclusive title
Canongate of stories
240. Church, - 1893- Novelist Eng. The Porch
R. T. 1972
241. Churchill, - 1938- Playwright Eng. Cloud Nine
Caryl
242. Churchill, - 1731- Satirist Eng. The Rosciad
Charles 64
243. - 1520- Poet Eng. The Mirror of
Churchyard, 1604 Magistrate
Themas
244. City Ph. 1632 Comedy Eng. -
Madam Massinger
245. City of J. 1874 Poem Eng. -
Dreadful Thomson
Night
246. Ciril Dis H. D. 1849 Essay Am. -
obedience, On Thoreau
the Duty
247. Clampitt, - 1920 Poet Am. The
Amy kingfisher
248. G. Colman 1766 Comedy Eng. -
Clandestine
Marriage
249. - 1341- Poet Eng. The cuckoo
Clanvowe, Sir 91 and the
John Nightingale
250. Clare, - 1793- Poet Eng. The village
John Minstrel
(Spenserion)
251. Clarel H. 1876 Poem Am. 7000 Line-
Melville
252. Clarissa S. 1747 Novel Eng. Epistolary
(The History Richardson novel
of a Young
Lady)
253. Clarke, - 1917 Novelist Eng. Science
A. C. Fiction
32
Literary Terms
33
Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Nationality Main works

Genere
School
267. Comical G. 1664 Play Eng. Alove in a Tub
Revenge Etherege
268. Coming E. B. 1871 Novel Am. -
Race Lytton
269. Complaint J. Lydgate ? Poem Eng. Rhyme Royal –
of the Black Influence of
knight chancer
270. Compton- - 1892- Novelist Eng. Menand
Burnett, D. I. 1969 Wives-Porents
and Children
271. Comus J. Milton 1637 Poem Eng. Pastoral
272. J. 1692 Comedy Eng. Adapted
Confederacy Vanbrugh
273. J. Gower 1390 Poem Eng. Octosyllabic
Confession Couplets
Amantis
274. T. De 1821 Autobiography Eng. -
Confessions of Quincey
an English
Opium Eafer
275. H. Melville 1857 Novel Am. His
Confidence- Masquerade
Man
276. Congreve, - 1670- Playwright Eng. The Sudgement
William 1729 of Paris
277. B. Disraeli 1844 Novel Eng. The first
Coningshy American Epic
278. M. Twain 1889 Satirical Am. The Arrow of
Connecticut Fantasy Gold
Yankee in
King Arthur's
court
279. Connelly - 1890- Novel Am. The Fast
Marcus 1980 Sooner Hound
280. Conquest T. Dwight 1771- Poem Am. -
of Canaan 3
281. Conrad. 1- 1857- Novelist Ukraine -
Joseph 1924
282. Conroy. - 1899- Novelist Am. Diana
Jack 1980
283. Conscious Sir R. 1722 Play Eng. -
Lovers Steele Autobiography-
Psychological
Romance
284. N. 1974 Novel S. Africon
Conservationist Gordimer
285. Constable, - 1562- Poet Eng.
Henry 1613
33
34

School
286. Contarini B. Disraeli 1832 Novel Eng.
Fleming
287. Contrast R.Tyler 1787 Play Eng. -
288. Cook - 1818- Poet Eng. Old Armchair
Eliza 89
289. Cook - 1830 Novelist Am. Historical
John Esten Novels-
Canolles
290. Coolbrith - 1840- Poet Am. The Singer of
Ina Donna 1928 the Sea-
Golden Gote
291.Cooper, - 1918- Ploywright Irish Everything in
Giles Stannus 66 the Garden
292. Cooper, - 1789- Novelist Am. The
James 1851 Deerslayer-
Fenimore The Prairie
293. Cooper, - 1805- Poet Eng. The
Thomas 92 Purgatory of
Suicide
294. Cooper - 1910- Novelist Eng. Scenes from
Williom Later Life
295. Coover - 1932 Novelist Am. Pricksongs
Rober Lowell and Descants
296. Coper. - 1945 Poet Eng. The River
Wendy Mary Girl
297. Coppard, - 1878- Poet Eng. Fishmonger's
American 1957 Fiddle: Tales
English
298. Coral R. M. 1858 Novel Scottish Adrenture
Island Ballantyne
299. Corbett, - 1582- Poet Eng. Certain
Richard 1635 Elegant
Poems
300. Corelli, - 1855- Novelist Eng. Ardath – The
Marie 1924 Soul of Lilith
301. W. 1623 Play Eng. Tragedy
Coriolanus Shakespeare
302. Corsair L. Byron 1814 Poem Eng. The Bride of
Abydos
303. Cotton, - 1630- Poet Eng. Poems of
Charles 87 Several
Occotions
304. Country S.O. Jewet 1896 Novel Am. Unnamed
of the Pointed narrator
Firs
305. Country W. 1675 Play Eng. Comedy
Wife Wycherley
34
Literary Terms
35

School
306. Coverdal, - 1488- Translater Eng. Protestant
Miles 1569 reformer and
Translator of
B. ble
307. Coward, - 1899- Playwright Eng. Peace in our
Sir Noel 1973 Time –Look
After Lulu
308. Cowley, - 1618- Poet Eng. -
Abraham 67
309. Cowley, - 1743- Playwright Eng. Which is the
Hannah 1809 Man – More
Ways Than
One.
310. Cowper, - 1731- Poet Eng. Anti-
William 1800 Thelyphthora:
A Tale in
Verse
311. Cozzens, - 1903- Novelist Am. Morning
J. Gould 78 Noon, and
Night
312. Crabbe, - 1755- Poet Eng. -
George 1832
313. Crane, H. - 1899- Poet Am. White
Hart 1932 Buildings
314. Crane, - 1871- Novelist Am. The Monsrer
Stephen 1900
315. Cranford E. Gaskell 1851- Novel Eng.
3
316. Crashaw, - 1612- Poet Eng. Steps to the
Richard 49 Temple
317. Crawford, - 1854- Novelist Am. The White
F. M. 1909 Sistwe
318. - 1735- Essayist Am. Letter From
Crevecoeur, J. 1813 An American
H. St. J. Farmer
319. Cricket on Ch. Dickens 1845 Novel Eng. A Christmas
the Heath story
320. Criterion T. S. Eliot 1922- Literory Eng. -
39 Journal
321. Critic (A R. V. 1779 Play Eng. Comedy –
Tragedy Sheridan Borlesque
Rehearsed)
322. Critical CoxSDyson 1959 Journal Eng. Literary
Quarterly Journal of
Modern
Literature
323. Crock of J. Stephens 1912 Novel Eng. Fantesy
Gold
35
36
Writer Writer Date Style – Nationality Main works

/Work Genere
School
324. Croker, - 1780- Essayist Eng. Essays on the
J. W. 1857 Early period of
the French
Revolution
325. Croker, - 1798- Folklorist Irish Fairy Legends
T. C. 1854 and Tradition
of the South of
Irland
326. A. Tennyson 1889 Poem Eng. Written in 20
Crossing the minutes
Bar
327. Crotchet Peacock 1831 Novel Eng. Plot in
Castle minimal -
Satire
328. - 1878- Playwright Am. Expressing
Crothers, 1958 William – A
Rachel Lady's Virtue
329. Crowne, - 1640- Playwright Eng. The Married
J. 1712 Bean
330. Crucible A. Miller 1953 Play Am. -
331. Cuckoo Sir J. 1390 Poem Eng. Once
and the Clanvowe attributed to G.
Nightingle Chacer
332. Cullen, - 1903- Poet B. Am Leading
Countee 46 Figure of the
Harlem
Renaissance
333. Culture M. Arnold 1869 Essay Eng. -
and Anarchy
334. - 1732- Playwright Eng. The west
Cumberland, 1811 Indian –The
Richard Jew
335. - 1894- Poet Am. No Thanks
Cumming, e. 1962
e.
336. Cursos Anonymous Middle Poem Eng. Dedicated to
Mundi Eng. the Virgin
Mary
337. W. 1610 Play Eng. Its Source is
Cymbeline shakespeare Holinshed's
Chronicles
338. - 8th. C. Poet Eng. Elene-The
Cynewulf Fates of
Apostle
339. Ben Jonsor 1600 Play Eng. -
Cynthia's
Revels
(Fountain of
self love)
36
Literary Terms
37

/Work Genere
School
340. - 1900- Novelist Am. The Olive of
Dahlberg, 77 Minerva
Edward
341. Daisy H. James 1879 Novel Am. -
Miller
342. Daly, - 1838- Plaxwright Am. The Flash of
John 99 Lightning
Augustin
343. Dame Unknown Middle Fabliau Eng. -
Sirith English
344. Dance Anthony 1951- Novel Eng. A Sequance of
to the Music Powell 75 12 Novel
of time
345. Dane, 1888- Playwright Eng. The Moon is
Clemence 1965 Feminie
(A.
Winifred)
346. Daniel Unknown Old Poem Eng. -
English
347. Daniel, 1562- Poet Eng. A Defence of
Samuel 1619 Rhyme
348. Daniel, G. Eliot 1876 Novel Eng. -
Deronda
349. - 1606- Playwright Eng. -
D'Avenat, Sir 68
William
350. - 1893- Poet Am. An Outland
Davidson, 1968 Piper
Donald
351. - 1857- Poet Eng. The Godfrid-
Davidson, 1909 Self's the Man
John
352. Davies, - 1565- Poet Eng. Humours
John 1618 Heaven on the
Earth
353. Davies, - 1871- Poet Eng. Autobiogrophy
W. H. 1940 writer- Super
Tramp
354. Day of M. 1662 Poem Eng. Didactic poem
Doom Wigglesworth
355. Day - 1904- Poet Eng. Detective
lewis C. 72 Writer – The
Gate
37
38

/Work Genere
School
356. De - 1820- Novelist Am. Miss
Forest. John 1906 Raveinel's
W Conversion
From
Secession to
Loality
357. De Oscar Wilde 1905 Letter Eng.
Profundis
358. De - 1785- Eddayist Eng. Lake Poets
Quincey, 1859
Thomas
359. Death W. Cather 1927 Eng. -
Comes for
the
Archbishop
360. Death of E. Bowen 1938 Novel Eng. Influence of H.
he Heart James
361. Death's T. L. 1825 Play Eng. The Fool's
Jest –Book Beddoes Tragedy
362. Decline E. Gibbon 1776- History Eng. Classical
and Fall of 88 History
the Roman
Empire
363. - 1877- Novelist Eng. The Red Saint-
Deeping, G. 1950 Uther S
W. Igraine
364. Defence P.B. Shelley 1821 Essay Eng. Written in
of Poetry Italy &
published
Posphumously
365. Defore, - 1660- Novelist Eng. Robinson
Daniel 1731 Crusoe
366. Deirdre J. M. Synge 1910 Tragedy Eng. -
of the Sorrow
367. Dekker, 1570- Playwright Eng. The whore of
Thomas 1630 Banylon
368. Delany, 1942 Science Black Am. The Bride of
Samuel R. Fiction lost Desire
369. - 1543- Ballad Eng. -
Deloney, 1600
Thomas
370. Demos G. Gissing 1886 Novel Eng. -
(A Story of
English
Socialism)
371. Denis W. Thachery 1863 Novel Eng. Unfinished
Duval
38
Literary Terms
39

/Work Genere
School
372. R. Davies 1970-5 Novel Eng. -
Deptford
Triology
373. O. Goldsmith 1770 Poem Eng. -
Deserted
Village
374. T. Hardy 1871 Novel Eng. -
Desperate
Remedies
375. Devil is Ben Johnson 1616 Comedy Eng. -
an Ass
376. David Hume 1750s Philosophical Eng. -
Dialogus
Concerning
Natural
Religion
377. Diana of G. Meredith 1885 Novel Eng. -
the
Crossways
378. Diary of G. SW. Gross 1892 Comic Novel Eng. -
a Nobody mith
379. Dibdin, - 1745- Play wright Eng. The wedding
Charles 1814 Ring
380. Dick, - 1928- Science Am. The Divine
Philip k. 82 Fiction Invasion
381. - 1812- Novelist Eng.
Dickens, 70
Charles
(John
Huffam)
382. - 1830- Poet Am. Bolts of
Dickinson, 86 Melody
Emily
39
40
Abject. Dealing with aspects of life (often associated with death, excrement, or graph
violence) that are frequently repressed because they bear unpleasant reminders human
mortality.
Adamic language. A language (named for the biblical Adam) in which words have natural
and organic relationship to the things they represent. Modern linguists the relationship
between language and its objects of representation as beli arbitrary, a mere matter of agreed
convention.
Aesthetics. Branch of philosophy dealing with perception by the human senses, usual in
relation to beauty, especially to art. The formal study of aesthetics is a produ of the
bourgeois era, and Marxist critics often emphasize that bourgeois aestheti tends to convey
values that are in the interest of the bourgeoisie, even while seeki to portray those values as
absolute and universal.
Affective fallacy. The belief (considered fallacious by the New Critics) that the meani of a
work of literature resides primarily in the thoughts and feelings it provokes the reader.
Affective stylistics. Reader – response approach (developed by Stanley by Stanley Fish)
that the sequential feelings of the reader as he or she reads through a text.
Agrarians. Early name for the group that eventually became the New Critics. In t phase
their work consisted largely of writing poetry that presented agrarian (ru life in the
antebellum South as a superior alternative to the alienated condition caused by modern
industrial capitalism. Sometimes called the Soutbern Agraria
alienation. The process by which individuals become distanced and estranged from
products of their labor, from the world around them, from other people, eventually from
themselves. Considered by Marxist critics an inevitable conseque of life in capitalist
societies.
Alienation effect. The process by which certain works of art (especially the epic theater of
Bertolt Brecht) seek to distance their audience emotionally, thus leading to intellectual,
rather than emotional, response on the part of the audience. Some what similar to
defamiliazation, though generally with more political implications.
The Marxist critic Walter Benjamin valued Brecht's alienation effects for their ability to
shatter the aura that had traditionally surrounded works of art, thus poten tially making art a
tool of authority. Critics sometimes use the German term.
Verfremdungseffekt.
Allegory. A literary form in which the persons or objects decribed in the text are intended
to evoke another set (often of abstract or general nature) of persons or objects.
Allusion. A reference in a literary work to another literary work, thereby invoking the
context and implications of the carly work in the one that alludes to it
Ambiguity. Uncertainty in meaning or interpretation. Privileged by the New Critics as a
crucial property of the best literature.
Archaeology. Style of historical research, pioneered by Michel Foucault, that focuses on
detailed study of numerous texts (many of them relatively obscure) from a variety of
disciplines. The results of archaeological research generally yield local knowledge about a
given period in time and do not attempt to posit narratives of historical change, which is
viewed as radically discontinuous, with the relationships between different periods of time
being difficult or impossible to discern or describe accurately.
Archetypes. Fundamental images and motifs that seem to be common to large numbers of
individuals in widely differing societies. Associated by Carl Jung with the contents of the
collective unconscious and often seen as providing powerful literary images
Aristotelian logic. The tendency, based on a central philosophical premise of the Greek
philosopher Aristotle, to think in terms of either-or oppositions, that is, to belief that a given
object must either have a certain characteristic or not have that characteristic. Challenged
by poststructuralist theorists as too simplistic to describe the complexities and ambiguities
40
Literary Terms
41
of language. Also known as either – or logic, binary thinking, or dualistic thinking. Similar
to the Bakhtinian concept of monologism
Aura. The sense, described by the Marxist theorist Walter, of quasi-religious wholeness that
surrounds works of art, provoking awe and wonder in their viewers or readers. Benjamin
was concerned that this kind of response to art resembled the blind admiration of many
individuals for authority figures, especially of Germans for Adolf Hitler and the Nazis.
Avant –garde. Radical artistic and literary movement of the early to mid-twentieth century
Avant-garde artists employed highly unconventional techniques in an attempt to mount a
challenge to the tradition of bourgeois aesthetics, which they saw as aesthetically bankrupt
and politically authoritarian.
Base. In Marxist theory the economic system of a society, as determined by the dominant
mode of production. So-called vulgar Marxists tend to see the base as determining the
character of the society, or the superstructure Most Marxist critics see the base and
superstructure as interrelated in more complex was
Binary thinking. See Aristotelian logic.
Bourgeois cultural revolution. In Marxist thought, the historical process (extending roughly
from the fifteenth to the nineteenth century) through which the bourgeoisie gradually
supplanted the aristocracy and the Catholic Church as the most powerful ruling forces in
Europe, resulting in a shift from feudalism to capitalism as the dominant economic system.
Bourgeoisie. In Marxist theory, the class in a capitalist society that owns the means of
production and derives its wealth from exploitation of labor of the working class, or
proletariat.
Bourgeois subject. See subjectivity.
Bricolage. In structuralist and pieces of materials collected from various sources. In
literature, the assembly of texts as a patchwork of fragments from other texts.
Capitalism. Economic system (typical of modern Western Europe and North America) in
which the private capital or wealth is used to finance business activities, the profits from
which then go to increase that wealth. Under capitalism, a relatively small number of
individuals, or capitalists, own most of the means of production of wealth (for example,
factories and stores), while most individuals are employed 25 workers who do not share in
these profits but work for wages that must be set below the actual value of their labor in
order for profits to be made.
Carceral. Having to do with prisons. Used by Michel Foucault to describe the nature of
modern bourgeois societies, in which he see everyday life as controlled and administered to
an unprecedented extent. See carceral society.
Carceral society. For Foucault, a society that is based on fundamentally carceral practices;
that is, on the control of the behavior of the population through carceral techniques. Also
known as a "disciplinary society."
Carnivalesque. Having to with images of exuberant transgression, rule breaking, and
collapse of hierarchies. Associated with Mikhail Bakhtin's descriprion of the work of
Francois Rabelais and other writers.
Chronotope. The fundamental attitude toward space and time (and the relationship between
the two) that is prevalent in a given society at a given time. Coined by Mikhail Bakhtin,
who emphasizes that literary genres tend to be characterized by specific chronotopes.
Class. In Marxist theory, a group of people living under economic conditions that divide
their mode of life, their interests, and their culture from those of the other classes and put
them in hostile contrast to the latter. Under capitalism, the principal classes are the
bourgeoisie and the proletariat.
Class consciousness. According to karl Marx, the sense of belonging to a class and of
participating in the historical role of that class.
41
42
Cliché. An expression or idea used to commonly that it has ceased to convey any
substantial meaning but merely expresses habitual modes of speech or, at most stereotypical
ideas.
Collective unconscious. A repository of unconscious primordial desires and impressions
common to the entire human race. Associated with the psychoanalytic work of Carl Jung.
Colonial discourse analysis. Field of study in which various European and North American
texts (literary and otherwise) about the phenomena of colonialism and imperialism are
analyzed in order to determine characteristic attitudes toward these phenomena and the role
played by those attitudes in European and North American culture.
Colonialism. A particular type of imperialism in which citizens of a ruling central state
establish residence in foreign territories, or colonies, ruled by that state, usually in the
interest of economic or political domination of the colony by the central state.
Commodification. In Marxist thought, the process through which not only goods but also
services, ideas, activities, and ultimately human beings are reduced to the status of
commodities in a capitalist society. Somewhat similar to reffication.
Commodity. In Marxist terminology, a good produced for resale in a capitalist society.
Commodities are aspects of the capitalist economy that are valued not for their use value
but for their exchange value. Commodities are thus interchangeable and are not valued for
any genuine properties of their own.
Communism. Political and economic system (first envisioned by Karl Marx) based on
common ownership of property, especially of the means of production. In such a system,
each member works for the common benefit of all rather than for his or her own individual
interests. Marx summarized the basis of communist society with his famous slogan "From
each according to his ability, to each according to his need."
Contrast individualism.
Cultural materialism. The belief, associated especially with British Marxist thinkers such as
Raymond Williams, that the development of culture is closely related to the historical
development of material practices in a given society.
Cultural studies. Field in which the techniques and concerns often applied to the study of
literary texts are used to study culture as a whole. Cultural critics may continue to study
literary texts, but they focus on the way these texts contribute to the workings of the larger
culture that surrounds them. Such critics may also study film.
Television, advertizing, political speeches, and other "cultural texts" in order to try to gain
an understanding of the workings of culture.
Culture. Defined by Marxist critic Raymond Williams as the "lived experience of the
people, " culture in the general sense involves the entire range of social practices and
customs through which a society defines itself and conducts its everyday activities. In the
more restricted sense, culture usually means art, literature, and related aesthetic activities.
Decentering. The process (common to much contemporary criticism) of attempting to shift
attention from its traditional points of focus onto areas that have traditionally been ignored
or unappreciated. In poststructuralist criticism, the term also implies an emphasis on the
intertextual proliferation of meaning. Leading to multiple interpretations that may differ
substantially from the most obvious one.
Defamilliarization. Literally, making strange. The process by which works of at literature
present new and unfamiliar perspectives on reality, causing individual understand reality in
new and different ways. Believed by the Russian formalist be the most important strategy
for all works of art.
Defense mechanisms. In psychoanalysis, strategies (generally unconscious) thr which
individuals avoid dealing with unpleasant psychic by material by reconstit it in different
form, thus avoiding conflict or anxiety.
Demystification. The critical act of revealing the hidden assumptions behind gent accepted
attitudes or idras.
42
Literary Terms
43
Diachronic. Having to do with the way attitudes, practices, and systems change over
dialectical. Technique of thought and analysis that relies on the careful consider of
opposing alternatives before the reaching of any final conclusion. First devel extensively by
the German idealist philosopher G. W. F. Hegel, but now most, associated with the thought
of Karl Marx.
Dialectical materialism. Model of history, proposed by Karl Marx, that sees hist change as
driven primarily by the resolution of opposition between forces w material (economic)
interests are at odds.
Dialectical thought. Technique of thought in which conclusions are drawn only careful
consideration of opposing alternatives. Dialectical thought is partic crucial to Marxism,
thought Marv himself derived it from the work of predece especially the nineteenth-century
German philosopher G. W. F. Hegel.
Dialogic. The inherent ability of language to express multiple meanings simultane
especially because the same statement can mean different things in different co or to
different readers or listeners. Associated primarily with the theories of M Bakhtin, for
whom dialogism is a fundamental mode of thought that emph mulriple simultaneous
perceptions of reality. For Bakhtin, dialogism finds its su literary expression in the novel.
Disciplinary society. See carceral society.
Discourse. In the most general sense, any use of language. Now most frequently to refer to
a body of texts or statements that are conditioned by a common assumptions, attitudes, and
goals. This latter use is particularly associated wi work of Michel Foucault.
Division of labor. The process by which different kinds of work are assigt different
individuals in a given society. Ultimately leads to the kind of specialization typical of
modern capitalist societies and consequently (accor Karl Marx) to alienation of workers.
Dualistic thinking. See Aristotelian logic.
Dystopia. A society, originally envisioned as ideal, in which flaws in the conception or
abuses of the original system have caused the society to b oppressive to large numbers of its
inhabitants. See utopia.
Dystopian literature. Imaginative literary works that describe fictional dystopias.
As a means of criticizing or warning against current or potential practices real world.
Ego. Essentially equivalent, according to Sigmund Freud, to the conscious, thinking mind.
The ego is also the principal interface between the psyche and the outside world and is a
moderator between the authoritarian demands of the superego and the unmitigated desires
of the id.
Either-or logic. See Aristotelian logic.
Elizabethan. Relating to England during the reign of Elizabeth I (1558-1603)
Enlightenment. The historical period (roughly from the seventeenth through the nineteenth
century) immediately after the Renaissance in which reason, rationality, and scientific
inquiry became central values in European thought.
Epic theater. Type of drama, associated mostly with the work of twentieth-century German
dramatist Bertolt Brecht, that employs a number of unconventional techniques to call
attention to its status as a work of fiction and to encourage its audience to react to the drama
intellectually and critically rather than emotionally. See alienation effect, metafiction.
Episteme (also episteme). The fundamental conditions determining the characteristic style
in which knowledge is pursued and formulated in a given society in a given period.
Associated with the work of Michel Foucault, especially in Tbe Order of Tbings. In his
later work, Foucault emphasized that different disciplines might behave according to
different epistemes in the same historical period.
Epistemology. The branch of philosophy that deals with knowledge about being or
existence and the ways in which this knowledge is obtained.
Essentialist. An attitude marked by a belief that certain characteristics are inherent to
certain groups. Usually used in a negative sense to describe the overly simplistic way some
43
44
thinkers attribute inherent qualities to individuals on the basis of race, gender, or other
categories.
Exchange value. The price commanded by a good or service in a capitalist economy.
Determined, according to Karl Marx, by the total amount of human labor required to
produce the item rather than by the actual value of the uses to which it can be put.
False consciousness. An inaccurate perception of the social world resulting from
ideological practices that strives to conceal the true nature of social relations from
individuals. See ideology.
Feudalism. Economic system (typical of Europe in the Middle Ages) in which a hereditary
aristocracy maintained political power and land ownership, while granting the use of land
to individuals (serfs, or vassals) in return for obedience and service.
Figurative language. Language that, through various formal or stylistic devices, expresses
meanings that differ from the literal meaning of the language. Similar to commutative
language.
Formalism. Type of literary criticism that interprets literary works primarily through a
focus on the form, structure, and language of those works. Formalist critics tend to place
great emphasis on style and technique in the construction of literary works.
Prominent formalist schools include Russian formalism in the early twentieth century and
American New Criticism in the mid-twentieth century.
Frankfurt school. A group of twentieth-century German Marxist theorists (inch Theodor
Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Herbert Marcuse, and Jurgen Habermas) have been associated
with the Institute for Social Analysis in Frankfurt, Geri while the thinkers in this group may
differ significantly in their ideas, Fran School Marxists continue to place a great deal of
importance on the economics in a given society, even while often focusing on discussions
of culture and liter.
Genealogy. Type of historical research promulgated by Michel Foucault. Some similar to
archaeology, except that the results of genealogical research te emphasize similarities
between different historical periods, thought without gesting specific narratives models of
the historical development from period to another. In Madness and Civilization, for
example, Foucault demon: that certain attitudes toward madness in the eighteenth century
already con the seeds of nineteenth – century psychiatry, even though that psychiatry seen
make earlier approaches to madness obsolete.
Genre. A specific type of literary work, the members of which are connected it adherence to
certain characteristic conventions or techniques. The term is u: a number of different levels
by different critics. Some use it to mean funda literary modes such as comedy, romance,
tragedy, and satire. Others use it to basic literary forms such as fiction, drama, and poetry. It
may also be app subsets of these forms with varying levels of specificity. To some critics,
for ex the novel is a genre, whereas to others specific types of novels (the bildungs the
historical novel) are genre. The most sophisticate recent theories of gen been those by
critics such as Mikhail Bakhtin and Fredric Jameson. Who I emphasize the characteristic
ideology that lies behind a given genre.
Grotesque body. The aspects of the human body associated with activities such eating, and
excrement in which the boundaries of the individual body are to be open and permeable,
emphasizing the connection of human beings human beings and to the world around them.
Associated by Mikhail Bakht prominent images in the work of Francois Rabelais.
Gynocritics. Criticism that focuses on the study of literature by women, particl emphasize
the role of gender issues in such literature. Coinded by the femin Elaine Showalter. Also
called gynocriticism.
Hegemony. The process through which the bourgeoisie (though a minority) is power in a
capitalist society through processes of ideological dominat cause the proletariat to accept
bourgeois ideology and therefore submit to domination. Associated with the work of
44
Literary Terms
45
Antonio Gramsci, who arg bourgeois power resides more in ideological techniques of
persuasion than techniques of coercion.
Hermeneutic. Pertaining to interpretation. The science of hermeneutics deals phenomenon
of interpretation, especially of texts. This science has its roc interpretation and study of
sacred tests.
Heteroglossoa. Literally, multiple languages. Expresses the complex nature of societies,
which are informed by an intricate mixture of different attit modes of linguistic expression.
For Mikhail Baktin, the interaction at different attitudes and opinions of a society has a rich
potential that finds it literary expression in the novel.
Historicity. The characteristic of being related to the flow of history and of changing with
history.
Historiography. The discipline of the writing of history, or the study of different styles and
theories of the writing of history.
Humanism. Belief in the importance of human activity and of the ability of human beings
to solve problems common to humanity though rational action. Often implies a devotion to
studies promoting literature and culture as expressions of human concerns, especially
within the context of the Renaissance.
Hybridity. The property of being informed by differing social and cultural positions.
Postcolonial critics such as Homi Bhabha have emphasized that the colonial encounter
between European and non-European cultures resulted in a permanent modification and
influence of each culture by the other.
Id. According to Sigmund Freud, the portion of the human psyche that is the site of
unconscious, natural drives, a dark area of seething passion that knows only desire and has
no sense of moderation or limitation.
Idealism. The belief (associated with bourgeois philosphers such as G. W. Hegel and
Immanuel Kant) that certain universal abstract principles (like truth or beauty) provide a
fundamental basis for human endeavor and the design of human societies.
Compare metaphysical. Contrast materialism.
Identity theme. Characteristic patterns of interpretation and perception that define the
personal styles of individuals. According to Norman Holland, the meaning of a literary
work for a given reader is largely determined by that reader's identity theme.
Ideological State Apparatus. In the Marxist philosophy of Louis Althusser, any one of
numerous institution and practices that act to convince the general population (especially
the working class) to accept the ideology of the ruling class (especially the bourgeoisie).
Examples include schools, churches, the family, and culture.
Ideology. A particular view of the world, typically informed by a specific social and
political position, though that position may or may not be openly expressed. In much
traditional Marxist criticism, ideology (sometimes associated with "false consciousness") is
seen as a distortion of reality that helps the bourgeoisie maintain dominance over the
proletariat in capitalist society. Much recent Marxist criticism, however, recognizes that
this opposition between ideology and reality is simplistic.
Such critics, especially Louis Althusser, emphasize that perceptions of reality are
influenced by one or another kind of ideology.
Imaginary Order. In the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the area of the human psyche
dominated by the preverbal infantile stage of joyful fusion with the mother's body.
The primary locus of fantasies and images and thus of obvious importance for the study of
literature.
Imperialism. Political system in which a single central state rules a collection of other
territories, usually comprising citizens of nationalities different from that of the ruling state.
Generally believed by Marxist critics to be an inevitable consequence of the drive for new
markets and new sources of labor and materials that is central to capitalism.
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46
Individualism. Belief in the importance and autonomy of individual human beings a

opposed to the importance of the social group. Generally associated with bourgeon
ideology and with capitalism. Marxist critics note that individualism leads to a emphasis on
emphasis on competition, rather than cooperation, between individuals, thus makin it
possible for a bourgeois minority to exploit a working-class majority.
Inform. To make a substantive contribution to an idea or attitude, as when a desit for social
and economic justice informs Karl Marx's critique of capitalism.
Intentional fallacy. The belief (considered fallacious by the New Critics) that it meaning of
a work of literature is determined by the original intention of the autho
Interpellation. The "hailing of the subject" by dominant ideologies, that is, the proce
through which the identities of individuals are shaped and molded by the prevaility view of
the society in which they live.
Interpretive community. Groups of individuals that, because of shared training experience,
tend to employ similar interpretive strategies or to interpret texts similar ways. Associated
with the later work of Stanley Fish.
Intersubjectivity. The process of interaction or communication between differe individuals,
or subjects. Many recent critics (including Mikhail Bakhtin and a numl of Marxist and
feminist critics) have emphasized the importance of intersubjective as the source of
subjectivity, rather than the other way around.
Interiextuality. Term (coined by Julia Kristeva in reference to Mikhail Bakhtin's the of
language) that indicates the complex network of interrelations that ultimately all texts
together. May include overt forms such as allusion, but may also incl the more subtle ways
in which the system of language itself creates links among tr
Irony. Complex phenomenon through which language in one way or another imp a meaning
or meanings that differ from the literal meaning of that language. A for of figurative
language distinguished by the way the implied meaning often mo a direct challenge to the
literal meaning. Privileged by the New Critics as a cru property of the best literature.
Jacobean. Relating to England during the reign of King James I (1603-1625).
Kantian subject. See subjectivity.
Langue. In structuralist criticism, the rules and conventions that determine the way which a
language can be used or understood by its speakers or listeners.
Pecriture femimine. Literally, womwn's writing. Associated by Helene Cixous with fluid,
melodic language that is a natural result of feminie thought processes especially of a special
feminine relationship to the body.
Le parler femme. Literally, women's speech. Associated by luce Irigaray with the of
language use produced by women to help overcome their traditional domin: by men in
patriarchal society.
Liberal humanism. See liberalism.
Liberalism. Humanist political philosophy, central to capitalism, focusing on a beli
individual liberty, free enterprise, and democratic government. Generally im gradual social
and political reform leading to improvement and progress for so and for individuals.
Marxist critics see liberalism as an illusion intended to hide the economic exploitation that
is the true heart of capitalism. Also known as liberal humanism.
Literal language. Language that states its meaning in precise, direct, and unambiguous
terms. Similar to denotative language.
Local knowledge. See thick descriptions.
Logocentric. The notion (derived from the monotheistic religions of the Judeo-Christian
tradition) that there is an ultimate center and ground to philosophical truth Poststructuralist
theorists such as Jacques Derrida have argued that Western philosophy has traditionally
been informed by this mode of thought, which is insufficient for the appreciation of certain
complexities of language and reality Similar to metaphysical.
Magical realism. A literary mode (generally associated with third-world and especially
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Literary Terms
47
Latin American literature) in which fantastic and magical events are described in a
straightforward way that makes them seem unremarkable or unsurprising. The effect is to
suggest that seemingly fantastic events occur in the third world on a routine basis. Leading
practitioners of magical realism include Garcia Marquez.
Isabelle Allende, Gunter Grass, Ben Okri, and Salman Rushdie.
Manichean. Type of binary thought that tends to view reality in terms of radically opposed
pairs, each entirely alien to the other, such as good and evil. Postcolonial theorists have
emphasized the tendency of European colonialist thinkers to view the opposition between
Europeans and non-Europeans in these terms.
Materialism. The belief that physical reality (not abstract concepts) should be the basis for
all human endeavor. Generally implies a belief in the historicity of all human attitudes and
values, especially in the work of Karl Marx. Contrast idealism.
Material practice. Any activity that is ultimately related to the production and distri bution
of goods and services in a society.
Means of production. In Marxist thought, the material resources through which goods and
services are produced in a given society.
Menippean satire. Genre (named for the ancient Greek satirist Menippus) associated by
Mikhail Bakhtin with carnivaleque qualities in literature. Menippean satires tend to explore
both fundamental philosophical ideas and controversial current events.
They combine naturalistic detail with fantastic images. And they tend to combine the
formal features of numerous other genres.
Metafiction. Fiction that is largely about fiction. Rather than relate a narrative that is
intended to mirror reality, metafiction calls attention to its own status as fiction and to the
strategies through which it was constructed by its author. In drame, known as metadrama.
Metaphor. A form of figurative language in which two seemingly different ideas or images
are directly linked without the use of a connecting term such as "like" or "as." This linkage
invites a comparison between the characterisitics of the two ideas or images that
presumably produces a new and fresh insight. Thus, the metaphor "truth is beauty" links the
concepts of truth and beauty in ways that provide a new perspective on both. Often,
metaphors lose their power through overuse, and the become clichés.
Meraphysical. Associated with the belief that the truth of reality is determined abstract
concepts or forces that go beyond the physical world. Typically viewed I poststructuralist
critics as a negative characteristic leading to logocentric thought Compare idealism.
Metonymy. A form of figurative language in which one word or image is substituted
another with which it had a close and natural connection. In particular, metonyr often
involves the substitution of a characteristic of a the thing itself. F example, to say that one
lives "by the sweat of his brow" is a use of metonymy which sweat, a characteristic result
of hard work, substitutes for hard work its
Mimesis. The process by which art or literature represents reality. The fictional wo of
mimetic art is generally expected to resemble the real world.
Minor literature. Term coined by the French poststructuralist philosophers Gil Deleuze and
Felix Guattari to refer to literature written in a major European langue by an author whose
nationality is different from that implied by the language. F Kafka (a Czech Jew who wrote
in German) is their central example, though It writers in English (James Joyce, Samuel
Beckett) would also be good example Sometimes used now in the context of postcolonial
literature written in the langu of the formal imperial rulers.
Mirror stage. In the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the stage (at about six to eight
months of age) during which the infant begins to gain a sense of her own existe as a
separate entity and to establish an awareness of the boundaries of her body through its
literal mirror image or through outside objects-notably the mot
Mode of production. The system by which production of goods and service organized in a
given society. Examples include the feudal mode of production the modern era.
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48
Modernism. Important European and American artistic movement associated largely the
early twentieth century. Modernist works tend to be marked by intense for on style and
technique, which are often highly experimental. Modernist are is informed by an intense
sense of cultural and historical crisis. Though differ modernist writers (showing a wide
range of political and aesthetic attitudes) to this sense in very different ways. Leading
modernist writers include James Jo Franz Kafka, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot, and William
Faulkner.
Modernity. The historical phenomenon associated with the coming of the mo world, usually
beginning in the early decades of the twentieth century. Moder tends to be marked by a
radical alienation in which individuals must strive to a stable identity in a world wrought by
radical change and the destruction tradition. See modernism.
Monologism. A style of thought based on a belief that there is one correct visic the world.
Associated by Mikhail Bakhtin with certain shortcomings of the we philosophical tradition,
with implications that it is linked to political oppressie well. Informed by Aristotelian logic.
Somewhat similar to logocentric or metaphy thought.
Naturalism. Literary and artistic movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth
centuries. Naturalist literature is marked by an intense focus on detailed, almost scientific,
representation of very specifics of life. It often deals with the more negative aspects of
human existence and tends to see human life as determined by social and biological
conditions beyond individual control. Naturalist literature is often highly critical of the
economic exploitation central to capitalism. Leading naturalist writers include Emile Zola.
Upton Sinclair, Frank Norris, and Theodore Dreiser.
Oedipal drama. The crucial process during which, according to Sigmund Freud, the young
child must come to grips with the fact that his (and to an extent her) natural desires are
limited by sociality. In particular, the child must come to realize that his or her erotic desire
for the mother cannot be fulfilled because of the forbidding presence of the father.
Ontology. The branch of philosophy that deals with the nature or essence of being or
existence.
Organic unity. The ability of all of the parts of a well-structured literary work to combine
together to create a single, harmonious effect or impression. The term is derived from the
way in which the various parts of a plant work together to create a coherent, living whole.
Associated by the New Critics with the best works of literature, but often challenged by
poststructuralist critics as a fallacious criterion.
Orientalism. The discourse, or body of texts and statement, by which Europeans in the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries developed stereotypical views of non Europeans that
acted to produce an image of Europeans as superior, especially in terms of rationality and
responsibility. Derived from Edward Said's description of negative European stereotypes of
Middle Eastern Arabs.
Panopticon. A prison design, first proposed by the British thinker Jeremy Bentham and
important to nineteenth-century penal reform, in which the cells of prisoners are arranged in
a circle around a central observation tower. All prisoners can thus be kept under
surveillance at all times. Used metaphorically by Michel Foucault to describe the ability of
modern governments efficiently to keep track of the movements of their citizens in the
world at large.
Parole. In structuralist criticism, the collection of actual uses of language that constitute the
everyday life of a language.
Patriarchy. Literally, rule by the father. The tendency, prevalent in most of the world, for
societies to be dominated not only by men but also by masculine values and ideas.
Phenomenology. The branch of knowledge, growing from the work of such twentieth
century philosophers as Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, that deals with events as
they are registered by the human consciousness in the flow of time.
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Literary Terms
49
Phenomenological criticism is thus concerned with the ways works of literature are
perceived by their readers.
Pleasure principle. In psychoanalysis, the concept that, especially in infants. The fulfillment
of individual desire (of a primarily erotic variety, though the erotic for Sigmund Freud goes
well beyond conventional notions of the sexual) is the ultimate goal of life.
Polyphony. The process through which multiple voices (generally representing differer
social position and attitudes) interact in a literary text. Coined by Mikhail Bakhti to
describe the novels of Fyodor Dostoevsky.
Positivism. Philosophical system that recognizes only positive facts and observabl
phenomenon, usually emphasizing that the only valild facts or are those that can b verified
by scientific observation.
Postcolonial literature. Literature produced by writers from emerging nations that ha
previously been colonized by European imperial powers such as Great Britain an an France.
Leading postcolonial writers include Indian writers Salman Rushdie and Ani Desal; African
writers Ngugi wa Thiong'o. Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, and Buc Emecheta; and
Caribbean writers Derek Walcott and Michael Thelwell.
Postmodernism. Artistic and literary movement of the latter half of the twentie century
marked by an extension of the formal experimentation of modernism b by an ironic and
skeptical sense that differs strongly from the respect for the pow of art typically found in
modernist writers. Postmodernist literature tends to I playful and parodic and incorporates
elements from popular culture as well as tl tradition of "high" art. Leading postmodernist
writers include English I. Doctorow, Gabri Garcia Marquez. Thomas Pynchon, and salman
Rushidie.
Poststructuralism. General term for a variety of approaches to literature, philosophl and
other disciplines that arose in the late 1960s, largely as a reaction to what perceived as the
overly rigid techniques of structuralism. Poststructuralism is mark by a radical skepticism
toward the metaphysical tradition of Western philosophy a by a strong belief in the capacity
of language to generate multiple meaning Poststructuralist critics thus often focus on the
language in a text and on its inhere ambiguities; but poststructuralist thought can be applied
to any number of fie or disciplines.
Privillege. To place special value on something for specific theoretical reasons. Sometin
associated by poststructuralist critics with the way in which Western phiosof tends to view
reality by dividing in to dual oppositions, then privileging on te in the opposition over the
other.
Proletatiat. According to the Marxist view of capitalism. The working class, wh interests
are diametrically opposed to those of its bourgeois employers.
Real Order. In the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the deepest and most inaccessi part of
the human psyche. It is human psyche. It is concerned with fundamental and emotion:
powerful experiences such as death and sexuality and is available to consciousn only in
extremely brief and fleeting moments of joy and terror that Lacan descry as jouissance.
Realism. Artistic and literary movement in which works are presumed to embody
fundamental characteristics of reality. Realistic works tend to focus on typ individuals in
typical situations, though they may at the same time imply lar themes and historical
processes. Marxist critics such as Georg Lukacs have emphas the importance of realism as
a dominant mode of European art and literature du the nineteenth century when the
bourgeoisie were at the height of its history power. Leading bourgeois realist writers
include Honore de Balzac, Gustave Flaut George Eliot, and Thomas Mann. Socialist writers
in the twentieth century attempted to adapt realism to the expression of a socialist message,
especially in the movement known as socialist realism.
Reality principle. In psychoanalysis, the concept (which must gradually be grasped by the
maturing child) that individual desires are limited by social reality.
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50
Reception aesthetics. An approach to literature (associated primarily with the work of the
German critics Jauss and Iser) that places its emphasis on the aesthetic experience of
readers while reading and interpreting a literary work.
Reflexivity. See self-referentially.
Reification. The process through which not only goods but also services, ideas, activities,
and ultimately human beings are reduced to the status of objects (stripped of all mystery or
spiritual significance) in a capitalist society. In particular, all traces of the human labor
involved in the production of goods are removed, making the goods seem self-sufficient.
Leads, according to Marxist theorist Georg Lukacs, to the fragmentation of different
aspects of capitalist society into separate realms and to the loss of any sense of wholeness
in life.
Renaissance. Literally, rebirth. The historical period, encompassing roughly the fourteenth
to the eighteenth century (especially as described in modern historical accounts originating
in the nineteenth century) in which the world view characteristic of Europe in the Middle
Ages was supplanted by a new spirit of humanism and artistic creativity. Contemporary
scholars often prefer the term early modern period to the term Renaissance, which seems to
imply that Western culture was dead during the Middle Ages.
Representation. The process through which meaning is expressed in a literary text. In
traditional philosophy, representation is the process through which language conveys some
preexisting meaning or reality. In recent criticism, especially poststructuralist criticism,
there is much emphasis on the way in which meaning is actually generated in the process of
representation.
Repression. In psychoanalysis, the process through which unpleasant or unacceptable
thoughts or desires are forced out of conscious awareness and relocated in the unconscious
mind. Also often used in a political sense to indicate the process by which authoritarian
governments forbid opposition to their policies.
Repressive State Apparatus. In the Marxist philosophy of Louis Althusser, any institution
that employs techniques of repression to coerce the general population (especially the
working class) into obedience to the commands of the ruling class (especially the
bourgeoisie). Principal example include the police and the military.
Self-referentiality. Characteristic of works that call attention to their status as art and that
represent the process of artistic creation rather than exterior reality. Similar to reflexivity.
See metafiction.
Semiotic language. In the work of Julia Kristeva, language that relies not on the direct
expression of preexisting meaning, but on the creation of emotional impressions and effects
through sound, rhythm, and related techniques. Kristeva associates this kind of language
with poetry, and feminine thought.
Sign. A unit (usually of language) in which some preexisting concept or thing is
represented. For the structuralist Ferdinand de sign has two parts. The signifter is the
written or spoken symbol itself, whereas the signified is the concept or meaning that the
symbol represents. In turn, the signified is generally seen as al abstract concept that stands
in for the physical item, or referent, being represented.
Signification. The process of expressing meaning through signs, usually language
Socialism. A political and economic system in which the good of the community as whole
is valued over the desires of specific individuals. Generally associate with the thought of
Karl Marx (for whom socialism is a transitional state between capitalism and communism),
though there are many different socialist traditions.
Socialist realism. A type of realism (generally associated with the literature of the soviet
Union) that attempts to convey an accurate representation of reality informed by strong
sense of the historical movement beyond capitalism to socialism. Socialism realist works
are generally also expected to be accepted to be accessible to ordinary readers an therefore
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Literary Terms
51
to eschew experimental stylistic strategies. Leading socialist realist written include Maxim
Gorky, Mikhail Sholokhov, Valentin Kataev, and Fyodor Gladkov.
Speech genres. Characteristic types of speech governed by specific conventions an
expectations, much like literary genres. Milkhail Bakhtin emphasizes that all language use,
including everyday speech, is governed by genre conventions of one kind another.
Stream of consciousness. A literary technique (usually associated with modernism) which
the inner thoughts and feelings of a character are represented in such a as to create the
impression that the reader is viewing these thoughts and feelin as they might occur to the
character herself.
Structuralism. A technique of thought that was extremely influential in Europe in middle
part of the twentieth century. Structuralist techniques basically rely on insight that
languages obey certain basic structural principles and that other hum practices and
institutions, being largely the products of language, obey simil principles. Structuralism
builds upon the linguistic theories of Ferdinand de Saussu and came to be applied to
virtually all areas of intellectual endeavor. Lacan appli structuralist methods to
psychoanalysis; Althusser applied structuralism to Marx analysis; and Levi- Struauss
applied structuralism to anthropology. Critics like Barth and todorov applied structuralism
to literary criticism.
Subaltern. Term coined by Italian Marxist Antonio Gramsci to refer to groups or class in a
society other than those that are politically dominant. The proletariat is the most important
subaltern class in Europe, though the term is now widely used connection with colonial
peoples, especially in the work of a grow of Indian historians who publish the journal
Subaltern Studies.
Subjectivity. Existence as an individual human being. In traditional bourgeois though the
subject is an autonomous, fully formed entity, typically referred to in crit as the bourgeois
subject, the Kantian subject, or the transcendental subject poststructuralist critics, the
subject is an unstable product of language continually in the process of creation. For mean
and feminist critics, the subject is the product of ongoing social inter other subjects.
Sublimation. In psychoanalysis, the process through which unconscious (usually repressed)
material reemerges in the conscious mind in a modified (and therefore more acceptable)
form.
Superego. According to Sigmund Freud, the portion of the unconscious mind that acts as a
sort of internalized representation of the authority of the father and of society, authority that
establishes strict limitations on the fulfillment of the unrestrained desires residing in the id.
Superstructure. In Marxist theory, the part of society that includes culture, politics, religion,
education, and various other practices and institutions that go beyond the economic sphere.
Marxist theorists such as Antonio Gramsci and Louis Althusser have emphasized the
importance of the superstructure as the focus of bourgeois control over society as a whole.
Surrealism. An avant-garde artistic movement of the early twentieth century. Surrealist art
strives to tap into the unconscious mind and to achieve striking effects through the
combination of seemingly incongruous images.
Symbol. A form of figurative language in which a specific, concrete image, or thing is used
to represent a larger and more complex set of associations and Ideas. For example, the well-
known hammer and sickle emblem involves two simple material objects, but their
combination creates a symbol that evokes an entire range of ideas and principles that are
central to Communism, such as a belief in the value of labor and the dignity and humanity
of workers.
Symbolic language. In the work of Julia Kristeva, language associated primarily with the
direct expression of preexisting meaning. Kristeva associates this kind of language with
masculine thought.
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Symbolic Order. In the psychoanalysis of Jacques Lacan, the area of the human psyche
(mostly in the conscious mind) that is primarily concerned with language and symbolic
representation.
Synchronic. Having to do with the nature of practices or attitudes prevalent at a given point
in time.
Technologies of the self. The process, described by Michel Foucault in his later work,
through which individuals develop their own identities in relationship to the structure of
power in the society around them.
Teleological. Relating to or tending toward a specific final goal or conclusion.
Text. In traditional criticism, the actual words of a given work. In poststructuralist criticism,
a replacement for the notion of a "work" to indicate the belief that works are not
autonomous, self-contained artifacts but always engage in extensive relationships with
other works, if only because they consist of language, as do the other texts.
Textuality. In poststrucralist criticism, describes the dynamic relationship between literary
works and the system of language. Suggests the existence of the work in dynamic tension
with other works and with the activities of the reader or critic.
Thich descriptions. Detailed descriptions of a limited aspect of the ideas and practices of a
given society at a given time. Associated with the anthropology of Clifford Geertz and
adapted for use by new historicist literary critics. Similar to local knowledge.
Totalizing. Having to do with a mode of thought that attempts to encompass a broa range of
phenomena within a single systematic theory. Used in a negative sense b poststructuralist
critics, who believe all totalizing theories to be simplistic. Uses I a positive sense by
Marxist critics such as Georg Lukacs and Fredric Jameson indicate the power of Marxist
thought to explain and describe a broad range social and cultural phenomena in coherent
and consistent ways.
Transcendental subject. See subjectivity.
Typicality. In the Marxist philosophy of Georg Lukacs, the property of being represe tative
of large historical forces in a given society at a given time.
Use value. The actual value of the uses to which a good or service can be put. Relative
unrelated, according to Karl Marx, to the market value of the item in a capitali economy.
Utopia. An ideal society. Now often associated with unreasonably idealistic visions such a
society, but believed by many Marxist critics (especially Fredric Jameson) be a necessary
element of any genuine vision of political change. See dystopia.
Vernacular. The everyday language used by the common people of a given society.
Woman's sentence. Term coined by Virginia Woolf to indicate her belief that women
writers should develop their own characteristic styles of expression rather the being forced
to employ styles that have been developed in the course of a litera tradition dominated by
men.
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CHAPCHER 2
Literary History
Middle Age (1485)

The four and half centuries between the Norman Conquest in 1066, which effected radical
changes in both language and culture of England, and about 1500, when the standard
literary language had become recognizable "modern English" that is, the language we speak
and write today. The medival period in English literature extends for more than 800 years,
from Cadmon's Hymm at the end of the 7th century to Everyman at the end of the 15th.
The immediate effect of aristocracy.
During the Middle Ages there was a great influence of French ? language on the English
language.
Latin which had always been and continued to be the language of the international church,
produced a fairly rich literature in England, especially in 12th century. When written
English begins to reappear at the end of the 12th century, the larger part of it carries the
stamp or at least semi-popular origin, indeed, considered in it bulk Middle English literature
is a popular literature. Its origin in the orders of society below the top provides its most
striking contrast with old English literature; most of the latter seems to be uttered by a
singal aristocratic voice, grave, decorous, responsible, speaking in terms of high communal
aspiration. Middle English Literature is uttered by a medley of different voices, dealing
with wide range of topics in a great diversity of styles and tones and genres. Originality of
thought is a rare feature of this literature, they often seem to be saying precisely the same
thing as each other. The women's place in society was recognized in literature, and this
recognition undoubtedly reflects a changing attitude in history itself. There are no arch –
feminists in literatur before chaucer's Wife of Bath. The lack of originality in Middle
English literature is party due to the attempt by many writers, both religious and secular, to
make their works reflect the unchanging principles of Medieval Christian doctrine. The
inevitability of change – for the worse, even in the lives of people already apparently
wholly wretched – is one of the most insistently repetitive themes of Middle English
literature. The great age of medieval romance had been the 12th and early English literature
flowered suddenly and inexplicably in three great poets, writing expression to almost all
characteristic genres of Middle English. The author of Sir Gawin and the Green Knight
notonly produced the best romance of the entire period but also wrote some of its best
religious poetry. William Langland's achievement in Piers Plowman is important both in
literature and in history, since he faced squarely the great religious and social issues of his
day, and these became the great issues of the following century and a half. Langland's anti-
ecclesiastical satire played an important part in bringing on the reformation of the church.
If the 15th century in England lackes great names, it is nevertheless a period in which
popular literature flourished. Some of the best lyrics, religious and secular date from this
time; and this was also the century in which many of the ballads were composed. It was
also the period of much activity in drama. The Mystery plays, which had probably become
54
established in the previous century, continued to be performed widely. G. Chaucer's

Canterbury Tales is an example of the basic human paradox which places what people are
in opposition to what they think they are or pretend to be. The elements of the portrait are
divided between the critical and admiring.
Sir Thomas Malory's (1405-1471) book (Morte Darthur) is arractive not only because it is
the best and most complete treatment of the story of Arthur and his knights but also because
it is one of the greatest pieces of prose in English. Malory was the first English writer to
make prose had always been. He is in particular a master of naturalistic dialogue. "Death of
Arthur" the incident that gives that gives the book its title though the book itself concerns
the whole life of Arthur, is one of Malory's finest passages and the one on which Tennyson
based a famous IdyII. Medieval drama consist Mystery, Miracl and Morality.
Rhyme is condemned by some as being the invention of the Goths and Huns.
Protestant bais enters in too. The Middle Ages were Catholic, so rhyme considered on a
part with poetry. Puttenham calls rhyme "the idIe invention of monastical men. "Middle
Age is a crucial time in the history of the English language and literature. Middle English
was the language which resulted from the modification of Anglo – Saxon after the Norman
Conquest in 1066 and which was spoken and used as a vehicle for literature until about
1500 when the London dialect (that used by Chaucer), became the standard literary
language. An Anglo Norman period in which a French Dialect dominated non-Latin
literature lasted about 1350. After that date especially during the regin of Richard II (1377-
1400), Middle English literature the age of Medieval Dramas, the Miracle and Morality
Plays, of popular lyrics and Ballads.
Dominant genre of the Middle Ages: Religious Poetry
Common Subject and theme: Heroic ideals-Heroic narratives which is called "epic", it
characterized by a solemn dignity of tone and elevation style. Their poems were written
down, but recited aloud from memory. The immortality that old heroes had sought was
achieved through poetry, and poetry in turn gave inspiration to leter men in leading their
own lives. The vast bulk of old English poetry is specifically Christian, devoted or religious
subject.
Style: Middle English text such as Chaucer's written in a dialect which is the ancestor of
modern standard English. The genius for heroic poetry the Anglo-Saxons brought with
them when they came to Britian, as they poebably also brought with them the alliterative
from. The romance has certain typical features:
1. It generally concerns knights and involves a large amount of fighting as well as a number
of miscellaneous adventures.
2. It makes liberal use of the improbable, often of the supernatural.
3. It is involved with romantic love.
4. Characterization is standardized, so that heroes, heroines, and wicked stewards Causing
any disturbance in the narrative.
5. The plots generally consist of a great number of event and the same event is apt to occure
several times within the same romance.
6. The style is apt to be easy and colloquial – not infrequently loose and repetitious.
Major Writers and works of Middle Age
1. Beowulf : The greatest Germanic epic

2. Cadmon : Hymn
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Literary History
55
3. Battle of Maldon
4. The Wandered : Christian Lament
5. The Seafarer : Christian Lament
6. Layamon : Brut (1205) (The first treatment in English of the Arthurian
legend)
7. John Gower : The Lover's Confession
8. Sir Gawain and Green knight
9. The Pearl
10. W. Langland : Piers Plowman
11. ……… : Everyman (1485): Morality play
12. G. Chaucer: (1343-1400)
1. Translation of Roman de la Rose (Dream Vision)
2. The book of the Duchess(1370) (Dream Vision)
3. Troilus and Criseyade (1385) (Courtly love)
(an adaptation of Boccaccio's IL Filostrate)
4. The Parliament of Fowls (1375-58)
5. The Canterbury Tales (1386)
6. House of Fame (Dream Vision)
13. F. J. Child: The English and Scottish popular Ballads
14. St. Steven and King Herod
15. Sir Thomas Malory (1405-1471)
Morte Darthor (1406-70)
16. W. Caxton (1422-1491) : England's first printing establisher
Canterbury Tales
Author: G. Chaucer (1340-1400) (He is the father of English poetry)

Type of work: Poetry (Its rhyme depends on ancient Germanic
pronounciation)
Kind and school: Chivalric romance – folk tradition and Saint's legend
Setting: Time: Remoto Anitquity to fourteenth century.
Place: B ritian
Style: Royal Ryhme (Seven Lines poetry)
Main Characters: 1. Theseus
2. Emily
3. Palamon
4. John
5. Absolam
6. Summoner
7. Yeomen (devil)
8. Fox
9. Cecilia
10. The Queen
Main Stories: 1. The Prologue
2. The Kinght's tale (Romance-This is not Arthurian Story)
3. The Miller's tale (Fabliau – Octasyllablic)
4. The Friar's tale
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5. The Pardoner's tale (Sermon, Exemplum)

6. The Nun's Priest's tale (Animal Fable)
7. The Second Nun's tale
8. Reeve's Tale
9. Troilus and Criseyade (ciourtly love)
10. Monk Tale: Ca series of Tragedies)
11. Legend of Good women (unfinished-Heroin couplet)
12. The Parson's Tale
13. The Squire's Tale
Analysis: G. Chaucer, the first great poet in English literature, left behind him a work of
perennial attraction and enjoyment. Throughout the text, Chaucer, who places himself
along with other pilgrims as a naive, unobservant traveling companion, uses his persona to
effect satire and irony in the portraits. The reason for this great work's popularity lies in the
variety of tales. Chaucer handles with equal facility different genres of medieval literature
from the courtly romance told by the knight down to the bawdy tales of the Miller and
Reeve.
In the collection of twenty-four stories, there is something for everyone.
Chaucer also handles with dexterity different levels of language: courtly speech bawdy
expressions, elegant prayers-language of church, street and tavern. He can also use a
clipped reporting style and torn out a parody of the excesses in metrical romance. He has at
command a whole bag of rhetorical tricks. Only the "The Parlement of Fowles" among
other works of Chaucer is not based on the French model of poetry. In his works there are
all of the following styles except lyric, i. e. heroic couplet satire and realism.
The Sixteen Century (1485-1603)
Renaissance (1500-1660) Elizabethan (1558-1603)

(Golden Age of English Literature)
The 16th century in England is the age of the Tudor Sovereign.
Foremost among factors that shaped the Renaissance in England were the Tudor monarchs
themselves.
After fall of the fall of Constantinople, political and social order was restored and Henry
VII came to the throne in 1485.
Seven years after Henry VII became king, Columbus discovered America (1492). During
the 15th century a few English clerics and government officials has journeyed to Italy and
had seen something of the extraordinary cultural and intellectual movement flourishing in
the city – States there was only near the end of the century that Italian influence came to be
important, and it was not until the accession of Henry VIII to the throne in 1509 that a
notable Renaissance took place in England Individualism exerted a strong influence upon
the English Renaisance literature as did many other factors such as the Protestant
Reformation, introduction of printing by Caxton, which led to a commercial market for
literature, the spirit of nationalism, the revitalized university life, courtly patronage, and the
new science which led to the scientific approach to life and nature.
A great leader of the intellectual movement known ad humanism was Sir Thomas More His
masterpiece "Utopia" was written in Latin. Elizabethan education was based upon the
medieval triviom (grammer, logic and quadrivium (arithmetic, geometry, astronomy and
music). The age of the humanists had emphasized of the value of the classical language;
Cicero and the other masters of rhetoric were imitated in their own tongues. But in the Italy,
France and England alike there came to be a revolt against this sterile and slavish imitation
of the classics. After Martin Luther nailed his famous thesis to the church door in
Wittenberg in 1517, the Reformation itself gathered force Erasmus and more drew back.
Humanism and Reformation for a while seemed to be hotile forces.
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The Elizabethan drama did not begin in theatres but in the inns of the Court of London, it
began with tragedies written by gentlemen who practiced the law and in their spare time,
tried to copy Seneca.
Where, Ralf Roister Doister by Nicholas Udall and Grammer Curton's Needle by William
Stevenson are comedies of Mid Elizabethan; the Spanish Tragedy by Thomas Kyd is a pre-
Shakespearian play which foreshadows Hamlet.
The Reformation was a return to pure christianity.
If the morality play Everyman at the end of the 15th century marks the end of the "Middle
Ages", we must look for the beginnings of modern drama to the household of John Morton,
Archbishop of Canterbury. Interludes and morality plays continued to be popular down to
shakespear'es lifetime, but the development of the drama into a sophisticated art from
required another influence – the classics. In the middle of century we find a schoolmaster,
Nicholas Udall, a classical comedy in wrote English, based upon the Latin comedies his
students had been reading. He called it Ralph Roister Doister. The mid-16th century
contribution to the type of literature represented by Boccaccio' Falls of IIIustrious Men,
Chaucer's Monk's Tale and Lydgat's Falls of Princes was a collection of verse compliments
called The Mirror for Magistrates. The first regular English tragedy was called Gorboduc
or Fellex and Porrex; it was written by two lawyers, Thomas Sackville and T. Norton. It is
important that Gorboduc is in blank verse rather than in one of the awkward verse forms
characteristic of much midecentury writing. Much of the satire of the period is directed
against the superficiality and treachery of the court atmosphere. "A thousands hopes, but all
nothing", Wailed Lyly's" a hundred promises, but yet nonthing." The verse forms used by
the Elizabethans range from the extremely simple four – line ballad stanza through the
rather complicated form of the sonnet to the elaborate and beautiful 18-line stanza of
Spensers Epithalamion. Henry Howard who introduced blank verse into English and helped
the sonnet in the reign of Henry VIII, was also a practitioner of a form of iambic couplet in
which the first line had twelve syllables and the, second fourteen, this verse form, called
"poulter's measure", was the most common verse form in the 60's and 70's. Sonnets which
the Elizabethans often called "quatorzains' " using the term "sonnet" loosely for any short
poem, are fourteen – line poems in iambic pentameter with elaborate rhyme scheme. The
most common Italian form, which Wyatt, Sidney and others imitated, was divided
structurally in to the octave (The first 8 lines) and the sestes (last six).
The typical rhyme scheme was abba abba cdd ee. The so-called English sonnet, introduced
by Surrey and practiced by Shakespear is structurally three quatrains and a couplet: abab
cdcd efef gg. Spenser the most exprientntal and most gifted prosodist of the century,
preferred a form that is harder to write and richer in rhymes: abab bcbc cdcd ee.
The six line "Troilus Stanza" and seven line Rhyme Royal stanza both practiced" by
Chaucer survived into 16th century. Shakespeare used the former in "Venus and Adonis"
and the later in The Rape of Lucrece; that popular collection of historical poems. The
Mirror of Magistrates, features Rhyme Royal.
The pastoral convention presented a simple and idealized world inhabited by shepherds and
shepherdesses concerned not all with war or politics or commerce.
Its business consisted of tending the flocks, friendly poetic contests among shepherds, love
and the pursuit of contentment rather than fame or fortune. Pastoral lyrics expressed the
joys of pastoral life or disappointment in love. Pastoral eclogues were dialogues between
shepherds in which a poetic contest was staged, or there was serious, satirical comment on
abuses in the great world concealed in the disguise of the homely local concerns of country
folk. There were pastoral dramas and pastoral romances (Prose fiction) which embodied
the same values of Otium (leisure), freedom form pride and ambition and pursuit of humble
contentment.
Another popular convention was that of the mythological erotic poem derived from Ovid
mainly but influenced by Italian imitations of him. In 17th century a newer treatment of the
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convention returned to the frank sensuality of the Latin amatory poets and allowed for
elaborate mythological decoration of the narrative without worrying about moral propriety
or allegorical interpretation.
The Elizabethan Age was the age of great economic and political changes, nationalistic
expansion, commercial growth, and religious controversy. It witnessed the development of
English drama to its highest level and outburst of lyric poetry. As a result, this age was
called age of singing birds.
The Elizabethan sonnet depended upon a convention established by Petrach. The
conventional forms for satire were less well fixed in the 16th century than in some later
periods, though there is a good deal of Elizabethan satirical verse. The epigram was a form
that flourished, both in classical tradition of Martial and in the lyric form of words for a
madrigal; the famous "The Silver Swan" is an example. There were conventions for the
heroic poem, of which Spenser's Faerie Queen is the prime example. The classical epics of
Homer and Virgil had their influence, but so did the romantic.
In "Renaissance" Religion" changed radically with the new Protestant reforms.
The revival of interest in Greek literature lead to a new breed of classical scholars called
Humanists of whom Erasmus is one of the most famous. Last but very significant the new
technology of printing with moveable type, developed in the 15th century, facilitated and
quickened the spread of new ideas and knowledge. The term Renaissance was a 19th
century invention, coined by looking back at the period. It is doubtful whether those
participating in the burgeoning of the arts and ideas had such a clear view of the
significance of their own intellectual endeavours, although they were conscious of the
intellectual ferment around them. The word Renaissance can be applied to any equivalent
flowering of the arts and scholarship as occurred, for instance, in 12th century Europe.
Humanists were enemy of hypocrisy and late medival pretense that did not care for ideal
society of peace unity and piety. They wanted to rebuild a new society based upon the
highest ideals of ancient Greece and Rome.
Italian Epics of Ariosto and Tasso
The Dance of Death and related images were still living symbols to the Elizabethan
imagination. The Elizabethan spirit has been described as "sensuous, comprehensive
extravagant, disorderly for beauty, abounding zest for life."
The thought and feeling of Shakespeare's contemporaries was far more deeply affected by
Christian Humanism than by the extravagances of Marlow.
Some of the cynical undercurrent in shakespear's Hamlet and Troilus and Cressida reflects
the spirit of the time. The literary criticism of the Renaissance was coloured by the social
conditions of the age.
Edmund Spenser is a poets' poet and a magic mirror of the English Renaissance.
The Masque was a form of entertainment during the Renaissancec. The most appropriate
definition of "Renaissance is the revival of interest in the standards and models formulated
by the ancient classical masters in art and literature. The most influential Roman dramatist
during Elizabethan era is Seneca. The typical Senecan theme of vengeance is most
remarkably imitated by Elizabethan dramatists.
Dominant genre: Drama
Subject: Love – Man – Society
Style: Blank verse
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School: Classic
Masterpiece: Shakespeare's works
Dominant figure: Shakespeare
Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Elder (1503-1542)

The Sonnet was introduced into English by Wyatt. He took his subject matter from
Petrarch's sonnets, but his rhyme scheme came from other Italian modles. He is the poet
responsible for introducing the personal note into English poetry. Sonnet is the abbrivation
of Italian "Sonetto". Then sonnet began to take shape as a special material form under Fra
Guittone d'Arezzo in the 13th century. None of his poems appeared in print in his life time
and his first published work was Certain Psalms …
Drawn into English Metre, a version of the penitential psalms from a paraphrase by
Arention. More of his poetry, lyrics and satires appeared in Tottel's Micellany (1557).
"They Flee from Me "Shows his ability to combine native traditions and classical influence.
He is responsible for introducing the personal note into English poetry.
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Sideny's romance exists in two forms, called the "Old Arcadia and the New Arcadia"
The New Arcadia" was published in fragmentary form, almost three books, in 1590. The
Arcadia in both its old and new forms, is the most original work of English prose fiction
produce before 18th century. Sideny's Astrophel and Stella ("Starlover and Star") is the first
the great Elizabethan sonnet cycles. Sidney called poetry his "unelected vocation". His
achievement as the author of the most important work of prose fiction in his age, the most
important piece of literary criticism, and the most important sonnet cycle surely qualify him
as a major author. He uses dialogue, is often colloquial, and he heightens the situation as
much as he can be within his sonnets. He uses no standard conventional phrases.
He proves the superiority of poetry over history and philosophy. He lays emphasis on the
"transport" aspect of poetry related to the instructive quality of poetry. For him poetry is an
art of imitation, a speaking picture with this end-to TEACH AND TO DELIGHT. For him
the purpose and function of poetry is delightful instruction. Poetry is a creative process
through which the poet converts the Brazen world to a Golden one. His theory of tragedy is
based upon Platonic view points.
Sideny's Main Works

1. Old Arcadia (1580)
2. Defense of Poesy and Apology for Poetry (1595)
3. The Courtier
4. Astrophel and Stella (1591) (First English Sonnet Sequence)
5. New Arcadia (1590)
6. Lady of May (1578) (For entertainment of Elizabeth)
Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

He is the greatest nondramatic poet of the English Renaisance. He was interested in theories
of poetry and in experiments in quantitative versification in English; it also shows that
Spenser had ambitions plan as a poet. The Shepheardes Calender published in 1579 and
dedicated to Sidney in the verses. The Calender consists of twelve pastoral eclogues one for
each month of the year. Each is prefaced by an illustrative woodcut.
The eclogues of the Calender are divided into three groups plainitive, recreative and moral.
Spencer used a deliberately archaic language. There are thirteen different meters in the
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Shepheardes Calender: Three kinds of couplet; three kinds of four – line ? ; three kinds of
six line stanza; stanza of eight, nine and ten lines; and a setina.
It poetry strains at archaism it belongs to Spenser.
Spenser is sometimes called the "Poet's poet" because so many later English poets have
learned the art of versification from him. In the 19th century alone his influence may be seen
in Shelley's Revolt of Islam, Byron's Child Harold's Pilgriamge, Keat's Eve of St. Agnes
and Tennyson's The Lotos Eaters.
He is strongly influenced by Renaissance Neoplationism but remains always firmly
grounded in the earthiness and practicality. In Faerie Queene he reaches toward the highest
ideals of the Renaissance. He was strongly influenced by Puritanism in his early days. The
Faerie Queene is his masterpiece. It is a "Courtesy book". Like Castiglion's Courtier. It
exhibits the virtues of Holiness, Temperance, Chastity, Friendship, Justic and Countesy. It
consists of twelve canots as Virgil's Aeneid. The theme is not arms and man but something
more romantic – "Fierce warres and faithful loves." He is essentially a psychological poet
whose primary concern is feeling. The Faerie Queene is an allegorical and descriptive style.
Fletcher in the "The Purple Island" (1633) says, "Spenser was discouraged, scorned, his
writincg vilified poor, man, he lived; poorly man died, Although Arthur is not really a
major character in any of books of the Faerie Queene, he does appear in each book as a
Christ-Figure personification of Perfection.
Spenser's Main Works

1. The Shepheardes Calender (1579)
2. Mother Hubberds Tale: A political Satirte (1579)
3. The Faerie Queene (1609) (The greatest Renaissance Romance)
4. Compliants (Mother Hubberds Tale, The Ruines of time and Daphnaida (1591)
5. Amoretti and Epithalamion (1595)
6. A View of the Present State of the Ireland (1633)
Christopher Marlow (1564-1593)

He had written his tremendously successful play Tamburlaine. Tamburlaine dramatizes
the exploits of a 14th century Scythian Shepherd (Mongol chieftain) who conquered much
of the known world. When one of his victims accuses him of bloody cruelty, Tamburlaine
answers that ambition to rule is embedded in the laws of nature and in basic human
psychology. The English theater and heard nothing like this before.
Here is a resonant. Rhetorical blank verse. His major tragedies, all portray a hero who
passionately seeks power, power of rule, power of money and the power knowledge,
respectively.
Marlow's Main Works

1. Tamburlaine (1585)
2. Hero and Leander – narrative poem (1598)
3. Edward II (1594)
4. Dido, Queen of Carthage (1594)
5. The Massacre at Paris (1598)
6. Dr. Faustus (1604) (Blank Verse)
7. The Jew of Malta (1633)
8. Translation of Ovid's Amores (1599)
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William Shakesoeare (1564-1616)

About the turn of the century Shakespeare wrote his great romantic comedies and his
concluding history play in the Prince Hal series, Henry V. The next decade was the period
of the great tragedies: Hamlet. Macbeth, … About 1610 Shakespeare apparently retired to
Stratford, though he continued to write both by himself and in collaboration. This is the
period of the "Romances" or "Tragicomedies". Aside from his two early nondramatic
poems, he devoted his genius primarily to the stage.
He contributed the strange and beautiful poem, the Phonix and the Turtle to an anthology
in 1601. The biographical background of the sonnets has aroused much speculation, but
very little of it is convincing. The poems themselves are what is important. Thought the
vocabulary is often simple, the metaphorical style of the sonnet is rich. The rhetorical
strategy of the sonnets is worth careful attention. The imagery comes from a wide variety of
sources: gardening, navigation, law, farming, business, picturial art, art, astrology, somestic
affairs. Certain motifs are clear: a series celebrating the beauty of a young man and urging
him to marry; some sonnets to a lady, some sonnets (like 144) about a strange triangle of
love involving two men and a woman; sonnets about a rival poet; and incidental sonnets of
moral insight, like 129, and 146. The themes of "love, service and death" are commen in
Shekespeare.
Though irony is very commen in tragedy. His plays which reflects Senecan influence is
Richard III. His King Lear reveals the Sophoclean theme of disguise and inward vision
expressed in Oedipus Rex. Shakespeare is the master of metaphorical figures.
Shakespeare's Main works:

1. Comedy of Error
2. The two Gentlemen of Verona (1591)
3. The Taming of the Shrew
4. Titus Adnronicus
5. Richard III (Senecan Tragedy)
6. Henry VI (1591) (The First Work)
7. Venus and Adonis (1593) (Narrative poem)
8. The Rape of Lucrece (1594) (Narrative poem)
9. Love's Labour's Won
10. Love's Labour's Lost
11. Midsummer Night's Dream
12. The Merchant of Venice
13. Romeo and Juliet (tragedy)
14. Richard II
15. Henry IV, V
16. Much Ado About Nothing (1598)
17. As You like it (1599) (Romantic Comedy) (Problem play)
18. Twelfth Night (Problem play)
19. All's Well, That Ends Well (Tragicomedy)
20. Measure For Measure(Tragicomedy)
21. Troilus and Cresside (Tragicomedy)
22. The Merry Windsor
23. Julic Caesar (1599) (Tragedy)
24. Hamlet (1601) (Tragedy)
25. Othello (1606) (Tragedy)
26. King lear (1605) (Tragedy)
27. Macbeth (1606) (The Shortest Tragedy)
28. Antony and Cleopatra (Tragedy)
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29. Corliolanus
30. Timon of Althens
31. Pericles, Prince of Tyre
32. Cymbelin (Tragicomedy)
33. The winter's Tale (The Shortest Play) (Tragicomedy)
34. The Tempest (1611) (The last Work) (Tragicomedy)
35. Henry VIII
36. Phonix and Turtle (Poem)
37. Sonnets (1609)
Sir Thumas More (1478-1535)

More's famous philosophical romance Utopia (the name means "nowhere") is the father of
a whole class of writing, from Bacon's New Atlantic (1626), through swift's Gulliver's
Travels (1726), Butlers Erewhon (1872) and Bellamy's Looking Backward (1888), to the
"science fiction"
It drives part from Platpo's Republic and in part from the accounts of ravelers like Amerigo
Vespucci (1507) and hence is romatic. Utopia was written in Latin.It represents itself as a
traveler's tale, told by a veteran mariner. Itself as a traveler's tale, told by a veteran mariner.
It is not presented as a mere dream or impractical fancy, as the modern use of the word
"utopain", somerimes suggests. He was hostile to Reformation. Utopia is a rational world
governed by Humanistic and not Christian principles.
His books is divided into two books. The first written in dialogue form, the corruption of
the European civil life is criticized. In the second the traveler R. Hythloday describes the
institution of Utopia with ironic refrences to the real world with which the listeners are
familiar.
Seventeen Century (1603-1660)

-Jacobean Age (1603-25)
- Jacobean Age (1603-25)
- Caroline Age (1625-49)
- Common Wealth (1649-1660)
The main social problems which exercised the century can be broadly stated with their
solutions, in who sentences. In the religious sphere, the basic issue was: How far should the
refoemation of the Protestant church be carried? And the solution accompolished in 1688
was, "As far as each indivudual self – defined religious group wants." In the sphere of
constitional politics, the basic issue was: How much authoirty should the monarch have
independed of the parliament? And the solution accompolished in 1688 was, "Almost
none".
The characteric forms of literature under Elizabeth were courtly. Courtries patronized the
theater by attending plays and by lending the prestige of their names to different acting
companies The sonnet sequance, the pastoral romance (Sidney's Arcadia), the chivalric
allegory (Spenser's Faerie Queen), the learned sermon, the erotic idyII (Hero and Leander
or Venus and Adonis), the masque, the epic-all these were courtly forms, implying courtly
readers, With the obvious and immensely impoetant exception of Milton, hardly any of the
high literature of the 17th century was the work of Puritans or men sympathic to Puritan
cause. One may well think of metaphysical poets who followed Donne (Herbert, Crashaw,
Vaughan, Cowley, Cleveland) as trying to draw out the traditional lyric of love and
devotion by stretching it, under deliberate mental pressure, to encompass new unities from
which a sense of strain and violent effort was rarely absent. In the opposite direction,
Jonson and his "sons" the Cavalier poets (Carew, Herrick, Waller, Dacenant) generally tried
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to compress and limit their poems, giving them a high finish and a strong sense of easy
domination at the expense of their explicit intellectual content.
Like any great poet, Milton was capable of profiting from the study of craftsmen whom he
had no intention of imitating, and he did profit by study of Donne and Johnson. Milton's
style was fullu fromed by the period of the late 1630's he found his voice, it is usual to say,
in Lycidas (1637) but he defined as his "duty" kept him through the next twenty years at the
uncongenial labour of producing topical prose pamphlets on the public affairs. When he
finally brought it forth in 1667, Paradise Lost appeared to be a poem written by a man
formed in one civilization for an audience, reader in another.The heroic couplets which
were Dryden's favored poetic vehicle had developed only gradually in the hand, of the
Cavalier poets, froms rather jolting and irregular meter toward the poised and sinewy unites
out of which Dryden built his verse paragraphs. These couplets were less chocked with
learning that Milton's blank verse.Dryden is more a poet of statement, Milton is more
When the theaters reopened in, they were forced at first to rely on a backlog of twently –
year – old plays but gradually they built up a repertoire of of comedies (generally bswdy)
and tragedies in the rhetorical declamatory manner which gave them, quite as much as the
heroic couplets in which they were cast, the name of "heroic tragedies" Both these
fashions, like so much else in Restoration were extreme and temporary. Dryden who
practiced both modes, lived to see them both at the end – the heroic tragedies under weight
of their own pomposity, the bawdy comedies under the attack of an infuriated clergyman,
Jeremy Colier.
Sonnets were all range in the last years of Elizabeth, the first years of James.
Almost always they dealt with erotic themes, often they were linked together in sequances
to suggest if not to tell, a story. Donne turned the sonnet primarily to religious themes.
Milton's sonnets are few and mostly political. Like epic poetry in our day, sonnets just
disappeared. Allegory suffered an even more curious fate. It was of course the essential
method of Spenser's great poem, and a major ingredient in Milton's; "highest" and most
demanding poetry of the earlier age made use of it.
But then again it largely faded from view. Dryden did not accommodate his mind easily to
allegory.
Despite the immense examples of Shakespeare and Milton, Blank verse lost ground during
the century to the rhymed couplet. Couplets had been written since Chaucer's day, but only
after mid-century did they take on the smooth, antithetical energy best exampleified in the
opening lines of Absalom and Achitophel. Satire was a well established almost a normal
mode of poetry by the end, below satire burlesque was still another literary device to which
the century gave birth, with the aid of France. After unrelieved earnestness of the Puritans,
derision and buffoonery become the order of the day, and with the advent of burlesque, we
find ourselves on the very threshold of the modern novel, which Henry Fielding was to
define in memorable words as, "a comic epic in prose."
Dominant Genre: Verse
Subject: Man – Philosophy
Style: Epic
School: Classic – Metaphysical
Masterpiece: Milton's Paradise Lost
Dominant figures: Donne – Milton
John Donne (1572-1631)

His poetry represents a sharp break with of that written by his contemporaries.
Much Elizabethan verse is decorative in its quality. Its images adorn, its meter is
mellifluous. His poetry is written very largely in conceits, concenterated images
intellectual difficulty, most of the traditional "flowers of rhetoric" disappear compeletly. In
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his poetry one never encounters bleeding hearts, checks with roses, lipe like cherries. The
tears which flow in a Valediction: of weeping, are different from the ordinary saline fluid of
unhappy lovers; they are naughts, symbols of the worlde's emptiness without the beloved.
Donne's rhythms are colloquial and various. He likes to twist and distort not only ideas but
metrical patterns and grammar itself. In the lyrics, as in the elegies and sonnets the verse
never fails of a complex and memorable melody. Donne had an unusual gift rather like that
of a modern poet T. S. Eliot, for striking off phrases which ring in the mind like a silver
coin. They are two masters of the colloquial, style, removed like from the diginified,
weighty manner of Milton and the sugared sweetness of Elizabethans.
Donne and his followers are known to literary history as the "Metaphysical school" of
poets. That term was invented by Dryden and Dr. Johnson. But the influence of Donne's
poetic style was widely felt, especially by men whose taste was formed before
G. Gerbert, R, Crashaw, H. Vaughan, A. Marvell and A. Cowely are only the best known
of those on whom Donne's influence is recognizable. He is a spokesman for one side, a
troubled side, of human experience.
Donne first became known for love poems which were exciting in style.
Passionate, dramatic, erudite, and ingenous, awakward in meter but powerful old effective.
He wrote for educated and fashionable Londoners with High Style.
Ben Jonson (1572-1637)

He did so many different things in the literature of 17th century and made use of many
different style to do them. Actor, playwright, poet and poet laureate, critic, translator.
The first of his great plays was Every Man in His Humor. It was also the first of the so-
called" Comedies of humors". His classical tragedy Sejanus (1603); Volpone (1606) and
the Alchemist (1610) are two supreme satire comedies of the English stage. The bulk of
Jonson's poetry falls without undue strain into five groups based mostly on stylistic
qualities.
Ben Jonson is more popular than Shakespeare and influenced Yeats, Eliot, and Auden. He
was founder of school of Sons of Ben or Tribe of Ben. He was the founder of Epigram in
English and non dramatic poetry. Alchemist deals with two rogues.
John Milton (1608-1674)

His life falls into three division; there is a period of youthful education, which culminates in
the writing of Lycidas (1637) and his foreign travels (1638-9). There is a period of prose
and controversy (1640-60), when almost all his verse was occasional and when is major
preoccupations were political and social; and finally the last fourteen years of his life, when
the returned to literature, a mature and somewhat embittered figure to publish his three
great poems, Paradise Lost (1667), Paradise Regained (1671), and Samson Agonistes
(1671), a "Closet" tragedy.
The Renaissance is responsible for the rich texture of Miton's style, the multiplicity of its
classical references, its wealth of ornament and decoration.
Paradise Lost, being an epic, not only challenges comparison with Homer and Virgil it
undertakes to encompass the whole life of mankind – war, love, religion, Hell, Heaven, the
cosmos. The Age of Milton is known as "The Golden Age of the English pulpit".
His first great poem is "Memorial" poem for Edward King. His proses were more
elaborated, allusive, intricate and metaphorical. His Paradise Lost is in Blank Versw lambic
pentameter and unrhymed. John Phillip's " The Splendid Shelling" (1705) parodied epic
style of Milton's Paradise Lost. Milton's style is based on these features: 1. Shock tactics 2.
Dramatic form of direct address 3. The Rough idiom 4. The Rhythms of living voice. His
argument and phrasing is characterized by its theological context. In the Age of Milton the
output of poetry is much smaller and the fashion is toward shorter poems, especially the
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lyric. In prose, there is a matured melancholy. There is a notable advance in the sermon:
pamphlets are abundant.
Blank verse, heroic couplet and lyrical style and not Satire are the features of the Age of
Milton. Milton believed that God has given man freedom to choose how to live.
His last work remind us Oedipus at Colonus. Wistanley from lives of "the Most Famous
Poets,"(1687): Milton archetypal Puritan that he was, is most likely the target of this
invective. His fame is gone out like a candle in a snuff and his memory will always stink
which might have live in honourable repute, had not been a notorious and most impiously
and villainously belied that blessed martyr king Charles I.
Neoclassical Age (1660-1898)

-Restoration (1660-1700)
- Augustan Age (1700-45)
- Age of Sensibility (1745-98)
The literature of the Restoration period did not at once obtained the measured pace and
disciplined order that we associate with "classic" art. Dryden himself, delighted as Johnson
remarked: "in wild and daring sallies of sentiment in the irregular and eccentric violence of
wit." The age that produced Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress, perhaps the greatest literary
expression of the Nonconformist conscience, produced also the libertine poem of such court
wits as Rochester, Sedley, savage satire like Butler's the brilliant depiction of the dissolute
but elegant manners of the dissolute but elegant manners of the upper classes in the
comedies of Etherege, Wycherely and Congreve, and the the rant and bombast of Dryden's
rhymed heroic plays.
Perhaps the most important aspect of the Restoration period is the increasing challenge of
various forms of secular thought to the old religious orthodoxies which had been matters of
life and death since the Reformation. If it is not quite possible to talk sensibly of an "Age of
Reason" in England, it is possible to think of the early decades of 18th century as period of
good sense, restraint and reasonableness. The 18th century brought a recognition of the
limitation of man it also took and optimistic view of his moral nature.
Rejecting Hobbes, 18th century philosophers asserted that man in naturally good and that he
finds his highest happiness in the exercise of virtue and benevolence.
The doctrine of the natural goodness of man seemed to many to suggest that it is
civilization which corrupts us and that primitive men "Noble Savages" who live according
to the nature, are modles of innocence and virtue.
A sudden change taste in literature took place in 1660, it was a reaction against the intricacy
and occasional obscurity, boldness of European literature of late Renaissance in favor of
greater simplicity, clarity and regularity. This tendency is most readily to be observed in the
preference of Dryden for "easy, natural" wait, which aims to suprise rather than to shock.
This movement in England produced a literature than to shock. This movement in England
produced a literature the we term "Neoclassical", or "Augustan". Charles seemed in 1660 a
kind of Augusts, bringing to England civilized order and enlightened patronage of the arts a
self – consciously Augstan age.
The term "Augustan age" is derived from the period of literary eminence under the Roman
emperor Augustus (27BC-AD 14) during which Virgil, Horace and Orid flourished, this
Age symbolizes a return to the golden age of Greek masters.
It was not Dryden's aim merely to imitate the French poets or for that matter the Latin, but
to produce in England works that would be worthy to stand beside theirs.
He knew that this could be done only if English literature remaind true to its living
tradition. Chaucer, Shakespeare, entered his literary consciousness as well as Virgil, Horace
and Longinus. Ben Jonson's closed heroic couplets are the nodel for those E. Waller and j.
Denham, whom Dryden considered principal "refiners" of English metrics. The emphasis
on the correct, appropriate, restraint, surprising, nature, strength, freedom form pendantry –
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these indicate exactly the direction. The age agreed with HORACE that poet is born, not
made. To teach effectively the poet must please us by his fiction and by all the ornaments
of language, metrics and rhetoric that belong to his craft. As Pope said Homer and Nature
were the same. The poet was to be a member of society. He was to supplement his own
inevitably limited experience by the wisdom of the past, by studying Nature, wherever
truthfully represented; in Homer, Virgil, Horace, or Shakespeare.
Everyone associates the neoclassical period with the "closed" heroic couplet – i. e. a
pentameter couplet. Within he couplet it ws possible to attain certain rhetorical or witty
effects by the use of parallelism, balance or antithesis. The dramatic blank verse of the
Restoration too often led in 18th century poetry at a rather disagreeably declamatory and
rhetorical manner. But gradually a more lyrical blank verse developed, of which W.
Cowper is the master.
Dryden was the dominant figure of the Restoration period. The prose of the Restoration is a
clear in diction of the direction in which literature was moving.
Metaphors, similes and rhetorical flourishes were disapproved because they engaged the
emotion, not the reason and they had no place in the rational discourse. The ideal of good
prose came to be a clear, simple and natural style which has the ease and poise of well-bred
urbane conversation. This is social prose, designed for a social age. Dryden defined the
heroic plays as "heroic poem in little". The theme of these plays was the conflict between
love and honor in the hearts of impossibility valorous heroes and impossibly high mined
and attractive ladies. Dryden kept the three unities of action, place and time.
The real distinction of Resoration drams a was comedy which like its cousin satire is
concerned with criticism of man as a moral and social being. This sort of comedy-brilliantly
with cynical in its veiw of nature of man, whom it shows to bew sensual, egoistic, and
predatory – is known as "the comedy of manners", since its concern is to bring the moral
and social behavior of its familiar social types to the test of comic laughter. The nature of
Restoration comedy "Societies for the Reformation of Manners" were founded with the
supprt of the soberer Anglicans and the resurgent Nonconformists. Restoration drama was
deeply influecned by French classical tastes in art and literature. They were written for the
rich, upper class and fashionable society.
The literature of this period is literature of, concerned with civilization, with man in his
social relationships; and consequently it is critical and in some degree moral and satiric.
The lyric one of the glories of the Elizabethan age and the first half of the 17th century, has
become in become in the Restoration a minor graceful mode, appropriate to a song or a
"paper of verses" addressed to a mistress.
A new sort of comedy, "Sentimental comedy," began to replace the old comedy of
manners; the heroes suffer misfortunes which move the audience not to laugh, but to tears.
Satire flourished, its most distinguished practitioners being Pope and Swift though they are
only two among many effective writers. The satirist is usually is conservative. The satire of
both Swift and Pop is great because it was animated by moral urgency and heightened by a
tragic sense of doom. Pope saw the issue as a struggle between darkness and light, chaos
and order; a vesion which expressed in his greatest work. "the Dunciad." For Swift the issue
was on between "right reason" and "madness."
When M. Arnold "speaking for Victorian taste, called the 18th century an "Age of prose", he
meant to cast doubt its poetry. So many kinds of intellectual prose been perfected: Literary
criticism, with Samuel Johnson; biography, James Boswell philosophy, D. Hume; E.
Gibben. The prose style of the period often seems to build upon the principle of
Noeclassical verse; its elaborately balanced use of parallels and antitheses, its elegant
allusions to classical literature, its public, rhetorical ,manner, its craving for generality, The
materials of poetry were becoming rather inner life and private vision of the poet than the
public, social affairs of men.
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To say that the modern novel came into existence in the 18th century is not to say that there
was no prose fiction before 1700. Defoe ignored the sentimental and aristocratic
refinements of the earlier simply romance and was content to show his readers not a world
as it might, be, heroic world but their world as it was. He didn't seek his readers among
upper classes except through Robinson Crusoe (1719).
It the years between 1745 and 1784 were years of change and expriement, they were also
the period of Samuel Johnson's greatest achievement and influence. His critical writing
sufficiently reveal his devotion to the standards of Dryden and Pope, though his judgements
of particular writers and works were often personal, even idiosyncratic.
In Neoclassic theory poetry had been regarded as an imitation of human life. The great
Neoclassic writers had typically dealt with men as members of an organized society.
Restoration comedies usually included episodes of sustained repartee. These comedies
pervading tone is of cynicism, which shows a satirical observation of life. A high regard for
morality and didacticism. It was strongly inlfienced by Continental writer, especially
Moliere. With only a small number of theaters in London at the Restoration of Charles II,
and with the audience for drama much more restricted to upper social classes than it had
been in Shakespeare's time the nature of the play being written and performed change.
Restoration Comedy deals almost exclusively with the affairs of the upper classes; it is
graceful heavily concerned with sexual behaviour, and places a huge premium on wit as the
most acceptable social virtue.
The comedies tended to develop a morality of their own on in which good looks, wit, and
the ability to adapt with ease and skill to the highly sophisticated demands of top society
counted for more that the older virtues of sobriety and morality.
Dominant Genre : Drama
Subject : Man – Society – Nature – love
Style : Blank verse comedy – Heroic Couplet
School : Neoclassic
Masterpiece : Essay on Criticism
Dominant figures : Dryden – Pope
The Novelists of the Neoclassical period

1. Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)
- Moll Flanders
- Robinson Crusoe (1791)
- Roxana (1724)
- Colonel Jacque
2. Samuel Richardson (1689-1761)
- Pamela (Virtue Rewarded) (1746)
- Clarissa (1747-8)
- Sir Charles Grandison (1753-4)
3. Henry Fielding (1753-4)
- Joseph Andrews (1742) [Burlesque of Pamela]
- Tom Jones (1740) [comic epic]
4. Tobias Smollett (1721-71) Caricaturist
- Roderick Random (1748)
- Peregrine Pickle (1751)
- Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753)
- Humphy Clinker (1771) [Epistolary Novel]
5. Laurence Sterne (1713-68)
- Tristram Shandsy (1767-68) [Sentimental – comic]
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John Dryden (1631-1700)

His original nondramtic poems are most typically occasional poems. He had mastered the
tone and language and manner of grave public speech. Between 1664 and 1681 he was
mainly and most seriously playwright. He had completely mastered the heroic couplet. He
was able in one stride to assume his proper place beside the masters of verse satire; Horace,
Juvenal and Bioleau.
His drama belongs entirely to his age, though its influence persisted in to the next century.
His critical writing established canons of taste and theoterical principles that determined the
character of neoclassic literature in the next century. He helped establish a new sort of
prose – easy, lucid, and shaped to the cadences of natural speech. This is the prose that we
like to think of as "modern" although it is not everywhere evident in our modern age.
Johnson praised it for its informality and apparent artlessness. He created a poetic language
that remained the basic language of poetry until the early 19th century. His language is the
superbly civilized language of Augustan style at its best. Dr. Johnson called him: "the father
of English criticism". His Absolam and Acthitophel (1681) includes a famed 25 lines,
Lampoon (Burlesques) (a short Satirical work) of Zimri (His contemporary the Duke of
Buckingham). His first important and impressive poem. Heroic stanzas (1659) was written
to commemorate the death of Cromwell.
Dryden's Main Works:

1. Heroic Stanzas (1659)
2. Astraea Redux (1660)
3. Annus Mirabilis (1667)
4. Essay of Dramatic Poesy (1668)
5. All for Love (Antony and Cleopatra)
6. Absalom and Achitophel (1687) (major political satire)
7. Medal (1682)
8. Religio Laici (1682)
9. Translation of Virgil (1697) (The lofty language had been perfected by this translation).
10. Mac Flecknoe (1678). A stair Upon the True - Blue Protestant Poet T. S.
John Bunyan (1628-1688)

Bunyan is one of the most remarkable figures in 17th century literature. The Piligrim's
Progress is the most successful allegory in the English literature. Its basic metaphor life is a
journey is simple and familiar. Bunyan's style modeled on the prose of the English Bible
with his concrete and living language. It has different parts: "The Slough of Despond,"
"Celestial City," "Vanity Fair", "River of Death".
Bunyan's Main Works

1. Grace Abounding to the Chief of Sinners (autobiography) (1666)
2. Pilgrim's Progress (1678)
3. The Life and Death of Mr. Badman (1680)
4. The Holy War (1682)
William Congreve (1670-1729)

Congreve, in one Dryden's most graceful and gracious poem, has been praised as the
superior of Jonson, and Fletcher and equal of Shakespeare. His way of the World is Known
as a great achievement in comedy. The title of greatest Restoration dramatist must go to
William Congreve. He wrote a number of plays but his greatest triumph and arguably that
of the whole of this period was The Way of the World (1700). It was badily received when
first performed and has a which is so complex and intricate that it is almost
incomprehensible; nevertheless its wit, style and elegance it is a major achievement. Its
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character insight particulary into the female psychology, is deeper than in any
contemporary play.
Daniel Defoe (1660-1731)

His restless mind fertile in "projects" both for himself and for himself and for the country;
and his its for politics made the role of passive observery impossible for him. A special skill
in writing relaxed and careless prose which seems to reveal the consciousness of the first
person narrator and which comes alive because the language is the language of actual
speech. He was interested in he mere processes of living, and there is something of himself
in all his protagonist: enormous vitality, ultimate humanity, a scheming and not always
edigfying ingenuity. His "The shortest way with the Dissenters" caused him to be fined and
imprisoned. The English novel effectively start in the 18th century with him. He was
fascinating a character as he is a novelist. His best known work Robinson Crusoe is hased
on true story of Alexander Selkirk. a sailor. His books are rambling and relatively
disorganized, but his humanity, sense of humor, and the sheer liveliness of his mind
compensate for this.
He is an optimist.
Jonathan Swift (1667-1745)

Swift was a clergyman, supporter of the Anglican church. He was hostile to all who seemed
to threaten the Established church, Deists, freethinkers, Roman catholics, Noconformists or
merely whig politicians. In 1724, he was the leader of Irish resistance to English
oppression, under the pseudonym of "M. B. Drapier" he published the famous series of
public letters. He is still venerated in Ireland as a national hero. He has been called a
misanthrope, a hater of mankind, but he loved individuals, he hated mankind in general.
Swift is one of the greatest writers of prose. He difined a good style as "proper words in
proper places, "a more complex and difficult saying that a first appears. Clear, simple,
concrete diction, unacomplicated syntax, economy and conciseness of language mark all of
his writing. Gulliver's Travels consists four chapter:
1. Empire of Lilliput
2. Brobdingnag
3. Laputa
4. Houhnhnms (horses).
He is generally acknowledged to be master of prose satire of the 18th century. About 1696-
97 he wrote his powerful satire on caroptionsin religion and learning. A Tale of a Tub.
Swift's Main Worls

1. A Tale of a Tub/ Battle of the Books (1704) (Satirical and Allegorical)
2. The Journal to Stella (1766)
3. Cadenus and Vanessa
4. Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

Pope is the only important writer of his generation who was solely a man of letters. He was
the first writer to demonstrate that literature alone could be a gainful profession. His first
striking success as a poet was the Essay on Criticism (1711). "The life of a wit is a warfare
on Earth", said Pope, generalizing from his own experience.
In the 1730's he moved on to philosophical ethical and political subject in the Essay on
Man, the Epistles even political power and law are subject to the corruptor wealth, no
weapon remains to the guardian of the public weal but the "sacred weapon" of satire. The
permanent elements of Pop's style are his remarkable rhythmic variety despite, the
apparently rigid metrical unit – the heroic couplet – in which he wrote; the precision of
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meaning and the harmony (or the expressive disharmony, wehen necessary) of his
language; and his superb discipline, which enables him at his characteristic best to achieve
maximum conciseness together with maximum complexity. The Essay on criticism, an
informal discussion of literary poem in a plain style. His Essay on Man owes its content to
philosophy of Hobbes.
In short no other of the century can equal Pope in the range of his materials the diversity of
his poetic style and the sheer of the poet's craft. He is the master of the Rhetorical figures.
Pope is an ethical and philosophical poet and he was a satirist.
Essay on criticism is a grace (spirit of Beauty) beyond the reach of the art. His style
justifies his image of himself as the heir of the Roman poet (Horace), He believed the
philosophy of Diet. Rape of the Lock is an amusing parodies of the passages in Paradise
Lost. Essay on Man is a philosophical discussion of such majestic themes as the Creator
and his creation, nature of Man, of human society. The sairist traditionally deals in
generally prevalent evil and generally observable human types, and this is true of Pope,
even when he named actual individuals. Usally in the late satires as in the earlier Rape, he
used ficitional or type names although he most often had an individual in mind.
Pope's Main Work

1. Essay on Criticism (1711) (It is written like Horace Ars Poetica, Didactic poem)
2. The Rape of the Lock (1712) (Masterpiece of Mock epic, High Burlesque)
3. Translating Homer (1726)
4. Dunciad (staire) (1728) (Grand Tour)
5. The Essay on Man (1734)
6. Epistle to Dr. Arbuthnot (his finest poem in Horation way)
Samuel Johnson (1709-84)

His theme of themes is expressed in the title of his poem. The Vanity of Human Wishes.
Almost all of his major writings – verse, moral essay, or the prose fable Rasselas (1759) –
bear this theme. Phrases or clauses moving to carefully controlled rhythms, in language that
is characteristically general, often Latinate and frequently polysyllabic. It is a style which is
at the opposite extreme from Swift's simplicity or Addison's neatness. He said, "The
biographical part of literature is what I love most", for he found every biography useful in
revealing human nature and the way men live.
That there were "essential principles" which any writer must follow seemed to him self –
evident. He must adhere to universal truth and experience, i. e. to "Nature"; he must please,
but he also must instruct. He is conversationalist and most of his work were unreadable. He
attacked on Milton's Lycidas. He says, "He who makes a beast of himself gets rid of the
pain of being a Man."
Johnson's Mao Works

1. Dictionary (1747-55) (Included quotations from great weiters)
2. Irene (1749) (tragedy)
3. The Vanity of Human Wishes (1749) the finest poem)
4. The Rambler (1752) (eassy)
5. Rasselas (1759) (the porse fable)
6. Idler (1760) (A periodical moral essay)
7. Edition of Shakespeare (1765)
8. Live of Poets (1779-81)
James Boswell (1740-95)

His gift is not only narrative: it is also dramatic. He himself was a good deal of an actor and
a superb mimic, with a flair detecting the characteristic gesture, word, tone or trait. His art
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as an interviewer, a conversationalist, and a biographer is, like all great art, the product of a
deep and human interpretative imagination.
Boswell's Main Work

1. An Account of Corsica (1768) (First Important work)
2. Life of Samuel Johnson (1791)
3. Journal of a Tour to the Herbides (1785)
James Thomson (1700-1748)

He is the first and most popular nature poet of the century. He has a Latinized diction: and
his poetry is sentimental and filled with visual imagery. His blank verse pleaded those who
were pleased by Pope's couplets. His gifts not only narrative: it is also dramatic. He is the
sense of unity and proportion is perfect.
Thomson's Main Works

Hymn to Seasons:
1. Winter (1726) (descriptive, blank verse)
2. Summer (1727)
3. Spring (1728)
4. Autumn (1730)
Thomas Gray (1716-71)

The man who wrote the English poem best known and most loved by unsophisticated
readers. His early poetry is carefully impersonal expression of his own somewhat
melancholy temperament. Though colored by his own feeling, the pomes are not
confessions, but public reflection, on death, the sorrows of life and the mysteries of human
destiny. His genial humor, shy affection, and wide intellectual interests are revealed in
some of the most delightful letters of age that made letter writing an art. He belongs to the
school of graveyard poets. The rhyme scheme of his "Elegy written in a country churchyard
is alternate rhyme. He wrote in highly artificial diction. His comic "Ode on the Death of a
Favorit Cat," (1748) is moke epic, mock heric and High Burleque His Pindaric Odes,
influenced by Spencer, Milton and received harsh criticism by W. Wordsworth. His Elegy
is one of the poems that belongs to Mankind.
The Romantic Period (1798-1832)

Chronology
1757 Blake born, London.
1759 Wollstonecraft born, Epping.
1764 Hargreaves invents spinning jenny.
1769 Watt patents steam engine.
1770 Estimated population of England and wales: 7.48 million.
Wordsworth born, Cockermouth, Cumberland.
1772 Coleridge born, Ottery St Mary, Devon.
1774 Priestley discovers oxygen.
1775 Austen born, Steventon, Hampshire.
1776 American Declaration of Independence.
1779 Crompton incents spinning mule
1780 Gordon Riots: Blake at the burning of New gate Prison.
1783 Treaty of Versailles: American independence
Recognized
1785 Cartwright invents power loom.
1788 Byron born, London.
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1789 Fall of the Bastille: French Revolution begins.

Blacke, Songs of Innocence.
1790 Estimated population of England and Wales: 8.68
Million
1791 Paine, Rights of Man, Part One.
1792 Royal Proclamation Against Divers Seditious
Publications.
Paine outlawed
Continental allies invade France. September
Massacres in Paris.
Shelley born, Warnham, Sussex.
Paine, Rights of Man, Part Two.
Blake, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.
Wollstonecraft, Vindication of the Rights of Woman.
1793 Louis XVI executed. Britain and France at war. The Reign of Terror.
Reign of Terror.
Godwin, Enquiry Concerning Political Justice.
Wordsworth, Reply to the Bishop of Llandaff'.
1794 Trial and acquittal of Holcroft, Thelwall and Tooke.
Blake, Songs of Innocence and of Experieace.
1795 Seditious Meetings Act and Treasonable Practices Act.
Keats born, London.
1796 Coleridge, Poems on Various Subjects (including "The Eolian Harp").
Wollstonecraft dies.
1798 Wordsworth and Coleridge, Lyrical Ballads.
1799 London Corresponding Society suppressed.
Combination Acts make unions illegal.
Napoleon assumes absolute power as First Consul.
Wordsworth completes two – part Prelude.
1800 Britain produces over 80 per cent of world's coal and over 40 per cent of pig iron,
Wordsworth, Preface to Lyrical Ballads, second edition.
1802 Peace of Amiens (March): brief interlude in Anglo French war.
First practical steamship launched on Clyde.
1803 Anglo-French war resumes.
1804 Napoleon becomes Emperor.
Blake tried for sedition and acquitted.
1805 Battle of Trafalgar.
Wordsworth completes second version of The Prelude.
1810 Cobbett imprisoned for two years for attacking the use of flogging in the army.
1811 Population of England and Wales: 10.16 million.
First attacks by Luddites in Nottinghamshire.
1812 Tory Prime Minister Spencer Perceval murdered.
1813 Leigh Hunt imprisoned for two years for libeling the Prince Regent.
Southey Poet Laureate.
Wordsworth Distributor of Stamps for Westmorland.
1814 Napoleon abdicates.
Stephensons's locomotive.
Wordsworth, The Excursion.
1815 Battle of Waterloo. End of Anglo-French war.
Restoration of Louis XVIII.
1816 Coleridge, Christable, Kubla Khan, Pains of Sleep.
1817 Habeas Corpus suspended.
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Coleridge, Biographia Literaria. Keats, Poems.

1818 Keats starts Hyperion and publishes Endymion.
1819 Peterloo Massacre. "Six Act's severely limit the freedom of the press and the right to
demonstrate.
Keats starts The Fall of Hyperion and writes 'La Belle Dame sans Merci' and his major
odes.
1820 Keats, Lamia, Isabella, Eve of St Agnes and Other Poems.
1821 Population of England and Wales: 12 million.
Napoleon dies.
Keats dies.
1822 Foreign Secretary Castlereagh commits suicide.
Shelley dies.
1824 Byron dies.
1827 Blake dies
1834 Coleridge dies.
1850 Wordsworth dies. The final version of The Prelude published.
The span between the year 1798, in which Wordsworth and Coleridge published their
Lyrical Ballads and 1832 when Sir W.Scott died; the early period of the French Revolution,
marked by the Declaration of the Right of Man. No witer in Words worth's lifetime thought
of himself as a "Romantic". There are three main group and schools of the Romantic
writers: "The Lake School" or Wordsworth, Coleridge, and Robert Southey; "The Cockney
School" of Leigh Hunt, Hazlitt, and associated writers, including John Keats; and "The
Satanic School" of Byron, Shelly.
Wordsworgh defind all good poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful felling." He
located the source of the poetry in the outer world but in the individual poet their actions,
but the fluid feeling of the writer himself. Blake and Shelley described a poem as the poet's
imaginative vision, which they opposed to the ordinary world of public experience.
Romantic poems take as their subject matter, not the actions of other men, but experience.
Thought and feeling of the poets who wrote them. The lyric poem written in the first
person. And in the Romantic Lyric the (I) is often not a mere dramatise personal, a typical
lyric speaker. The Prelude represents a central form of English, as of Eureopean
Romanticism. Because of the prominence of landscape in this period, "Romantic poetry"
has to the popular mind become almost synonymous with "nature poetry." The Romantic
period was an age of radical individualism in which both the philosophers and poets put an
immensely higher estimate on man's potentialities and on his proper aims.
Many Romantic writers agreed that man's mind has access beyond sense to the infinite,
through a special faculty they called either Reason or Imagination. Some Romantic writers
deliberately isolated themselves from society in order to give scope to their individual
vision. The theme of exile, of the disinherited mind which cannot find a spiritual home in
its native land and society or anywhere in the modern world.
The solitary Romantic nonconformist was sometimes also a great sinner.
Most of the plays in this period were closet dromas the genius of an age which excelled in
subjective or visionary literary forms was ill adapted to the theatre.
Two new types of fiction were prominent in the late 18th century. One was the "Gothic
novel" which had been inaugurated in 1764 by Horace Walpole's Castle of Otranto, A
Gothic Story. The second fictional mode popular at the turn of the century was the novel of
purpose often written to propagate the new social and political theories current in the period
of the French Revolution. The best example, combine didactic intention with elements of
Gothic terror. William Godwin, the political philosopher, wrote Cable Williams (1794) to
illustrate the thesis that the lower classes are helplessly subject to the power and privilege
of the ruling class.
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Shelly's wife, Mary Godwin-the daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, who in 1792 had written
the first classic of feminist literature, a Windication of the Rights of women-achieved the
most impressive instance of the thematic novel of terror. The Romantic period produced
two great novelists, Jane Austen and Sir Walter Scott.
Austen's novels lack warmth, enthusiasm and energy and all deal with subject of getting
married. The most fertile period of English literature is the Romantic age.
Descriptive and narrative poems were aboundant during this period and favorite model for
the poets was the Spenserain Stanza. The age was rich in literary criticism. In this age
Wordsworth stands highest of all. The themes were beauty and happiness of plain living
and high thinking.
Dominant : Verse
Subject : Dream – Nature – Love
Style : Lyric
School : Romanticism
Dominant figures : Wordsworth – Shelley
Masterpiece : Lyrical Ballads
William Blake (1757-1827)

What Blake called his "Spiritual Life" was as varied, free, and dramatic as his "Corporeal
life" was simple, limited, unadventurous. Blake's symbolic thinking about human history
and his personal experience of life and suffering articulated themselves in the "Giant
Forms" and their actions, which constitute a complete mythology. In his 60's Blake said
"The nature of my work is visionary or imaginative." Blake was a born ironist who enjoyed
mystifying his well-meaning. Blake declared that, "all he knew was in the Bible." His
mythical premise or starting point, is not a transcendent God but "The Universal Man "Who
is himself God and who incorporates the cosmos as well. The Fall in this myth is not the
fall of man away from Gods but a falling apart of primal man a "fall into Division." Blake
describes this apocalypse as a return to original, undivided condition, "his Resturrection to
unity." For him the state of innocence is preferable to the state of experience. His poems are
challengingly mystical.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

Wordsworth is above all the poet of the remembrance of things past, or as he himself put it
of "emotion recollected in tranquility." Wordsworth revives the ancient theological concept
that God's creation constitutes a symbolic system, a physical revelation paralles to the
Revelation in the Scriptures. Hazlitt insisted, Wordsworth was "the most original poet now
living."
In the Prelude Wordsworth, recording his gratitude to the mountains lakes, and winds. J.
Milton had a strong influence on Wordsworth. The soul of his "Ode: Intimations of
Immortality" based on Plato's Phaedrus and Phaedo. Nature is his great theme and
mankind's interaction with living universe is for him the sole source, actual and potential of
illumination, significance and happiness. Two themes are dominant above all others
throughout the Perlude and his poetry. He is a Panthist and identified nature with God. He
poses a doctrine of sincerity and authen ticity. Like Neoclassicists he insists on treating
nature including human nature as a repository of Moral significance and standards. His
great poems form a kind of Spiritual Autobiography. He was sometimes is over
sentimental, sometimes sing-songy, sometimes is dull and sometimes wordy. "He was
friend of wise and teacher of good." The plainer language is necessary in order to imitate
those essential passions which consituate the truth of human nature. Poet's art is as an
acknowledgement of Beauty and that is the essence of great poetry. The task of a true poet
is to strip away the false accretion of ornaments in order to reveal the beauty and wonder of
nature in all its simplicity. His "source of " Ode: Intimations of Immorality" is Plato's
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Phaedrus and phaedo. The theme of Prelude can be considered as the power of the poet's
mind over the universe it inhabits. The most important and crucial point of the Perface to
the Lyrical Ballads is the incidents and situations are chosen from everyday and common
life. He wrote the Lyrical Ballads show a reaction against the Neoclassical war of stylistic
writing.
Dominant genre : Poetry
Subject : Nature – Love
Style :Lyric
School : Romantic – Lake poet
Masterpiece : Lyrical Ballads (1798)
Perlude (Autobiographical, blank Verse, Imabic pentameter,
unrhymed lines.)
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834)

He was dreamy, enthusiastic and extrodinarily precocious, poet. He has repeatedly been
charged with plagiarism. In opposition on the prevailing British philosophy of empiricisim
and associationism, Colerid for most of his mature life expounded his views of the mind as
creative in perception, intuitive in its discovery of the first premises of metaphysics and
capable of a poetic re-creation of the world of sense by the fusing and formative power of
the "Secondary imaginations. "He was one of "The two great seminal minds of England. "
"His influence is strongly evident in the 19th – century English and American traditions of
philosophical idealism, enlighted political conservation and liberal interpretation of
Trinitarian theology. His writing in verse though small in bulk, are the work of major and
notably original poet. No less impressive in their own way are the blank verse poems of the
lonely and meditative mind which, by and extension of his term for one the them, are
called, "Conversation Poems". After 1805, he continued to write occasional short lyrics,
which are remarkable equally for their quality and their diversity. He was the most learned
poet of his generation.
As a critic, he expressed the theory of "the Organic Unity" of literature. His inspiration
came from the words, pictures of old books, from dreams and visions.
Genre : Poetry
Subject : Mystical, philosophical
Hallucination and dream
Style : Blank verse
School : Romantic-Lake poet
Masterpiece : The Rime of the Ancient Mariner (1798)
Frost at Midnight (Meditative and descriptive)
G. G. Lord Byron (1788-1824)

The greatest and most English of the artist; he is so great and so English that from him
alone we shall learn more truths of his country and of his age than from all the rest together.
His influence was felt everywhere not only among minor writers-in the two or three
decades after his death, most Europeans struck, Byronic attitudes-but among the greatest
poets and novelists (including Gothe, Balzac, Stendhal, Pushkin, Dostoevsky and Melville).
His masterpiece, Don Joan, is an instance of the favorit Neoclessical type, a satire against
modern civilization, which has much more in common with the methods and aims of Pope,
Swift, Voltaire, or Sterne than with those of is own contemporaries. Bryon's lyrics are old
fashioned. He never used heroic couplet. His poem are so exuberantly variable.
Formlessness of Duan Juan is in a sems a manifesto, likend with one of Bryon's enduring
theme. The importance of individual expression as opposed as to the dealy weight of
conformity. It is a Satire, mock epic, anatomy and a picaresque romance. It aggressively
announces its own formlessness.
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It is not immoral but that is morally Nihilistic and destructive Duan Juan is like a comic
Odysseus Jor Don Quixtoe, Tom Jones or Child Harold. Duan Juan, the Spanish Libetine,
(The hero) had in original legend been Superhuman in his sexual energy and wickness (16
canto). The chief model for the poem was Italian seriocomic version of Medival chivalric
Romance. It is the longest satirical poem, Ottave Rima (ababa cc). Adoptable to Gulliver's
Travels and Johnson's Rasselas L. Steven's novel Tristram Shandy. Child Harold dictions of
the earlieriest lines of poem is in imitation of Spenser's Faerie Queen. It gains some of the
epic scope of Spenserian Legend. Child Harold is not a Red Cross Knight in search of
Holiness but an alienated person in search of self. The pilgrimage is aimless and errotic. He
says, "I always go on until Iam stopped, and I never am stopped, and I never am stopped.
"He glorified solitude and at last attoined it. He despised Romanticism and believed that
English poetry died with Pope. The central form of his poetry is remorseless quest.
He did not use the heroic couplet at all. He lost his life while helping the Greeks in their
war for independence.
Subject : Love – Nature
Style : Lyric – Colloquial Ottava Rima
School : Rlomantic – Stanic School
Masterpiece : Duan Juan (1818)
Main works : Child Harold (1812)
Hours of Idleness (1807)
Cain (Closet drama)
Sardanpalus (Closet drama)
Marino Faliero (Clwoset drama)
Manfred (Closet drama)
Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792-1822)

He was an extreme herotic and nonconformist. He saw himself in the role of alien and
outcast, scorned and rejected by the mankind to whose welfare he had dedicated his powers
and his life. He dedicated his life to war against all injustice and appression. The poems of
Shelley's maturity show the influence of his study of Plato and the Neo-Plationists. He
found congenial the Platonic division of the cosmos into two world – the ordinary world of
change, mortality, evil and suffering and the criterion world of perfect and eternal Forms of
which the world of sense experience is only a distant and illusory reflection. He expressed
his deepest philosophical ideas in nature poems like "Alaster"
Many of his poem express the limits of creatin knoeledge and refusal to let his intuition and
his hopes harden into a philosophical or religious creed. He had a great and strong influence
on W. B. Yeats and Robert Browning.
He had a religious temperament and evolved at his faith Protestant Orphism. He was a
visionary skeptic who could't reconcile the heart and the head. The central form of his
poetry is remorseless quest. He was influenced by William Godwin. His "Alastor" was
written in Wordsworthian style but directed against him. He considered Nature as a spirit.
For him poetry is an expression of imagination. By Platonic idealism he defends poetry
against Plato's attack. Shelley uses Dante's Terza Rima and the English sonnet form in
Adonais. The central form of his peotry is remorseless quest. His "The Triumph of life "was
written on the death of John Keats.
He says "Poets are the unacknowledged legislaters of mankind." He was strongly
influenced by William Godwin. He had a strong influence on W. B. Yeats. He considers
Nature as a spirit. The theme of "Prometheus Unbound" is the moral salvation of Man, and
is a lyrical closet drama, is filled with a passion Per freedom.
Subject : Injustice-Oppression – Philosophy – Prophetic
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Style :Lyric
School : Romantic-Satanic School
Masterpiece : Prometheus Unbound (1819)
Main works : Revolt of Islam
Address to the Irish People
The Necessity of Atheism
Queen Mab (1813) (Visionary philosophical and political poem
in 19 cantos)
The Cenci, (closet drama)
Defense of Poetry
Epipsychidion
Adonais, Elegy on the Death of Keats
Hellas, (Lyrical drama)
Alastor (The Spirit of solituble) 1816
The unfinished woek :The Triumph of Life
John Keats (1795-1821)

All of his poems posses the distinctive qualities of the work of his maturity: a slow paced,
gracious movementl a concretencess of decription in which all the senses tactile, gustatory,
kinetic, organic as well as visual and auditory-combine to give total apprehension of an
experience. He finds melancholy in delight and pleasure in pain; he is aware both of the
attraction of an imaginative dream world without "disagreeables" and remorsless pressure
of the actual; he aspires at the same time for aesthetic detachment (what in his letters he
called "Negative Capability) and for social responsibility. When Keats stopped writing at
the age of 24, greatly exceeds that at the corresponding age of Chaucer, Shakespeare or
Milton. Endymion is a profuse and obscure allegory of the poet's quest for a ideal feminine
counterpart and a flawless happiness beyond earthly possibility. His "Hyperion" based on
the theme of the struggle between older race of gods and the younger divinties. He differed
from his contemporaries because of his, choice of subject, style and themes. Wallance
Stevence has been influenced by keats. He has adopted La Belle Dame Sans Merci with
classical heroic couplet. His poems are so enhanting euphocial. La Belle Dame Sams
Merci, is a poem set in a castle in Medival Italy of a young love against a background of
age, death, human intolerance. His Hypeion has the theme of the struggle between older
race of gods and younger divinities. Wallace Stevent was influenced by J. Keats' "The Fall
of Hyperion" is parallel to P. B. Shelley's The Triumph of life. Disintorestedness,
uncertainity and tragic acceptance can express Keats' Negative Chapability. The name of
Agnes from the title of John Keats poem "Eve of st. Agnes means "Angel".
Dominant genre : Verse
Subject : Love-Pain-Misery- Time- Sickness
Style :Ode
School : Romantic- The Cockney School
Mastrtpiece : Endymion
Main works : Sleep and Poetry
1. Hyperion, (on the model of Milton's Paradise Lost)
2. Fall of Hyperion, (on the model of Milton's Paradise Lost),
(Unifinished, Dream Vision) (1819)
3. The Eve of St. Agnes (ode)
4. La Bella Dame Sans Merci (ode)
5. Lamia (Sonnet)
Romantic Essayist
1. Charles Lamb (1775-1834)
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2. Thomas De Quincy (1789-1859)

Confessions of an English Opium Eater
The Victorian Age (1832-1901)

The beginning of the Victorian Period is dated sometimes as 1832, the passage of the first
Reform Bill, and sometimes as 1837, the accession of Queen Victoria During the long
reign of Queen Victoria England was the first country highest point of development as a
world power. Because England was the first country to become industrialized, her
transformation was an especially painful one, but being first had a compensation: it was
profitable. Victorian suffere from an anxious sense of something lost, a sense too of being
displaced persons in world made alien by technological changes which had been exploited
too quickly for the adaptive powers of the human psyche. As preliminary corrective it is
helful to subdivide the age into these phases: Early Victorian (1832-48); Mid-Victorian
(1842-70): Late Victorian (1870-1901)
The early phase has been sometimes characterized as the Time of Troubles life in early
Victorian was much like. T. Hobbes's "Sate of nature"-Poor, nasty, brutish, and short." In
the early 1840's a severe depression, with widespread unemployment, led to rioting. The
second phase of the Victorian age had many harassing problems, but it was a time of
prosperity; agriculture flourished together with trade and industry. It was "The age of
improvement". "Most mid-Victorian poetry and critical prose less preoccupied with
thechnology, economics, and politics than with the conflict between religion and science. In
the mid-Victorian period Biology reduced manking even further into "nothingness".
"Darwin's treatise, The Descent of man (1871) raised more – explicitly the haunting
question of man's identification with the animal kingdom.
For many Victorians, the final phase of the century was a time of serenity, and security, the
age of house parties and long weekends in the country. The first English author of note to
be connected with Marxism was the poet and painter William Morries. The connections
between literature in the Romaptio and Victorian are close. Most Victorian writers, both in
poems and in essays, grappled with the same religioius, issues that had been a central
concern for Wordsworth, Blake and Shelley. It is significant that the Romantic poet most
influential in the Victorian age was Keats.
When Novelists and poets dealt with feminist topical, they commenly portrayed women's
domestic and social roles as educated companions of men or as doll-like subordinates.
Victorian women married or unmarried suffered painfully from boredom. The Women
Question was concerned with issues of sexual inequality in politics, economic life,
education and social intercourse. In the political shere it was abundantly evident that
women continued to rank as Second – Class Citizens.
The Victorian age was not an age of delicate taste. In general instead of taste and decorum,
the Victorian age tended to value strenuous energy. Only in drama is therea conspicuous
blank, or, at least, only in the writing of plays. The theater, throughout the period was itself
a flourishing and popular insituation, but despite it play of lasting interest. Only as the
century drew to its close did significant writing for the stage re-emerge after long absence,
in the lively dramas of Oscar Wilde and George Bernard Shaw.
One literary genre in particular throve luxuriantly in Victorian times: the novel.
The novelists for the most part do not share the preoccupation of the Victorian poets and
essayist with Man's relationship to God. Typically these works center on the struggles of a
protagonist, male and female, to find himself in relation to other men and women, in love or
marriage. Thackeray affirmed in a letter, "The art of novels is to represent nature: to convey
as strongly as possible the sentiment of reality". The historical novel, as established by Sir
Walter Scott remained popular throughout the post Romantic period.
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Most early 20th century novelists preferred to follow G. Eliot's example and concentrate on
the inner lives of their characters; and critical readers, adapting their tastes to the new
mode, were disposed acting rather than man recollecting, or reflecting, or trying to come to
a decision. The Victorian novelist had a sense of how his audience was responding to his
performance. And it was and audience that offered a special challenge because of its
exceptional diversity. The Victorianism can be described by moral seriousness. Moral
seriousness is the best description of Victorianism. Oxford Movement, Pre-Raphaelites, and
the New Education are associated with this Age.
Dominant genre : Novel
Subject : Man – Marriage
Style : Formal – Scientific
School : Realism and Naturalism
Dominant figures : 1. Tennyson
2. G. Eliot
3. Ch. Dickens
Masterpiece : Tennyson's works
Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809-92)

He is the greatest of the Victorian poets. He gained the title that Walt Whitman longed for,
"The poet of the people". For many Victorian readers, he seemed not only a great poetical
phrasemaker and a striking individual but also a wiseman whose occasional pronouncement
on politics or world affairs represented the national voice itself. His Idylls of the King is not
simply a hymn to progress. It records, instead a cycle of change from a society that has
emerged from a wasteland into civilization. Like Chaucer or Keats or Pope, Tennyson
studied his predecessor assiduously to perfect his technique. Most of his best poems are
about the past, not about the present or future. The past is his great theme: his own past (as
in All Along the Valley), his country's past (as in the Revenge), the past of mankind, the
past of the world itself.
Tennyson is the first major writer to express this awarness of the vast extent of geological
time that has haunted human consciousness since Victorian scientists exposed the history of
the earth's crust. Tennyson was merely "discoverer of words rather than of ideas. "He writes
in the manner of Keats Milton, Spenser and of classical poets such as Virgil. He used the
theme of "new woman" in his "The princess. "His main theme is "Withdrawal from an
uncongenial world to an ideal one. "He is lord of Language. His love for soltude kept him
from mingling frequently with intellectuals. He had dominated the poetic scene of England
for 60 years and had been the Voice of his Ages Struggle for serenity and faith. The Idylls
of the King, means to instruct Englishmen in his high ideals of nobility and chivalry, but
seemed to him that world honoured these ideals less and less. Tennyson was never able to
move on his own age and thus his poetry is sometimes strangled by a rather parochial view
and outlook. Besides writing poetry, he also wrote historical plays like Queen Mary. His
principal theme was the legendary narrative. His was never to be didactic. He did not much
care for beauty of description in most of his work it is only found in flashes. In 1850, he
was appointed as poet laureate. He was a traditional and conventional poet.
Subject : Time - Civilization
Style : Blank Verse
Masterpiece : Idylls of the King (Blank Verse)
Main works : In Memorian A. H. H. (Elegy)
Crossing the Bar
Maud
The Lotos-Eaters (Wandering of Ulysses and his Men)
The Princess
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Lady of Shalott
Robert Browning (1812-1889)

The dramatic monologue, as Browning uses, it, enables the reader, speaker, and poet to be
located at an appropriate distance from each other aligned in such a way that the poet
himself. Writing dialogue for actors led him to explore another from more cogenial to his
genius to his genius, the dramatic monologue, from that enable him through imaginary
speakers to avoide explicit autobiography. When he first discovered Shelley's works, he
became an atheist and liberal. Each speaker of monologue provides a mask for the poet, like
years, he was a poet preoccupied with masks. He draws from a different tradition, more
colloquial and discordant, a tradition which includes the poetry of Donne, the soliloquies of
Shakespeare, the comic verse of the early 19th century poets Thomas Hood, and certain
features of the narrative style of Chaucer. Of most significance are Browning's affinities
with Donne. The grotesque, which plays such a prominent role in the style and subject
matter of Carlyle and Dickens and in the aesthetic of John Ruskin, is equally prominent in
Browning's verse. Energy is the most characteristic aspect of his writing and energy is
perhaps the most characteristic aspect of Victorian literature in general.
Browning believes earthly man should live his daily expriences to the fulles capability in
joy and meaning without brooding about the hopes of the past or rationalization one's
failures. He believes man has responsibility and opportunity to work towards his own
eternal salvation. He is the most vigorously Optimistic writer of his age with an unwavering
faith in God and immorality and a great confidence in man. His doctoring success in failure.
Shelley influenced Browning. He was a religious optimist. He is the forerunner of modern
poetry.
Subject : Lift – Autobiography
Style : Dramatic monologue- Grotesque
Masterpiece : The Ring and the Book (1868-9) (Blank Verse, lambic
Pentametor Unrhymed Lines)
Main works : Pauline
Sordello
Strafford (1836) (historical tragedy)
Pippa Passes (1841) (first of the servies called Bells and
Poemegrantes)
Pied Piper of Hamelin (1842) (A poem for children for
reaching the Holy Land and removing of the rats from city)
Charles Dickens (1814-70)

A great Victorian novelist. His vision has special quality: it is cinematographic. He had
proven himself a master of humor, pathos and suspense. Dickens's view of society was
divided between his nostalgic sense of old order perhaps a mythical one in which kindness
makes social institutions run and his contrasting faith in the possibilities of progress in an
efficient industrial age. Few themes in Dicken's fiction are without their inherent
contradictions in this fragmented man who lived an integrated life only by and
overwhelming act of wil. His first attempt at writing hisotircal novel is Barnaby Rudge.
After completing his novel Pickwick Papers he commented, "Nearly dead with work and
grief for the loss of my child; and Barnaby Rudge is his first attempt at writing historical
novels. He was an expert in creating eccentric and humorous characters who are closer to
caricatures.
His Hard Times attacked the Victorian's terrible, inhuman educational system. In his later
works he paid more attention to the structure and unity of his plots and used more symbols.
Dominant genre: : Novel
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Subject : Social life and its reflection

Style : Humour
School : Realism
Masterpiece : Bleak House (1852-3)
The first work : Pickwick Papers (1836-7)
The unfinished work : The Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
Main works : Oliver Twist (1837)
David Copperfild (1849-50)
Christmas Carol (1843)
Hard Times (1854)
Great Expectation (1860-1)
Nicholas Nickleby (1838-9)
A Tale Mutual Friend (1864-5)
George Eliot [Marian Evans] (1819-80)

Like many English novelists, she came to novel – writing relatively late in life.
She was 40 when her first novel, Adam Bede (1859) The Mill one the Floss (1860) may
have influenced the work of a later master of retrospective vision, Marcel Proust.
This work was for Proust, the best loved of books. She was strongly affected by
Evangelicalism. As the result of her association with a group of freethinking intellectuals
and her own studies of theology, she reluctantly decided that she could no longer believe in
the Christian religion. Unlike the characters of such intellectual novelist A. Huxley, her
character only rarely discuss issues directly, and as W. J. Harwey notes she never produced
a "Novel of ideas." Her treatment in her novels of was called the Women Question was
similarly indirect. Her subjects were about the frustration of women in a male – dominated
culture. All of her characters are tested by situations in which they must choose, and the
choices, as in the Mill on the Floss, are often agonizingly painful.
Subject : Femail's social situation
Style : Feminism-nostalgic
School : Realism
Masterpiece : Middle March (1872)
The first work :Adam Bede (1859)
The last work : Middle March (1872)
Main works : The life of Jesus (1846) (Translation)
Daniel Deronda
Silas Marner (1861) (The waver of Raveloe)
Scenes of Clerical Life (1857)
Matthew Arnold (1822-88)

His career as writer can be divided into four periods. In the 1850's appeared most of his
poems. In the 1860's, his literary criticism and social criticism, in the 1870'shis religious
and educational writings, and in the 1880's his second set of essays in literary criticism.
Arnold's bad habits as a poet; for example his excessive reliance upon italics instead of
meter as a method of emphasizing the meaning of a line. He says, "My poems represent on
the whole, the main movement, of mind of the last quarter of century, and thus they will
probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what movement of
mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. "As a poet, like T. S.
Eliot and Auden, Amold provides a record of a sick individual in a sick society. This was
"actuality" as he experienced it. As a prose – writer, a formulator of "ideals" he seeks a
different role. It is the role of what Auden calls the "healer" of a sick society, or as he
himself called Gothe, the "Physician of the iron age." The Bible to Arnold was a great work
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of literature like the Odyssey, Although his life long attacks against the inadequacies of
Puritanism make Arnold one of the most anti-Viction figures of the Victorian age. He is the
father of the modern – criticism. To help make life bearable, poetry, in his view, must bring
joy. The emphasis in the letter upon movement of mind suggests that Arnold's poetry and
prose should be studied together. Such an approach can be fruitable provided that it does
not obscure the important difference between Arnold the poet and Arnold the critic. T. S.
Eliot once said of his own writings that in one's reflections one may be legitimately
occupied with ideals whereas in the writing of verse one can deal only with actuality."
Arnold's writings, provide a nice verification of Eliot's seeming paradox. As a poet the
usually records his own experiences, his own feelings of loneliness and isolation as a lover,
his longing for a serenity that he cannot find, his melancholy serse of youth. For him poet
must be a serious thinker who could offer guidance for his readers. He exployed a cajolery,
satire, and even quotations from the newspaper with considerable effect. In Sohrab and
Rustam he rose to epic severity and impersonality. He was unable to find rest and greatly
admired worsworth's Calmness.
The Scholar Gipsy tells an Oxford man who joins a band of Gipsy and wanders with them.
Dominant genre: : Essay - Prose
Subject : Social matters
Style : Critical
School : Realism
Masterpiece : Dover Beach (poem)
Main work : Sohrab and Rustum
: To a Friend
: Gypsy Scholar
Culture and Anarchy
Thyrsis: A Monody (1866) (Elegy on A. H. Cloug)
The Twentieth Century (1901)

- The Edwardian (1901-14)
- The Georgian (1910-36)
As the 19th century drew to close there were many manifestations of a weakening of
tranitional stabilities. The aesthetic movement, with its insistence on "art for art sake"
assaulted the assumption about the nature and function of art. M. Arnold's war on the
Philisitnes in Culture and Anarchy and which was later to result in the "alienation of the
artist "that is now a common place of criticism. The artist as rejected by ordinary, which in
different ways fostered the view of alienated artist. Another manifestation of the Victorian
age was therise of various kinds of pessimism and stoicism. The novels and poetry of T.
Hardy show one kind of pessimism and stoicism. The novels and poetry of T. Hardy show
one kind of pessimism. No one could have been more savage in his attacks on Victorian
conceptions of the family, education and religion than Samuael Butler, whose novel The
Way of All Flesh is still the bitterest indictment in English literature of the Victorian way of
life. The position of women was rapidly changing during this period. These events marked
a change in the attitude to women and in the part they played in the national life as well as
in the relation between the sexes which is reflected in a variety of way in the literature of
the period. A technical revolution in poetry was going on side by side with shifts in attitude.
The Imagist Movement fought against Romantic fuzziness and facile emotionalism in
poetry. They insisted on "direct treatment of thing, whether subjective, on the avoidance of
all world that did contribute to the presentation, "and free metrical movement than a strict
adherence to "the sequence of a metronome" could allow. All this encouraged precision in
imagery and freedom of rhythmic movement. At the same time a need was felt to bring
poetic language and rhythms closer to those to those of conversation, or at least to spice the
formalities of poetic utterance with echoes of the colloquial and even the slangy. It was T.
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S. Eliot who introduced into modern English and American poetry the kind of irony
achieved by shifting suddenly from the formal to the colloquial or by oblique allusions to
objects or ideas that contrasted sharply with those carried by the surface meaning of the
poem. G. M. Hopkins relapced Tennyson as the great 19th century poet. Hopkins absolute
precision of the individual image with a complex odering of images and a new kind of
metrical pattering.
The postwar disillusion of the 1920's was, it might be said, a Spiritual matter, just as Eliot's
Waste Land was a spiritual and not a literal was land. The years roughly 1912 to 1930-were
the Heroic Age of Modern English Novel. Joseph Conrade, James Joyce, and D. H.
Lawrence are the giants, with Virginia Woolf and E. M. Forster brillians minor figures – to
name only the most outstanding writers.
There are three major influences on the changes in attitude and technique in the modern
novel. The first is the novelist's reliazation that the general background of belief which
united him with his pubic in the common sense of what was significant in experience had
disappeared. The second was a new view of Time; times was not a series of chronological
moments to be presented by the novelist in sequence with an occasional deliberate
retrospect, but as a continuous flow in the consciousness of the individual. The third was
the new notions of the mature of consciousness, which derived in a general way from S.
Freud and C. Jung but were also part of the spirit of the age. Consciousness is multiple; the
past is always present in it at same level and is continually coluring one's present reaction.
This view of multiple levels of consciousness existing simultaneously, coupled with the
view of time as a constant flow rather than a series of separate moments means that a
novelist preferred to plunge into the consciousness of his characters in order to tell his story
rather than to provide and external framework of chronological narrative. The "stream – of-
consciousness" technique, where the author tries to render directly the very directly the very
fabric of his character's consciousness without reporting it in formal, quoted remarks was
developed in the 1920's as an important new technique of English novel.
Concentrations on the "stream of consciousness" led inevitably to stress on the lonliness of
the individual; each man is condemned to live in the prison of his own imcommunicable
consciousness. The theme of such modern fiction is thus the possibility of love, the
estabilishement of emotional communication, in a community of private consciousness. V.
Woolfs delicate projection of the relation between the self's need for privacy and self's need
for privacy and self's need for genuine communication, the search for communication of the
human condition, in Joyce's Ulysses, and the theme of human relationships in Lawrence's
novels. The dilemma of the human condition is never really solved in these novelists.
Modern Drama begins in a sense with the witty drawing – room comedies of Oscar. Wilde;
which reflected an attitude to the relation between sexes which was part of a view of
society held by a whole social class. G. B. Shaw in his general attitudes represent the anti
Victorianism of the late Victorian.
Criticism occupied a much larger place on the map of modern literry culture than it has ever
occupied before. New psychological and anthroprodogical ideas stimulated new kind of
critical activity. This is the great critical age, and criticism and creation have marched
together. Arnold thought literature was bound to replace religion as a source of inspiration
refreshment. The Major themes are: V. Woolf's self nedd for privacy. J. Joyces's search for
communion of human condition, and D. H. Lawerance's Human relationships.
Dominant genre: : Novel - Criticism
Subject : Alienation of the Modern Man and Artist
Style : Stream of Consciousness
School : Modernism (Symbolism, Surrealism, Expressionism)
Dominant figures : 1. T. S. Eliot
2. H. Pinter
3. T. Hargy
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4. W. B. Yeats
5. G. B. Shaw
Masterpiece : Waste Land (1920)
Brithday Party (1958)
Jude Obscure(1896)
Second Coming (Poem)
Major Barbara (1905)
Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

His novels set in a predominantly rural "Wessex", show the forces of nature outside and
inside man combining to shape human destiny. He presents characters at the mercy of their
own passions or finding temporary salvation in the age – old rhythms of rural work or rural
reaction. Men in his works are not masters of their fates. Most of Hardy's novels are tragic.
Hardy himself denied that he was a pessimist, calling himself a "meliorist" i. e. one who
believes that the world may be made better by human effort.
A number of his poem are verse anecdote illustrating the perversity of face, the disastrous
or ironic concidence. The sadness in Hardy-his inability to believe in the government of the
world by a benevolent God, his sense of the waste and frustration involved in human life,
his insistent irony when faced with moral or metaphysical question – is part of the late
Victorian mood. The poetic mood. The favorite poetic mood of both Tennyson and Arnold
was an elegic one, but this is not Hardy's mood. The sad – sweet cadeness of Victorian self-
pity are not to be found in Hardy's poetry. His works explore ironies with sometimes an
almost malevolent staging of coincidence in order to emphasize the disparity between
human desire and ambition on the one hand and what fate has in store for the characters on
the other. But Fate is not external force. Hardy's use of balled rhythms often helps to give
an elemental quality to his poetry, suggesting that this incident or situation, carefully
particularized though it is nevertheless stands for some profound and recurring themes in
human experience.
T. Hardy's voice is as important an in fluence on modern poetry as their method and style.
His poetry is mainly about love, the integration of love and naural world, his view of the
cosmos, and the sense of isolation that is a dominant theme conveyed by the literature of
19th and 20th centuries. Hardy's poetry conveys not only a sense of his own isolation but
also that of his protagonists who are very often solitary outsides, alienated from the life of
their fellows. The feeling of isolation in Hardy's poetry is not similar to that of worth that
gives him insight, inspiration, and Joy rather than pain and discomfort.
Subject : Fate-Natural forces
Style : Ironical Satirical
Masterpiece : Jude the Obscure
School : Naturalism
The first work : The poor Man and the Lady (1867)
The last work : The Well Beloved (1897)
Main works : Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
Test of the D'urbervilles (1891)
Far from Mading Crowd (1874)
The Famous Tragedy of the Queen of Cronwall-(verse drama
(1923))
Gerard Manely Hopkins (1844-89)

He was a sensitive poet fascinated by language and rhythm and a passionately keep
observer of the colour and form and detail of the world of nature. One of his ways.
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Sometimes he coined new words on the analogy of existing ones: and he used unusual
combinations of words and unusual word order to achieve the exact curve of meaning. His
interest in thythms was as great as his interest in his letters he developed theory of "Sprung
Rhythm." The combination of the colloquial and the formal, the building up of complex
patterns of meaning through the multiple suggestiveness given to words in their poetic
context, is what so excited 20th century poets when they discovered Hopkins. His popularity
rests on his experiement with the Supeung Rhythm. His poetry is very difficult, and poems
are built around traditional religious themes. Most of his themes is, "God is verywhere,
evident in Nature. "He was a musician, painter, Greek philosopher (scholar), a poet and
above all else a devout Iesuit priest.
Subject : Nature and God's position
Style : Lyric
School : Symbolic
George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)

He began his literary career as a writer of unsuccessful novels. He was never a conventional
socialist. He championed H. Ibsen as well as Wagner. His training in music and dramatic
criticism, his interest in social reform, his admiration for Wagner and Ibsen, the influence
of S. Buttler (the great satirist of Victorian life and thought) helped to make Shaw a
playwright. From beginning his aim as a dramatist was to shock his audiences. He used
paradox, both in the action and even more in dialogue, to dazzle and even bewilder his
audiences only to demonestrate that their absurd conventional views and unconscious
hypocrisies were responsible for their bewilderment.
Sometimes the sense of fun led him to conclude a serious critical comedy in sheer farce.
The most important feature of his play was his idea. Nietzche influenced him.
He is an outstanding exponent of the comedy of idea in Man in Superman.
Dominant genre : Drama
Subject : Force of life
Style : Critical - comedy
School : Naturalism
Masterpiece : Saint John (1923)
First work : Windower's House (1882)
Main works : 1. Mrs. Warren's Profession
2. Arms and Men
3. Man and superman (1904)
4. Major Barbara
5. Apple Cart (1929)
6. Candida
Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

He was for a long time regarded as sea writer whose exotic description of eastern
landscapes and exploitation of the romantic atmosphere of Malaya and other unfamiliar
regions gave his work a special kind of richness and splender. The use of intermediate
narrators and multiple points of view is common in Conrad. The notion of the difficulty of
true communion, coupled with the idea that communion can be unexpectedly forced on us.
His best work is in the oblique method. He is the greatest Modern Romantic, who sought
his subjects in an exotic setting. His object was to illuminate the inmost recesses of Man's
Soul. In The Nigger of Narcissus conrad uses a vivid tropical background in the study of
white man whose moral stamina is stapped by the influence of the tropics.
His novels show his knowledge of the sea as a lasting influence.
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Many of his novels based on the classic adventure story, but they rarely end at that. He is a
master of complex narrative techniques and such devices as time shifting view points. He
tends to show characters in extreme situation themselves and being tested, not always with
success.
He is both a Romantic and a modern writer: his search for truth and certainty inside a man.
The elements of uncertainty, sense of corruption, and loss of direction and purpose are all
very modern.
Subject : Corruption – Loneliness and Incommunicability
Style : Navigatory - Ironical
School : symbolism
The first work : Almayer's Folly (1895)
The last work : The Rover (1923)
Masterpiece : Nostromo (1904) (imagingary setting in South America)
Main works : Hearth of Darkness (1902)
Lord Jim (1900)
The Secret Sharer (1910)
The Secret Agent (1907)
The Mirror of the Sea (1906)
The Arrow of Gold (1919)
The Nigger of Narcissus (1897)
The Shadow line (1917)
William Buttler Yeats (1865-1939)

Most of Yeat's mystical and quasi – mystical ideas to sources common to Blake and Shelley
and which sometimes go for back into pre-Platonic beliefs and traditions. His greatness as a
poet lies in his ability to communicate. The power and significance of his symbols, by the
way he expresses and organizes them even to readers who know nothing of his system. He
acquired ideas of poetry which were vaguely Pre-Raphaelite: he believed that a poet's
language should be dreamy, evocative and ethereal. It was Irish nationalism that first sent
him in search of consistently simpler and more popular style. He combined the colloquial
with the formal language. He was realist – symbolist – methaphysical poet with an uncanny
power over words. The Byzantium poems show Yeats trying to escape from turbulence of
life to the calm eternity of life.
Yeat's special interes was poetic drama. Shelly had a great influence on Yeats.
His trust was in the intuition and imagination of man. He believed in fairies, magic and
other forms superstition. He saw in man a dual personality made up of the self and anti-self.
We sometimes find a poem based on Sligo folklore in the midst of a group of dreamy
poems written under influence of the Rhymer's Club or an echo of Irish nationalist feeling
in a lyric otherwise wholly Pre-Raphaelite in tons. He began in the tradition from the
London poets of the 90's. Spenser and Shelley and a little later Blake were important
influences.
Subject : Art-life
Style : Ironical
School : Symbolism
Main works : Adam's Curse
In the Seven Woods
The Tower
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James Joyce (1882-1941)

From a comparatively early age Joyce regarded himself as a rebel against shabbiness and
Philistinism of Dublin. He wrote only and always about Dublin. He began his career by
writing a series of stories etching with extraordinary clarity aspects of Dublin life, as a
result Dubliner is a book about Man's fate as well as a series of sketches of Dublin. The
center of his subjects was the relationship between the artist and society in the modern
world. In the Portrait Stephen worked out a Theory of art which considers that art moves
from the Lyrical form to the Dramatic the highest and most perfect form, where "the artist,
like the God of creation, remains within behind beyond or above his handiwork, refined out
of existence, indifferent, paring his figurnails." Most of his work are related to the rejection
by artist of the ordinary world of middle class values. His career belongs to that long
chapter in the history of the arts in Western Civilization which begins with the artist's
declaring his his independence and ends with his feeling his invitable "alienation." His
masterpiece Ulysess is the parallel with Homer's Odyssey: ever episode in Ulysses
corresponds in way to an episode in the Odyssey. Ulysses in an account of one day in the
lives of critizes of Dublin in the year 1904. The book opens at eight o'clock on the morning
of June 16, 1904. The novel explores the paradoxes of Human loneliness and sociability.
His concern is human relationaships.
He uses internal monolog and Stream of Consciousness. His genius is for the comic rather
than tragic view of life. He was one of the pioneers of free association technique.
Dominant genre : Nove;
Subject : Artist-Loneliness
Style : Stream of consciousness
School : Symbolism
Main works : Ulysses (1922)
The first work : A Portraite of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
(Autobiography
The last work : Finnegans wake (1939) (Dream Vision, theme:
Death and resurrection cycle)
Main works : Doubliners (1922)
D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)
His most characteristic writings are essentially a record in symbolic terms of his
explorations of human individuality and of all that might fulfill it, whether in the natural
world or in the world of other individuals. "Sense of truth", "Supereme impulse" are
phrases characteristic of Lawernce's belief in intuition. In his novels Lawerance probes with
both subtlety and power into various aspect of relationship – the relationship between man
and his environment, relationship between generations, the relationship between man and
women, the relationship between instinct and intellect and above all the proper basis for the
marriage relationship as he conceived it. He is concerned too with the impact of modern
industrial civilization on human sensibility, and finds many ways, at once realistic and
symbolic, of projecting this. Lawrence had a poetic sense of life. He is essentially an artist;
it is his renderning of life in his art, on his preaching about life's meaning, that matters.
His main concern is with the inner movements of impulse, the working of primary
emotions. His constant subject is the psychology of human relationship. His genius is
essentially aesthetic and visionary. His men and women are seen as jets of emotional
energy drawn from the vast, dark tides of the unconscious impulse. His celebration of
sexual impulse is reinforced by the emotional sanctions of mystical religiosity. He is the
first major English writer who studies Sexual emotion.
Regardless of its sentimental effects and social bearings.
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Subject : Art-Oedipus Complex

Style : Poetic-Psychological
School : Symbolic
Masterpiece : Sons and Lovers (1913) (autobiography)
The first work : The White Peacock (1911)
The last work : Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
Main works : Rainbow (1915)
Women in Love (1917)
Kangaroo (1923)
Plumed Serpent (1926)
Aaron's Rod (1922)
Trespasser (1912)
Was originally conceived as a sing novel to be called the
Sisters)
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
He has learned from the Imagists the necessity of clear and precise images and he learned
from T. E. Hulme and from his early supporter and advise Ezra Pound to fear romantic
softness and to regard the poetic medium rather than the poet's personality as an important
factor. He saw in the metaphysical poets how wit and passion could be combined. One side
of Eliot's poetic genius is, in one sense of the word, Romantic. The Symbolist influence on
his interest interest in the evocative and the suggestive. The Waste Land with aspects of the
decay of culture in the Modern Western world. His verse is a note of quiet searching for
spiritual peace with considerable allusion to Biblical, liturigical, and mystrical religious
literature and to Dante. Eliot explored essentially religious moods, dealing with the relaton
between time and eternity. His plays have all been, directly or indirectly, one religious
themes. He considered himself "Classicist in literature, Royalist in politics and Anglo
Catholic in religion", in favor of order against chaos, tradition agains eccentricity, authority
agains eccentricity agains rampant individualism. He began writing poetry in Traditional
modes; however the writer Arthur Symons in his book Symbolist Movement in literature
altered Eliot's view of poetry. He dismissed Milton and Victorians. He accepted the
Jacobean dramatists. The main organizing principle in the Wast Land is Myth of Death and
Rebrith. In the Waste Land (1922) Eliot replaced the standard flow of poetic language by
fragmented utterance and substituded for traditional coherence of poetic structure a
deliberate dislocation of parts in which very deverse components are related by
connections that are left to the reader to discover or incent. His immediate Wasteland is the
world after 1914-18. His concern is with the emotional and spiritual sterility of Western
man.
The poem presents a comparative vision between the 20th century and that of the past. In his
the Hollow Men, he used the assassination of Caesar, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and
Dante's Divine Comedy. He began writing poetry in traditional modes; The Wasteland, in
which Eliot was given suggestion by Ezra Pound, which led critics to think of the poem as a
joint effort. He was in favor of the "Metaphysical" poets such as Donne and Herbert.
Among dramatists, he accepted the Jacobean dramatists. The main organizing principle in
the Wasteland is myth of death and rebirth.
Subject : Corruption-Loneliness-Modern life
Style : Poetic
School : Symbolism - Realism
Masterpiece : 1. Waste Land (poem) (1920)
2. Murder in Cathedral (play) (1935)
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The Family Reunion (1939)

The Cocktail Party (1949) (Vers drama)
The confidential Clerk
Elder Statesman
E. M. Forster (1879-1970)
Most of his work is concerned with ways of discovering such a quality in personal
relationships aimed the complixities and distorions of modern life. He has written critical
autobiographical and descriptive prose, notably Aspects of the Novels (1927) which, as a
discussion of the techniques of fiction by a practescing novelist, had become a minor
classic of criticism. His novel deal with difference between living and dead relationships,
nature of love, relation between inward feeling and outward action, between the kinds of
reality in which people get involved in living.
At once anti-Christion, intellectual, detached, ironic, nostalgic, satiric, and comic, it took
times for his talent to be recognized, but when it was he was seen as one of the greatest
twentieth century novelists. His stance as an outsider, and as someone who felt strongly the
inflexibility of the English, may be explained by his homosexuality, and by his membership
of the "Bloomsbury Group."
Dominant genre : Prose-Novel
Subject : Man's life-Love
Style : Critical
School : Realism - Symbolism
Masterpiece : 1.Aspect of the Novels (criticism)
2. A. Passage to India (1924)
The first work : Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
The last work : A Passage from India (1924) (Allusion to Whitman's poem)
Main works : The Road from Colonus (Allusion to Sophecle's play)
The Longest journey (1907) (Allusion to Shelley's poem)
A Room with a View (1908)
Howards End (1910)
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CHAPCHER 3
Literary Criticism
Criticism
The interpretation, analysis, classification and ultimately judgement of works of literature
which has become a kind of literary genre itself. A broad division can be made between
practical criticism which focuses on the examination of individual text and theoretical
criticism which discusses the nature of literature and the relationship between literature and
the critic. A similar distinction also exists between descriptive criticism which attempts to
describe literature as it is and prescriptive criticism. The aim and conventions of literary
criticism, like literature itself, have changed constantly throughout the ages and there are
many different types of critical approach.
Mimetic Criticism
This theory of art see the work of art as reflecting the universe like a mirror. A word used
by Aristotle in his Poetics when he states that tragedy is an imitation of an action. Mimetic
criticism regards literature as imitating or reflecting life and therefore emphasies the truth
and accuracy of its Realism in a general sense.
Pragmatic Criticism
This theory of art sees the work as a means to an end, to teach or instruct: the focus is
changed to the work's effect on an audience. The assumption of most Neoclassic criticism
from Sir Philip Sideny's The Apologie for Poetrie (1598) to Dr. Johnson's many critical
studies at the end of 18th century is that literature serves a pragmatic purpose to teach by
delighting. It may be applied to those kinds of criticism which see literature as designed to
achieve effects on its audience (instruction, aesthetic pleasure) and judge it according to the
successful achievement of this assumes aim.
Major Critics:
1. Horace Art of Poetry
2. Sidney
3. Dr. Johnson
Practical Criticism
A concern not to theories about literature, but examine and analyse particular works,
working from the particular toward understanding of writers and periods.
Two books were particularly influential both by I. A. Richards: Principle of Literary
Criticism (1925) and Practical Criticism (1929). The tenets of practical criticism were taken
up and disseminated with fevour by the English critic and teacher F. R. Leavis: most British
universities and school still are dominated by this approach. Practical Criticism became
almost the Levis. In fact his approach to literature was less concerned with explaining texts:
Literary Criticism
91
he valued literature as the focus for moral and cultural perspective which it was the
business of education to provide.
Major Critics:
1. Dryden
2. Dr. Johnson Lives of English Poets (1779-81)
3. Wordsworth Biographia Literaria (1817)
4. Mattew Arnold Essays in Criticism (1865)
5. I. A. Richards Pracrical Criticism (1930)
6. T. S. Eliot Selected Essays (1932)
7. Virgina Woolf
8. F. R. Leavis
Objective Criticism
A name which can be pplied to much of the criticism since the 1920s, including the New
Critics, which examines the work of literature as an autonomous Creation, free from the
poet, the reader and the world. A poem is examined for its intrinsic complexity, Balance,
Pattern and coherence, in order to reveal relationships between its various parts and not
because it adds to our biographical knowledge of the poet, our understanding of literary
history, or any of its other extrinsic features.
Major Critics:
1. Kant Critique of Aesthetic Judgment (1790)
2. The Chicago and New Critics (1920)
Impressionistic Criticism
Criticism which concentrates on the critic's personal response to a work and attempts to
produce feeling in words, rather than to examine a literary work in the light of some theory
of literature. Much of the criticism of 19th and 20th centuries was impressionistic. The New
criticism and Practical Criticism sought to bring a more exact rigour into the evaluation of
response.
Expressive Criticism
Examining a text as an expression of the writer's feelings imagination and personality. It
tends to judge the work by its sincerity or the extent to which it has successfully revealed
the author's state of mind. Romantic writers such as Coleridge and Wordsworth were
expressive critics in this sense. The Criticism of 1920s regarded expressive criticism as
mistaken.
New Criticism
A name still applied to a major critical movement of 1930s and 1940s in American. John
Crowe Ransom's The New Criticism (1940) fixed the lable and summed up the issues. The
Autonomy of literature is a vital tenet of New Criticism.
As T. S. Eliot recommended a poem must be studied as a poem not as a piece of
biographical or sociological evidence or literary historical material or evidence of a
psychological theory of literature. New Critics defined various wrongful ways of looking at
literature, for example, the Intentional and Effective Fallacies. Close reading of texts
becomes the only legitimate critical procedure seeing the work as a linguistic structure in
which all the parts are hold in a Tension of Paradox, Irony, and Ambiguity, words, symbols
and images. Some of their ideas in this respect were taken from I. A. Richard's attempt to
create a proper terminology for literary effects and his remodeling of Coleridge's ideas of
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Form as the synthesizing element of poetry. Richard's idea that literature was written in a
special, non – referential language, also appealed to them. New criticism emphasizes the
self – sufficiency of a literary work, therefore it is called ontological criticism. This
movement is a literary revolution against over-emphasis upon the background and
environment of literature and concentration upon the author instead of the work. They insist
on the primacy of the text. The close scrutiny of words so as to analyze their associative
and symbolic significance is the major concern of the New Criticism. The major
practitioners are A. Tate, R. P. warren, J. C. Ransome, and C. Brooks.
Plato
The systematic Literary Criticism began in ancient Greece through Plato's the forceful
ideas. His approach to poetry can be considered as utilitarian. He is an idealist, thus to him
the art of artistic creation is worthless because truth lies in the world of ideal. The real
world is a shadow and poetic creation is a shadow, thus thrice removed from the ideal truth.
He says that poets are divinely inspired, therefore they compose poetry can not as a craft
but by the aid of some irrational mysterious source. "Poetry feeds and waters the passions
instead of drying them up and lets rule instead of ruling them" ; this is the charge brought
against poetry by him on moral grounds, introducing him as an ethical literary critic. The
idea of "repression of emotion" as a formula for a healthy society is adocated by him. He
would not allow poets in his ideal commonwealth of the Republic because they were liars,
in this sense the imitated the truth. For him content is more important than form. The
highest truth is austere, mathematical and intellectual. Poetry does not deal with truth.
Inspiration is closer to madness that to real knowledge. He declares that a poets is an
inferior who marries an inferior and has inferior offspring. There is no invention in the poet
antil he has been inspired and is out of his senses and then the mind is no longer in him and
is unable to utter his oracles. According to him truth revealed by poets is flawed and thus is
to be avoided at once. He is interested in content.
Aristotle
Aristotle who defined art as imitation in his Poetics is the prime example. The most
foundamental constituent of a tragedy in Aristotle's Poetics is Plot. His Poetic had become
the cornerstone of western literary criticism. In that he notes "epic poetry", tragedy,
comedy, and dithyrambic poetry all happen to be imitaions. He contends that poetry is more
universal. He establishes the basis of morality in the moderation between evil extremes, and
believes in suspension of disbeliefe complex plot in his view is superior to the simple one,
for it contains peripeteia and anagnorisis. Arousing pity and fear as the function of tragedy
in his Poetics results in an emotional relief that called catharsis. Regarding the action of
tragedy, he lays great emphasis upon probability and necessity and emphatically
acknowledges the superiority of poetry over history because poetry deals with the universal
truths with the emphasis upon what ought to be rather than what is. He justifies poetry
against Plato's censure by his argument of poetry in which he assert that poetry is a creative
process in which the poet transform reality according to the idea in his mind. "Historical
Falsehood," his philosophical defense of poetry indicates that poetry reveals a more
profound reality than history for it deals with probble impossibility. In his view "plot", "the
Soul of Tragedy" must constitute an organic whole probability and necessity are two
essential qualities to the attainment of organic unit. It means that without any unnecessary
events, various events should be logically interconnected and follow each other inevitably.
"Homartia is miscalculation or error of judgement", is the real definition of the Aristotelian
components of tragedy. Since tragedy is a representation not of men but action and life,
there could be no tragedy without action. Tragic hero must be of some social standing and
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personal reputation but sufficiently like ourselves in terms of his weakness that we feel fear
and pity when a tragic Flaw causes his downfall.
He makes distinction between poetry and history. The historian writes of what has already
happened; the poet writes of what could happen. "Poetry is more philosophical and a higher
thing than history."
Horace
His emphasis in literary criticism is upon imitation of the standards of the ancient Greek
(Hellenic) masters. In his formula artistic excellence is an outcome of disciplined wit, and
prescribes the poets to mix pleasure with profit, thus his approach to literature is classical.
The loyality to the ancient Greek rules is clearly apparent in his notion of Decorum which
means the appropriotness of style to genre. He in his versified Art of Poetry declared that
the aim of a poet is either instruct or delight a reader and preferably to do both. Plato and
Aristotle were primarily educationalist but Horace was a practicing poet. He offers practical
advice rather than theoretical propositions, though his advice is more dogmatic. He
believed a poet must be born with some ability and there will always be a scope for
originality as long as it follows the dictates of "Nature" but too much Originality is
dangerous. (His ideas on decorum, delightful teaching and imitation of classical models lie
at the heart of Renaissance literary theory. He is an arch-conservative in the age of
intellectual revolutions.) The aim of poets is to give either profit or delight. He talks as a
rational man addressing other rational men. He insists on five acts; and epics must start in
medias res.
He is against extremes. For Plato and Aristotle imitation meant imitation of nature. In
Horace, it begins to mean the imitation of the writer.
Lonignus
Longinus although ranked as a classical critic, transcends profit plus pleasure formula as
the sole criterion of literary excellence. He rather firmly emphasize the power of up lifting
the reader's soul through imaginative and emotional appeal.
"True sublime" he states lies in thoughts of universal validity. His approaches are more
similarly to the aesthetic trend of modern Criticism. If Longinus's Critical ideas revealed by
ancient classical masters of literary of literary criticism, he can be critic of the modern
notion of effective fallacy. Even the title of his work has never been translated to the
satisfaction of everyone. The traditional translation, On the Sublime has been objected to as
having a false commutation in English and such titles as the "height of eloquence" and "on
the Literary Excellence" have been suggested. He is the first real critic of general literature.
Unlike Aristotle, he is not interested in the natural history of literature, in the tragedy or the
epic. He is interested in the phrase or passage which strikes fire from his mind. He defines
sublimity by showing that it consist of a certain distinction and excellence in expression
and that it is from no other source than this that the greatest poets and writers have devived
their eminence and gained on immortality of renown. He presents five fountains of
eloquence in at attempt to clarify his defination. They are:
1. A firm grasp of ideas
2. Vehement and inspired emotion
3. The proper construction of figures
4. Notable Language
5. General effect of dignity and elevation
He believes that sublimity is recognizable because within each of us is a power which
aspires toward the great and the noble. He insisted on the well established concept of
organic unity. He belongs to Graeco – Roman literary speech.
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He can be considered as not only the first Romantic critic but also the first comparative
critic. The literature he is interested in is that which has given him pleasure.
He is speaking of faults to be avoided. He gives examples of the falls sublime, bombast, ill
– timed pathos, puerility and frigidity.
Unlike Horace who looks first for competence and consistency, longinus is all for a well –
timed flash of sublimity.
Dante (1265-1321)
The Middle Ages are no longer considered a period of Gothic darkness. Yet for the
historian of literary criticism, the period is still the Dark Ages. With the exception of Dante
no critic can be found who is worth mentioning. With philosophy primarily concerned with
theological problems. From the time of Saint Augustine on the reading the literary classics
was looked upon by a large number of people as either a waste of time or as actually
dangerous to one's immortal soul. Dante's achievement shows criticism is possible outside
of the classical vocabulary. A careful study of his Divine Comedy will show that not only
the poem as a whole but each episode has those four levels of meaning. Dante calls his
work a comedy because it begins horribly (with Hell) and pleasantly (with Heaven) like
Longinus, he is concerned with the proper Language for poetry. He belived the language
spoken by the people is an appropriate and beautiful language (Language of Romantic Age)
for writing. He asserts that vernacular is an excellent and acceptable vehicle for works of
literature. He is the significant critic of the Middle Ages. He says that there are three
subjects good enough for illustrious vernacular. They are safety, love, virtue. The best
poetic from to use is that of the canzone which contains the best of modern literature. It
should be written in the tragic style of the illustrious vernacular.
Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

In Renaissance period Sidney wrote Defense of Poesy. The most appropriate definition of
Renaissance is the revival of interest in the standards and models formulated by the ancient
classical masters in art literature. He in Defense of Poesy, demonstrates the superiority of
poetry over history and philosophy. His argument reveals that combining historian example
with philosopher's precept, the poet makes philosopher's difficult abstractions
understandable through the vivid examples of the historians. He emphasizes on the
transport of poetry related to the instructive quality of poetry. Poetry does not morely give
us a knowledge of virtue. It also moves us to virtuous action. Poetry for him is a creative
process through which the poet converts the brazen world to golden one. In his philosophy
the purpose of poetry is delightful instruction, and it is an art of imitation, a speaking
picture with this and to teach and to delight and it can not lie for he deals not with facts but
with fiction containing ideal truth. Imagination in his poetry and criticism makes the major
contribution to the fulfillment of creation in the poetic process. His theory about tragedy is
principally based upon Platonic viewpoints, and says that tragedy is an imitation of a noble
action stirring admiration and commiseration and teaches uncertainty of the world and the
work foundations upon which golden roofs are built. The deligful instruction, his criterion
of perfect poetry, is suggestive of the union of form and content, and his content is the very
didactic aspect of poetry. From to him is the artistic quality that moves the reader to follow
the moral lesson.
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John Milton (1608-74)

He was for Parliament, was against the King and a member of the Commonwealth
Government. He was not only a poet but a serious student of literary criticism. The poet
must use his gifts to inbreed and cherish in a great people the seeds of virtue and public
civility to allay the perturbations of the mind. For him, poets are the strong enemies of
despotism. He looks to the Bible to furnish his types of poetry. Because of his new political
and religious ideas, Milton never uses the key word decorum in a class sense. For him
meaning is always Moral or Aesthetic. His own Samson Agonistes modeled as it is on
ancient tragedy rejects the distinctions of birth and social position. The chorus addressed in
both poetry and the Commonwealth it is natural that he should give advice to the
magistrates on the political function of poetry. Faced with the role of poetry in the
Commonwealth his attitude for a moment seems to be that of Plato in his Republic.
John Dryden (1631-1700)

He helped form the Neoclassical school. He is attempting to help introduce into England
the new standards of taste without denying those parts of the English traditions that he feels
are still valuable. His head is with French critics but his hearts beats in time to the great
English poetry of the past. His Essay on Dramatic Poesy is an important landmark in the
history of literary criticism in England Dryden more than any other English Critic embodies
the spirit and ideals of Neoclasscism (It is his lasting contribution to literary Criticism). He
definines the imaginative literature as a just and lively image of human nature representing
passions, humours and the changes of fortune to which it is subject for the delight and
instruction of mankind. This is the purpose of literature that delight comes from liveliness
of style. Instruction comes from the recognition of facts human mature. His imitation of
classical rules is not slavish. Also the blind adherence to unities is of little value to him.
Thus he can be called the pioneer of Liberal Classicism. His major critical work An Essay
of Dramatic Poesy is in the form of a dialogue. The speakers are Neander (Druden himself,
the new man, who defends the English), Crites (Sir Robert Howard, who defends ancient
dramatic practice), Lisideius (Sir Charles Sedley, who speaks on favor of recent French
Drama) and Eugenius (Lord Buckurst, that of the Moderns). For him Shakespeare was the
man who of all modern and perhaps ancient poets had the largest and the most
comprehensive soul. "Shakespeare was the Homer or Father of our dramatic poets. Johnson
was the Virgil, the pattern of elaborate writing."
Other concerns center on:
1. The Language or fiction of a play
2. Issue of decorum
3. The differenced between the English and French theaters
4. The value of rhymed or opposed to blank verse in the drama with rhymed verse boing the
victor.
Alexander Pope (1688-1744)

He believes the supremacy of the ancient authority, which is based on human nature which
expressed it in his couplet: "The ancient rules discovered not devised / are nature still but
nature methodized". By "Metodized" he means order imposed on the universal and
unchanging aspects of human nature thus they are immortal. In another couplet "The wit is
nature to advantage dressed / what oft was thought but never so well expressed", he means
that expression is the dress of thought. By "well expressed" he implied the imaginative way
in which the general truths are expressed.
He followed Horace in his Neo-Classicism. The good poet uses his reason and his common
sense to discover the general truth about human character and behavior.
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The rules of poetry are to Pope natural and reasonable. Excess and enthusiasm in poetry
must be restrained by the rules. The poet and critics must be restrained by the rules. The
poet and critic must be constant readers of the ancients because the ancients were the ones
who discovered the rules of nature. He is against the conceits of the Metaphysical. The
Nature for him was not as the Romantics were to understand it, wild and mysterious but
something reflecting deep order, moderation, universal laws. According to him, the golden
age of criticism is the Classical age, the age of Homer, Aristotle and Longious.
He grounds his criticism in both imitation and rhetoric literary theories. His An Essay on
Criticism is the only significant critical treatise in English written in verse. The key term in
his Essay is "Nature".
Samuel Johnson (1709-84)

For the first time he called Donne and his follows Metaphysical poets. He is the spokesman
of the classical school with an innate respect for tradition order, discipline and authority.
His objective "to wed poetry with life" seems to be indicative of the dominant anti-escapist
Realism in his literary criticism. His critical doctrine based upon uniting pleasure with truth
of the nature and function of poetry. He condmn blank verse, for rhyme is essential for
poetry not only for providing pleasure but also for imparting emphasis.
He declares that "Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representation of
general nature", and says that Shakespeare is above all writers, the poet of nature, the poet
that holds up to his readers a faithful mirror of manners and life, because Shakespeare
familiarizes the wonderful, even where the agency is supornatural, the dialogure is level
with life. Johnson praises Shakespeare even though he has written tragic-comedies, because
in mixing good and evil, tears and smiles so in mingling tragedy and comedy, Shakespeare
holds a mirror to life. Johnson stands as a great breakwater in English literary criticism.
English Neoclassical criticism has Dryden at the beginning, Pope in the middle and
Johnson at the end. He was essentially and sufficiently an Augustan. The business of poet is
to examine not the individual but the species. To a poet nothing can be useless. The
province of poetry is to describe nature and passion. The end of writing is to construct; the
end of poetry is to instruct by pleasing. The only Unity he will admit as necessary is the
unity of Action.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1874)

He is the cornerstone of the Romantic School. His theory of imagination divides
imagination into two kinds primary and secondary imagination. For him it is secondary
imagination is universal and possessed by all. He says secondary imagination dissolves,
diffuses, disspates, selects, orders and reshapes William the raw material provided by the
primary imagination into objects of beauty in order to create; and moreover he makes
distinction between imagination and fancy by placing imagination superior to fancy
because it creats new shpaes of beauty by unifying different impressions and fancy is
merely mechanical juxtaposition of images retaining their individual properties. His theory
of poetry is in sharp contrast with the Classical view of poetry as imitation with instruction
and delight as its ends, As as Romantic he hold that pleasure is the end of poetry which is
an activity of imagination. In his theory the essential factor for the creation of legitimate
poem is Organic Unity; by it he refers to inter-connection between the parts and the whole
the unity of from and content, rhyme and meter as integral parts of poem. His typical poetic
devices, supernatural elements, do not accord with Neoclassical dramatic illusion and
credibility. His phrasal justification to resolve this controversy, willing suspension of
disbelief. His criticism is Impressionistic. His theory of imagination stands against the
Neoclossical concept of Imitation. He feels compelled to make of what constitutes of poetry
and a poet; a poem is that species, it is discriminated by proposing to itself such delight
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from the whole, as is compatible with a distinct gratification from each component part.
The poem is to be judged no as mirror of truth but as a thing in itself, almost as living
organism which cannot be measured by extrinsic standards but only by its own internal
consistency. The poet brings the whole soul of man into activity. It reveals itself or
Reconciliation of Opposites or discordant qualities of sameness with difference of the
general with the concrete; the idea with the image; the individual with representative.
William Wordsworth (1770-1850)

He says, "every great poet is a teacher while the aim of poetry to him is pleasure". The
mission of poetry is to purify the public, awaken their sensibility so as to communicate
fresh and original truths of nature to them, thereby, achieving the sweet and the useful. His
Perface to the Lyrical Ballads demonstrates a forceful request for simplicity both in theme
and treatement. He defines poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings
recollected in tranquility. A poet is a man speaking to men; the rustic language with its
simplicity easily communicates essential truths about human life. The poetry of the
Classical school is very artificial and unnatural. Meter is not essential to the poetry. To him
poetic truth is superior to the truth of philosophy and history. He believes, poetry increases
our knowledge of human life and human mature, so makes us wiser and nobler,
Imagination and intuition carry our Words worthian function of poetry. Selecting incident
and situations from humble and common life, as well as the employment of simple and
rustic language Wordsworth's theme and treatments, introduces him as a Realistic rather
than a Romantic. Imagination makes common and usual look uncommon and unusual. In
his doctrine, imagination is a universalizing, visualizing and creative facually. Foe him it is
feeling that matters. In his view of nature and function of a poet, the has a social mission
which prompts him to convey his thaughts to his readers; poets possession of a more
comprehensive soul and greater imagination enables him to react even to what he has not
experienced directly. In his view mind of main is a mirror to the beauty of nature. The poet
is a teacher of facts. His Preface to the Lyrical Ballads proves a forceful request for
simplicity both in theme and treatment. Unlike Pope, he chooses language really used by
people everyday speech.
He was very interested in Longinus.
P. B. Shelley (1792-1822)
Shelley applies Platonic ideas to resolve Platonic dilemma. Based on Plato's idea, for
objection to poetry, Shelley succeeds in defending poetry by claming that through
imagination the poet gets behind the copy imitates the divine ideas thus directly deals with
the ideals deals with the ideal truth. For him poetry is an expression of imagination.
His critical notion based an imagination and moral good argues that sympathy is an
instrument of moral good; imagination produces sympathy. Poetry strengthens imagination,
thus, poetry is an instrument of moral good. Poetry strips the veil of familiarity from the
world and lays bare the naked and sleeping poetry which is the spirit of its from; poetry
shifts the attention from the boredom of routine to the loveliness and wonders of the world,
that is to say poetry makes the familiar unfamiliar. Shelley believes that poets are the
Unacknowledged legislaters of the world. By means of Platonic idealism, he defends poetry
against Plato's attacks. Poetry in the record of the best and happiest moment of the happest
and best mind.
Hippolyte Adolpe (1828-93)

Age reinforce the realistic tendancy of Victorian literature by emphasizing the importance
of historical background in evaluating of work of art.
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With the rise of the Victorian era in 1830's, reason science and a sense of historical
determinism began to supplant Romantic thought. The growing sense of historical and
scientific determinism found its authorative voice in literary criticism and in many other
disciplines, in Charles Darwin. It was perceived that a literary work is not a more individual
play of imagination, the isolated caprice of an excited brain, but a transcript of
contemporary manners, a manifestation of a certain kind of mind.
Since behind each book there is a man, we must first consider him. We must examine the
environmental causes that joined in its creation. Taine divides such influences into three
main catagories: Race, Milieu, and Moment. For Man is not alone in the world. Nature
surround him and his fellowmen surround him, accidental and secondary tendencies
overlay his primitive tendencies. Living in the scientific and sociological atmosphere of the
middle 19th century, he believed that he could substitute new Scientific Truths about
literature for old ones. He could not view human nature except from a pessimistic
viewpoint. One must be realistic.
There is a system in human ideas and sentiments and that this system has for its native
power certain general traits, certain characteristics of the intellect and the heart common to
the men of one race or country. For race, he has to rely on the shaky anthropology of the
mid-19th century.
Matthew Arnold
He, the most outstanding Victorian critic, is a Classicist and his Classicism is seen in his
touchstone method of examining the absences or presence of literary value compared to
some lines of the ancient masters. He influenced by Taine, by man and moment the means
the writer and his social milieu. A literary work is a product of social forces. He is a
Classicist. He is a follower of Arisotle in his insistence on the importance of action as the
prime thing the soul of tragedy. He calls the Victorian era, an age of cultural decline due to
the lack of moral grandeur and artistic concern known as philistinism of the middle class. In
his criticism, poet should choose subjects that please always. Due to the widespread
philistinism of the era his plea is for the choice of ancient Classical subjects. In his
Classical doctrine, highest poetry results from the harmony of matter and manner, resulting
from the cooperation of an excellent subject and a simple and severe style. Arnold's
adherence to classical principles is seen in his idea of grand style which is reminiscent of
the Sublime of Longinus. His view on the subject demonstrates his preference for subjects
of high seriousness and truth of substance.
By defining poetry as "Criticism of life", Arnold implicitly claims that poetry is the noble
and profound application of ideal to life. He is against direct moral teaching he calls
didactic poetry as the lowest. In his criticism he believes the Touchstone method to realize
the presence or absence of high poetry; and by the application of this method, he means a
critic must always have in his mind lines and expressioins of great masters and apply them
to other poetry. In his definition of criticism Disinterested, is a key word, for keeping
himself aloof from the practical view of things, a critic must resist lending himself to more
political and practical consideration. His criticism is Objective, Moral, and Classical. He
refers to Homer, Pinder, Virgil, Dante and Milton as exponents of grand style. It was a lofty
or elevated style suitable for epic. He wants a return to what saw as virtues of Classical
Greek Civilization: they regarded the whole, we regard the parts.
He made art subservient to life. He made "high seriousness" the test of poetry. His
followers were thoughtful , fair- minded upholders of an intelligent idea.
I. A. Richards (1893-1979)
He is a well – known, believes in the existence of two languages referential and emotive. In
his Principles of Literary Criticism, comes to conclusion that it is possible on the basis of
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modern knowledge to construct a psychological theory of value that will enable us to

compare the worth of experiences, literary or otherwise. Richards divides impulse into
"appentencies" and "aversions". An appentcies is a seeking after an aversion is a
withdrawing from. That which satisfies an appentency is valuable. Obviously society can
does require the individuals who compose it to organize their impulses in a way consistent
with the interest of society as a whole but the organization of an individual may be better as
well than the standard of the group. Literature and arts become of the greatest importance to
us both as individual and as members of society. The poet is one who has a much wider
field of stimulation than the ordinary man and one who is able to manage his impulses with
less confusion. He is able to order experience because he is to bring Opposed Impulses into
equilibrium. Nothing can substitute for literature and arts because the experiences they offer
are rarely if ever obtainable elsewhere. Analyzing the witten responses, he catalogued the
various kinds of misreading to which poems can be subjected. His argument displaced the
uncritical notions of poetry inherited from the late Victorian age and it prompted a new
Close Reading of poetry for verbal ambiguities, ironies and other complexities in the work
of his pupil W. Empson, Levis and the Scrutiny group.
He holds that there is an essential Dichotomy between language of science and the
language of art. He insists close Textual Analysis of a literary work due to the special
nature of the language of literature. As well as its being a verbal fact. His approach to
literary criticism is Psychological. The true value of a literary work is received only though
a properly perceptive kind of reading. He says that poetry differe's from science in its
Emotive meaning attributed to words as well as the psychological adjustment it
communicates as an objective. His psychological defense from poetry suggests that, poetry
leads to proper balance of the nervous system. His discussion of the difference between
scientific and poetic Truth reveals that a poet makes a Pseudo-Statement. He is a New
Critic with a difference; it meant analysis, while his concern about the reader's reaction
makes him different from the New Critics. Aristotelian Katharsis results from the purgation
of excessive emotions, while the Richardian Katharsis results from the Harmonization of
opposite impulses.
T. S. Eliot (1888-1965)
He described himself as a classicist in literature, a royalist in politics and an Amgle-
Catholic in religion, Equalitarianism, progress and liberalism are detested by him. How
interwined a man's ideas about literature are with his social and religioius thinking. In his
critical doctrine, emphasizes the existence of Objective Correlative for the expression of the
writer's emotions. This phrase refers to a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which
shall be the formula for poet's emotion. He praises Metaphysical Poets for they have
achieved fusion of thoughts and feelings. By Dissociation of Sensibility he means the
separation of thoughts and feeling set in the 17th century. The concept of Tradition and
Recurrently is his chief factor in literary evaluation and means that Trandition is the
knowledge of the past writers which is not inherited but obtained through labour by those
who have the historical sense; meanwhile he believes in the Dynamic concept of Tradition.
The relationship between past and present in his idea of tradition is Reciprocal. By this
assertion "the more perfect the artist the more completely separate in him will be the man
who suffers and the mind which creates, "he means artistic "Depersonalization". For him
the poetry is an escape from emotion and an escape from personality, and it is organization
rather than inspiration; greatness of a poem depends on the greatness of the process of
poetic composition. This aim of poetry is Elucidation of works of art and the correction of
tase and the Promotion of understanding and enjoyment of literature. His criticism was very
much a part of the modernists, result against both the Romanticism and liberal historical
criticism of 19th century. It has been common to think of Eliot as the Father-figure of
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modern criticism. Wordsworth's emotion recollected in tranquility cannot be accepted by

Eliot.
Traditional Approach
In this approach the work of art frequently appeared to be of secondary importance
something that merely illustrated background. Such an approach let to the study of
literature as art. Literature is primarily art, it must be affirmed also that art does not exist in
a vacum. It is a creation by someone at something in history. New critics maintain that
literature has an instrinsic worth that it is not one of the media of transmitting biography
and history. Textual criticism has as its ideal the establishment of an authentic text or the
text which the author intended. To quote Thrope, "oridinary history of the transmission of a
text, without the intervention of a text, without the intervention of author or editor is one of
progressive degeneration. Textual criticism plays an important role in the studying the
gensis and development of a piece of literature. Textual criticism is the science of
discovering error in texts and art of removing it. Thrope says, "In Textual criticism the best
that can do is to cut the loose, to reduce the amount of error, to improve, to clarify the state
of textual affairs. Traditional approach is presented to literature under two headings
"Historical Biographical" and "Moral-Philosophical".
The first one sees a literary work chiefly as a reflection of its author life and times or the
life and time of the characters in the work. Novels may lend themselves somewhat more
readily than lyric poem to this particular interpretive approach. The Moral-Philosophical
approach is as old as Classical Greek and Roman critics. Plato emphasize Moralism and
Utilitarianism, Horace stressed delight and instruction. The lager function of literature is to
teach Morality and investigated philosophical issues. The important thing is the moral and
philosophical teaching. On its highest plan this is not superficislly didactic. The Traditional
Approach to literary analysis has to be somewhat deficient in imagition and neglected the
newer science, such as psychologly and anthropology. This approach in literary
interpretation is neither rigidly dogmatic no unaesthetic. It is electic. It does not eschew
insights from any other critical approach. It insists on its own fundamental validity.
Formalistic Approach
This approach is anti-impressianistic. Formalists define Intentional Fallacy or the error of
critical analysis by attempting to assess what the writer's intention was and whether or has
fulfilled it. Another critical fallacy in this approach is Affective Fallacy that defined as the
error of critical evaluation in terms of its results and effects in the mind of the readers; in
other words the confusion between the poem and its results. This movement was a short
lived school in Russia starting about 1917 which concentrated on form, style and technique
in art excluding other consideration, such as its social, political or philosophical aspects.
The principal text of formalist criticism is that language of literature is different from
ordinary language and that the critic's task is to define this literariness. Literary language is
constantly for grounding the qualities of language itself and back grounding of minimizing
the Denotative aspects of language. In this general view of literature the formalists are not
far from the American New Critics except that they concentrate more on refining the critic's
methods of discussing technical matters, such as meter, rhyme, and plot construction.
Formalist critics have used the discoveries and terminology of linguistics to help to define
the artistic devices which make literary language, deviate from the norm. The heart of
matter for the formalist critic is quite simply "what is the literary work, what are its shape
and effect and how are these achieved?" All relevant answers to these questions ought to
come from the text itself. As its name suggests Formalistic criticism has for its sole object
the discovery and explanation of form in the literary work. This approach assume the
Autonomy of the work itself and thus the relative unimportance of extra literary
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considerations, the author's life, his time, sociological, political, economic or psychological
implication. Classical art and aesthetics amply tesify to preoccupation with form.
Plato exploits dialectic and shapes movement toward Socratic wisdom by his imagery,
metaphor, dramatic scence, characterization setting and tone. Ideas shared and promoted
included literature viewed as an Organic Tradition, the importation, the importance of strick
attention to form a conservation related to classical values, the ideal of a society that
encourage order and tradition. The new critics sought precision and structural lightness in
the literary work; they favored a style and tone that work of everything necessary for its
analysis. After mastering the individual words one should look for structures and patterns,
inter relationships of the word: Hart crane, once called the Logic of Metaphor: images,
themselves totally dissociated when joined in the circuit of a particular emotion located
with specific relation to both of them conduce to great vividness and accuracy of statement
in defining that emotion. When that Internal Logic has been established the reader is very
close ot identifying the overall form of the work. In the systems of the past, the work form
usually meant what we would call external form. Ransom says: "The logical structure that
argument or the concept within the work and it refers to pricese or summary, what Brooks
has called the Heresy of Paraphrase. The local Texture comprises the particular details and
devices of the work. Modern (Formalistic) criticism has show that to speak of content as
such is not to speak of art at all, but of experience. Walt Whitman says: "The rhyme and
uniformity of perfect poems show the free growth of metrical laws." The short Lyric poem
has been favored genre for formalistic analyses, largely for reasons that remaind us of
poet's preference. This approach often neglects historical and social contexts that may
provide important insights into the meaning of the works.
Psychological Approach
In the general sense of the word there is nothing new about the psychological approach.
Aristotle used this approach in setting forth his classic definition of tragedy as combining
the emotions of pity and terror to produce catharsis. The complete gentleman of the English
Renaissance, Sir Philip Sideny with statements about the moral affects of poetry was
psychologizing literature. During the 20th century, psychological criticism has come to be
associated with a particular school of thought; the psychoanalytic theories of Sigmund
Freud (1852-1939). The foundation of his contribution to modern psychology is his
emphasis on the unconscious aspect of the human psyche. He demonstrated that like the
icebergs, the human mind is structured so that its great weight and density lie beneath the
surface. The oldest and best meaning of the word unconscious is the descriptive one; we
call unconscious any mental-process the existence of which we are obligated to assume
because for instance we infer it in some way from its effects but of which we are not
directly aware. He further emphasizes the importance of the unconscious by point out that
even the most conscious processes are conscious for only a short the most conscious period.
In view of this, Freud defines two kinds of unconscious: One which is transformed into
conscious material easily and under conditions which frequently arise and another in the
case of which such a transformation is difficult can only come about with a considerable
expenditure of energy or may never occur at all. We call the unconscious which is only
latent and so can easily become conscious, which is only latent and so can easily become
conscious, the preconscious, and keep the name unconconscious for the other. Freud
designates the prime psychic force as Libido or Sexual energy. The Id is the reserver of
libido, the primary source of all psychic energy. It functions to fulfill the primordial life
principle, which Freud considers to be Pleasure Principle. Without consciousness or
semblance of rational order the id is characterized by a termindous and amorphous vitality.
The Id is the source of all our aggressions and desires. It is lawless, asocial and amoral. Its
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function is to gratify our instincts for pleasure without regard for social conventions, legal
ethics or moral restraint.
The Id as defined by Freud is identical in many respects to the Devil as defined by
thelogians. In view of the Id's dangerous potentialities it is necessary that other psychic
agencies function to protect the individual and society. The first of these regulating
agencies that which protects the individual, is the Ego. This is the rational governing agent
of the psyche. Though the Ego lacks the strong vitality of the Id, it is needed to regulate the
instinctual drives of the Id that these energies may be released in non destructive behavioral
patterns. The Ego strands for reason and circumspection, while the untamed passions.
Where as the Id is governed the pleasure principle, the Ego is governed by the Reality
principle.
Consequently the Ego serves as intermediary between the world within and the world
without. The regulating agent that which primary functions to protect society it the
Superego. Largely unconscious the superego the superego is the Moral censoring agency,
the repository of the conscience and pride. The representative of all moral restrictions, the
advocate of the impulse toward perfection, in short it is as much as we have been able to
apprehend psychologically of what people call the higher things in human life. Acting
either directly or through the Ego, the Superego serves to repress or inhibit the drives of the
Id to block off and thrust back into the unconscious those impulses toward pleasure that
society regard as unacceptable, such impulses as overt aggression, sexual passions and the
Oedipal instinct. From the Freudian perspective the sexual implications of classic symbol of
Feminine beauty. But this beauty is being despoiled by some agent of masculine sexuality
the worm, symbol of Death, of Decay, and also of Phallus. Mark Twain's great novel has in
common with shakespeare's masterpiece. Both (Huckleberry Finn, Hamlet) are concerned
with theme of Rebellion, somewhat less controversial than Freudian dream sysmbolism are
his theories concerning child psychology. Contrary to traditional beliefs. Freud found
infancy and childhood a period of intense sexual experience, sexual in a sense much
broader than is commonly attached to the term. Further ramification of the Oedipus
Complex are a fear of Castration and an identification of the father with strics authority in
all forms. A story like Hawthorne's "My Kinsman, Major Molineux" has been interpreted as
essentially a symbolic rebellion against father figure. The crucial limitation of the
psychological approach is its Aesthetic, Inadequacy.
He is concerned with the content of literature and has nothing to say about its style, genre
or formal structure. Literature deals symbolically with patterns of emotional experience
which are common to all of us.
Mythological and Archetypal Approach

Obviously there is a close connection between mythological criticism and psychological
approach; both are concerned with the motives underlying human behavior. The difference
between the two approaches are those of degree and affinities. Tends to be experimental
and diagnostic, it is closely related to biological science. Mythology tends to be speculative
and philosophic; its affinities are with religion, anthropology and cultural history. Such
generalization of course, risk oversimplificatns its scope. What psychonalysis attempt to
disclose about the mind and character of people. And just the individual, so myth are
symbolic projections of a people's hopes, values, fears and aspirations. According to the
common misconception and misuse of the term myth are merely primitive fictions, illusions
or opinions based upon false reasoning. Myth is foundamental the dramatic representation
of our deepest instinctual life of a primary awarness of man in the universe, capable of
many configurations, upon which all particular opinions and attituded depend. Myth is to be
definedas a complex of stories, some no doubt fact and some fantacy which human beings
regard as demonstrations of the inner meaning of universe and of human life. Myth is a
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direct metaphysical statement beyond science. It embodies in an articulated structure of

symbol or narrative a vision of reality. Myth is not an abscure, oblique or elaborate way of
expressing reality it is the only way, Myths are by nature collective and communal; they
bind a tribe or a nation together in that people's common psychological and spiritual
activities. Myth is the expression of a profound sense of togetherness, a togetherness not
merely upon the plane of the intellect, but a togetherness of feeling and of action and
wholeness of living. Myth is abiquitous in time as well as place. It is dynamic factor
everywhere un human society; it transcends time, uniting the past with the present and
reaching toward future (spiritual and cultural aspiration).
Similar motifs or themes may be found among many different mythologies and certain
images that recue in the myths of peoples widely separated in time and place tend to have a
common meaning or more accurately tend to elicit comparable psychological responses and
to serve similar cultural function. Such motifis and images are called archetypes, With
brilliant audacity Frye identifies myth with literature, asserting that myth is a "structural
organizing principle of literary form."
Unlike the Traditional critic, who relies heavily on history and the biography of the writer,
the myth critic is interested more in prehistory and the biographies of the gods. Unlike the
Formalistic critic, who concentrate on the shape and symmetry of the work itself the myth
critic probes for the inner spirit which gives that form its vitality and its enduring appeal.
And unlike the Freudian critic who is prone to look on the artifact as the product of some
sexual neurosis, the myth critic sees the work historically as the manifestation of vitalizing,
intergrative forces arising from the depth of mankind's collective psyche. Cark Jung
believed libido psyhcic energy) to be more than sexual; also he considered Freudian
theories too negative because of Freud's emphasis on the neurotic rather than the healthy
aspects of the psyche. His primary contribution to myth criticism us his theory of racial
memory and archetypes. In developing this concept Jung expanded Freud's theories of the
personal unconscious, asserting that beneath this is a removal collective unconscious shared
in the psychic inheritance of all members of the human family.
All the mythologized processes of nature, such as summer, and winter the phases of the
moon, the rainy seasons, and so forth are in no sense allegories of these objective
occurances; rather they are symbolic expressions of the inner unconscious drama of the
psyche which become accessible to man's consciousness by way of projection, that is,
mirrored in the events of nature. In other words myths are the means by which archetypes
essentially unconscious forms, become manifest and articulate to the conscious mind. Jung
indicated that archetypes reveal themselves in the dreams of individuals, so that we might
say that dreams are Personalized Myths, and Myths are Depersonalized Dreams. An
application of my criticism takes us far beyond the Historical and Aesthetic realms of
literary study back to the beginning of mankind's oldest rituals and beliefs and deep into our
own individual hearts of darkness.
Archetypal approach tries to demonstrate the presence of some basic cultural pattern of
some basic cultural pattern or myth. It is interested in discovering common heritage of
mankind in a work of art. The critics of this school believe that civilized man preserves,
though unconsciously, these prehistoric are as of knowledge which he articulated obliquely
in myth.
Exponential Approach
The thematic statement made in literature are frequently more implicit than explicit, if only
because they are often made by the communicative and evocative power of symbols and
images rather than by expository language. One of the basic steps in the full appreciation of
work, then, is the recognition of such images and symbols. Such a method compares with
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what we developed in the formalist approach but lays significantly greater stress on the
Experience and Meaning of the patterns.
Pracing such thematic patterns in a literary composition assumes that significant literature
does attempt to communicate or as least to embody, meaningful experience in an
aesthetically appealing form. There is a relationship between the literary use of motifs and
the use of letimotifs (Subjects or Themes) in music, the comparison drawn by Strindberg
being particularly apt. Images, plot and ideas are the basic elements of these approach. Mrs.
Spurgeon would include as on image and every imaginative picture or other experience
drawn in every kind of way which may have come to the poet, not only through any of his
senses but through his mind and emotions or as well, and which he uses in the forms of
simile and metaphor in their the widest sense for purposes of analogy. Besides varying the
sense for purposes of analogy. Besides varying the sensuous appeals with a motif the author
can vary whole patterns. He can make one image pattern interact with another. He can let
them run parallel one with another. In summary, then, motifs or exponents can be diverse
images, diverse actions or episodes and different personalities; they can be mixture of
picture, meditations and symbols. We may begin with a seemingly minor detail, but can be
led by it almost inexorably to more details to richer patterns and to shifting relationships,
We are stimulated in Coleridge's phrase to see a unity that blends and fuses each to each, by
that synthetic and magical power to which we have exclusively appropriated the name of
imagination.
Feminist Criticism
This school assert that to be good both criticism and literature must move beyond both
sexes into an Androgynous point of view. This literary criticism as a part of the women's
liberation movement of the 1970s argues that a valid literary criticism that claims
universality must include the feminine consciousness. A particularly renowed work among
the writing of feminist critics is A Room of one's Own, by Virginia Woolf. Although the
traditional view may be that good literary criticism is Sexless, the feminist critic argues that
if it is to be valid at all, a literary criticism that claims Universality must include the
feminine consciousness. Usually the feminist critic claims that earlier criticism has been
Male Dominated and must be redone to include the femine consciousness, even, if
necessary, to the extent of reshaping systems of values. Although these several views one
not necessarily shared by all feminist critics, they seem to agree in attacking the shapers of
earlier criticism.
Some works that have a place in the writings of feminist critics date from 1960s and one
particularly important name is from considerably earlier: Virginia Woolf especially A
Room of One's Own (1929). Cheri Register identifies three subdivision of feminist
criticism only the first two of which are well defined:
1. the analysis of the image of Women nearly always as it appears in work by male authors
and 2. the examination of existing criticism of female authors. The literary criticism has a
sociopolitical purpose in that context and conversely, and that the claims to objectivity
made by formalist critics are specious and inadequate whenever they fail to pay heed to the
social contest.
Aristotelian Criticism (Chicago School)

This school can be considered as a reaction against Formalistic criticism. This approach
form. By plurality of method, the Chicago critics mean the emphasis on literary traditions,
the Aristotelian inductive method, the textual study, the form. Design and texture;
furthermore, all possible methods can be used for illumination of the work under study. The
Chicago School is also call the Neo – Aristotelian school. Any reader may be Aristotelian
when he distinguishes one genre from another, or when he stresses Plot rather than
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character or diction or when he stresses the Mimetic role of literature. M. Arnold's preface
to his poems is as a notable of Aristotolian Criticisms. It was in part reacting against what
seemed to be an inadequacy in the work of New Critics. In the Neo-Aristotelian position
developed by crane is valuable for its emphasis upon theory, historical perspective and
scholarly discipline. It has stimulates very little practical criticism.
Genre Criticism
This is the criticism of Kinds or Types like several approaches that have been described, is
a Traditional way of approaching a piece of literature, having been used in this cased far
back as Aristotle's Poetics. For many years it was used assumed that if one knew into what
genre a piece of literature fell, he Knew much about the work itself. Because Alexander
Pope and his readers were schooled in the classics and the genres of classic literature, it was
easily recognized when he parodied the epic, turned it inside out and produced a mock –
epic, The Rape of the Lock, Pope took the conventions of the epic genre and deliberately
reversed them: the epic theme is mighty contests arising from trival things; the hero is a
flirtatious woman with her appropriate arms. Such are the kinds of comments that
traditional genre criticism could provide. It held way though the 18th century, when it was
dominated. In his introduction Frye points to our debt to the Greeks for our terminology for
and our distinctions among some genres and he also notes that we have not gone much
beyond principle of genre is simple enough. The basis of generic distinctions in literature
appeares to be radical of presentation. Words may be acted in front of a listener; they may
be dung or chanted; or they maybe written for the reader. Hirsch insists one the
individuality of any given work. More important be shows again and again how the reader's
accurate perception of the genre that the author intended as the wrote the work. As he says
"every shared type of meaning (every genre) can be defined as a system fo conventions".
History of Ideas
Studying a piece of literature in the light of the history of ideas is somewhat similar to the
historical approach. The concept of reverge as found in certain Renassiance English plays
can be tied directly to the study of Seneca in the universities of the 16th century. This is the
study of the influence of the spirit of the time on a given work. In this contury the
relationship between Existentialism and the theater of Absurd provides and example. When
one speaks of the history of ideas, he maybe thinking more precisely an area of philosophy
than of history and a form of study more recent than the traditional, historical biographical.
There love joy says, "By the history of ideas I mean something at one more specific and
less restricted than the history of philosophy. It is differentiate primarily by the character of
the unit with which it concerns itself. Any unit idea which the historian thus isolates he next
seeks to trace through more than one, ultimately ideed through all of the provinces of
history in which it figures in any important degree, whether those provinces are called
philosophy, art, science, literature or politics. Lovejoy singles out the need for seeing the
relationships between philosophy and modern literature; Most teachers of literature would
perhaps readily enough admit that it is to be studied chiefly for its thought content and that
the interest of the history of literature is largely as a record of the movement of idea. It is by
first distinguishing and analyzing the major ideas which oppear again in literature and by
observing each of them as a recurrent unit in many contexts, that the philosophic
background of literature can best be illuminated.
Linguistics Approach
In 20th century, linguistic, the study of language, has become a discipline in itself.
There is debate about linguistics as an approach to literature, and not the least of the
difficulties in pursing it is the overlapping quality of what we are separating, for the sake of
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convenience and clarification into several different approaches to literature, the linguistic,
Stylistic the structuralist and in some instances the rhetorical approaches. Mark Lester
suggests two main claims that are made by those who wish to see linguistics as an approach
to literature: the proposition that since language is the medium of literature the more we
know about the medium, the more we can know about the literature and the proposition that
the critic may gain insight into the writer or the work or both by discovering patterns in the
linguistic choices that the writer, consciously or unconsciously has made. He concludes that
one area of modern language study, structural linguistics, has provided attempts at literary
analysis that were mostly out and out failures. There is no such thing as a distinctive literary
language. And if it is true, it means though linguists may tell us a great deal about language,
they can tell us noting about literature.
The Phenomenological Approach

When a reader place himself in the hands of an author, surrending his time and attention to
that author's creation, he begins to live within the world that the auther has created.
Conversely the text which has been waiting for a reader, begins to come alive for the text
can live only when read. The Space and Time dimensions of the reader's everyday life and
the facts of that life do not cease to exist but they are augmented by space – time
relationship and the facts of the fictive world that the reader now inhabits. D. Halliburton
says that art, "is not a means of securing pleasure, but a revelation of being. The work is a
phenomenon through which we come to know the world". He says, "My chief concern is
with the existential situation of the work, the way it stands against the horizon of
interrelated phenomena that we cal life.
Phenomenology as a philosophical discipline, has investigated these thing ans within its
powers, has described and analyzed their operations and structures.
"literary phenomenology, in its own away, must, I believe, try to do the same. It is above all
method, a method for changing our relation to the world for becoming more acutely aware
of it. As a method, the philosophical discipline known as phenomenology reaches out to
touches out to touch a number of man's concenrns. Iser's treatment of the novel is especially
important in our seeing the world within which the trader can live, for the reader is involved
in the world of the novel in such manner that he better understand that world and ultimately
his own world more clearly. Reading a work of fiction involves us in a process that has
duration and necessarily involves a chaning self as the reader reads. Similarly subsequent
rereading of a text create an interaction between text and reader that is necessarily different
because the reader is different, because he now know what is to come and reads in different
way from his initial reading. When reading a literary work, there is a moment when it
seems to me that the subject present in this work disengages itself from all the surrounds it,
and stands alone. Literature is a form of consciousness and stands alone. Literature is a
from of consciousness and literary criticism is the analysis of this from in all its varities.
Though literature is made of words, these words embody states of mind and make them
available to others. The comprehension of literature is a process of G. Marcel calls
intersubjectivity. Criticism demands above all the gift of participation that power to put
onself within the life of another person, which keats called Negative Capability.
The Rhetorical Approach

As a corrective to the New Critic's tendency to set up what J. C. Gerber has called a
"cordon Sanitair between the reader and the work that distances the work almost as the
historical approach." This is that made of internal criticism which considers the interactions
between the work, the author and the audience. As such it is interested in the product, the
process and the effect of linguistic activity, wether of the imaginative kind of utilitarian.
When rhetorical criticism is applied to imaginative literature it regards the work not so
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much as an object of aesthetic contemplation bus as an artistically structured instrument for

communication. It is more interested in a literary work for what it does than for what it is.
As a matter of fact, literary criticism itself really had some of its beginnings in rhetorical
analysis, for our first critics, Plato, Aristotle, Longinus, Horace, were devoted way, indeel
formulaters of rhetoric. There is stress on the influence of Horace more than of Aristotle in
the later development of rhetorical criticism. This approach helps us to stay inside the work
although we may go outside for terms and strategies, thetocial analysis is similar to and
supportive of the formalistic approach but may go beyond it.
The Sociological Approach (Marxist Criticism)

It may be considered as a historical approach in that whenever a work has been studied in
its social milieu, we have sociological criticism. From a different perspective this renewed
interest in Marxist Criticism in the result of the opinion of many that the formalist approach
especially as practiced by the New Criticism, has been inadequate in treating the literary
work. The formalistic approach, a Marxist might say, is even elitist and deals too
restrictedly with the made object, with the art work's internal or aesthetic form and not
enough with the social milieu in which it found its being or the social circumstances to
which it ought to speak. Consequently, among the schools of criticism that have found
formalistic criticism inadequate, none have been more direct in their attack that the new
Marxist. Though acknowledging the Marxist criticism, in its stress on content has some
difficulty in dealing with form, a Marxist oriented writer can and will challenge the
formalists: they need to explain how their own methodologies can come to grips with class,
race, sex with oppressions and liberation.
The Structuralist Approach

This method to literary criticism has an interdisciplinary it has European source or
influences and it has close relationship to structural linguistics, particularly the work of
Saussure. TO reduce a definition of structuralism to a few words is an act of courage but
some have tried. Structuralism is a study of the laws of composition both of nature and of
man's creations. At a quite a different level it might be study of how recurrent patterns may
be detected, not just within a particular work but throughout literature, perhaps revealing
something about the way of the human mind works. Reducing the highly complex idea to a
phrase, we would say that structuralism is the study of relationships. Piaget's opening
sentence alludes to the difficulty of defining structuralism, but having said that a structure is
a system of transformations, he goes on to state that the notion on of structure is comprised
of three key ideas, the ideas of wholeness, the wholeness, the idea of transformation and the
idea of self-regulation. Structuralism is not new he points out despite its only recent
formulations and intensive study; and as many others say, it is essentially a method.
Smithson provides a difinition dependent on Piaget and Claude Levi-Strauses (the later an
anthropologist who has had a large influence on the movement) identifies four basic
principiles of structuralism. 1. The emphasis upon relations among elements; 2. The
structuralist concern with the Synchronic rather than the Diachronic; 3. The contention that
structures exist below the surface; and 4. The universal presence of the structures of the
structures and the necessary relations among them. Central to the idea of structuralism is
the idea of System; a system; a complete, self –regulating entity that adapts to new
conditions by transforming its features while retaining its systematics structure. In such a
system, every literary unit from the individual sentence to the whole order of words can be
seen in relation to the concept of system.
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The Stylistics Approach

Style has traditionally been a concern of rhetoric. Stylistics defined in a most rudimentary
way is not the study of the words and grammar an author uses, but the study of the way the
author uses his words and grammar as well as other elements both within the sentence and
within the text as a whole. Although the distinction between linguistics and stylistics as
approach to literature is difficult to make we offer these these parallel statements: 1. in
linguistics we have a study the materials available to users of language, the syntactic forms
the grammar, materials, in other words available to all users by virtue of their ability to
recognize and to duplicate sentence patterns, 2. in stylistics we have a study of the
particular choices an author makes form the available materials, choices that are largely
culture oriented and situation bound. A text is structured in a certain way because it is a
distinct use of certain distintictive materials given in advance. We need to make a
fundamental division between the linguistic materials available (grammatical facts) and the
use made of them. Langauge has a cultural dimesion so that not merely grammatical
competence but Sociolinguistic competence is important to the mature member to the
auther and reader there in. Because of the emphasis on the choices and performance (rather
than on availability of grammar) stylistics concern the full text rather than the sentence.
Although it may move toward evaluation of text. D. Lodge says that a certain kind of
stylistics can never become a fully comprehensive method of literary criticism. According
to Lodge the stylistician looks at linguistic element in the context of the language as a
whole, where as the critic takes as his context the text as a whole; more importantly the
stylistician is less concerned with questions of value than is the critic, who undertakes to
combine analysis with evoluation. It is the essential characteristics of literature that it
concerns values. And values are not amenable to scientific method. There seems to be an
essential difference in the aims and consequently the results of linguistics and what can be
called stylistics. A linguistic description is adequate to the extent that it predicts
grammatical sentences beyond those in the corrups on which the description is based. Now
stylistic analysis is apparently primarily classificatory rather than predicative in this sense,
the result of linguistic analysis is a grammar which generates unobserved uttrances. The
aim of stylistic analysis would seem to be Typology which would indicate the features by
which they may be further separated into subclasses. Linguistic is concerned with the
description of a Code stylistics is concerned with differences among the messages
generated in accordance with the rules of that code.
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CHAPCHER 4
Drama
Act
A major division in the action of a play. Such division was introduced into English by
Elizabethan dramatists who limited ancient Romana plays by structuring the represented
action so that it fell into five acts. Late in the 19th century a number of writers followed the
example of Chekov and Ibsen, by constructing plays in four acts. In the present century the
most common form for nonmusical dramas has been three acts.
Anabasis
The rising of an action to a climax. In drama the approach to the climax in Othello when the
Moor muders Desdemona.
Anarchornism (Wrong Time)

The inclusion of some action or object in a work of art Which is out of time with the
historical period being depicted A famous example is Shakespeare's reference to a clock
(II.I,192) in Julius Caesar (1599) and to billiards in Antony and Cleopatra.
Anagorisis
Aristotle in his Poetic (4th B. C) uses this term to refer moment when truth is discovered by
the characters in the play. The classic example is in Oedipus Rex, when he discovers he
himself has killed Laius.
Angry Young Man

The term seems to have been first used as the title of an autobiography by L. Paul. It
became a catch phrase in Briton in the middle and late 1950s and by 1960 at the latest was a
much used cliché. Several novels of the period feature anti-heroes comic, or unpleasant as
their protagonists.
1. J. Osborn : Look Back in Anger (1957)
2. K. Amis : Luck Jim (1953)
3. J. Braine : Room at the Top (1957)
4. J. Wains : Hurry on Down (1953)
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Antagonist
In drama or fiction the antagonist opposes the hero or protagoints. In Othello lago is
antagonist to the Moor. In Mayor of Caster bridge Fafrae is antagonist to Henchard. Satan
is the Antagonist of Heaven's Almightie King, in Milton's Paradise Lost. (1667)
Anti-Climax
A rhetorical term, but, in colloquial use A sudden use of effect of banality, either
intentional or unintentional. According to Dr. Johnson, "A sentence in which the last part
expresses something lower than the first". A famous example of this is provided by the
digressive speeches of the porter just after the murder of Duncan in Act II scene 3 of
Shakespeare's Macbeth (1606)
Anti-hero
An uheroic protagoinst of a play or novel. A characters whose attractiveness or interest
consists of the inability to perform deeds of bravery, courage or generosity.
Anti heroic element have existed in comedy from earlier times.
1. Cervantes Don Quixote (1605)
2. Sterene Trist ram Shandy (1759-67)
3. T. D. Eliot Alfred Prufrock
4. A. Miller Willie Loman
Aside
Aside is a common dramatic convention in which a character speakers in a such a way that
some of characters on stage do not hear what he says while others do.
Black Comedy
Drama in which potentially tragic or unpleasant situations are treated with a cynical
amusement. Many modern play exhibit this disillusing comic despair.
1. S. Beckot Waiting for Godot (1954)
2. E. Albee Who is Afraid fo Virginia Woolf
3. Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice (1596-7)
Ctastrophe
The climatic final moments of tragedy when the plot is resolved
Catharsis
A term devised by Aristotle to explain the effect of tragic drama on audiance.
He discusses the way in which the tragic downfall of the protagonist arouses the pity and
fear.
Chorus (band of dancers)

In the tragedies of ancient Greek playwrights Aeschylus and Sophocles the "Chorus" is a
group of characters who represent ordinary people in their attitudes to the action which they
witness as bystanders and on which they comment. Originally the Chorus was a group of
performars at a religious festival especially fertility rites.
In modern drama the Chorus is fairly rare though choral characters are common enough.
Two play which do imitate the Greek convention quite closely are Milton's closet drama
"Samson Agonistes" (1671), T. S. Eliot's Murder in the Cathedral (1935), Shelly's
Prometheus Unbound (1820) and T. Hardy's The Dynasts (1904-8).
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Chronical Play (History Play)

Nationalistic feeling after the defect of Spanish Armada in 1588 led to a vague for plays
recounting the history of England. Playwrights drew their material from Holinshed's
Chronicles (1577-87)
Major Works:
1. Marlowe Edward II (1592)
2. Shakespeare Richard II
Henry for All Seasons
3. R. Bolt A Man for All Seasons (1962)
Comic Relief
It is the introduction of comic characters, speeches or scenes in a serous or tragic work.
Such elements were almost common in Elizabethan tragedy.
1. The gravediggers Hamlet (V. i)
2. The drunken Porter Macbeth (II iii)
3. Falstaff Henry IV
4. Mercutio and Old Norse Romeo and Juliet
5. Lago's gulling of Roderigo Othello
6. Fool's Mockery King Lear
7. Webster's The Duchess of Malfr and White Devil
8. Marlowe's Dr. Faustus
Double Plot (Plot)

Many Elizabethan plays generate interest via their plot plus strong subplot, the latter either
concerning a parallel series of events.
1. Shakespeare King Lear (Gloucester Story)
Henry IV (subplot of Falstoff)
Dumb-Show
A not uncommon feature of Elizabethan plays was a mined version of the plot as is
demonstrated by the example which precedes the play – within – the play in Shakespeare's
Hamlet. In a Dumb Show also refers to mimed scent within a play.
1. Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream (1594)
2. Webster Duchest of Malfi (1613)
Entr'act
A short interlude often musical to divort an audience between the acts of a play.
Epic Theater
A form of drama and a method of presentation developed in Germany in the 1920s. The
founder and director of this influential movement was Erwin Piscator; its greatest.
Dramatist B. Brecht. It his words the essential point of epic theater is that it appeals less to
spectator's feelings than to his reason. It is called Didactic Theatre.
1. Brecht Threepeny Opera (1929)
Mother Courage and Her Children (1941)
Hamartia (Tragic Flaw)

Aristotle in his Poetics used this word to denote the error of judgemnt which a tragic hero
makes and which leads to his downfall. It suggests that tragedy is a question of character
rather than actions.
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Heroic Drama (Heroic Tragedy)

Plays mostly written during the Restoration Period (1660-1700) with subjects aspired to
epic grandeur, dealing with the explaits in battles and lows, of great warriors, emperor and
kings. Typically demands of love and patriotic duty come into conflict. Dryden was the best
of the heroic dromatists.
Major Works:
1. J. Dryden All For Love (1677)
2. W. Shakespear Antony and Cleopatra (1606-7)
3. N. Lee The Rival Queens
4. T. Otway Venice Preserved
Invective
A brief denunciation of someone in derogatory language. A famous example occurs in
Shakespeare's King Lear (II. Ii) when Kent abuses Oswald.
Invocation
A poet's address to a God or a muse, to assist in composing his poem. Milton starts Paradise
Lost (1667) with an invocation.
Kitchen Sink Drama

A term applied to plays of the 1950s, and 1960s which focused realistically on domestic
life, family quarrels, marriage and the problems of ordinary bourgeois way of life such
plays were thought to be typical of radio television drama.
1. J. Osborn
2. A. Wesker The Kitchen
3. A. Owen
4. T. Robertson
Masque (Mask)
A courtly dramatic entertainment which flourished in Europe during the late 16th and early
17th c. Songs, poems, dancing, drama play by masked actors, extravagant costumes and
spectacular stage effects and decorations were all expensively combined in a loose plot
usually allergorical or mythological.
1. Milton Comus
2. B. Jonson Love Freed from Ignorance and Folly (1611)
3. Shakespeare The Tempest (1611)
Love's Labour's Lost (1593)
4. Dekker Old Fortunates (1660)
5. J. Ford The Sun's Darling (1624)
6 Nabbes Microcosmus
Miracle Plays
A form of late medieval drama. Dramatistations of saint's live and miraculous events and
legends. The most famous example is the cycle of forty two French plays called Miracles
de Notre Dame (Late 14th c.)
Morality Play
Everyman (1500) is the best known of many morality plays written and performed between
about 1450 and 1550. Many morality plays contained a character called the vice a half
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comic, half evil tempter. Shakespear's Falstaff is supposedly a sophisticated version of this
figure. Morality plays are a development of the mystery plays of the late Middle Ages.
Mystery Play
Dramatisation of the Old New Statement which evolved steadily from about the 10th. C.
onwards. By the 14th C. elaborate cycles had developed, played During the Feast of Corpus
Christis with each guild responsible for a biblical episode from the Creation right through
to the Crucification and resurrection of Christ.
Naturalistic drama
Drama which seeks to mirror life with the utmost fidelity. It became established and
popular late in the 19th. C. stemming from the naturalism of Zola going beyond the realism
of Ibsen. The Main French dramatist was H. Becque.
Poetic Drama
A Play with all the dialogue in verse. The commonest form used in English in Blank Verse.
Shakespeare's plays are the greatest example of poetic drama in this meter. Heroic tragedies
of the Restoration period were written in Heroic Couplets.
1. Shelley Prometheus Unbound (1820)
2. T. S. Eliot
3. Christopher Fry
Is a dramatic type which was popularized by H. Ibsen. In it, the situation of the protagonist
is so rendered as to indicate that it represent a contemporary sociological problem.
H. Ibsen: A Doll'shouse
G. B. Shaw: Mrs. warren's Profession
Man and Superman
Restoration Comedy (Comedy of Manners)

A comedy of Manners which flourished in the late 17th. C. Its main preoccupations were
sexual intrigue, the cuckolding of stupid hasbands by clever, if immoral men-show-town.
Its polished, witty dialogue, full of repartee is often provocative Licentious.
1. Wycgekley The Country Wife (1675)
The Plain Dealer (1674)
2. Etheredge The Man of Mode (1676)
3. Vanbrugh The Relapse (1697)
The Provoked wife (1697)
4. Farquhar The Recruiting Officer (1706)
The Beaux's Stratagem (1707)
5. W. Congreve The Way of the world (1700)
The Double Dealer (1694)
Love for Love (1695)
Revenge Tragedy
A special form of tragedy which concentrates on the protagonist's pursuit of vengeance
against those who have done him wrong. These plays often concnetrates on the moral
confusion caused by the need to answer evil with evil. In English literature the Elizabethan
interest in Sencan Tragedy gave rise to many examples of this minor genre.
1. T. Kyd. The Spanish Tragedy (1586)
2. Shakespeare Hamlet (1600-1). Titus Andronicus (1594)
3. Tourneur The Revenger's Tragedy (1607)
4. Webster The Douchess of Malfi (1619)
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5. Marlow The Jew of Malta (1592)

6. J. Marston Antonio's Revenge (1600)
7. H. Chettle Hoffman (1602)
8. J. Fletcher The Bloody Brother (1616)
9. Shelley The Cenci (1819)
10. A. Miller A view from the Bridge (1955)
Romantic Comedy
An Elizabethan style of comedy. Shakespeare's As You Like It (1598-1600) is typical. Its
major concern is love.
1. Shakespeare A Midsummer Night's Dream
Twelfth Night
Satyr Plays
The fourth play in the groups of four plays (the tetra logy) during the period of classic
Greek drama. The were grotesque and comic vesions of tragedies.
1. Euripides. The Cyclops (5th. C. B. C)
Senecan Tragedy
Seneca was a first c. A. D. Stoic Roman philosopher, who is credited with adapting nine
tragedies from the Greek. His play are characterised by concentration on imparting
atmosphere and action through the language, by declamatory passage and the theme of
Revenge. These plays translated into English in 1581, and exerted a strong influence on
English drama.
1. T. Norton, T. Sackville Gorboduc(1561)
2. T. Kyd The Spanish Tragedy (1586)
Soliloquy
A curious but fascinating dramatic convention which allows a character in a play to speak
directly to the audience about his motives and feelings, as if he were thinking a loud.
1. Shakespeare Macheth (1605-6)
Hamlet (1600-1)
2. Webster The Duches of Malfi (1614)
3. Becket Play (1964)
Theatre of Silence:
A theory of drama, more accurately called the theatre of unspoken devised by Jean-Jacques
Bernard (1888-1872) in the 1920s. In his view dialogue was not sufficient; equally
important was characters could not and did not say.
Theatre of the Absurd

A term applied to many of the works of a group of dramatists who were active in the 1950s:
Adamov, Beckett, Genet. Ionesco and pinter. Among the less know were Albee, Arrab!
Was probably coined by Martin Esslin, who wrote the theatre of the Absurd (1961).
Tragedy (Goat Song)

Possibly the most homogeneous and easily recognized genre in Literature and certainly one
of the most discussed. Basically a tragedy traces the career and downfall of an individual
and shows in this downfall both the capacities and the limitations of human life. The
protagonist may be a superhuman, a king or in the modern ege, an ordinary person.
Aristotle observed that it represented a single action of certain magnitude, that it provoked
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in the audience the emotion of pity and terror which were then resolved or dissolved by
catharsis at the play's climax and that certain features of the plot were common notably the
existence of some connection between the protagonist's downfall and his behaviour,
(hamartia, error) and the process of the traversal of fortune (peripeteia) and the moments of
discovery (anagnorisis) by which the protagonist learned the truth of his situation.
Many of Aristotle's term and ideas are still accepted as valuable insights into the nature of
tragic drama. However, his theory of the unities of time, space and some of his other ideas
came to be regarded as prescriptive of formula for the construction of true tragedy. Seneca
was the most influential Roman tragedian: his play were probably not meant to be
performed on stage, though he borrowed his subject from the Greek playwrights. In the
Middle Ages tragedy was regarded simply as the story of an eminent person who suffers a
downfall. The classical tragedies and theories of Aristotle were unknown. In English
literature the Elizabethan and Jacobean periods are the great age of tragedy. Shakespearian
tragedy concentrate on the downfall of powerful men and often illuminates the resulting
deterioration of a whole community around them. Mid-twentieth century writers have also
concentrated on the tragic fate of ordinary people though not with the same bitter
indictiment of human failings.
1. Aeschylus
2. Sophocles Oedipus Rex (5th BC)
3. Euripides
4. Sackville and Norton Gorboduc (1561)
5. Kyd The Spanish Tragedy (1586)
6. Webster The Duchess of Malfi (1614)
The white Devil (1608)
7. Shakespeare Hamlet (1600-1)
King Lear (1605)
Richard III (1592)
8. Dryden All For Love (1678)
9. T. Williams A Street Car named Desire (1947)
The Glass Menagerie (1947)
10. A. Miller Death of a Salesman (1947
A View form the Bridge
11. S. Becket Waiting foe Godot (1954)
12. Pinter The Caretaker
Tragic Flaw (Hamartia, error)

The downfall of a tragic hero should be caused not by evil but by mistake, has become a
common insight into the way tragedies work.
Tragic Irony
Dramatic Irony as manifested in tragedies when the audience knows the eventual fate of the
protagonist and watches him struggling towards the truth in a process of painful discovery.
Tragicomedy
It is mixture of tragedy and comedy. The playwright J. Fletcher defined it in his Perface to
the Faitful Shepherdess (1610). For the Elizabethan and Jacobean theorists the fact that
both upper and lower class people could be depicted together on the stage in tragicomedy
was significant.
1. Shakespeare The Merchant of Venice (1596-7)
The Winter Tale (1610)
2. S. Becket Waiting for Godot (1954)
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3. Chekhov The Cherry Orchard (1904)
Hamlet (1601)
Author: William Shakespeare (1561-1616)
Time: 25 AD
Place: Denmark
Theme: Love and Death, Oedipus Complex
Kind: Revenge Tragedy
School: Classic
Main Characters: 1. Hamlet

2. Horation
3. Gertrude
4. Ophelia
5. Polonius
6. Claudius
7. Laertes
8. Rosencrantz
9. Osric
10. The Gravediggers
Plot
A ghost appears to the night watchmen outside the royal castle in Elsinore, Denmark. It
does not speak until its appearance, and then it only speaks when alone with Hamlet, Prince
of Denmark. The ghost very much resembles Hamlet's recently deceased father, the former
king Hamlet-and he clamis to be such – but Hamlet is not sure whether to trust the
apparition or not. The ghost reveals a harrowing story of murder committed by Claudius,
the King's brother who promptly assumes the throne after Hamlet Senior's himself to
revenge, Hamlet is understandably irate to learn of his father's untimely murder, but as of
yet he remains uncertain of the ghost's credibility. He resolves to put on an "antic
disposition" – to act like a madman – in hopes of confirming Claudius guilt or innocence,
and then in order to take necessary action.
Further complicating the situation is Hamlet's mother, Gertrude, who has remarrid shortly
shortly after her husband's death; Hamlet's anger at her haste is only magnified by her (in
his mind) "poor" choice: nine other than his father's brother, Claudius! That makes Hamlet
both son and nephew to Claudius, the new King of Denmark, the same party guilty of his
father's blood. Hamlet meanwhile becomes romantically involved with Ophelia, daughter to
the king's advisor named Polonits.
Both Polonius and his son, Laertes, counsel Ophelia to resist Hamlet's advances.
She does.
It is not long before everyone at court has noticed a considerable change in Hamlet's
behavior – he is no longer merely melancholic, but now his words quite often fail to make
sense. The King and Queen attempt to figure out what ails him by employing two of his old
friends, Resencrantz and Guildenstern, as spies. Polonius, thinking he has discovered the
root of Hamlet's sorrow, reports to the King and Queen of Hamlet's unrequited love for his
own daughter, Ophelia. Claudius and Gertude are skeptical, and after witnessing a cruel
exchange between Hamlet and Ophelia, they are certain Polonious is dead wrong.
Something else, still unknown, plagues the young Hamlet. It the most famous soliloquy of
all drama ("To be, or not to be, that is the question"), Hamlet wonders whether he is not
better off dead; and while he decides against committing suicide, he wonders whether he is
not better off taking no action at all. Eventually he come to realize it is his duty to realize it
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is his duty to revenge his father, like it or not, and so he summons up stamina up stamina
and courage to do the dark deed.
It the meantime a host of players have arrived at Elsinore, and they agree to stage a piece
called The Murder of Gonzago (alternatively called The Mousetrap) at Hamlet's behest.
Hamlet is still looking for confirmation of Claudius' guilt, for he still hasn't made a decision
on the ghost's trustworthiness; he sees this play–within-the-play as the perfect opportunity
to "catch the conscience of the King." When a scene is played before Claudius that too
strikingly resembles his own murder of Hamlet senior, the King flees the performance in
horror. Hamlet is thereby instantly convinced of Claudius's guilt and the ghost's honesty.
His mother, distraught at what the play has done to her husband, calls for Hamlet to
reprimand him. En route to his mother, Hamlet encounters the King alone, apparently at
prayer; Hamlet decides it is not yet high time to kill the King because he would have made
a final reckoning and thus go to heaven, not hell. Next Hamlet and Gertrude talk in her
chamber, but before long they are interrupted by a voice behind the curtain. Hoping to
strike Claudius dead, Hamlet stabs blindly with his sword and soon learns he has instead
killed Polonius. He then continues to converse with his mother, telling her how shameful
and adulterous her marriage to Claudius is.
As a consequence of Polonius's murder, Hamlet is sent away to England by Claudius in the
hope he will recover his wits there. Claudius also argues it is for Hamlet's own good, to
protect him against the public outrage over Polpnius' death, but in fact it is Claudius' own
attempt at self-defense against a possible betrayal by Hamlet: Claudius knows Hamlet
knows that Claudius killed his brother, Hamlet's father. Furthermore, Claudius knows he
cannot rest safely until Hamlet is dead, so he ships Hamlet of with a sealed letter to the
King of England calling for Hamlet's execution. It the meantime, Laertes has learned of his
father's death and returns from his studies in France to confront the King about it. Claudius
diplomatically redirects Laertes' rage at Hamlet, promising that justice (in the form of
revenge) will be done soon enough. Shortly thereafter the court learns of Ophelia's
unexpected death by drowing, most likely a suicide. Laertes is further incensed. Word then
comes that Hamlet will be arriving back in Elsinore the following day, a puzzling piece of
news to Claudius because he had assumed Hamlet was in England awaiting decapitation.
Hamlet has somehow escaped. Hamlet arrives just in time for Ophelia's funeral. There he
scuffles with Leartes, protesting that he loved Ophelia more than Leartes ever did; they
nearly come to blows before being separated and sent away. Claudius calms Laertes,
reassuring him that they will soon be able to implement their plan aginst Hamlet. The
previous night they devised a scheme to secure Hamlet's dealt that will involve a fencing
match between Laertes and Hamlet. Laertes will secretly use a sharp blade instead of a
blunted one – and he will douse the tip with a poisonous potion – so that he can
"accidentally" scratch Hamlet during the match and thus bring about his death. The King
concocts a backup plan with a poisonous drink which, if need be, Hamlet would
unknowingly swallow during a rest in the match. The next day arrives and the proposed
fencing match fencing match is accepted by Hamlet. Everything proceeds on course until
Gertrude, drinking to Hamlet's health, inadvertently gulps down the poison intended for her
son. Laertes, aware all is about to be spoiled, quickly stabs Hamlet, outraged, manages to
get Laertes' sword and wounds him as well. The Queen, crying foul play, dies. Leartes
points his finger a Claudius, whom Hamlet then promptly stabs to death. Hamlet and
Laertes reconcile before their own inevitable deaths. Horatio, Hamlet's close friend, is the
only survivor of this slaughterhouse eight, and so he must bear testimony of Claudius'
treachery to the world. Denmark, now kingless, passes into the hand of Fortinbras, a valiant
solider from Norway whom Hamlet greatly admired.
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Criticism'
An indisputable reason for the Ghost's appearance, acknowledge by Hamlet and confirmed
by the Ghost itself, is to prove the Prince for delaying the revenge. The prevailing theories
were that a ghost may he 1 a hallucination 2 a spirit returned to perform some deed left
undone in life 3 a specter seen as portent 4 a spirit returned from the grave or from
purgatory by divine permission or 5 a devil disguised as a dead person.
As You Like it (1599)

Author: William Shakespears (1561-1616)
Time: No time
Place: Forest of Arden (In the western part of France but first the
Wildhood)
Source: Thomas Lodge's Rosalynde
Theme: Love
Kind: Comedy-Folk Festivals
School: Realistic-Symbolic-Pastoral
Main Characters: 1. Oliver

2. Orlando
3. Celia
4. Rosalind
5. Touchstone (Fool)
6. Silivius
Plot
Outside a place in France, we meet Orlando, a young nobleman, loudly complaining to his
old servant Adam: His older brother Oliver has been oppressing him since their father died,
keeping him in poverty and making him work like an animal. He has sent their middle
brother, Jacquer, to school, but Orlando is not given any apportunities. Orlando vows to
win his own forture, and will start by challenging the famous wrestler of the ruling Ducke
in the matches which will be held The next day.
The wrestler, Charles, Visits Orlando's cruel brother Oliver later that day. Oliver learns the
latest news: The old Duke, Duke Senior, has been overthrown by his wicked younger
brother, Duke Frederick. Duke Senior has fled to the Forest of Arden, Where he lives
outdoors with his noblemen, like Robin Hood. However, his daughter Rosalind remains in
Duke Frederick's court, due to her close relationship with her cousin Celia – Duke
Frederick's daughter. Oliver asks Charles not to go easy on Orlando in the matches the next
say, bt instead to try to kill him. The next day, at Duke Frederick's court, Celia tries to
comfort the dejected Rosalind, who misses her father. At the wrestling matches. Orlando
makes a huge impression on Celia and Rosaling when he challenges and defeats Charles.
Although only able to speak a few words to each other, Rodalind and Orlando fall in love.
However, when Duke Frederick finds out that Orlando is the son an old enemy, her refuses
to give him the promised reward. The frustrated Orlando returns home, only to be warned
by his loyal servant Adam that Oliver is determined to kill him. Supplied with Adam's life
savings, the two set off for the Forest of Arden, hoping to find and join duke Senior.
Meanwhile, Duke Frederick – angered by Rosalind's popularity among his people – has
banished her from his place. The steadfast Celia proposes to Rosalind that they flee together
Arden, to join Rosalind's father, Duke Senior. To make their journey safer, Celia disguises
herself as a peasant girl and renames herself "Aliena", While the tall, quick – spoken
Rosalind dresses up a boy renames herself "Ganymede." For added safety, they take along
Touchstone the clown, Duke Frederik's court jester, who is loyal to Celia.
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Rosalind/ "Ganymede", Celia/"Aliena", and Touchstone arrive in Arden Forest safe but
exhausted. They quickly meet the locals, who include a shepherd named Silvius, lovesick
for a haughty shepherdess called Phoebe, and an elderly shepherd named Corin. From
Corin, "Ganymede" and "Aliena" buy a cottage and a flock of sheep, and set up
housekeeping as shepherds.
We are introduced to Duke Senior and his men, who live a simple, cheerful life in the
Arden Forest. Among his men is the constantly dejected Jacques, who is always moping
about something (much everyone else's amusement). Sitting down to their customary
afternoon meal, the Duke and his men are suddenly interrupted by the sword – waving
Orlando. He has reacged Arden Forest with Adam, now dying of hunger, and demands food
from Duke Senior at sword point. When the duke calmly welcomes him, Orlando
apologizes for his rash behavior, and he and Adam are absorbed into the forest community.
Meanwhile, Duke Frederick has discovered Rosalind ands celia's disappearance, as well as
Orlando's flight from his own home.
Enraged, he summons Orlando's brother Oliver and banishes him, telling him not to return
until he can find and produce his brother and the missing women.
In the Forest of Arden, the locals have discovered that someone has been hanging rather
badly – written love poetry in the branches of the trees. Celia discovers that the writer in
none other that Orlando, who has arrived in Arden and is distributing poems proclaiming
his love of Rosalind. Rosalind, who has become known to the locals in her male person of
"Ganymede", dicides to approach Orlando in her male disguise and become close to him.
As "Ganymede", she catches his eye and intrigues him with her wit. Then she proposes a
strange game: to cure him of his lovesickness for the absent "Rosalind", Orlando should
pretend that the boy "Ganymede" is actually Rosalind, and pay court to "her" just as if she
were really his beloved. Orlando agrees to try this peculiar remedy, and agrees to come by
every day to woo "Ganymede"/ "Rosalind". Meanwhile, other people are also suffering the
pangs of love: Touchstone has met a female goatherd named Audrey whom he is
determined to marry, if only he can find a good priest. The local vicar, Sir Cliver Martext,
is uneducated and incompetent – as Jacques points out. Elsewhere in the forest, Silvius is
trying to court the proud shepherdess. Phoebe who continues to reject him. The old
shepherd Corin brings Rosaling "Ganymede" and Celia "Aliena" to watch this spectacle,
but the outspoken "Ganymede" Rosalind bursts out of hiding to order Phoebe not to be so
full of herself. However, Phoebe unexpectedly falls in love with this beautiful young
"man"! Now everything is really in a tangle.
The next day, Orlando comes as usual to "Ganymede's" house to court "him". In her
disguise, Rosalind teaches him the ways of love, and even has Celia stage a mock wedding
between Orlando and "Ganymede". When Orlando is late in returning.
Silvius brings "Ganymede" a love letter from Phoebe, which Rosalind / "Ganymede"
rejects. Just as Silvius is leaving, someone unexpected appears: Orlando's brother Oliver,
who is carrying a bandkerchief staind with blood! He tells a complicated sotry, explaining
how he has been looking for Orlando for a long time, and how Orlando has just saved his
life after he was attacked by a lion in the forest. He goes on the say sincerely that he,
Oliver, has had a change of heart and regrets his cruelty to Orlando. The wounded Oralando
has sent Oliver with the handkerchief to explain to "Ganymede" why he was late for their
appointment. Rosalind "Ganymede", overwhelmed by the blood and by her fear for
Orlando, finally faints.
Elsewhere in arden, Touchstone is forced to defend his claim to Audrey against another
Youngman, named William, but through intimidiation and superior force of puns,
Touchstone drives him away. Meanwhile, Oliver and Orlando have become friends again-
and Oliver and Celia / "Aliena" have fallen in love, planning to be married the very next
day! Orlando and "Ganymede" discuss this privately, and seeting that their courtship game
is wearing thin Rosalind / "Ganymede" grows serious "Ganymede" tells Orlando that he
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know some magic, and that he can summon the real Rosalind to "Aliena" and Oliver's
wedding tomorrow, where Orlando can ask her to marry him if he wished.
They are interrupted by Phoebe, who is very angry at "Ganymede" for his reception of her
love letter, and by Silvius. Rosalind "Ganymede" promises Phoebe that he will marry her
tomorrow if he ever marries a woman, but that if Phoebe herself rejects him for some
reason, she reason, she must marry Silvius instead. Phoebe agrees to this. "Ganymede" then
promises both Orland and Duke Senior that he will procure Rosalind the next day if
Orlando will agree to marry her and Duke Senior will agree to let Orlando be her husband.
Puzzled, they promise this, and, making everyone swear to gather then, "Ganymede" sends
them all. The next day, everyone gathers in the forest at the appointed time, including
Touchstone and Audrey, who also plan to be married today. Rosalind / "Ganymede"
promises them he will now produce the mysterious Rosalind, and she and Celia "Aliena"
head out of sight together. When they reappear, they have both removed their disguises!
Orlando and Duke Senior joyfully recognize Celia and Rosalind, and Phoebe, realizing that
she has been tricked, resigns herself to marrying Silvius. The god Hymen-Greco-Roman
god of marriage-descends from heaven, and marries the four couples: Orlando and
Rosalind, Oliver and Celia, Phoebe and Silvius, and Touchstone and Audrey.
Suddenly, another unexpected guest arrives – Jacques de Boys, Orlando and Oliver's third
brother! He has come to announce that Duck Frederick, who was about to storm Arden
Forest with a large army in order to capture his brother, has been converted to religion by a
wise man he met on the way, and has decided to become a monk and return the kingdom
and crown to Duck Senior. Duck Senior's melancholy courtier, Jacques, is intrigued by this
story, and announces his intention to become a monk as well. Duke Senior orders his
musicians to strike up a tune to celebrate the multiple weddings, and after a dance and a
light – hearted epilogue (or final speech) which Rosalind addresses to the audience, the play
ends happily.
King Lear (1605)

Author: William Shakespear (1561-1616)
Time: 25 B. C.
Place: Britian
Theme: Love and Death, Selfless Love-Devotion
Kind: Tragedy
School: Classic – Symbolic – Allegorical
Main Characters: 1. Lear

2. Fool
3. Edmund
4. Goneril
5. Regan
6. Edgar
7. Cordelia
Plot
Lear, the father of three daughters, is a powerful king in Pre-Christian Britain.
Believing that he is setting old, Lear wants to pass the responsibilities of his government to
his three daughters and their spouses. Goneril married to the Duke of Albany; Regan is
married to the Duck of Cornwall; and Cordelia, the youngest and Lear's favorite, is being
courted by the King of France and the Duke of Burgundy. Lear envisions himself spending
the remainder of his life visiting each of them in turn.
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Lear's intention is to divide his kingdom into three parts, each to be ruled by one of the
daughters. Before dividing his kingdom and giving it to his three girls, Lear, at a public
ceremony, asks his daughters how much they love him. Generil and Regan are adept at
flattery and easily convince their father of their limitless love for him; they even claim their
love for him leaves no room for them to love their husbands.
Lear is pleased by their devotion. Cordelia says that she loves Lear as her father and as the
rulor of the country, but she honestly says that she will love Judging Cornelia to be
impudent, he disinherits and disowns her. As a result, the kingdom is divided into two
parts, mstead of three. The Earl of Kent, who understands the purity of Cordelia's filial
love, tries to persuade Lear to reconsider his decision; Lear flies love, tries to persuade Lear
to reconsider his decision; Lear flies into a rage at the suggestion and banishes Kent from
Britain. He later returns in the disguise of a menial servant in order to protect the king.
Without a dowry, Cornelia is no longer pursued by the Duke of Burgundy. She marries the
King of France. Another scene of disinheritance occurs at Gloucester Castle. Edmund, the
illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, plots to outs Edgar, his half-brother, from his
position as heir to the Earl's fortune. He shows Gloucester a false letter stating that Edgar
wants to kill his father. Edmund then persuade Edgar to flee from the castle. In his absence,
Gloucester declares Edgar to be an outlow and makes Edmund the heir to his title and
property. Having granted his land and power to Goneril and Regan, Lear begins to make his
visits to them. During his first stay at the castle of Goneril and her husband, the Duke of
Albany, Lear is made to feel unwelcome. Goneril believes her father's temperament is
unpleasant and his knights irritating. She directs; she will then use the incident to deprive
her father of his men, disempowering him. Goneril succeds in upbraiding her father about
the behavior of his knights. She refuses to pay for the maintenance of one hundred of them
and reduces the number to fifty. A disgusted Lear curses her and leaves with his remaining
knights.
Lear heads for the castle of Regan and her husband, the Duke of Cornwall.
Goneril has sent her sister a message to tell her about the quarrel with Lear and his
impending visit to her. Regan and her husband ride to the castle of the Duck of Gloucester
to avoid receiving her father. Not finding Regan at her castle, Lear sends Kent to
Gloucester to announce the imminent arrival of the king. Outside the castle walls, Kent
meets Goneril's steward, Regan, and Gloucester rush out and are unable to understand
Kent's outrageous behavior Cornwall orders Kent to be put in cks The son of a Brahmin,
Siddhartha, at fist seems content to follow the pious Hindu's path to salvation. He
religiously reads the scripture and performs sacrifices. He realizes, however, that the
doctrine of his parents and tutors do not comply with his spiritual needs. He decides to
leave home to seek his own salvation. His friend Govinda goes with him. Both Siddhartha
and Govinda learn to restrain their impulses and concentrate on the sprit. Such
concentration is achieved by the partice of self – denial. Soon they realize that the Samana
way does not yield true satisfaction. It is only a means to realization of the self but not the
end.
Criticism
Bradley believes that despite the increasing evidence of Goneril's cruelty, the daughter does
not yet deserve her father's diatribe which includes the Curse of Sterility. It is the greatest
tragedy of life. Shelley louded it as "the most perfect specimen of dramatic poetry in the
world. A critic declared that it is the "noblest spiritual utterance since Divine Comedy".
Othellp (1604)
Author: William Shakespear (1561-1616)
Time: No Time
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Place: Venic-Cyprus
Theme: Disloyalty – Innocence – Lack of Experience
Kind: Tragedy
School: Symbolic - Romantic
Main Characters: 1. Desdemona

2. Othello
3. Brabantio
4. Michael Cassio
5. lago
6. Binaca
7. Roderigo
Plot
The play opens late at night in the city of Venice. Desdemona has eloped with the Moor
Othello, and Rodrigo, her former suitor, is distraught. He is speaking angrily with lago and
resents that he has not been told of the love of Desdemona for Othello. Iago is also angry.
Othello, whom he hates, has passed him over for a promotion, making Cassion a lieutenant
instead of him.
Iago and Roderigo go to the home of Brabantio, a Venetian Senator and the father of
Desdemona. They call to him, and Iago, with glee, tells Brabantio that his daughter has
eloped with Othello. Before the Senator can come downstairs, Iago flees the scene, not
wanting to get involved. When Brabantio appears, he is furious over the news and demands
to know the whereabouts of Othello and his daughter.
Roderigo says he will take him to Othello.
The next scene open with Iago telling Othello about Brabantio's anger over the marriage
and his plans to take Desdemona away from the Moor. Cassio then enters and tell Othello
that there is bad news from Cyprus and he must go at once to see the Duke of Venice.
Before Othello can depart the infuriated Brabantio comes on to the scene, accompanied by
several armed men Othello refues to be drawn in to a fight instead, they all agree to appear
before the Duke and voice their complaints.
Brabantio is certain that the Duke his side.
As the Duke listens to both Othello and Brabantio, Desdemona appears and professes her
love for her husband. The Duke tries to gain reconciliation between all parties. Brabantio
refues to listen and accuses Othello of using witchcraft or drugs to win Desdemona, which
she refutes. In the end, Brabatio has no choice but to allow Desdemona to go with Othello,
but he promises he will have nothing else to do with Othello, but he promises he will have
nothing else to do with his daughter.
He will not even allow her to stay in his house while Othello is off at war.
Since Othello is to go Cyprus the same night, Desdemona plans to follow him,
accompanied by Emilia, her maid, and Iago, who is Emilia's husband. After these plans are
made, Desdemona and Othello go off together. Left alone with Roderigo, Iago tempts his
friend. He tells Roderigo that Desdemona will quickly grow tired of the Moor and them
Roderigo can win her love. He also persuades Roderigo departs.
Left alone on the stage, Iago, in a soliloquy, reveals his hatred of Othello and thinks of
ways to destroy him. He decides to use Cassio to get his revenge.
The scene changes to Cyprus, following a terrifying storm, which has battered the Turkish
fleet. Cassio arrives on the first ship, followed by Desdemona, Emilia, Iago, and Roderigo.
They all express anxiety about Othello's absence; Desdemona is particularly worried about
her husband's safety. Cassio tries to entertain her and divert her mind from her fears.
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Othello finally arrives in the third vessel. Desdemona is delighted to see her husband, and
they go off together.
When Iago witnesses Desdemona and Cassio engaged in conversation, he begins to hatch a
plot. He tells Roderigo that the is sure that Desdemona really loves Cassio and instructs his
to provoke a quarrel with Cassio later in the evening.
There is to be feast to celenrate Othello's victory and his marriage. During the festivities
Iago manages to get Cassio drunk Roderian then provokes him, and a fight ensues. When
Montano, the Governor of Cyprus, tries to stop the fighting, Cassio wounds him. Iago send
Roderigo to ring the alarm – bell, which, rouses the town and brings Othello and desdeniba
on the scene. When Othello hears what has happened, he dismisses Cassio from his position
of lieutenant. Iago advises Cassio to ask Desdemona to intercede for him with Othello and
promises to arrange a meeting for him with Desdemona. When Cassio departs, Iago utters
his third main soliloquy that gives details of his plan.
Julius Caesar (1599)

Author: W. Shakespeare (1561-1616)
Time: 45 BC.
Place: Rome
Theme: Devotion for country – Real Love – Death
Kind: Tragedy – Historical
School: Realistic– Symbolic
Main Characters: 1. Caesar

2. Portia
3. Brutus
4. Mark Antony
5. Cassius
6. Lepidus
7. Octavius
Plot
Having defeated Pompey, Julius Caesar represents, for the majority of the Roman people,
the promise of a new prosperity, But he is mistrusted by Pompey's former supporters and a
group of variously motivated patricians led by Cassius, who share a belief that Caesar
wishes to be crowned. The shrewd Cassius manages to persuade Brutus, the most repected
of republicans, to join the conspiracy. Ignoring the warning of a soothsayer, Caesar decides
to go to the Capitol and is assassinated.
After explaining the reasons for the murder to the crowd, Brutus allows Mark Antony to
speak. His skilful rhetoric turns the people against the conspirators, and evil war is again
inevitable. Brutus and cassius flee the city and gather their forces, while Antony, Lepidus
and Caesar's great nephew Octavius form a triumvirate, organize a brutal proscription and
prepare for war.
After quarrelling Brutus, Cassius learns that Brutus' wife, Portia, has committed suicide.
Partly out of remorse, he accepts Brutus' decision to march on philippi and confront
Antony's army, though he does not agree with it. The battle is last and Brutus and Cassius
kill themselves. The play ends with Octavius' ominously ambiguous proposal that he and
Antony should part the glories of this happy day.
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Criticism
Cinna insists that conspirators "Win the noble Brutus to our party". It is clear that it is the
nobility that conspirators want associated with their actions and Antony's final speech sums
him up as "the noblest Roman of them all". Brutus's nobility is everywhere in evidence.
All the other characters make reference to it. Brutus very nearly destroys his alliance with
Cassius over a matter of principle. He insists on fighting a battle against Cassious's better
judgement, and once committed mistime his attack in such a jeopardize to fortunes of both
his an Cassius' armies.
Macbeth (1606)
Author: W. Shakespeare (1561-1616)
Place: Scotland – Birnam wood – Dunsinane Castle
Theme: Greed, Love for power
Kind: Historical – Tragedy – Chronicle
School: Symbolic - Absurd
Main Characters: 1. Banquo

2. Macbeth
3. Lady Macbeth
4. Duncan
5. King of Scotland
6. Malcolm
7. Macduff
Plot
Scotland is in the middle of a war against several nations aided by some Scottish traitors,
most notably The Thance of Cawdor (a thane is the equivalent of an English earl). King
Duncan of Scotland has a brilliant general named Macbeth, who nearly single – handedly
wins the war for Scotland. On their ride back from the battlefield to King Duncan, Macbeth
and his best friend Banquo run across three witches. They tell Macbeth that he will be
Thane of Cawdor and then will become the King of Scotland. They predict that Banquo
will father a line of Scottish kings but will not be one himself. Macbeth and Banquo refuse
to believe the strange predictions until a messenger arrives from Duncan that Macbeth has
been named Thane of Cawdor.
Macbeth now believes that he will become king since his first prediction came true.
When Macbeth and Banquo meet up with Duncam, the King declares that they will
celebrate their victory at Macbeth's castle. Lady Macbeth receives a letter from Macbeth
informing her of the witches's prophecies, and she concludes that they should murder
Duncan so that Macbeth can become king right away. Macbeth arrives at his castle, just
ahead of the others, and Lady Macbeth tells him that must murder Duncan tonight. Duncan
and the others arrive at the castle to celebrate.
After the feast, everyone goes to sleep, but Macbeth says that he refuses to kill Duncan, but
Lady Macbeth convinces him to go through with it. After Macbeth murders Duncan, he has
regrets and fears about the consequences. Lady Macbeth says that there is nothing to worry
about. Macduff, the Thane of Fife, arrives at the castle right after Duncan is murdered.
Macbeth (now all cleaned up and in his sleeping clothes) to see Duncan. To his shock,
Macduff discovers that Duncan has been murdered, and he wakes up the entire castle to
make everyone know what has happened. All the thanes meet to discuss what they should
be next.
Duncan's two sons, Malcolm and Donalbain, decide to skip out on the meeting and feel
because they are whorried that whoever killed their father might kill them next.
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When Malcolm and Donalbain run away, the other thanes conclude that they must be
quilty, and they crown Macbeth the new King of Scotland. Since his prophecies has come
true, Macbeth worries that Banquo's prophecy will come true, Macbeth worries that
Banquo's children from becoming kings, Macbeth hires two murderes to kill Banquo and
his only son Fleance. The murderers succeed in killing Banquo, but Fleance manages to
escape. Macbeth in hosting a banquet for his friends when he finds out from the murderers
that Fleance escaped. When he returns to the party, Macbeth seen the ghost of Banquo
sitting in his chair and he stats to go crazy (no one else can see the ghost). Lady Macbeth
tells everyone that the party is over because she is afraid that Macbeth might say something
gives them away. The other thanes, witnessing Macbeth's strange behavior, conclude that
he must have killed Duncan and Banquo. Some of the thanes go England to find and bring
back Malcolm, the rightful heir to the Scottish throne.
Macbeth's world in chaos he seeks out the witches for advice. They tell him that he should
betware Macduff. They then tell him that only a man not born of woman can harm him and
that he will reign until the forest moves towards his castle.
Macbeth takes these prophecies to mean that no one will harm him and that he will harm
him and that he will rule forever. Macbeth sends assassins to the castle of Macduff to
murder macduff's wife and children. Macduff, meanwhile, is in England trying to convince
Malcolm to return. After Malcolm is convinced that Macduff is honest, he reveals that he
reveals that he has ten thousand English soliders to support him in the war against Macbeth.
The other thanes join up with Malcolm and Macduff's army to lay siege to Macbeth's castle.
Lady Macbeth, now gone crazy thinking about the murders they've committed, kills herself.
Macbeth, with no reasom left to live but determined to fight to the very end, confronts
Malcolm's army assured by the witches' prophecies that he will succeed.
Macbeth then sees from his castle window what seems like the forest moving towards him-
it's actually Malcolm's army covering themselves with branches from the trees in the forest.
Then Macbeth forest. Then Macbeth faces Macduff in single combat because Macbeth
knows that no man of woman born can harm him. Macduff reveals to Macbeth that he was
ripped from his mother's womb early, which makes him not of woman born. Macduff kills
Macbeth and cuts off his head to present to Malcolm, who is declared the new King of
Scotland.
Criticism
The identification of Macbeth with hell bounds in this play reintroduces the theme of
cosmic conflict. Macduff's words "Make all our trumpets speak," reals the "angels trumpet
tongued. In the end, Macbeth is with nothing more than his obsessive memory of the
appretions and their promises which the witches presented to him. He paraphrase their
words again reducing his uttrances to the bawling of an idiot. When Macduff enters just as
his enemy has spoken of women and birth, we realize that he himself is haunted by
ambiguous thoughts of wife and children's ghosts.
Romeo and Juliet (1595)

Times: 25 A. D.
Place: Verona - Italy
Theme: Love - Death – Devotion – Selfless Love
Kind: Tragedy
School: Realistic - Romantic
Main Characters:
1. Romeo
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2. Juliet
3. Montagues
4. Capulets
5. Tybalt
6. Friar Lawrence
7. Paris
Plot
ACT I
Years ago there lived in the city of Verona in Italy two noble families, the Montagues and
Capulets. Unfortunately, there existed much bad blood between them. Their animosity was
so pronounced that they could not stand the sight of one another. Even the servants of the
house carried on the animosity of their masters.
The bloody feuds of the two families led the Prince to order all brawls to crease on pain of
death. Romeo, son of old Montague, is a handsome young man. He fancies he is in love
with Rosaline, who disdains his love. As a result, Romeo is depressed.
To cure him of his love, his friend Benvolio induces him to attend a masked ball at the
Capulets, where he could encounter other beauties and forget Rosaline. At the ball, Romeo
is attracted by a girl who he learns us Juliet, on learning Romeo's identity from a servant,
confesses to herself that her only love has sprung from her only hate. Meanwhile, the fiery
Tybalt, Juliet's cousin, recognizes Romeo and challenges him. Old Capulet forbids him to
insult or harm any quest. Tybalt vows to settle the score with Romeo later.
ACT II
That night Romeo lingers in Capulet's garden, standing in the orchard beneath Juliet's
balcony. He see Juliet learning over the railing, hears her calling out his name, and wishes
that he were not a Montague. He reveals his presence, and they resolve, after an ardent love
scene, to be married secretly. Next morning, Juliet sends her Nurse to make final
arrangements for the wedding to be performed at the cell of Friar Lawrence. The Friar, who
is a confessor to both the houses, feels that this union between a Montague and a Capulet
will dissolve the enmity between the two houses.
ACT III
Meanwhile, Tybalt has been seeking Romeo to avenge the latter's intrusion at the ball. He
encounters Romeo returning from Friar Lawrence's cell. Romeo, softened by his newfound
love and his marriage to Juliet, refuses to be drawn into a quarrel with Tyball, now his
kinsman by marriage. Mercutio grapples with Tybalt and is slain. Aroused to fury by the
death of his friend, Romeo fights with Tyblt and kills him and takes shelter in the Frair's
cell. The Prince, on hearing of the trouble, banishes Romeo. The Friar advises Romeo to
spend the night with Juliet and the flee to Mantua. Meanwhile, Juliet's parents, believing
her grief to be due to her cousin Tybalt's, seek to alleviate her distress by planning her
immediate marriage to Paros, a kinsman of the Prince.
ACT IV
In despair, Juliet seeks Friar Lawrence's advice. He gives her a sleeping potion, which for a
time will cause her to appear dead. Thus, on the day of her supposed marriage to Paris, she
will be carries to the family vault. By the time she awakenes, Romeo will be summoned to
the vault and take her away to Mantua.
ACT V
The Friar's letter fails to reach Romeo. When he hears of Juliet's death through Balthazar,
Romeo procures a deadly poison from an apothecary and secretly returns to Verona to say
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his last farewell to his decased wife and die by her side. In the Capulet tomb. Romeo
encounters Paris, who has come to strew flowers on Juliet grave. Paris challenges Romeo
and in fight that ensues, Paris is killed. Then at Juliet's side, Romeo drinks the poison and
dies. When Juliet awakens from her deep sleep, she realizes Romeo's error and kills herself
with his dagger. Summoned to the tomb by the aroused watchman, Lord Montague ring,
their hands in anguish. The Prince listens to Friar Lawrence's story of the unhappy fate of
the star crossed lovers, Romeo and Juliet. He rebukes the Capulets and Montagues for their
bloody feud. The Capulets and Montague decide to reconcile as a result of the deaths of
their children.
A Midsummer Night's Dream (1596)

Times: 25 A. D.
Place: Athens
Theme: Real love in Mark
Kind: Comedy
School: Romanticism
Main Characters:
1. Theseue
2. Oberon
3. Denetrius
4. Hermia
5. Helena
6. Lysander
7. Puck
Plot
These us, the Duke of Athens, is betrothed to Hisppolyta, the queen of the Amazons. As
they are discussing their marriage, which is just four days away, Eggeus, an Althenian,
comes to These us with a complaint that his daughter Hermia has refused to marry
Demetrius, an Athenian youth chosen by him. He insists that Hermia be put to death, per
the law prevailing in Athens. Theseus wants to give Hermia four days time to either agree
Demetrius or face death.
Hermia is in love with Lysander and dose not want to marry Demetrius, who has been
unfaithful to Helena. The lovers decide to leave Athens and go to Lysander's aunt, who
lives seven leagues from Athens, Where Athenian law cannot be enforced.
They decided to meet the following night in the wood outside Athens. They reveal their
plant to the heart-broken Helena in an attempt to console her. Helena decides to inform
Demetrius about this plan, for she is certain that he will reward her for the information. She
expects that Demetrius will pursue the lovers and dicides to follow him to the woods.
The woods outside Athens is a favorite haunt of a band of fairies headed by Oberon and
Titania. They have of late fought over a changeling boy who is in the care of Titania.
Oberon demands that Titania give the boy to his page. Titania refuses and Oberon decides
to teach her a lesson. He sends Puck, his attendant, to fetch the flower, called love-in-
idleness, Which has a magical quality. If the juice of the flower is squeezed over the eyes of
a person who is asleep, it makes the person fall in love with the object he / she first sees on
waking up. He decides to cast this spell over Titania.
As he is waiting for Puck to return with the flower, Helena and Demetrius enter the scene.
All Helena's pleas are ignored by Demetrius, who is in pursuit of Hemia.
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Oberon feels sorry for Helena and decides to help her. When Puck arrives, he tells him to
go in search of an Athenian youth with a lady and anoints his eyes with the juice of the
flower. Oberon himself goes to Titania with the flower.
Puck mistakes Lysander and Hermia for Demetrius and Helena and squeezes the juice on
Lysander's eyes. Meanwhile, Helena comes that way. Seeing Lysander, she calls out to him.
Lysander wakes up, sees Helena, and falls in love with her. Helena thinks that he is teasing
her and runs away from, but Lysander pursues her.
In another part of the woods, the workmen form Athens have gathered to rehearse a play
that they plan to present in honour of their Duke to celebrate his wedding. Puck sees them
and decides to play a trick on them. He places an ass's head no Nick Bottom's shoulders.
When his friends see Bottom transformed, they are scared and run away. Bottom feels that
they are all trying to play a prank on him. To show them that he is not afraid, he starts
"surging". The noise wakes up Titania, who is under the spell of love – in idleness. She sees
Nick Bottom and falls in love with him.
Oberon notices Demetrius still professing love to Hermia and realizes that Puck has made a
mistake. Herima spurns Demetrius and goes in search of Lysander.
Demetrius, exhausted, falls asleep. Oberon order Puck to bring Helena there and squeezes
the juice of the flower on the eyes of Demetrius. Puck brings Helena to the scene, followed
by Lysander. Demetrius wakes up and falls for Helena. Thus, both men are in love with the
same girl, and Helena believes that they are both playing a cruel joke on her. Hermia
arrives on the scene too. She is shocked to see the change in Lysander. Demetrius and
Lysander decide to settle the matter by fighting a duel and move into the woods. They are
followed by Helena and Hermia, quarreling with each other.
All for Love (1677)

Author: J. Drydon
Times: 17 the century
Place: Eygept
Theme: Devotion – Self scarifying – Love
Source: Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
Kind: Blank Verse Tragedy
School: Romantic – Symbolic
Main Characters: 1. Iras

2. Octavian
3. Antony
4. Cleopatra
5. Alexas
Plot
All for Love: or, The World Well Lost. A tragedy in blank verse by John Dryden, Dryden's
chief source in Shakespeare's Antony And Cleopatra, from which he borrows freely; but the
two plays are very different. Under the influence of French neoclassical theory, Dryden has
regularized Shakespeare, confining the action of the play to the period following the battle
of Actium. In All for Love, Cleopatra struggles for possession of Antony with his general
Ventidius, his friend Dolabella and his wife Octavia. The latter nearly succeeds; Caesar
(Octavian) is prepared to come to terms with Antony but requires him to separate from
Cleopatra and return to his wife, Octavian's sister. The plan founders when Antony grows
jealous of Dolabella, thinking the younger man way supplant him in Cleopatra's affections.
His suspicions are skillfully fed by Octavia but, with the desertion of the Egyptian fleet and
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the report that Cleopatra is dead, the play returns to historical fact and he tragedy runs its
course.
Criticism
Dryden focuses his attention upon the lovers, not their empires; and the gain in
compactness, unity and stress is quite obvious. The climax is particularly powerful.
Many critics point out that Dryden here lacks the range, psychological sublety and the
power lines, which are to be found in Shakespeare's plays. The play illustrates the
Neoclassic theory of unity of time, place and action.
Auther's Main Works: 1. Spanish Friar
2.Secret Love
3. Love Triumphant
4. The Conquest of Graniad
Love for Love (1695)

Author: W. Congreve (1670-1729)
Time: 16th century
Place: London
Theme: Love – Selfless Love – Devotion
Kind: Comedy of Manners
School: Classic – Symbolic - Romantic
Main Characters: 1. Scandal

2. Jeremy
3. Ben
4. Valentine
5. Sir Sampson Legend
Plot
Valentine is a fashionable man – about – town whose extravagance has led him into debt.
His father, agrees to pay them only if he will sign his in heritance away to his younger
brother. Valentine has to agree, but realizing that he faces ruin, pleads and even feigns
madness to avoid signing the bond. Angelica, whom he has been unsuccessfully courting,
intervenes. She uses her charms to extract a proposal of marriage from Sir Simpson and
gets possession of the bond. Valentine, believing that will marry his father despairs and
declares himself willing to sign. Angelica then reveals her plot, declares her love for
Valentine and tears up the bond. Meanwhile the independent, minded Ben has buckled of
Sir Sampson's plan to marry him to Miss Prue, a foolish countrly girl.
Criticism
The play is regarded as one of the most brilliant illustraions of the comedy of Manners. It is
relies totally upon dialogue that is graceful, witty, rapid, and incisive, and focuses on the
foibles, petty vices, quirks and affection of people. It was the dramatist's sophisticated with
that audience come to hear and Congreve did not disappoint anyone.
Auther's Main Works: 1. Semel
2.The Double Dealer
3. The Mourning Bride
4. The Way of the world
5. An Impossible Thing
6. Old Bachelor
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She Stoops to Conqure (1773)

Author: O. Goldsmith (1730-74)
Time: 17th century
Place: London
Theme: Disloyalty – Seduction
Kind: Laughing Comedy
School: Realistic – Symbolic
Main Characters: 1. Tony Lumpkin

2. Sir Charles Marlow
3. Young Marlow
4. Hardcastle
5. Hastings
Plot
She stoops to Conquer: or The Mistakes of a Night A comedy by Oliver Goldsmith, first
produced at Covent Garden in 1773.
Mr and Mrs Hard castle have have a daughter, Kate, and Mrs Hardcastle has a sony by a
previous marriage, the oafish and dissolute Tony Lumpkin. Sir Charles Marlow has
proposed a match between his son and Kate Hardcastle. Young Marlow and his friend
Hasting according make the journey to the Hardcastles' home in the country but, thanks to
Tony Lumpkin's misdirect ions, arrive there believing it to be an inn. The scene is thus
expertly laid for the comedy that follows. Young Marlow takes Kate to be a servant and
falls in love with her; his mistake frees him of the inhibition he normally feels in the
presence of ladies. Kate's friend Constance Neville falls in love with Hastubgs; Mrs
Hardcastle, who dotes on her son Tony and had intended him to marry Contance, is
thoroughly displeased. Sir charles Marlow's arrival puts everything to rights.
Criticism
It is based on the sustained confusing of a private home for an inn and the farcical situations
resulting from this confusion. The play has the lively spirit, breezy dialogue and rapid
movement which we associate with the earlier comdedis of manners Its characters are fresh
and memorable. Tony Lumpkin is the prototype for generations of spoiled and rebellious
brats.
Auther's Main Works: 1. The Capativity

2. The Good Natured Man
3. Deserted Villiage
4. The Haunch of Vension
The School for Scandal (1777)

Author: R. B. Sheridan (1751-1816)
Time: 17th century
Place: London
Theme: Loyality and Honour
Kind: Comedy of Manners
School: Classic – Realistic - Romantic
Main Characters: 1. Snake

2. Caerless
3. Joseph Surface
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4. Sir Peter Teazle

5. Sir Benjamin Backbite
6. Sir Oliver Surface
Plot
School for Scandal, first performed at Drury Lane in 1777. Sheridan, who was the leading
partner in the solute but good – hearted; Joseph is decorous but hypocritical.
Each of them would like to marry Sir Peter's ward, Marria, who is also being courted by Sir
Benjamin Backbite, one of the malicious circle headed by Lady Sneerwell. The plot is
complex and in geniously handled. It hinges on the return of Sir Oliver Surface from
Bengal, his discovery of the true characters of his nephews, and the eventual unmasking of
Joseph Surface in a justly famous "screen scene". The end sees Charles Surface untied with
Maria and the much 0 tried Teazles reconciled.
Criticism
In deliberately imitating the comedy of manners of his predecessor, Congreve, Sheridan
also carries out a conscious attack on sentimental comedy, which is the main object of
satire in this play. His characters are divided in to good and bad.
Auther's Main Works: 1. Duenna
2. The Critic
3. Rivals
4. Pizarro
5. A Trip to Scarborough
Major Barbara (1905)

Author: G. B. Shaw (1856-1950)
Time: 19th century
Place: London
Theme: Social frustration – Poverty is Demoralizing
Kind: Restoration Comedy – Poverty is Demoealizing
School: Socialistic Realism
Main Characters: 1. Adnrew Under shaft

2. Britomart Under shaft
3. Adolphus Cusins
4. Major Barbara
Plot
Major Barbara, daughter of the armaments manufacture Andrew Under shaft, has joined the
Salivation Army in revolt against her father's profession. Quite as much a rebel as Barbara
against the conventions of society (represented by his wife and son), Under shaft weakens
her faith, not only by argument, but also by showing her the model conditions in which his
workers live. Barbara is forced to realize that her own fight against poverty is less
successful than her father's.
Citicism
It is a philosophical comedy which deals with the bankruptcy of 19th century lieralism in
the face of the brute facts of sex, nationalism and poverty. This raises the central issue of
modern aesthetics as squarely as any piece of writing can. When they see the rich man's gift
accepted where his own conscience money was rejected, turn to Barbara with cynical scorn,
and Barbara, facing at once the failure of her attempt at salvation.
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Auther's Main Works: 1. Man and Superman

2. Apple Cart
3. Widower's Houses
4. Saint Joan
5. Caesar and Cleopatra
6. In Good King Charles Golden Days.
Brithday Party (1957)

Author: H. Pinter (1930- )
Time: 20th century
Place: A Room
Theme: Worth, value and position of Man
Kind: Absurd
School: Realistic – Symbolic
Main Characters: 1. Goldberg

2. McCann
3. Stanley
4. Meg Boles
5. Lulu
Plot
In a seaside boarding house belonging to a deck chair attendant and his accentric wife, Meg
the only boarder is Stanley who claims to have been a concert pianist, and who suffers from
the persecution mania of a neurotic refugee. When two new boarders, a Jew called
Goldberg and Irishman called McCann come to lodge at the house, Stanley is terrified. At a
birthday party, given in his honour, he is driven to hysteria during a game of blind man's
buff. The next day Goldberg and McCann remove him to an unknown destination.
Criticism
It is comedy of menace, essentially concerned with exposing the existence of personal
menace in the world and charting the individual's destruction under the pressure of that
menace. Problems in communication between individuals and the perception of reality.
This implies that society might be the source of meance but nevertheless it is the menace
and its effect which are important, not its derivation.
Stanley incorporates various aspects of the artiste in society, and is crushed by unfeeling
society.
Auther's Main Works: 1. Party Time

2. No Man's Land
3. Home coming
4. The Room
5. The Lover
Wating For Godot (1953)

Author: S. Becket (1906-89)
Time: No time (Timeless)
Place: No Place (No where)
Theme: Nothingness
Kind: Absurd
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133
School: Realistic – Symbolic - Surrealistic
Main Characters: 1. Vladimir (Didi)

2. Estragon (Gogo)
3. Pozzo
4. Lucky
Plot
In Act One, two tramps, Vladimir and Estragon, wait beside a leafless tree (the stage is
otherwise bare) for the arrival of Godot, with whom they believe they have an appointment.
In order to pass the time, or perhaps simply to accompany the passing if time, they play
verbal games reminiscent of the cross – talk of music – hall comedian. When Pozzo arrives,
holding his slave Lucky with a rope, the trapms wonder if he is Godot, but Pozzo denies all
knowledge of Godot. To the discomfort and confusion of Vladimir, Estragon and audience,
he makes Lucky "dance" and then "think", in a long, incoherent triade, Master and slave
depart and a boy arrives to tell the tramps that Godot will not be coming that day "but
surely tomorrow". In Act Two the tree has leaves, but there is little other evidence of
change as Vladimir and Estragon continue waiting. Pozzo enters again but blind and
dependent on the guiding rope that binds Lucky to him. Lucky is now dumb but Pozzo is
unaware of any difference when they have gone, a boy who may or may not be the same
boy but who claims to be his brother, arrives with the same message, Still determining to
go, the tramps do not move.
Criticism
The rising curtain exposes a landscape that is strange and alien. A country road or an actual
lonely road is the main setting and there is a single tree. The idea of a road implies a
journey to look forward to.
Auther's Main Works: 1. Endgame
2. Triology of Molloy (Novel)
3. Unnamable
4. All that Fall
5. Happy Days
6. Foot falls
7. Not I
8. Breath
9. Come and Go
10 Play
11. Krapp's Last Tape
CIAN
Author: George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824)
Time: The period of Genesis
Place: Outside Eden
Kind: Romantic tragedy
Main Characters: 1. Adam

2. Eve
3. Cain
4. Abel
5. Adah
6. Zillah
7. Lucifer
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Plot
While Adam, Eve, Abel, Zillah and Adah prayed to God, Cain stood sullenly by and
complained that he nothing to pray for, since he had lost immortality when Eve ate fruit
from the tree of knowledge. He could not understand why, if knowledge and life were
good, his mother's deed had been a deadly sin. Abel, Adah, and Zillah urged him to cast off
his melancholy and join them in tending the fields.
Alone, Cain deplored his worldly toil. Tired of the repetitious replies to all his questions,
replies which refused to challenge God's will, he was not longer sure that God was good.
At the conception of this thought, Lucifer appeared to explain that Cain's mortality was
only a bodily limit. He would live forever even after death. Cain, driven by instinct to cling
to life, at the same time despised it. Lucifer admitted that he also was unhappy ins pite of
his immortality, which was a cursed thing in his fallen state. He launched into a bitter tirade
against God, whom he described as a tyrant sitting alone in his misery, creating new worlds
because his eternity was otherwise expressionless and boring to him. Lucifer exulted that
his own condition was at least shared by others. These words echoed for Cain his own
beliefs about the universe. Long had he pitied his relatives for toiling for sustenance, as
God had decreed when he had banished Adam and Eve from Eden.
Lucifer confessed that beguiling snake had not been a disguise for himself the snake was
merely a snake. He predicted, however, that later generations of man would array the fall of
Adam and Eve in a cloak of fable.
Cain then asked his mentor to reveal the nature of death, which held great terrors for Cain.
Lucifer promised to teach Cain true knowledge if Cain would worship him. But Cain,
having refused to worship even God, would not worship any being. His refusal was,
according to Lucifer, in itself a form a worship.
Adah came to ask Cain to go with her, but he claimed that he must stay with Lucifer, who
spoke like a god. She reminded Cain that laying serpent, too, had spoken so. Lucifer
insisted that the serpent had spoken truly when it had promised knowledge from the fruit of
the forbidden tree; man's grief lay not in the serpent's so-called lie but in man's knowledge
of evil. Lucifer said he would take Cain with him for a hour, time enough to show him the
whole of life and death.
Traveling with Lucifer through the air, Cain, watching with ecstasy the beauty around him,
insisted upon viewing the mystery of death, which was uppermost in his mind. The
travelers came at last to a place where no stars glittered and all was dark and dreadful. As
they entered Hades, Cain voiced again his hatred of death, the end of all living things.
In the underworld he saw beautiful and mighty shapes which, Lucifer explained, had
inhabited the world and died by chaotic destruction in an age before Adam had been
created. When Lucifer taunted Cain with his inferiority compared to those other beings of
an earlier age, Cain declared himself ready to stay in Hades forever.
Lucifer confessed, however, that he had no power to allow anyone to remain in Hades.
When he pointed out to Cain that the spirits of the former in habitants of the earth had
enjoyed a beautiful of the earth had enjoyed a beautiful world. Cain said that earth was still
beautifull. His complaint was against man's toil for what the earth bore, his failure to obtain
knowledge, and his un mitigated fear of death.
Cain, bewailing the trade man had made of death for knowledge, asserted that man knew
nothing. Lucifer replied that death for knowledge, asserted that man knew nothing. Lucifer
replied that death was a certainty and therefore truth and knowledge. Cain thought that he
learned nothing new from his journey, but Lucifer informed him that he had at least
discovered that there was a state beyong his own.
They discussed Cain's relative state of happiness in life, which, Cain asserted, was
dependent upon his love for his family. Lucifer hinted that Abel, favored by the others and
by God, caused Cain some jealousy. Cain them asked his guide to show him where Lucifer
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lived, or else God's dwelling place. It was reserved for those who died, Lucifer claimed, to
see either one or the other, not both.
As Lucifer prepared to return his pupil to earth, Cain complained that he had learned
nothing. He had, Lucifer sad, discovered that he was nothing. With a warning to distinguish
between real good and eivl, and to seek his own spiritual attachment, Lucifer transported
the motal back to earth.
Standing over their son Enoch, who was asleep under a tree, Adah and Cain discussed their
ever-present sorrow: they must all die. When Adah said she would gladly die to save her
parents, Cain agreed only if his own death might save everyone else. Adah prophesied that
such a gift might some day be rendered. Seeing the pair of altars Abel had erected for a
sacrifice, Cain uttered his first evil thought by muttering a denial Abel was his brother.
Abel insisted that Cain share in the sacrificial rites he was about to perform.
While Cain impiously stood by, Abel knelt in eloquent prayer. Cain's prayer was a defiant
challenge to the omnipotent to show his preference for one of the altars. His own offering
were scattered to the earth, while Abel's sacrifice burned in high flames toward the
heavents. In anger Cain attacked his brother's altar, and when Abel protested that he loved
his God more than life, Cain struck him a moral blow.
Adam, Eve, Adah, and Zillab, rushing to the scene of the murder, accused Cain of
murdering his brother. Eve uttered loud imprecation against her guilty son.
Adam ordered him to depart. Only Adah remained by his side. The Angel of the Lord then
appeared to confront Cain and ask the whereabouts of his brother. The Angel predicted that
henceforth Cain's hand would cultivate no growing things from the earth that he should be a
fugitive. Lest the man guilty of fratricide be the cause of another murder, the Angel branded
Cain with a mark on his forehead, to warm the beholder that to kill Cain would engender a
sevenfold vengeance. Cain blamed his evil deed upon Eve, who bore him too soon after her
banishment from Eden, when her own mind was still bitter over the lost paradise.
Adah offered to share her husband's fate. Carrying their children with them, she and Cain
traveled eastward from Eden.
Critical Evaluation
Byron suffered from excessive guilt over a sin he never clearly identified in any of his work
or letters. But biographers are almost in universal agreement that the sin was incest with his
half sister, Augusta. Whether this sin, or the many others he indulged in as a student and
continental traveler, is the shaping force in his poetry is largely a matter of conjecture.
Nevertheless, from his early meloderamatic verse tales such as The Giaour (1813) to his
later dramatic poems, Manfred (1817) and Cain, the protagonist is always haunted by a
sense of his corruption and at the same time sustained by strong feelings of individual
power, uniqueness, and worth.
In Manfred, for example, the hero dies refusing to acknowledge the power of Death over
his soul. Although suffering from remorse, Manfred cannot accept any jurisdiction over his
soul other the judgment of his own mind. Cain begins by establishing the protagonist's
anger, his indignation at the injustice of his fate. Why should his mother Eve's eating of the
forbidden fruit have cost him his immortality?
Cain's complaint had the same urgency and authority that animated the political and social
revolutions of Byron's time. Why should the forms of the past dictate the possibilities of the
future? What distinguishes Cain from Byron's other works on the remorseful hero is that
whereas in the others the hero's individual sense of power compensates him for the self-
loathing of his guilt, in Cain the protagonist discovers his uniqueness through the help of
Lucifer and then plunges into the action – the killing of his brother – which stamps him
with everlasting guilt.
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Byron could not separate man's genius from his propensity toward evil. Like Blake, Byron
understood the misplaced energy in so much of man's misguided actions. To adapt a phrase
of Blake, Byron "was of the devil's party with knowing it".
But he lacked a mystical vision like Blake's to explain the paradox of his own sensibility. It
was Byron's fate, like Cain's, to live a life of exile, literally and spiritually.
BRAND (1866)
Author: Henrik Ibsen
Time: Nineteenth century
Place: West coast of Norway
Kind: Social criticism
Main Characters: 1. Brand, a priest

2. His Mother
3. Agnes, his wife
4. Einer, a painter
5. The Mayor
6. The Doctor
7. The Dean
8. The Sexton
9. The Schoolmaster
10. Gerd, A gipsy girl
Plot
Brand, a young priest, met three types of people as he made his way down the mountainside
to the tumble – down church in his home valley. The first was a peasant whose daughter
was dying, but for whome he would not give his own life.
The second was Einar, a young painter returned from travel overseas, and Agnes, his
betrothed, who were gaily on their way to the town of Agnes parents. The third was a half –
gipsy girl named Gerd who taunted him to climb up to her church of ice and snow. In the
peasant, Einar and Agnes. And Gerd – the faint hearted, the light – hearted, and the
uncontrolled – Brand saw exemplified the triple sickness of the world; and he vowed to
heaven to bring about its cure.
In the village Brand gained the admiration of the crowd when he risked his life to aid a
man. Later he saw Agnes sitting by the shore, disturbed and uplifted by new power
awakening in her, a vision of God urging her to choose between two paths.
Then he saw his aged mother, who offered him all her savings on condition that he would
preserve them for family use. Brand refused and urged her to give up all her earthly
possessions. The mother left unrepentant, unwilling that her life time savings should be
scattered. By these encounters Brand was convinced that his mission lay close at hand in
dialy duties, even if he were unapplauded by the world. As he started to return to the
village, Einar suddenly appeared and demanded that Agnes return to him. But Agnes,
having seen the vision, refused to go with Einar, even though Brand warned her it would be
gray and sunless in his fissure between the mountains; he demanded all or nothing.
Three years passed. Although success had marked Brand's work, he realized that, married
to Agnes and blessed with her love and that of their son Alf, he had yet made no real
sacrifices. The tests soon came. First his mother died, unrepentant.
Them the child became ill, and the doctor advised them to leave their icy home or the child
would die. When Brand agreed, the doctor pointed out that, in leaving, Brand would belie
his own stern attitude towards others; his words would become mere preachments. Agnes
made ready to go, but Brand was haunted by the larger issues. Should they go or stay? As
mother of the child, Agnes – Brand thought – should make the decision. When Agnes said
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that she would abide by her husband's choice, Brand chose the only way he could, though
he knew his decision meant death or the child they loved.
A year later, the mayor, with elections near, arrived to seek Brand's aid in building a house
for the poor. When Brand said he himself was going to build a new church which would
cost the people nothing, the mayor left.
Agnes felt that she must challenge her husband with what he demanded of others, all or
nothing. Is she where to return to her old life, Agnes asked, would he choose her or his holy
work? There could be only one answer. Agnes rejoiced, knowing indeed that for the
husband she loved it was all or nothing. Soon afterward she died, leaving Brand alone.
A year and a half later the new church was complete and a great through gathered for the
consecration. The mayor and the dean congratulated Brand on his great accomplishment.
Einar appeared, emaciated, fanatic. He had become a missionary. He brushed aside as
unimportant the news of the death of Agnes and her child; his only interest was the faith in
which she died.
Einar left, but the encounter had made things clear to Brand. He exhorted the people to lead
a new life. It had been wrong, he said, to lure the spirit of God to their heart by simply
building a larger church. There should be no compromise. It must be all or nothing. He
waved them away from the church and locked the door.
When he called the people to the greater Church of Life where every day was dedicated to
God, they lifted Brand on their shoulders. Up toward the mountains he urged them. As the
rain began to fall, the sexton warned them they were on the way to the lcechurch. The older
ones complained of feeling faint and thirsty. Many cried out for a miracle. They felt the gift
of prophecy was on Brand and called on him to speak. Uplifted, he told them they were
waging a war that would last all their lives; they would lose the wealth of mammon but gain
faith and a crown of thorns. At this the crowd cried out that they had been misled, betrayed,
and they were ready to stone and knife the priest.
Brand toiled upward, following far behind by a single figure, Gerd. Now he heard an
invisible choir which mocked him, saying his work on earth was doomed. The apparition of
Agnes appeared, saying he could be reunited with his wife and son if he would blot out
from his soul three words which had characterized his old life:
nought or all. When Brand spurned the tempter, the phantom vanished. Gerd, with her rifle,
caught up with him. She saw that Brand's were pierced and torn, his brow marked with
thorns. To Gerd he was the Lord, the Redeemer. Brand bade her go, but Gerd told him to
look up. Above him to look up. Above him towared the lce- chrch. Brand wept, feeling
utterly forsaken. With his tears came sudden release. His fetters fell away, and he faced the
future with renewed with renewed youth and radiant faith.
In the forms of snow from the mountain heights Gerd saw a mocking sprite, and she raised
her rifle and shot. With a terrible, thunderous roar an avalanche roar an avalanche swept
down. As it was about to crush him, Brand called out to God. Above the crashing thunder a
voice answered with assurance of a God of love.
Critical Evaluation
Brand, although not his first successful play, brought Henrik Ibsen to prominent stature as a
dramatist. This verse drama – a play in poetry – was written in the first phase of Ibsen's
career when his plays dealt mainly with historical themes, folklore, and romantic pageantry,
before the playwright turned to prose and social issues in the second phase of his career.
Brand was, however, the first of Ibsen's masterpieces, foreshadowing his best-known plays
of social criticism. In addition, the play did more than enhance Ibsen's personal reputation.
It vitalized the Norwegian theater, which had been languishing under the shadow of the
Danish theater in Copenhagen even after Norway's separation from Denmark in 1814.
Brand thus has historical significance as well as artistic importance.
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The play combines poetry and moral passion in a grim Norwegian landscape of jagged
mountains, deep – fissured valleys, and cruelly cold temperatures. The setting is an apt
complement to the solemn, tragic mood of the play and to the dour cynicism of many of
Brand's parishioners and fellow villagers. Indeed, gloom pervades the play, affecting
characters like some malign virus. At the beginning of the play, for example, Einar and
Agnes were symbols of light – heartedness to – Brand a light – heartedness which, not
incidentally, the priest deplored as evil. Later Agnes broke off her engagement to Einar in
order to marry the stern Brand and ive a life of great sacrifice, terminating in early death.
Likewise, Einar subsequently forsook his hearted ways and became a religious fanatic. It is
the image of Brand, however, that dominates the play, most vividly reflecting the
atmosphere and mood of the drama.
Brand is, after all, the tragedy of a supreme idealist misled by an image of holiness.
The protagonist's uncompromising attitude in his dealings with others even with his wife
and in matters relating to the survival of their son – reveals his conviction that the path to
holiness is too narrow for concessions or backsliding. Every ideal must be maintained
unblemished, for there is no bargaining with God. Brand was so convinced of his rightness
that even his mountain – climbing injuries appeared as vindicating stigmata just before he
caught sight of the Ice – church. Yet, Brand's epiphany was ironically shattered by the rifle
shot of Gerd, his one remaining flower and a social outcast (she was half gipsy) like the
now- repudiated priest.
CAMPASPE (1584)
Author: John Lyly (c. 1554+1606)
Time: c. 325 B.C.
Place: Athens
Kind: Historical – romantic comedy
Main Characters: 1. Alexander, King of Macedon

2. Campaspe, his captive, a maiden of Thebes
3. Hephestion, his chief general
4. Diogenes, philosopher
5. Apelles, painter
6. Manes, the servant of Diogenes
Plot
The great king Alexander had conquered the city of Thebes and taken prisoner and taken
prisoner the beautiful and virtuous Campaspe, whom he promised to treat gently.
In Athens, at that time, was Diogenes, the ill-tempered philosopher. His servant Mances
complained to the servants of Plato and Apelles, the painter, that Diogenes was a man of
exceedingly frugal habits and that his servant, in consequence, often went hungry.
Also in Althens were Plato, Aristotle, and several other great philosophers whom.
Alexander had called to his headquarters. The great thinkers disputed the difference
between divine and natural causes until Alexander came to them and asked each a difficult
question about such things as animals, gods and men, life and death, and the composition of
the world. After each philosopher had answered wisely, Alexander departed, satisfied with
their sagacity. Then Diogenes entered and berated them for toadying to the king. Upon the
entrance of Manes and his fellow servants, after the departure of the philosophers, there
ensued a witty echance between Diogenes and the servants, in which Diogenes abused them
all.
During a long dialogue in the market place, Alexander admitted his love for Campaspe, at
which Hephesion was horrified. While his loyal general decried love as a weakener of men.
Alexander defended the passion and told Hephestion to allow him to love in peace.
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Alexander, seeing Diogenes in his tub, went to him and asked if he had no reverence for
kings, to which Diogenes replied that he had none and wished nothing from anyone.
Apelles entered and said that the portrait he was painting of Campaspe was not quite
finished.
While Campaspe posed for the painting, Apelles praised her beauty but Campaspe, saying
that she did not believe men's flattery, cut short the painter's questions about her feeling
toward love with a request that he get on with the painting.
Although several of Alexander's lieutenants declared their concern for the king's martial
inactivity, Alexander was planning a campaign against Persia. After telling Hephestion that
be wished only a brief respite from war, the conqueror went to talk with Apelles and
Campaspe about the painting. Apelles excused his delay by saying that Campaspe was so
beautiful that it was difficult to paint her as she really was.
Alexander was pleased with the work, and his love for Campaspe grew even greater,
despite Hephestion's warnings against love.
Returning to his house, Apelles, in a long soliloquy, revealed his despair over his hopeless
love for Campaspe, whom he knew he could never obtain because she was loved by a king.
In a melancholy song he praised her beauty and bemoaned his helpless condition.
Several of the servants met in the market place to witness a strange event:
Diogenes had said that he would fly. Manes entered, followed by a crowed of citizens, and
they all approached Diogene's tub. It soon became apparent that Digenes had made the
promise so that he could gather a group of Athenians about him and berate them for their
lack of virtue and wisdom. After a heated debate, the citizens left in disgust. The servant,
however, were amused by the philosopher's biting criticisms.
Alone in the palace, Campaspe debated with herself whether she preferred Apelles to the
great Alexander. Apelles entered, and in a veiled dialogue revealed his love for her. Later,
at Apelle's studio, he and Campaspe vowed their love for each other, but their feeling of
mutual devotion was mixed with fear of Alecander's displeasure. A page entered and told
Apelles that Alexander wished him to take the painting immediately to the place; the
conqueror suspected rightly that the painter had finished the portrait but did not wish to part
with it.
When Sylvius, a citizen, brought his sons to Diogenes to be educated, the father made his
three sons dance, do acrobatics, and sing. Diogenes, unimpressed, criticized the boy's
performances and called them trivial. Neither the boys nor Diogenes wanted anything to do
with the other, and Sylvious departed in anger.
A short time later two of Alexander's soldiers, accompanied by a courtessn passed by
Diogene's tub. Bent on pleasure, they paused to ask him what he thought of their intention,
and he insulted them harshly. One offered to stale him, but, afraid of being found by
Alexander, they left after singing a short song.
Soon Alexander and Hephestion approached the tub. Alexander, believing that Apelles was
in love with Campaspe, told his page to summon Apelles and then to cry out that his studio
was on fire. The page left, and the two great warriors talked with Diogenes about love,
which the philosopher scorned.
Soon Apelles appeared. While he was talking with Alexander about a new painting, the
page entered and shouted that Apelles' studio was afire. The painter revealed his love for
Campaspe by being concerned only about her portrait.
Alexander then told him of the ruse and had the page call Campaspe. After he had forced
the two lovers to dmit their true feeling for each other, Alexander, in a sudden burst of
generosity, ordered them to marry.
Alexander then commanded the page to summon his generals so that they could prepare to
invade Persia. When Hephestion praised the king's conquest of his feeling, Alexander
replied that the man should not wish to command the world if he could not command
himself, and that he would fall in love when there were no more countries to conquer.
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Critical Evaluation
John Lyly is remembered primarily for the prose style of his "Euphues" novels in which the
balanced construction, rhetorical questions, and multiple similes which had previously been
added to English prose style were combined and intensified.
This style, known as euphuistic, is used throughout Campaspe, as, for example when
Hephestion asks Alexander, "Will you handle the spindle with Hercules, when you should
shake the spear with Achilles?
The plot of this play is a slender one, consisting almost wholly of two events: Alexander
falls in love, and Alexander resists love. It is not for stage action that one turns to
Campaspe, but rather for lively and thoughtful dialogue, quick thrusts of cynical retorts and
artfully designed orartions in defense of one opinion or another.
Diogenes is the master of the curt reply, as in this example: Alexander: "How should one
learn to be content?" Diogenes: "Unlearn to covet." Hephestion, Alexander, Apelles, and
Diogenes all deliver set speeches against love, for love, on Campaspe's beauty, and on the
moral ills of the Athenians.
But the spine of the play is the point of its debate. The central questions is:
Should men live in the world or above it? Living in the world would include the food which
Diogenes denies himself and his slave, as well as the woman whom Alexander covets.
Living above the world, according to Lyly, would "seem not only to include Diogenes" life
style, but also Alexander's life as a full – time conqueror, and Apelles" life as an artist.
Lyly taste for balanced antithesis is his contrast of Alexander and Apelles as it is in his
prose style: as Alexander moves away from his recent attraction to the life of the flesh,
Apelles moves toward it. Most Elizabethans would have regarded Alexander's final
decision as the best one for all concerned.
CANDIDA
Author: George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950)
Time: 1894
Place: London
Main Characters: 1. The Reverend James Morell, a Christian Socialist clergyman

2. Canadia Morell, his intelligent, vivacious wife
3. Eugene March banks, a poet in with Candida
4. Mr. Burgess, Candida's father
5. The Reverend Alexander Mill, Morell's idealisric, admiring
young curate
6. Proserpine Garnett, Morell's secretary
Plot
George Bernard Shaw's critics often bring a two- fold charge against his plays:
(1) his characters are too academic and lifeless; (2) his plays are merely tracts for
expressing Shavian ideas on love, war, property, morals, and revolution. This charge.
However, is not usually leveled at Candida. Usually the most completely anti-Shaw Critic
concedes that here is one play free, for the most part, from any really revolutionary ideas,
aside from a few comments on socialism and corruption in government. In fact, in the lively
Candida, Show is saluting an old, established institution: marriage. But as he salutes, the
author is, as usual, winking.
Candida belongs to the group of his Plays, Pleasant and Unpleasant published in 1898. It
was given its first public London production in 1904, after a private presentation in 1897,
and has gone on to become one of the most popular plays in the Shaw repertory, probably
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ranking second only to Saint Joan. It was an early favorite with Shaw himself. He held on
to it for some time before allowing its production, preferring to read it privately to his
friend, who, it is said, would weep loudly at the more touching scenes.
Shaw and the English and American theaters are correct in their veneration for Candida, for
the play is put together in masterly from, with respect for a uniformity that is often lacking
in some of his other works. Here is a play that gives an audience highly comic scenes on the
one hand, and yet moments of highly serious insights on the other. Finally, here is an
extremely actable play. Candida herself is one of the great roles in the modern theater, that
of the self-possessed woman who, as in many homes, subtly runs the household while
appearing subservient to her husband. The Reverend James Mavor Morell, the husband in
question, is another excellent role: the hearty Christian Socialist clergyman, the popular
speaker always in demand, the unintimidated man man who is happy and secure in his
important position until untoward events began to occur, brought about by a young, wild,
seemingly effeminate friend of the family, the poet Eugene Marchbanks. The role of
Marchbanks, the eighteen – year – old worshiper of Candida, has also been a favorite of
many stage juveniles though others have seen it as a highly distasteful, unrealistic part to
play. As the boy who grows faint at the thought of Candida's peeling onions, who rants, and
whines over the thought of the earthly, boorish Morell being married to such a poetic
delight and inspiration as Candida, Marchbanks often reminds us of the young and ethereal
Shelly, and is possibly a younger Bernard Shaw.
Most readers and viewers are quick to not that Candida bears a great resemblance to Ibsen's
A Doll's House. Shaw, however, has reversed Ibsen. In the latter's play, Nora is the doll, the
pupper; but in Candida the rables are turned.
Morell, though a likable, high – principled fellow, is actually the doll. It is his wife, as he
eventually learns, who is responsible or his success. Thus when Candida is "forced" to
choose between Marchbank and Morel, she chooses Morell, the weaker of the two. This is,
supposedly, Shaw's Virgin Mother play; certainly Candida plays the role of Morell's wife
mother, and sister rolled into one. She is the one who arranges his affairs, who keeps him
happy and content, who peels his onion for him.
Her true status Morell finally comes to realize, though later he will probably rationalize his
way out of his paradoxical victory. Here, then, is one aspect of the play, and to many the
main idea behind it: the coming of a husband and wife to a fuller understanding of each
other.
All of this bears a certain resemblance to romantic drama, and perhaps that is the secret of
the play's success among non Shaw theatergoers. Show tiraded against romanticism, but
Candia is often romantic. Although Candida discovers a typical Shavian thought – that
service and not necessarily contentment is the greatest triumph in life – the play and its
celebration of the wife – mother role seems greatly romantic in comparison with other
Savian drama.
If one takes the view that the play concerns growing awareness between a husband and
wife, Marchbanks severs as the catalyst bringing about the final result.
Though the poetic railings of the young poetaster, Morell begins to wonder if he is actually
too commonplace for Candida.
But when Morell is accepted and the poet is spurned un the famous choosing scene,
Marchbanks leaves as a more adult being with a secret in his heart, and apparently quite
eager to go out into the night. It may well be that Marchbanks realizes that this mundane
domesticity is not for him – he has a greater destiny than this. Candida has revealed the
average happy marriage to him, and he realizes there is no poetry in it. A poet must go out
into the night, and on to greater and more exalted triumphs.
This, quite possibly, is another of Show's main ideas in the play – that the man of genius is
out of place in conventional society. However, the fact that the role of Marchbanks is often
unrealistic and overdrawn reduces the total effect of this particular Shavian premise.
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Though his excessive behavior, the conflict between Marchbanks and Morall fails to
convince many readers and viewers; to some, there is no chice at all between the likable
clergyman and the effeminate boy.
Most others, however, are willing to overlook this flaw and to ignore the charge the
Candida, in the "choosing" scene, behaves in a most conceited fashion. Audiences have
much more preferred to delight in the hight comedy of Candida, its amusing situation and
the witty, sparkling dialogue which is generaly consistent throughout the play. This is, next
to Saint Joan, Shaw's best constructed drama. And there is no doubt that its great popularity
is due not only to its form, but also to the fact that in Candida we have Shaw's safest play.
THE CARETAKER (1960)

Author: Harold Pinter (1930- )
Time: The present
Place: A house in west London
Main Characters: 1. Davies, the proposed caretaker

2. Aston, a tenant who lives in the room and takes care of
Davies for a time
3. Mick, Aston's brother and owner of the house in which they
have a room
Plot
The caretaker is a dramatic study of the relations among three men in a clitered, unkempt,
crudely, furnished furnished room: Aston, the slow – witted tenant, man in his early thirties;
Mick, the landlord, who is Aston's younger brother; and Davies, and old tramp subsisting
on the brother's hospitality. At the nrginning of the play, which takes place entirely within
the confines of a single room, Aston has rescued Davies from a fight at a nearby from his
job at this establishment, Aston has brought him to the room, Charitably he gives Davies a
chair, a bed, and a little money, and offers him cigarettes, a pair of shoes, and a job as
caretaker of the flat – an offer that is repeated by Mick. But Davies' persistent complaints
ablout the arrangements made for him gradually antagonize the brothers, and at the end of
the play, in a moment that is almost tragic in impact, Davies is driven out. The power of the
play derives from the skill with Pinter moves his charactes toward the inevitability of this
final expulsion.
Davies is established at the outset of the drama as a lonely derelict, at once patheric and
ludicrous. From the moment that Aston ushers him into the room, the audience sees that he
is utterly dependent on the kindness and generosity of his host.
So simple a convenience as a chair to sit gives Davies satifaction, for this is a man deprived
of common comforts, dispossessed of the amenities and securities that insulate the life
average working man. During his job at the café, he says, he could never get a seat during
the tea break. But Davies is less often grateful for small favors that dissatisfied with large
ones. In spite of his position as a mendicant, he masquerades as a man to be reckoned with.
He tells Aston, for example, that the fight at the café started because to empty a bucket of
rubbish because he refused to empty a bucket of rubbish because he thought the task
beneath his position and he resented this affront to his dignity as an old man. He therefore
challenged the Scotsman who had given him the order (as he later threatens the innocuous
Aston with a knife), but actually he was capable only saying what he might have done to
his antagonist had he been younger, or what he may do later in revenge. His Falstaffian
bravado collapsed in the face of imminent violence, from which Astom saved him just in
time. In retrospect, he is forced to asmit that the Scotsman could have put him in the
hospital with a dingle punch.
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The incident, even in the retelling, graphically reveals the central paradox in Davies'
character: the conflict between his situation and his pretensions. He is a beggar with
appalling arrogance, a petty, useless hobo who presumes to be a man of stature and
importance. His is fanatically zenophobic, denouncing to Aston the numbers of Poles,
Greeks, and Blacks who would crowd him out of a seat at the café; he accepts pipe tobacco
only after explaining that he has been recently robbed of a tin of it; he declares that he has
dined in the best company, that he abandoned his wife shortly after their marriage because
of her slovenly housekeeping. He contends, too, that he has a number or friends who help
him, among them a lavatory attendant who gives him soap, and he repeatedly maintains that
papers establishing his identity are available in Sidcup, where he intends to go as soon as
the weather clears. But as the play proceeds, Davies' claims, his demands, and his
cantankerous assertiveness gradually appear for what they are, the threadbare covering of a
helpless old man, clutching desperately at the rags of a tattered self – respect. The story
about his papers is partently spurious, and even his name is subject to question, for he has
been living much of his life, he says, under to be a connoisseur of shoes, preferring leather
to sued and pointedly expressing his dissatisfaction with the fit of the footwear offered him
by Aston, but he must confess that his own shoes are almost entirely worn out. He does not
like his bed which is situated directly under an open window and is consequently exposed
in the night to rainy gusts, but he has no other place to sleep and must accept it.
In large part, of course, Davies' character is defined and elicited by the two other figures in
the play. Each punctures the old man's noxious presumpuousness in a different way, Aston
by his disarming modesty and Mick by his cool, cruelly penetrating tone of sustained
mockery. Aston is deceptively mild in appearance and manner. He is thoughtful, quite,
patient, and generous to a fault, qualities which make him seem the perfect putty for
Davies' rather heavy – handed manipulation.
When Davies rejects the proffered shoes, Aston does not chide his guest for ingratitude;
instead, he returns to the room, in the third act, with another pair of shoes. He opens not
only his house and purse to Davies, but also his heart; in a long speech at the end of Act II,
he unfolds the bleak horror of his past – of his early hallucinations, of the insidious rumor
which sent him to a mental institution, of the electric shock treatment he received there, of
his discharge, of his present life as kind of human vegetable. Aston, in fact, is clearly the
sort of man who needs the compassion that a personal caretaker would give him, and he
seems unconsciously to imply this fact when he offers Davies the job of caretaker; the
meaning of the term vacillates between "house kanitor" and "sympathetic guardian". Pinter
exploits this ambiguity throughout the play. But the ambiguity is especially enriched by the
cirvumstances in which the job offer is made. As a crude, demanding intruder, Davies is
fitted to be a caretaker in neither sense. On the contrary, we see from the beginning that as a
homeless, destitute old man, he himself requires a caretaker. In Aston, his kindly,
unassuming, uncomplaining host, Davies thinks that he has found his man.
But Davies woefully underestimates Aston. The old man shortly discovers that his modest
host is perfectly capable of self – assertion when the occasion demands. On the morning
after their first night in the room together, Aston charges Davies with jabbering in his sleep,
creating a disturbance that awole Aston. The next morning, when Davies complains tha rain
and wind came in upon him through the open window as he slep, and he therefore demands
that the window be closed, Aston insists that the window shall remain open. Still later, in
Act III, Aston reacts sharply when Davies explodes over the treatment he has been getting.
After accepting the second pair of shoes which Aston offers him, after churlishy objecting
to the color of the laces, Davies goes to sleep. Once more his muttering awaken Aston, who
in turn arouse the old man. When Davies spews out a torrent of abuse at Aston's mental
status and draws a knife on him, Aston quietly tells the old man that he smells and that he
must leave. Davies can do nothing for the moment except leave.
He goes off in a flurry of feckless imprecations.
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But if Davies underestimates Aston, his judgment of Mick is doubly inept. From his first
encounter with Davies at the end of Act I, Mick is almost ruthlessly in command,
supremely confident of his power to strip away every one of Davies' pretensions and to
expose him for the selfish, useless parasite he is. Davies, signigicantly clad only in his
underwear, is rummaging in a sideboard drawer when Micj enters the room, surprises him,
forces him to the floor, and calmlu launches on a cross – examination calculated to drive
the old man mad. He taunts Davies by withholding his trousers, all the while questioning
him about his name, his bed, his sleep of the night just passed, his reason for being in the
room, and his intentions, all the time mockingly pretending that Davies might be a
prospective tenant of limitless means. When Aston enters the room with a bag for Davies,
Mick takes it and teases Davies with it before letting him have it. It is Mick, too, who
restates Aston's offer of the creataking job, but he defines the duties in flamboyantly
elaborate terms. The man he wants, he tells Davies, must be a first – class interior decorator
capable of transforming the rudely funished room into a sumptuously appointed flat.
Davies, of course, is comoelled to admit that he has no such qualifications; this is only one
of the many retractions and evasions to which Mick's merciless questioning drives him. The
final blow comes in Act III when Davies turns to Mick for support against Aston, who has
just asked Davies to leve. With that astounding presumption which has marked his conduct
and attitude from the beginning, Davies expects to displace Aston in Mick's affection, in
effect, to gain Mick as a caretaker. But it shortly becomes clear that Micj has no intention
od evicting his own brother, for whom he has generously provided living quarters; instead,
he tells Davies that Aston can do what he likes with the house. At this point Aston returns
and firmly repeats his order that Davies must go. It is a tribute to Pinter's power as a
playwright that Davies' plight here is almost tragic. He has proved himself a thoroughly
boorish, obnoxious, petulant, cranky, and ungrateful guest, but he somehow holds out
sumpathy in the final moments of the play. He is no logner ludicrous; he is now desperate
must roam the world in search of care.
In the light of this ending, the play might be called a comedy – turned – tragedy. It has its
moments of laughter, for Pinter has an uncanny gift for reproducing the banalities of
ordinary conversation – its trudging pace, its cul – de – sacs, its involutions, its maddening
regression. His dialogue, therefore, is often amusing, as are the ludicrous claims, evasions,
and selfdeception of Davies. But like the climate in so many of Pinter's plays the
atmosphere of The Caretaker is subtly, treacherously charged with potential menace. The
characters who move about in the room are never directly exposed to the dangers of the
outside world, but Davies must sleep with a gas stove above his head (the gas jets make
him apprehensive), and with the wind and rain blowing in upon his head. He wants to close
the window, to insulate himself from the world outside, but Aston will not let him; and it is
into that world that Aston ultimately thrusts him. As the curtain falls on the final act, one is
left with the spectacle of a lonely, desolate, dispossessed man, still talking of papers in
Sidcup which do not exist.
CAST (1867)
Author: Thomas William Robertson (1829-1871)
Type: Social criticism
Time: Nineteenth century
Place: England
Main Characters: 1. The Honorable George D'alroy, a young

man of social position
2. Marquise De St. Maur, George D'Alroy's mother
3. Esther Eccles, an actress love by George D'Alroy
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4. Eccles, Esther's drunken father

5. Polly, Esther's sister
6. Captain Hawtree, George D'Alroy's friend
7. Sam Gerridge, Polly's fiance
Plot
Captain George D'Alroy. Whose mother was married to a French marquis, fell in love with
a beautiful dancer named Esther Ecvless. Despite is mother's pride in rank and family, he
was resolved to marry the girl, but his good sense warned him that the marriage might
result in his mother;s unhappiness. In an effort to prove he was right in wishing to marry
her, in spite of her place in a lower level of society, D'Alroy took his friend, Captain
Hawtree, to see Esther at her home.
Haetree agreed that Esther was a charming girl. Indeed, he himself was quite charmed with
Esther's sister Polly. He warned D'Alroy, however, that the difference in social positon and
culture were too great to be bridged; he pounted out what D'Alroy wished to overlock – that
Esther's father was a confirmed drunkard and loafer and that Polly was satisfied to marry a
petty tradesman. Hawtree tried to make D'Alroy see that such people could never be
acknowledged as the relatives of the daughter – in – law of the Marquise de St. Maur and
the wife of an officer in a good regiment.
When Hawtree recommended that D'Alroy take a leave of absence from the regiment and
travel to the West Indies in an effprt to forget Esther, D'Alroy said that he had already tried
unsuccessfully to stay away from her. He said also that he would rather be dead than give
her up for good. D'Alroy pointed out that the girl's love for him was worth more than a title,
at which statement Hawtree only smiled.
Captain D'Alroy, refusing to listen to his friend's well – intended advice, married Esther,
and the newly married pair moved into good lodgings. A few weeks after the wedding
D'Alroy's regiment was ordered to service in India. The captian did not know how to break
the news to Esther. When the day of departure arrived, he still had not told her. To add to
the complications, he had word that his mother, the marquise, was coming to bid him
goodbye. Before he could tell Esther, his mother arrived. Afraid to let his mother meet
Estther, D'Alroy had her hide in a bedroom.
Overhearing the conversation, Esther learned that her husband would embark within a few
hours. Unable to contain herself, she burst into the room. The marquise misunderstood at
first and thought that Esther was her son's misress. When she learnd that the girl was his
wife, however, she was only slightly mollified. Then Esther's drunken father came in,
accompanied by Polly's tradesman – fiancé, Sam Gerridge. The marquies was dismayed.
A few months after D'Alroy's departure for India. Esther gave birth to a son.
While she was still convalescing, word came that D'Alroy had been captured by Sepoys and
undoubtedly killed. In addition, Esther was in need of money. Her father, entrusted with the
money D'Alroy had left to provide for her, had spent the funds on drink and horse – racing.
Too proud to ask her mother – in – law for help, Esther lived in real poverty. When the
marquise heard of Esther's sad straits, she offered to take the baby and rear it as a grandson
of the nobility ought to be reared.
Too spirited and loving to accept the oftern, Esther indignantly showed the marquise to the
door.
Esther then tried to get work as a dancer, but the theater manager, knoeing her story, took
advantage of her plight and regused to pay her even a living wage, so that she and the baby
were forced to rely on financial help from fiancé, who had but little money of his own, and
on an unecpected check from Hawtree. Esther felt truly degraded when she father stealing
the baby's gold necklace in order to pawn it for money to buy liquour.
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Captain Hawtree, who had been promoted to a majority, returned from India and went to
see what he might do to help his firend's window. He had not even guessed the extent of
Esther's difficulties. The sight of him was too much for her. She become ill and to be put to
bed. Polly then invited Hawtree to stay for tea with her and her fiance. While they sat at tea,
D'Alroy himself, much to everyone's surprise, came to the house.
D'Aleoy told that after his capture he had been befriended by a native whom he had helped
some time before. With the assistance of the native and his own daring in killing a guard
with his bare hands, D'Alroy had managed to escape not long after Haetree left India.
D'Alroy was surprised to learn that he was the father of a son. Overjoyed, he swore that he
would buy the boy a pony the next day. As soon as his first rapture at seeing his child was
over, D'Alroy wanted to see his wife, but Polly was afraid that the shock of seeing her
supposedly dead husband might kill Esther. Polly asked D'Alroy to leave the room until she
could break the good news gently to her sister.
Esther was a sensitive woman, and it took only a hint from Polly to let her know the news
was about D'Alroy. As soon as she guessed, D'Alroy's mother also arrived.
Pleased with D'Alroy's return, she forgave him his marriage to a commoner and agreed to
accept her son's wife and the child without further regard for Esther's inferior social rank.
Highly pleased with his mother's change of heart and the splendid way in which Esther had
cared for herself and the child during his absence, despite the many terribe difficulties she
faced, D'Alroey told Hawtree that Esther had proved caste of on importance. He said Esther
had proved that a woman with brains could surmount a crude and vulgar background and
make herself capable of being accepted by the highest classes of society.
In her own happiness Esther felt somewhat sorry for her sister, who was content to marry a
tradesman. Polly thought, happier than Esther could possibly be on the other hand, that she
would be.
Critical Evaluation
T. W. Robertson was one of those rare, fortunate writers who was hailed as a
"revolutionary" innovator in his genre, and at the same time, achieved great popular and
commercial success. He was able to realize both of these frequently contradictory goals
becaude his theatrical approach was novel, and is sharp cintrast to prevalent dramatic styles
and assumption, while the plot subatance and ideological implications of his plays were
essentially conventional, conservative, and well suited to the needs and expectations of his
Victorian middle-class audience. This combination of theatrical effectiveness and thematic
propriety is, perhaps, best illustrated in his most famous play, Caste.
If the "realism" of Cast seems quaint, contrived, and occasionally crude today, it must be
remembered that Robertson was reacting against the ornate, excessive, "stagey", theatrical
style of the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, which was characterized by
extravagant spectacle, unfettrered emotionalism, overwrought acting, and pseudo – poetic
speech. Robertson rightly believed that, with ascendancy of the bourgeoisie, such
"aristocratic" trappings were obsolete and that the public was ready for a solid does of
ralism. He was the first modern British playwrith who had his characters sit in real chairs,
drink out of real teacups, open and close real doors and windows – in short, Robertson
more or less brought the "fourth – wall convention" to the Victorian stage, althought he did
so imperfectly. But even if soliloquies, asides, and many other relics of the moledramatic
stage remained, the impression of contemporary reality, a sense of "environment", was new
to the British theater.
This physical realism was enhanced by Robertson's attitude toward dialogue and acting.
The dialogue in his best plays in quick, colloquial, witty, and intimate. The long rhetorical
set pieces were out; snappy exchanges between characters became the rule. The acting style
Robertson imposed, both through his scripts and his directing, was simple, natural, and
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relatively underplayed. The new stress was, therefore, on ensemble performance rahter than
individual histrionics, and this shift in emphasis has been crucial to the modern stage.
In terms of plot and character, Cast seems today to be absurdly contrived.
However, one of Robertson's most important contributions to English drama was his
adaptation of the French "piexe bien faite" – or "well – made play"- as popularized on the
Continent by Eugene Scribe and Victories Sardou, to the middle – class Visctorian
environment, thus creating a distinctive genre: the British realistic well – made play.
The characterizations in Caste are shallow and stereotypical, but they are nicely
orchestrated. The "noble" couple, George D'Alroy and Esther Eccles, is juxtaposed agsinst
the "common" one, Sam Gerridge and Polly Eccles; the haughty, aristocratic mother,
Marquise de St. Maur, is opposed to the lazy, worthless father, Eccles; the honest worker,
Sam, who understsand his placr in society, is measured against the jobless sponger, Eccles,
who does not. Each character, therefore, acts as a representative of his social class and
demonstrates the validity of that social arrangement. Eccles proves that he belongs at the
bottom of the social heap. The Marquies is unpleasant, but her last – scene conversion to
understanding, triggered by the miraculous return of her son, vindicates her character and
social class. Esther, by sheer nobility od character, demonstrates herself to be the exception
that proves the social rule. Sam and Polly are going up the ladder the only generally
axxeptable way, one rung at a time. George D'Alroy makes the play's thematic statements:
George: Oh, Caste's all right. Caste is a good thing, if it's not carried too far. It shuts the
door on the pretentions and the vulgar; but is should open the door very wide for
exceptional merit. Let brains break through its barriers, and what brains can break thtough
love may leap over.
Thus, T. W. Robertson discovered and fixed the from, the "well – made" play, that was to
serve as the model for most "serious" English theater for the succeeding fifty years, and he
wedded it to a Victorian ideology that was to permeate the British stage until the onslaught
of George Bernard Shaw.
Cat on A Hot Tin Roof (1955)

Author: Tennessee Williams (1914- )
Type: Drama
Time: The present
Place: The Mississippi Delta
Main Characters: 1. Big Daddy, A Wealthy Mississippi landowner of

Humble origins
2. Big Mama, his wife
3. Gooper, a son sometimes called Brother Man
4. Mae,his wife, sometimes called Sister Woman
5. Brick, another son a dipsomantic
6. Margaret, his wife
Plot
One March 24, 1955, The Playwright's Company presented Tennessee William's Cat on a
Hot Tin Roof at the Morosco Therater in New York. The play starred Barbara Bel Geddes
as Margaret, the Cat; Ben Cazzara as her troubled husband Brick, and Butl lves as Brick's
Big Daddy.This presentation marked the tenth anniversary on Broadway of Tennessee
Williams, who started his string of theatrical successes in 1954 with The Glass Menagerie.
As Williams himself admitted in an article which appeared first in the drama section of The
New York Times and them was reprinted as the preface to Cat on a Hot Tin Roof,
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previously he had been preoccupied with emotions that tend to bind people ever more
closely to a cell in solitary from which as prisoners they cry out.
Feeling that all of us live in solitary confinement, he beliveves that we can understand the
emotions with which he has clothed his lonely characters. He endeavors to make his
audiences feel not only that they can identify themselves with the persons on the stage.
Consequently, the subject matter of his plays lies not in the everyday surface aspects, but in
those subjects people do not ordinarily talk about, the hidden, inner concerns of spiritual
life or spiritual death. But in his plays Tennessee William's characters do talk about their
problems to such an extent that there is a close rapport between characters and audience
whether or not there seem to be a similar closeness between character and character.
William's control of his characters is such that, having presented them, they take care of the
situations that arise. He seems never to manipulate them; these are no puppets pulled in to
position by strungs. They are, instead, vastly troubled, earthy creatures who speak out their
hearts.
The Mississippi Delta family presented in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof is no a pretty one. Ruled
over by Big Daddy, who emerged as a wealthy landowner after pulling himself up from the
position of overseer, each member has gone his separate, lonely way until the time comes to
celebrate Big Daddy's sixty – fifth birthday. One son, Gooper, has a brood of five, going on
six. The other son, Brick, is a dipsomaniac whose wife Marharet is childless. Big Mama is a
hearty playful, and vacuous creature.
The plot, involving an attempt by Gooper to get possession of the plantation when Big
Daddy dies, is as negligible as Gooper himself. Only three characters are the meat of this
play. The people who matter are Big Daddy, Brick, and Margaret.
Each has been living a lonely life, but has put up a front to preserve the social amenities.
While they cannot explaon themselves to one another, the explanation of their thoughts and
feeling comes clearly across the foolights in language that is as blod as their thoughts.
Brick and Margarel have been living under a sort of truce since the death of Skipper, whom
Margaret had accused of being in love with Brick. Brick accused Margaret of responsibility
for distorting the friendship between himself and Skipper to such an extent that Skipper
took to drink and succeeded in blooting himselg out.
Brick and Skipper had been such a successful pass combination in college football that they
could not resist the attraction of a professional team. Margaret, by then married to Brick,
felt that the boys refused to grow up to their adult responsibilities, but went along with them
as an ardent rooter for their team. Before long they were a jealous triangle. After Skipper
drank himeself to death, Brick refused to sleep with Margaret and began to drown his own
sorrows.
This much comes out in the first act, which is really an extended monologue by Margaret.
She feels that the situation has become so intense that she is merely a cat trying to stay on a
hot tin roof as long as possible. She intends to stay if she can because she loves Brick.
He is almost oblivious of her, though patient in an impersonal sort of way. Each day he
drings until he feels a click in his head that promises peace for a while. On this day, Big
Daddy's birthday, he has not yet been able to drink enugh to feel the click. The night before
he had broken his ankle while trying in the dark to jump the hurdles on the high school
athletic field, and so he has not attended the birthday dinner. The rest of the family intends
to celebtate the cutting the cutting of the birthday cake in his room to have him join in the
festivities. Impatient and inarticulate, Brick wants nothing to do with any of them, but
Margaret persuades him to be as gentle as possible with Big Daddy, who does not know
that the doctors, althought assuring him that he suffers only from a spastic colon, have
really found him fatally ill with cancer.
The second act is again almost a monologue carried on by Big Daddy with Brick as the
nearly silent objective, just as he was in the act with Margaret. After the candles on the cake
have been lighted, Big Daddy practically orders the rest of the family out of the room, as he
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is determined to uncover the reason for Brick's drinking. In an intense scene Big Daddy
pierces through Brick's protective armor by showing that he has had to develop a tolerance
for people in spite of their habitual lying and by admitting that he has endured the company
of Big Mama and Gooper, although he has hated them for years. It is with love that he
reaches through to Brick. When Brick finally explains his reason for drinkling, Big Daddy
finds it incomplete until Brick remembers that the last time he had talked to Skipper he had
hung up on a telephone call during which Skipper had tried to make a drunken confession.
Poimting out that Brick was disgusted with himself for failing to face the truth of the
situation, Big Daddy feels that he has found the reason he looked for.
But Brick, emotionally involved as he is, faces one truth with another and tells his father
that the doctors have lied to him. There is only one satisfaction for both men; neither has
ever lived among liars all their lives.
When Tennessee Williams gave this play to Elia Kazan to read, Kazan, who was to direct
the play, objected to the third act on three counts. He thought Big Daddy too vivid to kept
off stage after the secons act. He wanted Brick to show some effect of his father's loveing
insight in the second act. And he wanted Matharet to appear more sympathetic to the
audince as the play ended. Williams debated the first suggestion; a return of Big Daddy
could only be an anticlimax after the second act. He thought Brick's paralysis of spirit could
not undergo a change so soon after even so revealing a diagnosis. But he was willing to
make Maggie the Cat as charming to the audience as she had become to him.
The third act is involved with Gooper's telling Big Mama that her husband really has cancer
and suggesting a plan of trusteeship for the plantation after Big Daddy dies. Big Mama will
have none of Gooper's plan. Instead, she turns to Big Daddy's favorite, Brick, and suggests
that Big Daddy would like best to leave the place to Brick's son if he had one. Aroused by
the noise of a family argument inside and a thunderstorm outside the house, Big Daddy
comes back. Margaret, telling him she has kept his big brithday present until last,
announces that she is carrying Brick's baby. As Big Daddy goes out happily to look over
his land, Gooper and his wife pounce on Margret and declare that she is lying. Brick degies
them both. As the play ends, he feels the click of peacefulness and prepares to make
Margaret's lie come true.
As is usual with Tennessee William's plays, there were mixed reactions among the
reviewers following its dramatic presentation. Some found it enjoyable; some thought
Williams had evaded the main issue; some thought it had tremendous dramatic impact. All
agreed that it had an important place in the Williams canon.
CATILINE
Author: Ben Jonson (1573-1637)
Type: Political tagedy
Time: First century B.C.
Place: Ancient Rome
Main Characters: 1. Catiline, leader of a conspiracy against Rome

2. Lentulus, and
3. Centhegus, his lieutenans
4. Curius, a conspirator and spy
5. Cicero, sefender of the State
6. Cato, "the voice of Rome"
7. Julius Caesar, shrewd polirician, friend of the
conspirator
8. Fulvia, a countesan and spy
9. Sempronia, feminist conspirator
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10. Aurelia, Catiline's wife

Plot
Under the sinister in fluence of Sulla's ghpst, the reckless patrician Catiline organized a
conspiracy to overthrow the Roman Republic.The conspirators, including the rash Cethegus
and outcass senators Lentulus Curius, gathered at Catiline's home. Catiline and his wife
pandered to the weaknesses of each and skillfully manipulated them without allowing them
to realize that they were his puppets. The consprators concluded their meeting with a
gruesome sacrament, pleding faith by drinking the blood of a newly – slaughtered slave.
The first step in their plan was consule. When four of the candidates withdrew in favor of
Catiline, leaving only three men in the race, success seemed very probable. The two
remaining candidates were Antonius and lukewarm, and Cicero, a "new man" but a
dangerous antagonist.
A Chorus of Roman citizens gathered and discussed the uncertainty of the survival of great
national powers, which often seem to carry in theme selves deeds of their destruction:
luxuries and vices soften nations and leave them easy prey to their own malcontent or aline
invaders.
Fulvia, the profligate wife of an elderly fool, numbered among her lovers the conspirator
Curius and Julius Caesar, the latter on a very casual basis. Since she was interested in
wealth, not romance, she forbade her servants to admit the down – at – heels Curius on
future visits. While being readies for her social day, she was visited by Sempronia, a
feminie bluestocking politician well past the bloom of youth.
Sempronia was an eager supporter of the patrician Cariline and a scorner of "that talker,
Cicero arrived to interrupt their goosip, Sempromoa overrode Fulvia's objections, ushered
him in,.and made great play of leaving the lovers alone. Fulvia's reception of Curius was so
hostile that he became enraged and dropped threats and hints of future greatness and power.
Fulvia immediately shifted to Delilah's tactics and Wheedled his secret from him.
The Chorus gathered before the election and peayed for wisdom to choose consult worthy
of Rome's great past. Antonius and Cicero won the election, shocking and infuriating
Catiline and his party. Cato praised Cicero warmly; but Caesar and other sympathizers with
Catiline regarded the new consul with veiled hostility or open contempt. Catiline masked
his fury in public, but in private he planned rebellion and civil war. Fulvia, partly through
self – interest an partly thought a vain dislike of playing second fiddle to Sempronia,
carried information to intimidiate Curius and appealing to his greed, Cicero wom him as a
Catiline's inner circle; fulvia served the same purpose among the feminine conspirators.
Alone, Cicero bemoaned the low estate of Rome, which was redendence on such tools as
Fulvia and Curius for safety. He strengthened his position still further by giving a province
to Antonius.
Caesar showed catiline favor and gave him advice, but did not join the assem blage of
conspirators' next meeting, plans were laid for setting fire to the city at strategic points and
starting local uprisions to be timed with invasion from outside. The first move was to be the
murder of Cicero that very night. The feminie conspirators entered with Catiline's wife
Aurelia. Under cover of their excited chatter, Curius whispered to Fulvia the plan to
assassinate Cicero.
She left the meeting and warned Cicero in time for him to gather protecting friends and
impartial witnesses. Although the attempt on Cicero's life failed, the threat of civil violence
terrified senators and citizens. The Chorus expressed horror at the danger, which seemed
brought about by the city's guilt.
In the Senate, Cicero delivered an impassioned oration against Catiline and disclosed
knowledge of intimate details of the conspiracy. Catiline lost control of himself, threatened
Cicero and Rome, and left to join his army outside the city.
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Lentulus and Cethegus remained in changer from Caesar and other concealed supports od
Catiline, but Cicero chose to avoid a break with them. He persuaded the ambassadors from
the Allobroges, who had been approached by Catiline's men, to pretend to join the
conspiracy and to secure incriminating documents. When the ambassadors were arrested, as
prearranged, a conspirator taken with them tumed state's evidence to save his life. With the
evidence to save his life. With the evidence of the conspirator and the ambassoadors, the
Senate approved the Senate approved the approved the arrest and execution of the
conspirators remaining in Rome, though Caesar tried to save their lives. Caesar was
accused by Curius, but Cicero chose to pretend that this dangerous man was innocent,
allowing him to remain alive and uncurbed.
After the execution of the conspirators, the leader of the Roman forced arrived and reported
the defeat od Catiline and his "brave bad death" while leading his troops. Honored and
rewarded by the Senate and Roman people, Cicero pronounced thanks for Rome's rescue.
Cirtical Evaluation
To watch a dramatic work by Ben Jonson come alive on the stage, one must go to Volpone
(1605) or The Alchemist (1610). Catiline's monstrous conspiracy is deftly and engagingly
developed, and the ghost scene which opens the play is intensely dramatic. However,
Cicero's orations were too fulsome and long – winded for Jonson's Elizabethan audience,
which applauded the first two acts but jeered the third, much to Jonson's disgust. Three
centuries of prospective producers have elected not to fly in the face of that lesson.
In his preface to the truxulent Jonson wilidied the audience which had failed to appreciate
thr King's Player's production, a response characteristic of that feisty intellectual aristocrat
when his work was criticized. Jonson considered Catiline his classical masterpiece. In it he
had taken pains to avoid the shortcomings of his earlier and more ambitions classical
tragedy, Sejanus (1603). Catiline features a Greek chorus, and observes the classical unities
of time, place and action. It is admirable for its carefully delineated characters, impressive
rhetoric, and inexorable march of events. But dramatically the plot is weak. It has too many
characters and too little interaction between the protagonist and antagonist. The action
seems disjointed and rambling, and typically for Konson, none of the female characters is
sympathetically drawn.
Because Catiline is too unmitigated a villain for his fall to see truly tragic, his conspiracy
become a social rather than an individual tragedy. The escape from condemnation od
Caesar, whose complicity Jonson had emphasized, expands the social message of the play.
The infamous Gunpowder Plot of 1605 had dramatized the dangers to a free society of
conspiracies and of Caesars who might attempt to capitalize on them. Catiline, with a moral
tone that assuredly recommended it to the Puritan censors, emphasizes the need for social
order.
Further Readings of Drama

1. Much Ado about Nothing A comedy by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, first performed c.
1598 and published in Quarto (Q1) in 1600 as well as in the First Follio of 1623. The
Claudio / Hero plot was already a familiar story and could have been taken from any
number of sources. More original is the invention and elaboration of the unwilling love of
Beatrice and Benedick.
Claudio, in the service of the Prince of Aragon, Don Pedro, falls in love with Hero,
daughter of Leonato, Governor of Messina. The match is welcomed by all but don pedro's
discontented brother, Don John, who determines to destroy it. With the aid of his
henchmanm, Borachio, he convinces Claudio that Hero is unfaithful, and Claudio waitstill
the marriage service itself to rehect his intended bride. Hero faint away. And Leonato is
persuaded to challenge assumptions of her guilt by announcing that she is dead. When the
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garrulous Borachio is overheard boasting of Don John's strick, Claudio's horror is relieved
by Leonato's forgiveness and by Hero's return to life.
In what is formally a sub – plot, but one which attracts more attention than the conventional
main plot, Claudio's friend Benedick and Leonato's niece Beatrice fight a duel of wit which,
through the manoeuvers of their friends, is exposed as a disguise of their real love for each
other. That love is tested when Beatrice, outraged by Claudio's treatment of Hero, demands
that Benedick kill him. Benedick challenges Claudio to a duel, but the timely discovery of
Don John's duplicity spares the two friends that con frontation.
2. Jew of Malta, (The Famous Tragedy of the Rich) A tragedy, with comic emelents, by
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE. It was first produced in about 1590 but not published until
1633. The published text is believed to contain a number of alterations made during
production and these are usually attributed to THOMAS HEYWOOD. The play was very
popular and gave EDWARD ALLEYN, the creator of Tamburlaine and Doctor Faustus,
another great opportunity as an actor.
Barabas, a successful Jewish merchant of Malta, counts his riches and ponders on the
Christian's envy of his success, and their persecution of his people. He knows them for
hypocrites who use their religion as their excuse. Barabas longs for the power that would
emable him to deal with his enemies.
The Turks demand tribute from Malta and the governor of the island decides to extract the
money from the Kews. Barabas resists but his wealth is taken by force and his house
confiscated – the governor turns it into a nunnery. He decides to avenge himself on those
who have wronged him and embarks on a campaign of destruction.
Abigail, his daughter, has a Christian lover and he disposes of both of them. He poisons
well and destroys the entire nunnery, his former house, with poisoned porridge. But his plan
to destroy the Turkish commander and his retinue at a banquet by means of a collapsible
floor goes awry. He is betrayed and meets his deathin a cauldron under the same floor.
3. Coriolanus A tragedy by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, first performed c. 1608 and
published in the First Folio of 1623. The main source is STR THOMAS NORTH'S
translation of Plutarch's Lives.
Rome's plebeians are a constant, though inconsistent, force in the play. When it opens, they
are on the varge of rebellion against their patrician rulers. Persuaded by the tactful
Menenius Agrippa to work for the common good, they are immediately incensed by the
arrogant scorn of Caius Matrius. But crisis is temporarily averted by the appointment of
five Tribunes of the People and by the dispatching of Caius Martius to put down a Volscian
uprising. His success in capturing the Volscian city of Corioli wins him glory in Rome and
the honourable name of Coriolanus. Election to the Senate seem certain, but Coriolanus.
Election to the Senate seems certain, but Coriolanus is too proud to observe the traditional
rites of public humility, and the Tribunes refuse to support him.
The Volscian leader Tullus Aufidius, who is Coriolanus' sworn enemy, prepares another
attack on Rome. Hated by the pleneoans, Coriolanus is finally persuaded by Volumnia, his
mother, to face them and ask for their support, but it is a role he cannot sustain. His outburst
in the Forum forces the Tribunes to demand his banishement, and Coriolanus presents
himself to Tullus Aufidius in Antium, either as a sacrifice or as an ally. He becomes the
leader of the Volscian army against Rome, rejects the desperate pleas of the Senators and is
persuaded to spare the city only after an astonishing congrontation with his mother,
Volumnia. Aufidius sees the peace treaty as a betrayal, and when Coeiolanus taunts him, he
and the Volscians kill him as an enemy.
The story of Coriolanus was much less familiar to the Elizabethans than that of Julius
Caesar or Antony and Cleopatra. This fact alone would distinguish Coriolanus from those
other Roman plays. It is a stark political tragedy, in which Shakespeare gives unusual
attention to the people on those who undertake to rule them. It is a consideration that relates
the play more obviously to KING LEAR among the great tragedies than to ANTONY And
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CLEOPATRA. On the other hand, the making and breaking of the individual Coriolanus is
told so barely as to invite comparison with TIMON OF Athens, which was probably the
next play Shakespeare wrote.
4. Antony and Clopatra A tragedy by WILLIAM SHEAKESPEARE, first performed c.
1607 and published in the First Folio of 1623. The sole source is SIR THOMAS NORTH'S
trandlation of Plutarch, on which it relies for much of the language as well as for the story.
Infatuated with Cleopatram Antony neglects his duties as a Roman triumvir and lingersin
Alexandria. Only when news of Poempey's rebellion os added to news of the death of
Antony's own wife, Fulvia, does he decide, despite Cleopatra's pleas, to leave for Rome
with his liyal general, Enobarbus. The uneasy triumvirate of the scheming Octavius' sister,
Octavia. Even Pomey accepts terms. Abandoned in Alexandria, Cleopatra beats
themessenger who brings new of Antony's marriage.
In Athens with Octavia, Antony hears that Octavius has ridiculed him and sent an army
aginst Pompey. Octavia returns to Rome on a peace mossion, and Antony goes back to
Egype and Cleopatra. There he promises the eastern provinces of the Roman Empire to her
and her children. Given such a pretext for open hostility, Octavius embarks his army.
Against advice from Enobarbus, Antony combines with the Egyptian fleet to engage
Octavius at sea. The battle at Actiums is turned into a fiasco when Cleopatra's ships turn
tail and Antony follows her back to Egypt.
In despair, Enobabus desert his leader and dies soon afterwards. More at home in a land
battlem, Antony recovers his firmness of purpose but, after an initial cictory, is again drawn
into defeat by the Egypitan army's defection. The Cleopatra hides in her monument and
sends Antony a message that she is dead. Defeated and despairing, he falls on his sword,
and in carried to the monument, where he dies in Cleopatra's arms. Octavius visits
Cleopatra and leaves confident that she will return as his prisoner to Rome. But Cleopatra
achieves a new dignity at last, robbing Octavius of his triumph (over Antony as well as
herself) by arranging for her own death. She has dealy asps smuggled into the moment,
dresses herself in her finest robes, and holds the asps to her body. The outwitted Octavius
concedes that she be buried with Anotny.
5. Antonio and Mellida and Antonio's Revenge A play in two distinct but related parts by
Johm MARSTON, weitten for the Boys if St. Paul's, first performed in 1599 or 1600 and
published in 1602.
Antonio and Mellia is essentially a love – story, though with dark aspects.
Antonio, son of Andrugio, Duke of Genoa, loves Mellida. Daughter of Piero, Duke of
Venice. Genoa and Venice are at war, and Piero, Dicke of Venice. Genoa and Venice are at
war, and Piero puts a price on the heads of Andrugio and Antonio.
Disguised as an Amazon, Antonio goes to cenice and persuades Mellida to run away with
him. They are captured, and Andrugio offers himself to the enemy in order to save his son's
life. To general surprise, Piero relents as consents to the marriage of Antonio and Mellida.
This happy ending is overthrown in Antonio's Revenge, which is formally a REVENGE
TRAGEDY. Poero kills Andrugio and wins the hand of his window. He also thwart
Antonio's happiness by contriving to dishonour his own daughter, Mellida, who dies of
grief. Antonio is visited by the ghost of his murderes father, whom he avenges by killing
Piero. The relationship of Antonio's Revenge to KYD's earlier THE SPANISH TRAGEDY
and to SHAKESPEARE'S HAMLET has been often noted.
6. The Two Gentleman of Verona, A comedy by WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE, first
performed c. 1593 and published in the First Folio of 1623. The source of the play is a story
by Jorge de Montemayor, Diana enamorada, but Shekespeare may have come upon it by
way of a lost play, The History of Felix and Philiomena, known to have been acted at court
in 1585.
The two gentlemen are the friends Valentine and Proteus, who both fall in love with the
Duke of Milan's daughter Silvia, though Proteus was originally contracted to Jukia in
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Verona. Proteus betrays Valentine to the Duke, who wants his daughter to marry thurio, and
Valentine becomes the leaderof an outlaw band. Julia disguises herself as a boy and beomes
page to Proteus. Silvia is captured by robbers and rescued by Proteus, still pressing his
unwelcome suit. Eventually the confusions and identities are resolved; the Duke withdraws
his objection to Valentine, allowing him to marry Silvia and Proteus to marry Julia,
The Two Gentlemen of Verona is a charming romantic comedy, without the emotional or
imaginative range of Shakespeare's ,ature work in the genre. Proteus's servant Launce,
much troubled by his dog, has some of the best theatrical opportunities. The part was
probably written for WILL KEMP.
7. The Way of the World, A comedy by WILLIAM CONGREVE, first performed in 1700,
when its comparative dailure contributed to Congreve's decision to turn away from the
theatre. It is a complex play whose elegant, witty dialogue polishes a plot that gradually
reveals how far self – interest way go to make money and mar marriages.
In order to marry Millamant, Mirabell must win the consent of her aunt, Lady Wishfort. His
best hope lies in lady Wishfort's eagerness or a lover of her own. But Lady Wishfort is only
one of the obstacles. More threatening is the spite of Mrs Marwood, whose love Mirabell
had not returned. He liaison with Lady Wishfort's avaricious son – in – law Fainall takes
them into a conspiracy which carries the play to the point of near – tragic confrontation.
Nor is Millamant easily won, as she makes clear in the famous "proviso" scene in Act IV
by laying down her conditions for marrying Miranell, Lady Wishfort, gullible and
constantly being gulled, is finally shaken into consenting to her niece's marriage when the
villainies of Fainall and Mrs Marwood are exposed.
8. Twelfth Night: or, What You Will A comedy by WILLIAM SHAKESPEAR, first
performed c. 1600 nad published in the First Folio of 1623. The most direct source was
probably BARNABE RICH'S Apolonius and Silla, a story derived from the ltalian of
Matteo Bandello.
A shipwreck brings to the sea coast of IIIyria a mournful but still resourceful Viola,
saddened by the loss, in the same wreck, of her "identical" twin brother, Sebastian.
Disgused as a boy (Cesario), she seeks service in the court of Orsino, Ducke of IIIyria.
Orsino is hopelessly in love with Olivia, a lady who rejects him ostensibly because she is
mourning her dead brother. As Cesario, Viola is sent to Olivia's house with messages of
love from Orsino. Olivia is attracted to Viola, who is secretly falling in love with Orsino.
Uknown to Viola, Sebastian arrives in IIIyria with his fithful friend Antonio. The two men
are separated, and accidents of identical appearance and identical dress lead, through
mistaken identity, to Antonio's belief that Sebastian has betrayed their friendship, to the
astonished Sebastian marriage to Olivia, and to a nearcrisis when Orsino belives that Viola
has stolen Olivia from him and threatens dire punishment.
9. All's Well that Ends Well A comedy by WILIAM SHEKESPEAR, probably written or
revised in 1602-4. Claims for an earlier date are based on the proposal that this is the Love's
Labour's Won referred to by FRANCIS MERES in Palladis Tamia (1598). It was no
published until the First Folio if 1623. The source is a story from Boccaccio's Decameron,
probably, probably read in the English version in WILLIAM PAINTER'S The Palace of
Pleasure.
Helena, ward of the Countess of Rousillon, vainly loves the young count Bertram. She
succeeds in marrying him only when she follows him to the French courtand cures the sick
with a remedy inherited from her father. Lnvited to choose a usband from among.
10. Look Back in Anger A play by JOHN OSBORNE, first performed at the ROYAL
COURT THEATRE in 1956, when it spearheaded the post – war revival of the British
theatre.
Jimmy Porter, graduate of a readbrick university, runs a sweet stall in a London market and
lives in squalor with a middle – class wife, whom he persistently abuses.
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When she leaves him, he sets up hom with her middle – class actress friend, subjecting her
to exactly the same treatment. Thr play ends with Jimmy and his wife reconciled in a scene
which many critics have found falsely sentimental. The play's contemporary importance
was not dependent on its filmsy plot, but on the articulate anger of Jimmy Porter, whose
triades against the complacency of the English estabilishment won Osborne a reputation as
leader of the ANGRY YOUNG MEN.
11. Measure for Measure A play by WILLIAM SHEKESPEARE, formally a comedy but so
dark in tone that it is more often classed among the PROBLEM PLAY. It was first
performed c. 1604 and published in the First Folio of 1623. The main source is the story of
Promos and Cassandra which WHETSTONE had borrowed from Cinthio's Hecatommithi
in a play (1578) and a collection of romance (1582).
Disrurbed by the unruliness of Virnna, Duke Vincentio resolves to absent himself from rule
and end entrusts law – enforcement to his puritanical deputy, angelo. Disguised as a friar,
the duke remains in Vienna to observe the consequences of his decision.
Angelo order the destruction of the brothels and, invoking a law against lechery, imprisons
Claudio for impregnating the woman to whom he is betrothed. Knowing that the penalty is
death, Claudio asks his sister, Isabella, a novice in a nunnery, to intercede. Confronted by
Isabella, the unyielding Angelo experiences his own lust.
He offers Claudio's life as an exchange for Isabella's body. Outraged when Claudiobegs her
to accept the offer, Isbella abandons him, but is persuaded by the disguised duck to play a
trick on Angelo. The duke reveals that Angelo had broken a marriage – contract with a
certain Mariana's dowry was lost. Mourning her lost love, Mariana now lives in isolation.
She would willingly cake Isabella's place in Angelo's bed. The substitution as arranged, but
the duke's scheme is ruined by Angelo's decision to have Claudio killed despite his promise
to Isabella. The fortunate death in prison of pirate with some physical resemblance to
Claudio gives the duke another opportunity to thwart Abgelo.
12. The Malcontent, A tragicomedy by JOHN MARSTON, commonly regarded as his most
accomplished play. It was published (with revisions probably by HOHN WEBSTER) and
performed (with RICHARD BURBAGE as Altofronto/ Malevole) im 1604, but may
originally have been produced a few years earlier.
Altofronto, Duke of Genoa, has lost his throne to the usuroer, Pietro, but has returned to
court disguised as Malevole, a philosopher – buffoon licensed to speak his mind. His ally in
the deception is Mendoza, Pietro's first minister. But Mendoza is an ambitious rogue, who
has seduced Pietro's willing wife Aurelia and now has his eyes on Altofronto/ Malevole's
wife Maria. Malrvole warns Pietro that Mendoza is plotting against him and persuades him
to go into hiding. He than announces that Pietro is dead. Mendoza seizes the throne, by
revealing himself to Pietro in his true guise as Altogronto, and Mendoza's duplicity is
expoded during a ball at the dica; palace.
13. Sophocles, Antigone

Antigone's brothers, Polynices and Eteocles, had gought a battle for the throne of Thenes.
At the beinging of the play, they are both dead, having killed each other in combat. Creon,
the new monarch, has decided to honor the memory of the younger brother, Eteocles, by
giving him a state funeral. During his lifetime Eteocles had broken his pact with Polynices,
according to which the two brother had agreed to take turns at ruling Thebes. This enraged
Polynices, who brought an army of Atgives to fight against Eteicles in this dispute. After
the civil war has ended, Creon brands Polynices a "traitor" and proclaims that anyone who
attempts to bury Polynice's body will have to face death.
Antigone resolveds to defy Creon's edict, and in the opening scene (or Prologus) she asks
her sister, Ismene, to join her in the act of burying Polynices. Ismene refuses to help
Antigone because she does not wish to violate Creon's order.
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Antigone's strong respect for family bonds and divine law prompt her to conduct funeral
rites for her brother. She is caught by Creon's watchman and brought before the neraged
king. At her trial, Antigone pleads that her defiant act is in accordance with the overriding
laws of the gods.
Creon is reluctant to accept this justification and is unrelenting in his harsh stancr as he
condemns antigone to be immured (buried alive) in a cave. Ismene comes forward to claim
a share in Antigone's guilt and in the penalty that goes with the crime. Creon dismisses her
pleas as he considers her present behavior to be a temporay mental abnormality although he
had ealier accused her of being Antigone's partner in crime.
Then Creon's son, Haemon, pleads vainly with his father to forgive Antogone.
The blind prophet, Tiresias, also threatens Creon with the catastrophic consequences of
defying all divine laws in refusing burial to Polynice. Finally, the Chorus begs Creon to
relent and release Antigone.
At last Creon is moved, and he goes to the cave to find Haemon clasping the dead
Antigone, who has hanged herself. In blind fury, Haemon charges with his sword towards
his father, but misses him and then kills himself. Filled with remorse, Creon returns to his
palace to find that his wife. Eurydice, has already received the tragic news of the two deaths
from a messenger. In deep despair, Eurydice takes her own life, leaving Creon to grieve
alone.
14. Aeschylus Agamemnon

In the immediate aftermath of the fall of Troy, the play opens at King Agamemon's palace
in Argos with the lonely Watchman's soliloquy. From the roof of the palace, the Watchman
begs the gods for respite from his interminable watch.
The stars, his sole, plentiful and stedfast, companions seem to him like so many "dynasties"
revolving in endless cycles, waxing and waning, moving out of winter into summer and
back again. What he wishes, in short, is rest. He relates how he has been obliged by the
queen to keep watch for a fire. Further he cannot sleep for restless fear. In his musings he
hints of a great bygone woe, "the pity of this house", which he hopes will soon be
redeemed. The flames, he says, and the Watchman spies a messager's blaze that hails the
fall of Troy. He draws a joyous analogy to a sunrise.
The soliloquy closes with the Watchman hopeful that his king will return home, since the
house, he says, has too long wallowed in a dismal sadness. The senescent Chorus enters and
begins its recapitulation of the commencement of the Trojan war tens years previous: the
call to action, the deploying of the one thousand ships, the loss of so many young Argive
lives. They go on to explain that the devastating fall is the exacting of a procrastinated
punishment by angry gods upon the transgressors.
They inquire about the bonfires, sacrifices, and oblations the queen has ordered to be
executed throughout the city, to all the gods. She is mute.
The Chorus recalls the omen, interpreted by a seer, of the hare tore open while still "ripe,
bursting with young unborn yet." We are made aware that "the secret anger" which
"remembers the child that shall be avenged, "refers to anger over the sacrifice by
Agamemnon of his maiden daughter Iphigeneia. Next, the disapproving Chorus outlines
Iphigeneia's sacrifice at the hands of her battle – impassioned father, thought without
reaching its climax. What is to come, the future, the action of the play, apparently lies in the
hands of Clytaemestra. Clytaemestra announces victory at Troy. The leader of the Chorus,
understandably skeptical, questions her source. She cites the concatenation of fires,
beginning with the one in Troy, relayed across watchman at various posts, ending with our
Watchman. Asked to unfold more of the story, the queen imagines the plundering og Trou
at the moment, and waens the Choeus that the men should perpetrate no sacrilege, should
maintain reverece for the forgein city's gods and citizens, lest in the act of despoiling, they
despoil themselves before the journey home. The Chorus interprets the news as the divine
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justice of Zeus on Paris, for his having stolen Helen away from Menelaus, her husband.
There is no escape, they say, from perdition. But justice has come at great once again,
displaying a jadeghness. Then the Herald, warrior, appears with word of Agamemno's
imminent arrival. He voices how terrible was terrible was his homesickness and how sweet
its new relief. Following this news, Clytaemestra reminds the Chorus of its haughty attitude
towaed her "womanish" credulity, then openlu proclaims her long, chaste fidelity to her
husband. She moves backstage to make ready for his return, An inquiry is made by the
Chorus to the Hrtald as to Menelau's state and whereabouts. It turn out he has disappeared
in a terrible storm at sea. The Herald exits after narrating the storm. The Chorus, left alone
on stage, muses again on the lamentable results of Helen and Paris's marriage. Daring is
recorded as the undesirable offspiring of aged Pride. Soon, Agamemnin, with Cassandra a
captive soothsayer, beside him, enter in a chariot. The leader of the Chorus admits to the
king that, although he had despised of his decision to pursue Helen at all costs, he
wholeheartedly welcomes his return. Agamemnon is eager to give thanks to the gods for his
triumph. Speaking to her husband in fron of an assembly of Argive citizens, Clytaemestra
relates how trying her wait has been in lieu of myriad tales of wounds and death to
Agamemnon, and she implores the disgruntled audience to patirnce, to maintain the council
and order. She greets Agamemnon in full grandiloquence, and the king is asked to step into
his home on tapestries of crimson unfurled at his wife's command. But he refuses. I am a
only a man, he says, a mortal, and will not support being honored like a god. The spouses
clash over this, and Agamemnon is shown as a hard, unyielding man. Clytaemestra tries
several different approaches to get him to accept her invitation. Her behavior is suspicious.
After some more provocative words, however, Clytaemestra finally persuades Agamemnon
to tread against his better judgment. He does so barefoot, at a human, but there is still
something ominous in this.They enter the house.
The Chorus meditates on its uncured anxiety. Sight of Agamemnon has brought only more
of the doleful dread and morbid fear. The Chorus cannot forget the injustice of the past, and
neither, they are sure, can the gods. Sick at heart, they await the inevitable floe of blood.
Clytaemestra reappears and orders the strangely mute Cassandra out of the chriot to
worship at their altar. When the girl stays put, Clytaemestra leaves, not wishing to waste
anymore of her time. Cassandra cries out insanely to Apollo, who the Choru notes is not a
god of lamentation, and utters abdtruse prophecies about infanticide, fatal baths, and a
murderss in the house. The Chorus believes she merely augurs her own death. They discuss
the origin of her gift – and her cuse, which auditors forever be incredulous of her veracious
forecasts. As predicted, her most clear and disturbing divination, "you shall look on
Agamemnon dead," is misunderstood. Finally, she sees in the future a son (Orestes) who
will eventually come to murder the mother (we must assume this is Clytaemestera, although
her name appears in none of the prophecies) that kills his father.
Cassandra then enters the house having resolutely accepted it also as her tomb.
From inside the house a sudden cry is heard. Agamemnon has been stabbed in the bathtub.
The Chorus, in a panic, disintegrates, and the individual members speak frantically among
themselves. They show themselves to be cowaeds, and Agamemnong cries out again before
they even decide to take action. At once the doors of the palace swing open and behold!
There lie Agamemnon and Cassandra, dead, with Clytaemestra standing over them. She
describes to them, cold – bloodedly, it seems, the gruesome facts of her seduction,
entrapment, and murder of the king who, she says, brought them all so much pain. She is
remorseless; the Chorus is appalled at her brutality. The old men renounce her immediately.
Next, Clytaemestra tries to justify her action as righteous, as ordained by the gods,
retribution for the slaughter of her daughter. She portrays herself as an instrument of divine
causality, of destiny. The Chorus will not hear of it and continues to wonder how they
should mourn the dead king. The meaning of his death is still uncertain. Normally there
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would be a public lament for the fallen hero. Clytaemestra indicats all Argos in her action
and declares that her husband shall not be mourned.
Essentially they are debating, that is, whether Clytaemestra's actions were divinely caused,
or whether what she did was motivated by a based, human desire for revenge. In the end,
having no other recourse, the fretting Chorus must agree with Clytaemestra. But, just then,
Aegisthus, exiled son of Thyests and the queen's secret lover bursts into the palace crying
that he hatched the plot – he helped murder Agamemnon im revenge for his father (His
father, Thyeste, was tricked by Agamemnon's father into devouring his two sons,
Aegisthu's brothers). The chorus predicts his downfall as before they had presaged
Clytaemestra's. They accuse him of womanly cowardice for not having killed Agamemnon
himself. Tyrannical Aegisthus then threatens the old men and the state with torture and
bondage. When the chorus, insolent to Aegisthus's boasting, rise up, Clytaemestra
intervenes. Orestes is spoken of as the only hope for Argos. Deaf to the impotent gibes of
the Chorus, Clytaemestra reminds her lover and new king that they new have to power.
They enter the house together, and the doors close behind them.
15. Anton Chekov, The Cherry Orchard
The Cherry Orchard describes in the lives of a group of Russians, in the wake of the
Liberation of the serfs. The action takes place over the course of five or six months, but the
histories of the characters is so complex that in many ways, the play begins years earlier.
The play opens in May, iside the cherry orchard estate; friends, neighbors, and servants are
preparing for the long awaited return of Madam Ranevsky, the mistress of the house, and
her daughter Anya. Madame Ranevsky has two daughters. She filed the cherry orchard five
years again after the deaths of her husband and young son.
She is returning there now from France, where her abusive lover robbed and abandoned
her. She has accrued great debts during her absence. Lopakhin begins by telling the story f
his own success: born a serf, he has managed to make himself a fortune. Anorher former
serf, Firs, readies the house during Lopakhin's speechers; First has ,aintained the same post
he always has, despite the Liberation. Dunyasha confesses a potwnrial romance between
she and Ephilhodof, but no one is interested.
Finally, Madame Ranevsky returns. Her friends and family are overjoyed to see her. Act I
introduces many subplots: a romance between the tutor Trophimof and Anya, another
hopeful romance between her sister Barbara and wealthy Lopakhin, a love trigngle between
the servants Dunyasha, Yasha, and Ephilhodof, the debt of the neighbot Pishtchik, the class
struggles of Lopakhin and Firs, the isolation of Charlotte, etc. The main intrigue of the play,
however, hitchches on Madame Renevsly's debt. Neither she nor her brother Gayef have
money to pay the mortgage on the cherry orchard estate, and unless they fnd a silution, the
state will be auctioned off in August.
Lopakhin suggests that Madame Ranevsky build cillas on the estate. She can lease them
and use the money to pay the mortgage. Madame Ranevsky and Gayef object to the idea,
and prefer to work something out on their own. However, as spring passes into summer,
Madame Ranevsky only find herself more in debt, with no solution in sight. Strange
romances between Anya and Trophimof and Dunyasha and Yasha contimue, while nothing
develops between Lopakhin and Barbara and Dunyasha and Ephikhodof. Firs' health is
declining. Madame Ranevsky is receiving letters from her lover, and Gayefbegins to
consider a job at a bank. Pishtchik takes out loans from Madame Ranevsky, Whose own
funds are deinding away to noting.
On the night of the auction, no solution has arrived. Madame Ranevsky holds a ball.
Charlotte performs, and guests and servants alike dance. Madame Ranevsky and trophimof
have a serious concersation about Madame Ranevsky's extravagance; not only does she
continue to run up debts, but she is now considering to return to her absive lover in France.
Madame Ranevsky is nervous about the outcome of the auction; she is still hoping fo a
miracle.
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Finally Gayef and Lopakhin return: Lopakhin has bought the cherry orchard.
Barbara is furious, and Madame Ranevsky is devastated, but Lopakhin cannot hide his
happiness: he has bought the estate where his family lived as serfs. Ironically, he
encourages the party to continue, even thoug the hosts are no longer prepare to celebrate.
Act IV shows Madame Ranevsky leaving the cherry orchard for the last time.
Lopakhin has bought champagne, but no one but the uppitu servant Yasha will drink it.
Lopakhin and Trophimof share a tender farewell: Trophimof will return to the university.
Charlotte complains that she no longer has a position; Ephikodof has a new positoon with
lopakhin, Pistchik is able to pay off his debts. Gayef has a job at a bank, Barbara a position
as a housekeeper, and Yasha will stay on with Madame Ranevsky, who is returning to
France. Many characters try to confirm that First has been sent to the hospital. Lopakhin
misses his last chance with Barbara, and Dunyasha cries that Yasha is leaving.
Madame Ranevsky and Gayef share a nostalgic moment ablone before leaving on a
realively optimistic note. In the last moment, we hear axes cutting down the orchard, and
First stunbles on to stage, forgotten, locked in the house. He lies down to rest and
presumably dies.
16. Arthur Miller, Death of Salesman

Willy Loman is an aging salesman who returns home one noght from a sales trip, unable to
concentrate on the road. He needs to keep making sales since there are so many payment to
make, and they need the money. His wife, Linda, is worried about him, but she is
completely devoted to him and encourages him to find a job where the does not have to
travel anymore. His two adult sons, Happy and Biff, are back in the house for the first time
in years, taking about their future job prospects. Both Biff and Willy are determined to ask
for better jobs: Biff from Bill Oliver, a successful man whom he new long ago, and Willy
from Howard Wagner, the son of the man who first hired Willy to the firm. Both are
uusuccessful.
As the play ungolds, the observer learns about vatious incidents in the Loman family past
which account for their present condition. Biff, having alwas relied on athletics, fails math
and does not graduate high school. Willy, having always encouraged Bigg not to
concentrate on acadenics since he had such great athletic potential, does not want to be
blamed for Biff's failures. Moreover, one day, Biff catches Willy cheating on Linda with
another woman in Boston, and his esteem for Willy completely vanishes. Willy thinks Biff
is intentionally spiteful to him and only wants to hurt Willy, but soon Willy realizes that
Biff just wants Willy to accept him for who he is.
Biff says that he is not business type and just want to want to work on a farm in the open
air, and he breaks down crying since Willy keeps forcing him to pursue a job with Bill
Oliver. Biff says he does not want to lie anymore.
When Willy sees Biff crying, he finally realizes tha Biff loves him and has not been trying
to hurt him all these years. He wants to make up for it by giving Biff 20,000$ with which to
start a new business with, and Willy will get the money by killing himself and collecting
the insurance policy. Willy kills himself by crashing the car before Biff can make amends
with him. Biff realizes that they have all been living a false dream, but Happy is determind
to carry out Willy's dreams. Linda is distraught, especially since she has just paid the last
payment on the mortgage but now there is no one to live in the house.
17. Henrik Insen, A Doll's House

It's Christmas Eve. Nora Helmer, a beautiful young wife, has been out doing some last –
minute shopping. When she returns, her husband Torvald immediately comes to see what
his "lirrlesquirrel" has bought. They playfully act out their roles – Torvaldthe big, strong
husband, Nora the dependent, adoring wife.
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This is a happy Christmas for the Helmers and their children because Torvald has recently
been appointed manager of the bank. Soon they'll be well off and won't have to scrimp.
However, Torvald, will still control the cash in the house, because he feells that his
irresponsible Nora lets money run through her fingers, a trait she "inherited" from her
father.
An old school friend, Kristine Linde, comes to visit Nora. During the conversation, Kristine
revels that she had married a wealthy man she didn't love in order to support an
invalidmother. Her husband's three years ago left her penniless and she's returned to seek
work. Nora promises to speak to Torvald about a job in his bank.
Having had such a hard time herself, Kristine is scornful of Nora's easy married life until
Nora describes a secret she has been concealing for many years. Early in her marriage, whe
Torvald became seriously ill, she secretly borrowed a largesum to financr a year – long stay
in a warmer climate. Since he did not know the extent of his illness, and since, even if he
had known, borrowing money would have been against his principles, she pretendrd the
money was from her late father. Since then she has been struggling to repay the debt by
economizing from her personal allowance and by secretly working home.
The women are interrupted by the arrival of Nils Krogstad, a clerk Torvald's bank. When
Krogstand goes into the study, Dr. Rabk, an old family friend, comes out. Knowing of
Krogstad's reputation as a forger, Rank tells the women that Krogstad is one of those
"moral invalids". Unknown to any of them, Torvald is firing Krogstad. This leaves a
vacancy, and, when Torvald joins them, he agress to give Kristine the job.
Torvald, Dr. Rank, and Kristine then leave together. As Nora is playing happily with her
three young children, Krogstad reappears. It turns out that that he is the one who had lent
the money to Nora. He also knows that Nora not only forged her father's signature as
cosigner of the loan but dated is several days after his death.
Krogstad leaves after threatening to expose Nora unless he gets his job back.
Nora pleads with Torvald to reinstate Krogstad, but he refues. She is frantic, imagining that
once Krogstad reveals the truth, Torvald will himself assume the blame for the forgery and
be ruined. The next day Dr. Rank, who is suffering from a fatal illness comes to visit. He
speaks openly of his impending death and tells Nora that he loves her. Nora is upset, not
because he loves her, but because he has told her so and ruined the innocent appearance of
their relationship.
The arrival of Krogstad interrupts their conversation, and Nora slips down to the kitchen to
see him. He tells her he has written a letter to her husband, which explains the debt and the
forgery. Then as her leaves, he drops it into the locaked mailbox. In despair because
Torvald has the only key to the box, Nora thinks wildly of suicide.
18. Tennessee Williams, The Glass Menagerie

William's play is set in St. Louis in the 1930's. All the action takes place in the Wingfield
apartment. Amanda Wingfield lives there with her two adult children, Laura and Tom –
both in their mid – twenties. Amanda is a disappointed ex-southern belle, who's been left by
Laura and Tom's father, an alcoholic telephone repairman whose name we never learn.
After Amanda gave birth to Laura and Tom, her husband left her to pursue a life of travel
and adventure. The family is clearly struggling with money, and they live in a small
apartment in a sprawling building. The entrance is form the fire escape rather than through
a proper hallway. The only interior rooms we see are the dinnig room, kitchen, and the
living room, which doubles as Laura's bedroom, and in which she displays and tends to her
glass menagerie, the collection after which the play is named.
Tome narrates the play in kind of retrospect – he calls it a "memory play" – and he's also a
character in it. The play begins with dinner at Wingfield's. Tom, Laura and Amanda are
having what seems to be a typical conversation: Amanda is frustrated with Laura's lack of
"gentleman callers" , and she babbles endlessly about the good old days down soult when
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she was a popular young girl , receving dozens of callers in a single day. Tom and Laura
tease their mother – not particularly goodnaturedly – about her neurotic repetitions of these
scenarios, but they suffer thought her tales.
The next day Amanda finds out that Laura's been missing classes at Rubicam's Business
College. She comes home and accuses Laura, who finally admits that instead of going to
class she's been walking in the park or at the zoo. She says that she dropped out of business
school at Rubucam's Business College after having thrown up in the bathroomdue to
nervousness. Laura's inability to attend classes and pursue a career throw Amanda's
naturally high level of anxiety into overdrive.
She insists that Laura either at a job or try harder to meet a man to support her. If Laura
can't find a beau, Amandas says, she fears that the two of them will have to appeal to their
in – laws for money. Tome can't support them forever.
Amanda's anxiety about Laura's situation causes her to put more pressure on Tom, and she
interrogates him about where he goes each evening. She's nervous that Tom wants to leave
town, just like his father. Tom tells her he's been going to the movies, but Amanda finds
this hard to believe because Tom is out every hight and she can't believe anyone could go to
the movies that often. They have a rollicking fight on his way out the door, and he rips his
coat off and throws it, breaking some of Laura's glass. Amanda doesn't notice the damage
and storms out, but Tom stay and help Laura clean it, during which time we get a sense of
how protective he feels of his sister.
When Tom arrives home later, he and Laura have an exchange about his whereabouts. He
seems quite taken with the escapism of the movies, although in other moments he's quite
critical of the way in which American culture revolves around going to the movies to watch
others participate in action while the spectator sits still in the dark only to return to his or
her uneventful life. Their conversation worries Laura that her brother is deeply unhappy
living in St. Louis and working at the warehouse of Continental Shoemakers which indeed
he is. She expresses her anxiety to Amanda, who takes Tom aside and presses him again to
find a man for Laura. She insists that he find Laura a gentleman caller before flying off to
unknown shores.
Surprisingly, when we next see Tom he's found someone to bring home to dinner and meet
Laura. His friend Jin O'Conner who also works in the warehouse will be coming over the
following night. Amanda is thrilled, but when she tells Laura about the impending visit,
Laura becomes hysterical. She had had a crush on a boy named Jim O'Conner in high
school. At Soldan, he had acted in all the plays and been quite popular. Even though Laura
had few friends, they had a special relationship, and Jim had a nickname for her – Blue
Roses – which was a mishearing of "pleurosis", a lung inflammation that caused Laura to
miss school. She vows not to come to dinner if it's this Jim.
When Jim and Tom arrive, Laura takes to the couch, ill and pale Amanda eats dinner with
the boys, during which time the lights go out. Tom's not paid the electricity bill that month,
instead sending sues in to the Merchant Marines. He's hatching a plan for escape. Amanda
sends Jim in to the living room with a candelabra. When they are alone, Jim and Laura
strike up a very intense flirtation.
He seems pompous, indeed, but also won over by Laura's quirks. He convinces her to dance
a waltz with him, and when they do they knock over a glass unicorn – Laura's favorite piece
– and its born falls off. Jim is changrined, but Laura recuperates the incident, saying that
now the unicorn will be like all the other hornless horses, and will be less lonely, scince
they'll accept him as one of their own.
Jim then reveals to Laura that he'd like to pursue a relationship with her, but can't because
he's engaged to be married to a girl named Betty. Amanda re-enters just after this
conversation, bearing snacks, and Jim leaves hastily, making his excuses. Amanda is
baffled and furious. She accuses Tom of playing a Cruel joke on Laura, but the says he
didn't know Jim was engaged. The play ends shortly thereafter with Tom's closing
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narration. He says that he fled St. Louis soon after the dinner and did have the life of travel
that he'd aimed for. He moved from city to city, as he had wanted. But he's felt haunted, he
says- felt like something (or something (or someone) was pursuing him, making him antys.
He's been unable to separate fully from Laura. The play close with him waxing melancholic
about his sister. He passes store windows at night, he says, and glass trinkets catch his eye,
reminding him.
19. T. S. Eliot, Murder in the Cathedral

The play can be said to being at the climax, for the tension and fear imposed by the state
have reached the people at the lowest level. At the beginning of the play, there is a sense of
doom that hangs heavy in the air. Everyone fears that Becket's return will result in tragedy,
clearly foreshadowing the end of the play from the very beginning.
The plot centers on the changed friendship between King Henry II and Thomas Becket.
Henry has raised Becket to the post of Chancellor and later makes him the Archbishop of
Canterbury. The Chancellor's position is that of the first subject in the Kingdom, controlling
the ecclesiastical patronage of the King.
The post of Archbishop is the highest religious head, next to the Pope. After becoming the
Archbishop, Becket stops supporting the radical changes the King want to introduce in
England.
Becket opposes the King's thirst for power, as he tries to raise the standard of the Crown
higher than that of the Pope. Before the play begins, Becket has undergone a transformation
and has started living a very pious life, giving up all the enjoyment he previously shared
with the King. When disputes develop between the two, Becket fless to France.
With this background, the play begins with the news of Becket's return to England after
seven long years in France. The people of Cantebury of Cantebury are overjoyed to have
him back, and their welcome to him, though a small one, is astonishing.
England is eagerly waiting for their beloved religious head that has always strongly
supported and guided the poor peadants and countrymen. As the people are busy meeting
and welcoming the Archbishop, the three priests have an apprehension that Becket is not
fully reconciled with the King. Both of them are proud and strong personalities; as a result,
they may not be able to renew their old tie of friendship.
The priest worry that the homecoming may cost Becket his life. The women of Canterbury
represent the simple oflk of the town. They have lived a hard life, and they know that it is
their fate to suffer and struggle whether the King rules or the barons' rule.
During the seven years of Becket's exile, their lives have been even more painful.
Noe since Becket is back home, they are happu; but they feel a curious sense of doom.
They gather outside the cathedral and await Becket. They are asled to put on cheerful faces
as Becket arrives. When Becket arrives, the priests greet him and apologize for their simple
welcome. Becket informs them that his letters have been interrupted by spies and that his
assassins have been waiting for an opportunity to kill him, like hungry hawks.
The tempters enter the stage and suggest if Becket pleases the King on his terms, he can
become happy and prosperous. The temptations include a life full of fun and feasting;
Chancellorship and the status of the post; joining hands with barons to overthrow the
tyrannous King; and finally, dying at the hands of the assassins and becoming a martyr.
Becket faces each tempter. The first temptatopm has no effect on him because he is no
longer fascinated by feasting and good times. The second temptation of chancellorship is
also weak one for Becket is already a Keeper of "the Keys of heaven and hell." He is the
supreme power in England and, hence, Chamcellorship cannot lure him. The third
temptation of overthrowing the King for the sake of the Normans is also brushed aside.
Becket says that he will not act like a wolf and betry the King. The last temptation is
sudden and unexpected. By allowing the King's assassins to kill him, he can aquire the
glory of marrydom. Becket soon realizes that even the desire of martyrdom if filled with
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sinful pride, will lead him to damnarion. He refuses to commit the sin of cherishing the
desire.
20. Eugene O'Neill, Long Day's Journey Into Night

The entire play takes place in the family room of the Tyrone's summer home.
The year is 1912, the time is one August morning and Mary and James enter after breakfast.
We soon learn that Mary has recently returned from treatment at a sanatorium for her
morphine addiction. In Act One's opening, we also learn that Egmund has been away
traveling, and that recently his health has been deteriorating.
He's developed a terrible cough. Jamie and Edmund enter, and James and Tyrone can't
seem to resist fighting. A bit of teasing becomes bitter arguing, but Edmund and Mary
interced and calm them down. Edmund tries to tell a humorous story about one of their
tenants, but tyrone doesn't appreciate and Edmund's interpretation of events. Tyrone calls
him a socialist and an anarchist, and Edmund, sick of being criticized, goes upstairs
coughing. Mary is worried but refuses to hear talk Edmund might be truly sick. She goes
into the kitchen to supervise the help. With her gone, Jamie and Tyrone talk frankly about
Edmund: he might have consumption. The two men fight bitterly, going through a series of
arguments we will hear many times before the end of the play: Tyrone accuses Jamie of
being without direction, and Jamie morphine addiction on his father's bargain hunting and
the consequent shoddy medical care. Mary returns, and the two men shut up. They go out to
work on the lawn. Edmund comes down, and he tries to talk to Mary. She's concerned
about his health, and he's concerned about hers. He tries to talk frankly about his health,
and he's concerned about hers. He tries to talk frankly about her problems with morphine,
because he feels she should confront her past. She seems to preder to avoid the topic. She
complains about Tyrone's miserliness, and how because of it she has never had a real home.
He goes out the lawn to lie in the shada while the other town men work, and Mary is left
alone.
Act Two, Scene One. Just before lunchtime. Edmund chats with Cathleen, the hired girl.
Jamie comes in and sneaks a drink; Mary has been upstairs all morning, and Jamie fears,
that Mary is taking morphine. Edmund denies it, but when Mary comes foenstairs her
strange, detached manner confirms Jamie's suspicions. Later, Tyrone enters and sees soon
what has happened. Finally, even Edmund can no longer deny that Mary has slipped back
into use of the druge.
Act two, Scene Two. Just after lunch. Mary criticizes Tyrome for being addicted to bad real
estate investments. They receive a phone call from Dr. Hardy, and Tyrone takes it. From his
manner when he returns, we know that it is not good news. Mary goes upstairs to shoot up
agin, and the three men start to fight. Edmund goes upstairs to try to speak to her, and while
he is gone Tyrone confirms with Jami that Edmund does, in fact, have consumption. Jamie
worries that Tyrone, miser that he is, will send Edmund to a cheap sanatorium. Jamie goes
out, waiting for Edmund to a cheap sanatorium. Jamie goes out, waiting for Edmund so that
he can accompany him to town. Mary comes down, and the Tyrone parents talk. We learn
about their past: she had Edmund in part for the death of an older son, whose name was
Eugene. Edmund comes downstairs. He urges his mother to fight the morphine addicrion,
but she pretends to have no idea what he's talking about. Edmund leaves, and then Tyrone,
leaving Mar alone. First she is relieved, and then she is achingly lonely.
Act Three. Half past six in the evening, same day. Mary sits in the family room, waited on
by Cathleen; again and again, she trats Cathleen to whiskey. She muses about her youth,
and her childhood dreams of being a nun or a concert pianist. Mary also remembers
meeting Mr. Tyrone, and how in love she once was. Cathleen is trying to focus, but she is
not terribly sharp and she has become a bit drunk.
Edmund and Tyrone come home. Mary receives the men happily, but they see quickly that
she is lost in the dope. Mary warns Edmund that Jamie wants to make him a failure, like he
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is. She thinks about their childhood, and worries that Tyrone's habits have started them on
the path to alcoholism. Mary reminds Tyrone of the first night when they met. There is a
brief, touching moment of tenderness. And then she returns to critizing him. She then
speaks nostalgically a bout her wedding dress, and how she fussed over it. She doesn't
know where the dress is now; it must be in the attic somewhere. Tyrone goes down into the
cellar to get more whiskey, and Edmund and Mary are alone. Edmund tries to tell Mary
how sick he is, but she refuses to listen. They talk about her problems with morphine, but
talking so directly about the past hurts Mary, soe they stop. Edmund leaves. Tyrone trturns
and asks her to have dinner with him. She decided to go upstairs instead, presumably to
shoot up yet again.
Act Four. Midnight, that night. Edmund comes home to find his father playing solitaire.
The two have the normal quota of fights and drinking, but they also manage to have an
intimate, tender converstion. Tyrone explains his stinginess, and he also reveals to Edmund
that he ruined his career by staying in an acting job for money. After so many years playing
the same part, he lost the talent he'd once had.
Edmund understands his father now better than he ever has. He talks to his father about his
days sailing and talk indirectly about his hopes to be a great writer. They hear Jamie
coming home drunk, and Tyrone leaves to avoid fighting. Jamie and Edmund have their
own conversation, and Jamie confesses something: although he loved Edmund more yhan
anyone else in the world, he wants Edmund to fail. And he'll try to make Edmund fail. Then
Jamie passes out, dead drunk. When Tyrone returns, he wakes up, and then they start to
fight again. Mary comes downstairs, by now so doped up she can barely recognize them.
She is carrying her wedding gown, lost completely in her past. The men watch in horror.
She does not even know they are there.
21. Volpone: or, The fox A comedy by BEN JONSON, often regarded as his masterpiece.
It was first performed by the KING'S MEN in 1605-6 (published 1607) and is the most
frequently revived of Jonson's plays. Although formally set in Venice, Volpone directs its
merciless moral scrutiny on the customs and values of the rising merchant classes of
Jaconean London. Volpone, a wealthy Venetian without heris, lets it be known that he is
near death in the confident belief that avaricious legacy – hunters will flock to his bedside,
there to be duped by himself and his quickwitted servant, Mosca (fly). On the promise of
inheriting the dying man's fortune, three of Venice's leading citizens receal their true
corruption. The laws he claims to sustain. The decrepit Corbaccio (crow) will disinherit his
own son. The sanctimonious Corvino (raven) will send his virtuous wife, Celia, to
Volpone's bed.
The exuberance of the two vileness of their victims, comes close to exvusing the criminality
of their schemes, but Volpone overreaches himself when, having willed his property to
Mosca, he pretends to be dead. The infuriated Volrore takes the matter to court, where
Mosca recognizes and exploits the personal advantage of his master's "death". To thwart
Mosca, Volpone has to come alive and alive and reveal the whole plot, on the strength of
which recelation he, along with everyone else, is appropriately punished. Only the virtuous
– Corvino's wife and Corbaccio's son – are rewarded.
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CHAPCHER 5
Novel
Anti - Novel
Modern experimental fiction which deliberately refuses to make use of elemnts considered
essential in traditional novel. Such as plot, characteration or ordered narrative sequence.
1. Sterne Tristram Shandy (1759-67)
2. B. S. Johnson The Unforurnates (1965)
Albert Angelo (1964)
Bildungstroman
A novel describing the protagonist's development from childhood to maturity.
1. J. Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Confessional Novel
A rather misleading and flexible term which suggests "autobiographical" type of fiction
written in first person and which on the face of it is a self revelation.
1. Camus La Chute
2. A. Gide Tentatives Amouresuse (1891)
Les Faux Monnyayeurs (1926)
Novel
Documentry Novel. (Thesis Novel)
This form of fiction was invented by the Goncourt brothers. They used the term roman
documentaire, but their novel's were rother dofferent from their focumentary successors.
In the 20thc. Such a novel has become a form of fiction which, like documentary drama, is
based on documentary evidence in the shape of newspaper articles and legal reports
1. T. Dreiser An American Tragedy
2. G. Green The Quiet American
Entertaiment
A term used nu G. Green to distinguish his serious novels from his morw lighted ones.
1. A Gun for sale
2. Our Man in Havana
Episrolary Novel
A common form of 18th century novel: the story is told entirely through letters.
1. Richardson Pamela (1740-1)
Clarissa (1747-8)
2. Smollett Humphry Clinker (1779)
3. S. Bellow Herzog (1965)
166
4. E. Bronte Wuthering Heights

5. M. Harris Wake up stupid (1959)
Cothic Novel
The word originally referred to a Germanic tribe but came to be used to mean medival.
Gohtic novels were fictions which dealt with cruel passions and supernatural terrors in
some medival setting such as a haunted castke or monastery.
This type of romance was very popular in 18th century.
Major Works
1. Walpole The castle of Ortanto (1764)
2. A. Radcliffe Mysterues of Udolopho (1794)
3. M. Lewis The Monk (1795)
4. Ch. Maturin Melmoth the Wanderer (1820)
5. M. Shelley Frankenstein (1818)
6. Ch. Dicjebs Bleak House (1833)
Creat Exoectation (1861) Miss Havisham's episodes
7. W. Beckford Vathek (1786)
8. W. Godwin Caleb Williams (1794)
9. E. Bronte Wuthering Heights
10. Ch. Bronte Jane Eyre
11. E. A. Poe
12. J. Austen Northanger Abbey (1803)
Historical Novel
A type of novel developed by Sir W. Scott, starting by Waverley (1814) Micah
Clarke (1889)
1. Canan Doyle
2. T. H. White
3. Carola Oman
4. A, Duggon
5. Thacleray Vanity Fair (1847-8)
In Medias Res
A phrase describing a common technique of storu telling in which the narrator begins not at
the befinning of story or action but in the middle, going back to recount earlier events at a
larger stage or letting them emerge during the course of the story. The origin is Horace's
remark in Ars Poetica.
1. Emily Bronte Wuthering Heights (1848)
Novel
The word comes from the Italian novella, a piece of news tales, which was applied to the
collections of short tales like Boccoccio's Decameron (1348-58) which were popular in the
14th c. Nowdays along with poetry and drama the novel form the third in the trio of major
genres. The category is as wide as poetry, novels are long prose fiction including everykind
of plot (tragic, comic) all styles and mannres of dealing with from all points of view.
1. D. Defoe Robison Crusoe (1719)
Moll Flanders (1722)
2. S. Richardson Pamela
3. L. Sterne Trisram Shandy
4. H. Fielding Tom Jones
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Novel of Character (Psychological Novel)

It is on the protagonists motive for what he or she does and on how the protagonist as a
person will trun at. The credit for having written the first English novel of character is
almost unanimouslu given to S. Richardson's Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded (1740).
Novel of Incident
In the novel of incident the grater interest is in what the protagonist will do next and how
the storu will turn out.
Novel of Adrenture:
Literature in English is particalorly rich in this form of fiction, which is seldom to be found
in orther languages. Daniel Defoe appears to have been its main pioneer with he Life of and
Strange and Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719). This produced many
imitations known as "Robinsondes" and large quantity of what is caked desert island
piction."
The novel of adventure is also related to the picatrsque novel and romance.
Novel of Ideas: A
Vague category of ficrion in which conversation, intellectual discussion and debate
predominate, and in which plot, narrative, emotional conflict and psychological depth in
characterization are deliberately limited. Such a form of novel is perhaps best examplisied
by A. Huxley's Crome yellow (1921), Point counter point (1928) and After Many a
Summer (1939).
Novel of Sensation:
A form of fiction which had some vogue from 1860 on wards. As the term suffests, the
themes and ation of the nocel were improbable, melodram and lurid. The qauikty secret was
a favourite theme.
It is more than likely that the novel of sendation was eventually to influence the evolution
of the thriller and the detective story.
Novel of the Soil: A

Work of fiction whose main theme is the stuggle of human beings against the notural forces
of the earth
J. Steinbeck Grapes of wrath
P. White The tree of Man (1956)
D.H. Lawrence The Rainbow (1915)
Picaresque
A kind of novel which recounts theadventures of a likeable rogue. It usually has a simple
plot, episodic in structure, consisting of a series of a series of adventures happening to the
hero whose character changes little: its tome is likely to be somewhat amoral and satiric.
1. A. R. Lesage Gil Blas (1715)
2. D.Defoe Moll Flander (1722)
3. H. Fielding Tom Jones (1749), Jonathan Wild (1743)
4. Byron Don Juan (1819-24)
5. Voltaire Candide (1759)
6. Thakeray Memoroes of Barry Lyndon Esq (1856)
7. T. Nashe The Unfortunate Traveller (1594)
8. Smollett Roderick Random (1748)
9. T. Mann Confession of Felix Krull (1954) (unfinished)
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10. J. P. Donleavy The Ginger Man (1959)
Psychol logical Novel

A loose, general term referring to novels which concentrate on the inner lives of their
characters, their ideas, feeling mental and spiritual development, tather than their external
action. Many novelist during the last 200 years have written psychological novels.
Regional Novel
A novel which emphasizes and documents the geography, custom and speech of a
particular place with a more serious explanatory focus than for mero background
informarion.
1. T. Hardy Wessex Novels (Hampshire, Dosert)
2. Gaskell Mary Barton (1848) (Manchester)
3. M. Edgeworth (1769-1849) Castle Rackrent (1800)
Belinda (1801)
4. A. Bennett The Potteries, Missisippi, Yoknapatwpha
5. W. Faulkner Deep South
Roman a Clef (Novel with a Key)

A novel which some of the characters are thinly disgusted portraits of real, famous people,
D. H. Lawrence and Sir O. Mosley appear in A. Huxely's Point Counter Poiny (1928)
1. T. Mann The Magic Mountain (1924)
2. D. H. Lawrence Sons and Lovers (1913)
3. G. Orwel Animal Farm
Roman Fleure (Novel – River)

A series novels each complete in itself, but all following the development of the same
characters.
1. Proust A La Researche du Temps Perdu (1913-27)
2. R. Rolland Jean Christophe (1906-12)\
3. C. P. Snow Strangers and Brothers (1940-70)
4. H. Williamson A Chronicle of Ancient Sunlight (1951-69) \
5. A. Powell A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-76)
Science Fiction
Literature about the imaginary marvels or disasters created by scientific and technological
discoveries and inventions of the future.
1. J. Verne Voyage to the Center of the Earth (1864)
2. H. G. Wells The Timer Machine (1895)
The War of the Worlds (1898)
Sociological Novel
A novel with a political or sociological argument concentrating on some aspects of society
which needs reform or on the social and economic conditions of its characters.
1. Ch. Kingsley Alton Locke (1850)
Sentimental Novel
A form of fiction in 18th. C. England. It concentrated on the distresses of the virtuous and
attempted to show that a sense of honour and moral behaviour were justly rewarded. It was
very apparent in Strene.
1. Richardson Pamela or Virtue Rewarded (1740)
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2. Goldmith The Vicar of Wakefield (1766)

3. Mackenzie The Man of Feeling (1771)
4. M. Edgeworth Castle Rackrent (1800)
Dialogue Novel
One frature of the modern novel which takes on great importance is the use of dialogue and
conversation, especially when presented with very little narrational intervention. This gives
the reader the challenge of filling out the "script" – it is minimalism of quite a different kind
from the interior monologue mode.
1. Evelyn, Waugh (1902-66) Put out More Flags (1942)
2. Iris Murfoch (1919-) Under the Nex (1954)
3. Henry Green (1905-73) Living (1929)
4. Ivy Compton (1892-1962) Dolores (1911)
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THE MODERNIST NOVEL
IN THE TWENTIETH
CENTURY
There is no such thing as the modernist novel. It is a critical artifact, largely Anglo –
American in origin and use. The French normally speak of 'lamodernite' and 'le
postmoderne, the British and the Americans of their derived "isms" which are aesthetic
constructs, not cultural processes. None the less, modernism is a usable artifact. The
concept of the 'modernist' novel cues us in to the changing relationship of society and
literary form in the twentieth century, to anomic and anonymous city life, to greater
freedom and fragmentation, to a felt loss of community. It is a century when the contours of
space and time take on a new and bewildering meaning. Cars and planes reduce distances
and make the sensation of speed a feature of everyday life. Electronic communications
introduce us to the disembodied speech of those to whom we talk and the disembodied
images of those we simultaneously watch in our millions on spatiallu separate screens. The
theory of relativity in physics has its fragment counterpart in the relativities of everyday
experience. The material world is dissolved in to atoms and atoms themselves can be split
for the destructive purposes of military science. If God is dead, then replacements are hard
to come by. On a bad day, the world becomes a handful of sand slipping slowly through the
fingers.
In this intimidating context the old distinction between the Real and the Modern, realism
and modernism, should be finally buried. The great feat of the twentieth – century novel is
not to show that vision triumphs over fact or that experiment triumphs over experience. It is
to show that the world, once flat and later round, is now a cube. It has to be seen from all
'sides', even though three are no sides. Point of view, whereby things can be seen differently
by different characters but still blend into marrative perspective, becomes problematic. We
can never be sure that the whole is the sum of tits parts, nor that perception exhausts
experience. If science shows the world to be infinite in its complexity, the modernist novel
shows experience to be limitless. Narrative becomes difficult because the real itself is more
elusive than materialists ever thought. Not that it can never be known, as Lacanians and
Althusserians suggest, but that knowledge extends and changes the boundaries of our
experiencen of the real even while its validity as knowledge is still in dispute. The real
connot be wished away simply because it is not absolute, because in finding out more we
also find we know less. We find that the real has no absolute Teuth. One of the profound
experiences of the Real is the discovery of limits.
In Henry James's The Ambassadors (1903). This is the painful and singular experience of
Lambert Strether. Yet James's impersonal past tense narrative distances us from the central
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figyre's painful discovery. We have still, though only just, a vantage point from which to
judge. In James Joyce and William Faulkner this is largely swept away. It is the reader, not
the author, who must erect the scaffolding necessary for the high – angle master shot. The
post Jamesian novel, by and large, has swept the scaffolding away.
The Real remains the predominant quest of the novel until 1950 and bevond Because the
world of modernity has become more and not less elusive, the Real has become more and
not less important. Joyce, for example, confessed his wish to reinvigorate the Real, to find
new ways od uncovering it in the spirit of Flaubert and Dostoevsky (see Powers, 1974). In
Ulysses (1922) his multiple styles, which are so often disconnected from fixed point of
view, are multiple uncoverings. They are not relativist variations on a fixed theme, different
angles from which to view a fixed object, but changes of style to match the changing
objects of a changing world. A single day in Dublin, in which Ulysses as novel never shifts
beyond the boundaries of the city, becomes a bottomless abyss. The past as myth and as
memory seeps in to the presentness of all things. The individual selves of Bloom or Molly
or Gerty Macdowall are little more than sieves, porous to the point of saturation. Myth,
memory and desire all devour the passing instant in Bloom's eventful, uneventful day with
a ferocious voracity, Reality is no longer a cast list of round characters with intersecting
perspectives on the world, for the world is no longer a consensual field of vision. In Joyce
and Faulkner, reality is a swiftly moving target bombarded by heteroglot styles from al
angles and distances. In Virfinia Woolf there is no threshold over which consciousness
must pass in the mellifluous triangle of narrator, character and reader. It suffuses all being,
or rather creates a chain of being without visible boundaries. In Narcel Proust, memory
bursts in like an unexpected guest on the present instant excited by a sound or a smell, a
cake or a flagstone, and the mundane world is made ecstatic through resemblances.
The world as myth and history, as past, present and future, has to be contained in a bounded
text which acknowledges the infinty of things. If everything is elusive, however, nothing
can be nrglected or repressed. In Ulyddes eating, excreting, masturbating and copulating are
ceremonies of the ordinary just as much as death and birth. In Woolf's To the Lighthouse
(1927) death is a parenthesis in the lyric flow of existence, in the lyric flow of existence, in
the numinous experience of flowing though the hour, the day, the season which underlies
the various 'apparitions', as Woolf terms them, of the self. By 1929, in Faulkner's The
Sound and the Fury, even madmess has become a narrative point of view and desire its
unrecognized subject. Benjy's Blakean voice has the enforced innocence of poetic fixation,
the primal desire which involves naming its love-object but which cannot know, as Quentin
does, that desire for Caddy entails incest and moral transgression. Yet the parodic and
mercenary prose of brother Jason equally has its limitations. Each of the three brothers
'sees' what the others cannot and fails to 'see' what the others can. The movement from
Benjy's madness and Quentin's incestuous melancholia to prosaic and Quentin's incestuous
melancholia to prosaic and comic fact is a movement towards the conventional real, but it
also a loss, a leap from interior vision towards the mundane. Dream and memory give way
to disenchantment. And while Jason's money – fetish is more obvious and material than
Benjy or Quentin's fixation on Caddy, it is just as much a mystification of the ordinary.
Confused, we move forward with mixed feelings, surging out of poetic darkness towards
the light at the end of the tunnel. But we also feel the move to be irreversible, like the
movement out of childhood Benjy can never make, the movement which even more than
madness is a trope for innocence.
To read this kind of modernist text is indeed to lose one's literary innocence.
It is, at first, to panic and seek out distance when one is up against the surface of the world.
It is yo fear the plunge in to elements which might be either solid or liquid, clear or opaque.
But once immersion in this fractured experience is accepted as a way of life, former
innocence is largely forgotten. We adjust to the challenge of trying to make the fragment
coherent, to recompose the dissolutions of style and theme, to retotalize the discontinuous.
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Criticism occasionally helps us to do this. But Fredric Jameson's contention that the
modernist novel is now canonic, and therefore 'known' in its entirety is misleading
(Jameson, 1981). It still continuous to surprise us. It still fragments, shocks and uncovers.
Through its fluid mixture of tenses, narrators and styles the modernist novel brings home to
us the fragilities of our space-time continuum, the fragility of our uncertain selfhood, and
the evil reptures of history in a century of war and apocalypse.
In the process we stand to lose Renaissnce perspective, roundness of character and clarity
of plot, all crafted assiduously over two centuries. We lose the flow of time which is change
over time, which must run like a river until it traches an ocean, the flow that finallu halts.
We thus have to change our sense of an ending. For if experience is fragmented, it is also
unrnding.
There is neither river nor ocean. The losses run deep, but the gains can match them. We
become aware of the pressentness of things, their horror and their radiance, nwhere more so
than in Joyce's epiphanies. Jouce's epiphanies are secular versions of the sudden revelations
of religious experience. They extend the search for clarity of the nineteenth-century
romantics. If they are formal and composed, like those of the aspiring artist Stephen
Dedalus, they suggest a romantic ambition which remains unfulfilled. Yet Joyce's strss on
the radiance that lies 'in the whatness of a thing', in 'the soul of the commonest object', is
central to twentieth – century narrative. Epiphany illuminates the smallest or most
immediate object of its vision. It can dial on the Ballast Clock in Stephen Hero (written
1904), the girl on the strand with the 'likeeness of seaull' in A portrait of the Artist as a
Young Man (1916), or the legends of lead – papered tea packets in Ulysses which Bloom
sees in the shop-window in Westland Row.
Like its close sibling Imagism, epiphany celebrates the immediate power of the image. But
it renders its perception ambiguous. Is it Joyce the author, Bloom the hero, or Stephen, the
aesthete posturing as author, who imparts the radiance? Or is it merely the thing itself How
long does radiance last and how does it radiate over Joyce's reader's? Is it a passing moment
soon to be lost or an enternal recurrence in a world full of surprise? Is the singular and self-
contained esisode in Ulysses a master epiphany all to itself? Does the 'mysteriouse instant'
arise out of a sea of becalmed reveries or a trickling stream of consciousness? To none of
these questions is there a clear answer. Epiphany is a narrative textative of the uncovering
of what is present in the world, to the sences, to the imagination, to memory, to desire. Its
upiquity is formidable.
This is especially so as the ordered epophanies of Portrait of an Artist give way to their
fragmented counterparts of Ulysses. The sudden heightening of experience which no longer
depends on the momentous event becomes a semistructured accident, like Stephen taking a
chnce that night on Nighttown.
Despite such puzzles, the narrative transition in the novel becomes clearer.
The epiphanous instant displaces the perspectival sequence. A new form of the Real
replaces classic realism. Epiphany, not perspective, is now the key to narrative. Narrative
devolves as much as it evolves, goes sideways and backwards as much as forward. In The
Sound and the Fury Faulkner goes back eighteen years in time from the narrative of
Quentin.
But Quentin's narrative itself goes back in time obsessively, from Harward to Jefferson,
from college to childhood. In reverie he is beating up Dalton Ames, his sister's seducer. In
reality he is being beaten up by Gerald Bland, the college stud. The reverie is partly parodic
of Southern honour. Quentin is quixotically defending girls who don't desire his protection,
yet the reverie is also the epiphanous instant of revenge for the beating Ames has originally
given him. By unwittingly repeating the does, Bland reminds us of Quentin's compulsion to
repeat his earlier failure. But Quentin feels compelled because his mind is already suicidal,
his sense of self disintegrated, his longing for death eaually a longing to merge fact and
fantasy. Faulkner prevents us from holding the past and the present in separate hands as
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separate tenses. As we read the shift from one to the other, we see it like a film montage of
long jumps played backwaeds, always ending with the start of the run-up. Equally
Faulkner's epiphany makes up equidistant from truth and falsehood, the fantastic and the
real. For by this time Quentin is mixing memory with retrospective desire, and wishes to do
so.
If narrative changes so so narrative structures of feeling. Raymond Williams (1977, chap.
6) has seen the latter as representations of historical structures of experience, the emergent
and defining structures of a particular period. In the nineteenth-century English and Grench
novel we can posit the main structres as those of comoassion and fortune. Risk, success and
friendship, sympathy for endured hardships of adverse fortune, eventual love and marriage,
are the shared experience of authours, heroes and readers. While the heroes are immune,
but only just, they are usually surrounded by disaster and death. The inheritance and the
business fortune are convenient turns in plot, well-timed endings for heroes in adversity.
Historically, structures of feeling combine wish and actuality, fear and yearning. They play
on structures of experience by being utopian and systopian at the same time. Forms of
feeling both represent and idealize forms of experience in the age of progress. Dickens,
Balzac and Eliot show a destitution which their readers fear, but also a compassion which
goes beyond the rational and calculative idead of Comte, Bentham and Spencer.
The end of the century sees the beginningd of a transformation which really takes off with
the trauma of total war in 1914. The precarious nineteenthcentury idyll of peogress is
suppkanted by militarism, by disenchantment, and by revolution. Individual fortune and
social compassion seem inappropriate to the theatre of organized slaughter. The devalution
of value prophesied by Nietsche seemed to many to have come to pass and Spengler wrote
The Decline of the West (1918), the transient post-war bible of the German bour-geoisie
which left such a powerful impression on T. S. Eliot. In the post-war world both pleasure
and destruction were more explicit, more known, more talked about as fundamental human
drives. In the English – language novel the new structures of feeling which emerge are
those of absence, dislocation and desire. Love, compassion, success are relics of an eclipsed
age of progress, now stetched on the rack by the polar opposites of revolution and Fascism.
In D. H. Lawrence's Women in love (1921), for example, military metaphors are introduced
in to the field of passion, into an Edwardian Bloomsbury tangled up in the vicissitudes of
love and hate, opposites which were no longer separable. It was a retrospective insight,
reading from the mid – point of slaughter of 1916 back into a falsely secure world already
dominatead, in Lawrence's view, by the technological machine which combined rational
efficirncy and a depersonalized cruelty. For Rupert Brikin and Ursula Brangwen, love is
clawed into existence by mutual animosity and endless abstract argument about its true
mature. It becomes an ideological monster which devours all the feeling it is meant to
signify. When words have killed it off, its exhausted speaklers relapse into carnal contact as
if by default.
Lawrence and Woolf reject, however, the emerging ideological currents of the Edwardian
world. Lawrence abhors equally the upper – middle – class effete-ness of Bloonsbury and
the trchnological efficiency of Fordism designed to judge woekers in capitalist industry as
optimum machines. He also gives us in the figure of Gerald Crich, an English 'blond beast
of prey' whose sadism has adjusted to the machine, an embodied prophecy of the Fascism
to sweep Europe in the next decade. Woolf repudiated the rationalist ethics of G. E. Moore
which held Russell, Keynes and Bloombury in its thrall, and which elevated common –
sense explanation over the metaphysical veil, Woolf, however, had no wish to return to the
veil but found instead a numinous radiance and wonder in the ordinary for which there was
no rational expression. The rejection of rauonafism in a secular world involved for both a
concern with the present – ness of things. For Lawrence feeling rushes impetuously from
one moment to the next as a lived presence which does not stop for reverie. For Woolf the
world is something both to be womdered at and questioned a source of constant
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astonishment and probing in which nothing is obvious and nothing can be taken for granted.
Fabian rationalism, as a proposed reform of the known and the obvious, is by comparison a
grotrsque complacency.
Lawrence briefly injects a passionate structure of feeling into the English novel in the
amours of Ursula Brangwen who stridently, raggedly finds fragile love – in – exile with
Brikin. But after Women in Love he loses this in a quagmire of mushiness, polemics,
polemics and pornography. Passion as the violation of a debased social order which is so
crucial to the French and the Russian novel, becomes stillborn in the Anglo-American
fiction of the twentieth century. For Joyce, Woolf and Faulker, and also for Erest
Hemingway, Djuna Barnes and Malcolm Lowry, the reality of the modern predicament is
the absence of love.
Community, both as communion and communication, breaks down. The new structures of
feeling are more oppositional than those they succed. They suggest an abiding lostness at
the centre of things, a failure to connect, an implosive inwardness which cannot be
contained within the splitting shell of the ego. The shattered ego is I,,ersed in a world
superabundant with senseimpressions, but the centre cannot hold. If it cannot define itself,
it cannot equally define the objects of its needs and satisfactions. These become, as Lacan
retrospectively suggests having read the great modernosts, forms of objectless desire (1966,
p 28ff). Desire is cathected by figures and objects in way which seem more arbitrary than
intended. We can see this in the overdetermined chnce which governs the meetings of Joe
Christmas and Jonna Burden in Faulkner's Light in Augst (1932), or that Bloom and Gerty
MacDowell in Ulysses. It is often sexual but not necessarily so, since it resides above all in
the experiential promiscuity of objects, a restless yearning shorn of romance and cast adrift
in a world of commodities.
Though they reside in the styles of narrative language, in the multiple forms of wrought
epiphany, the absences of the modern novel are not primarily linguistic but social. They are
defined by class, by race, by gender, by cultural periohery. They are absence within
community rather than absences from community. The best novels of exile are those in
which characters are immersed in the life of a particular time and a particular place, only to
feel simultaneously a howllowness in their own lives. This is the fate of the Divers in Scott
Fitzgerald's Tender is the Night (1938), the Bournes in Hemingway's controversial. The
Garden of Eden (1986), of Frederick Henry in Hemingway's A Farewell to Arms (1929), of
Nora Vote in Barnes's Nighteood (1936) and of Geoffrey Firmin in Lowry's Under the
Volcano (1947). Exile here puts the protagonists on a fraught, insecure periphery of their
own world. Absent from their homeland, they cannot escape its traces. Surrounding
themselves with a welcome strangeness, they can never annihilate that strangeness, so that
they are simultaneously decentred by what they repress and what they resist, by what they
conceal and what is thrust upon them.
But there are forms of exile nearer at home, forms of interior estrangement of those in their
own habitus. This is the fate of Bloom the wandering cuckolded ad- collector, of the pre-
exilic Stephen Dedalus, of Quentin Come-son who is in cultural exile at Harvard and
spiritual exile at home in Mississippi, of the peripatetic unnamed narrator in Ralph Ellison's
The Invisible Man (1951) whose South is a trauma from which he must escape and whose
North is a New York City in which he must keep on running. The poor whites of Faulkner
and Flannery O'Connor, the black protagonists of Ellisin, Richard Wright and Toni
Morrison, are the damend of a particulat earth whose resourcefulness entails flight. In Light
in August Faulkner's Joe Christmas, a mulatto orphan with a white Calvinist forther and no
known parentage, is the victimizining victim of the Southern mythology of race, his
splitting self an impossible splitting of colours in a skin that has the texture of parchment.
In Faulkner's Sanctuary (1931) the white trash bootleggers change colour with every
reading, from light to dark and back agin as if they were the haunted ghosts of plantation
slaves. But it is Joyce's Bloom, the derided Jew, 'the whireyed laffir' cautious and pacific ri
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the last in Dublin's fair, colonial city whose interior absence and objectless desire is the
most powerful of all. His stram-of-cinsciousness is in effect a stream of pre-consciousness
harmessed, as Moretti (1988, p. 197) suggests, to the equivalence of commodities, a split
consciousness which lies divided under the ensign of advertising, the ultimate capitalist
sign. Bloom dispersed among the bric-a-brac and detritus of the world of commodities, is
Bloom the excluded insider, a human vacuum filled with the cast- offs of a colonized,
commodified culture and the desires it stimulates through envy and secrecy.
The splitting of the Self portends its possible doubling and reperions. If there is no defence
against the flooding of the Self's interior by exterior objects, there is equally no
containment of the ego-ideal projected outwards into the world. Freud's brilliant verbal play
on the uncanny in his essay of the same name (in Freud, 1985, p. 261) indicates this clearly.
The strange and the remote, after initial repudiation, are often recognized as part of
something familiar. That which is unfamiliar, which is far from home ('unheimlich'), turns
out at time to be too close for comfort. The Other becomes an apparition of the astonished
Self. Doubling is at the core of modernist narrative, asking of its readers to find the Other
whom it never explicitly names. It is a product of the weakened ego which sees its desired
object narcisstically as a projection of itself. As Horace Benbow bends down to drink the
spring water on the opening page of Sanctuary his face splinters among the ripples in to 'a
myriad refkection' In the reflection the hat of the watching Popey who stands on the
opposite bank appears to be sitting on his own head. The image establishes cinematically
that Popeye is his lower-class double, the impotent gangster who later violates and abducts
Temple Drake. Popeye's open desire for Temple echoes the concealed widhes of Benbow,
the middle – class lawyer, for Judge Drake's kidnapped daughter. But Benbow also desures
Temple as a feminized persona, a beautiful version of Self whose predatory actions reflect
his own unept whish to be utterly promiscuous. In his cryptic desperation he desires to be
both male predator and female Other, to be violator and violated.
The multitude of streams and mirrors into which he gazes, tells us, mythically, who he is. If
Benbow's sister is called Narcissa by her author, then Benbow is … .
In Joyce, the effect of doubling overlaps past and present, history and myth. Buck Mulligan
is Stephen's modern double, the mouthpiece of instant aphorism and gaiety who plays with
language too much and too lightly. Shakespeare is his mythic double, the historical bard he
tries to recreate in his own image. At the same time the Ghost in Hamlet who is regarded by
Stephen as a version of the playwright is also Bloom's double, the bisexual cukold of
middle – age who has failed to survive the ravages of times. Stephen must avoid being
Mulligan as a young man in order to avoid being Bloom in middle age and must do so by
being the shadow of the Shakespeare he has invented, narcissistically awaiting the succubus
(possibly Molly) who might wound him into art.
If Bloom is one version of the disintegrating middle – aged and impotent persona, then
Geoffrey Firmin, in Lowry's Under the Volcano (1947), is another.
Firmin's doubles are his boyhood friend, Laruelle, and his brother, Hugh, both practical
men who have succeeded in love and life where he has failed.
But though they are both lovers of the wife of 'the Consul from Cuckold-shacen', and
successes respectively in the fields of film and politics, they are not really successes at all.
They have both compromised, and thus Yvonne is attacted back to the perverse purity of
her ex-husband who drunkenly seeks his cabbalistic truths and finds nothing but mirrored
instances of his own degradation. Firmin wastes away in the interior world of delirium
tremens just as Hugh has wasted himself as an 'indoor Marxman' in cowboy dudes and
Latuelle as a European expressionist becalmed in Hollywood. As in Joyce, the protagonists
double with history. Laruelle, recalling his passion for Yvonne, at one point confuse the
couple with Maxmilian and Carlota in the ruined chapel of the Miramar, 'lovers out of their
element' who finally turn in to 'ghosts'.
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The tragic celebrated lovers of Mexican history, the emperor and his bride, atr rchoed in the
tragic and doomed journeys of Geoffrey and Yvonne, separately, to the Farolito. But the
doom of Firmin is also the coming doom of the world. Doubling in space as well as time,
the novel place Mexico as the transatlantic double of Spain. The trivial but vicious
imbroglio of Firmin's murder at the hands of fascist paramilitaries echoes the devouring of
Republican Spain by the rapacious rebel army of Franco. As Lowry writes the novel,
Europe appears to be repeating on a grander scale the doom of Spain, while Geoffrey and
Firmin repeat on a lesser scale the noble failure of Maxmilian and Carlota and the earlier
failure of their marriage. Firmin attains tragic stature by sharing complicity in his own
downfall and that of the civilized world.
If doubling repudiates the self as bounded certainty, the narrative of omission repudiates
self as motive. In the 'Sirens' episode of Ulysses, Bloom's stream – of – consciousness
becomes incoherent as the cuckolding hour appeoaches, not so much a filling – in of
consciousness as a musical evasion of consciousness. In Hemingway's terse narrative prose
we have simple statement as important often for what it does not say as what it does. The
sentence is a series of balanced conjunctions. The nouns are bleak and bare. There are few
adjectives in sight. In his dialogue we read statements as clear polished surfaces whose
meaning remain oblique. In A Farewell to Arms (1929), Catherine Barkley's tense 'Keep on
lying to me' undermines the aura of that romantic love she vainly seeks. Trust constantly
pledges itself as an automatism which buries misfiving. Frederick Henry in turn cannot
reflect on the full meaning of the war in which he is involved without encountering an
abyss, without staring into is moral void as if petrified into stone. All narrative motion is a
necessary urgency, skimming over the surface of things best left untouched, over the
reakity after 1914 that for Eliot humankind could no longer bear.
In Barnes's Nightwood (1936) omission is taken to perhaps its furthest point.
After Nora has lost Robin Vote to the 'squatter' Jenny Petheridge, she turns to Matthew
O'Connor, the Irish-Americal doctor, for consolation, catching him in bed late one night in
transvestite garb awaiting someone else. In chapter 5 of the novel, 'Watchman, what of the
Night!' the doctor, tears streaming though his mascara, fills up the void left by Nora's limp
and desolate questioning. The night that has devoured Tobin is buried under his torrential
invocation of the night that engulfs Paris, and finally the world. The silence that is the
absence of all understanding is filled in by the speech in which all understanding is melted
down like gold into molten liquid. It runs away with itself and signifies nothing. Nora is
calmed by the flow of words which tell her nothing, which become more and more
desperate as they pour from the doctor's lips.
As he lies in bed peeping out of the covers, they try to conceal the agony which the night
holds for both of them. For Robin, the love – object of man and woman alike, the destroyer
of lives, cannot be 'known' as Jenny the 'looter' can be 'known' and damned as a ,alicious
intruder. Robin is the enigma which lies beneath the commodified object of desire her
lovers have made of her, and that is precisely her main attraction.
In Hermingway's posthumous novel The Garden of Eden (1986), edited down in its
published form to a third of its manuscript size, he invokes the bisexual ambience of exile
we find earlier in Barnes and which he himself, through his various myths of masculinity
but also mindful of censorship, had previously repressed. Gatherine Bourne retains the
Christian Bourne retains the Christian name of Hemingway's earlier heroine but none of her
romantic illusions. Instead she uses the context of their recent marriage to turn identity
inside out and upside down. She and her writer husband agree through her persuasion to
become physical twins, images of each other with their bleached blond hair and dark
suntanned skins, acting out a unisexual utopia which soon turns to nightmare. Catherine
longs perversely to be both twin and brother to the husband she calls her 'girl'. Her dialogue
has the quality of a poetic voice in which the sub – text is perversity, or forms of perversity
which cannot be openly named. Her quest is lost from the start. There can be no permanent
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trading of identities, no end to the sexual difference which suffers merely transient
obliteration. There is something a little precious too in the endless honeymooning which
makes Hemingway a lesser writer of bisexual desperation than Barnes. But Catherine
Bourne's failure is still a failure on a grand scale, an attempt to reverse the cultural order of
things which exposes by implication the vast domain of male power.
David Bourne's canny instinct for durvival takes him beyond the perversity which sees
Catherine take up with another woman by eventually taking over that woman himself in the
completion of the triangle. If perversity threatens sexual identity, or creates a new identity
which cannot be sustained, then the odds are still staked in favour of male victory. It is
Catherine who finally goes insane.
Though Hemingway's novel has a novelist as a hero who us writing a novwithin the novel
about game-hunting in Africa, the novel about game-hunting in Africa, the novel itself still
still belongs to the epiphanous mode. Its reflexive dimension, howerve, points us to the
merafictional successors of epiphany in the modernist novel. Here Robert Schooles (1980)
has suggested the term 'fabulation'. Fiction become a neverenging story. The device of
storytelling is usually exponsed by the author's self insertion within the text, his or her
presence as narrator consciously creating a fiction with no solid realities or clear endings.
The illusion of the real is invoked only so that it had be discarded. John Fowles writes a
version of Mediteranean exotica in The Magus (1966) where his exotic Greeks and their
planted confederates finally have no tangible nature. In The French Lieutenant's Woman
(1969) he writes a beautiful pastiche of the Victorian novel with a knowing narrative
commentary and sexual licence which the 'swinging sixties' have given to him. In Gravity
Rainbow (1973) Thomas Pynchon plays with the idea of destructive rocketry as the
predestining weapon of an invisible Calvinist God, updating the angel of destruction to
resemble Werner von Braun. In Lanark (1981) Alistair Gray comically doubles his
autographical self in the two figures of the fifties Glaswegian Dubcan Thaw and the
dystopian figure of Lanark in Unthank, the city of the future, only to triple that self by
making a dramatic authorial entrance as himself in the Epilogue. In fabulism, often called
postmodernist but for no obvious reason, the death of the author is as far away as ever.
Even if the fiction of the last twenty years may still be called modernist in the fracturing of
its marratives and the openness of its endings, it is clear that it has altered course. The
boundaries between reality and fantasy have, at times clearly disdolved. The novel's illusion
of reality, even when fractured in the ways we have suggested, is no longer just being
examined or just being parodied. At times it is dispensed with altogether. The wish to spin
our fictions which cannot be pinned down to a material world is response, no doubt, to an
age of global electronic information where more can be known and communicated than
ever before. The elusiveness of fictions gives them a special pedigree in a culture which is
increasing;y documented and saturated by self- advertisement. It is a way in which the
world of the book can resist the world of the screen. Whether it can continue to do so into
the next century remains yet to be seen.
FURTHER READING
Adorno, T. W. (1984) Aesthetic Theory, translated by C. Lenhardt, Routledge & Kegan
Pail. London [first public 1970]
Auerbach, Erich (1968) The Representaion of Reality in Western Literature,
177
American Novels
The Last of Mohicans (1826)

Writer : James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851)
Time : 1757
Place : Lake Chamlain, Northern New York
Point of View : Third Person
Theme : Racial Discrimination
Type : Historial Romance
School : Western Novel, Realistic, Poetic
Main characters: 1.Uncas

2. Magua
3. Natty Bumppo = Leatherstocking
4. Chingachgook
5. Cora
First Paragraph:
Mine ear is open, and my heart prepared:
The worst is worldly loss thou canst unfold:
Say, is my kingdom lost?
Plot
The novel present Bumppo in his maturity and is set in 1757 during the Seven Years War
between the French and the British. Cora and Alice are in their way to Fort Willian Henry
to join their father. They are accompanied. They are accompanied by Major Heyward.
Magua, their Indian guide plans to betray. His plan is frustrated by Hawkeye who is the
Last Mohican chieftain. Although supposedly given safe conduct the English are attacked
and the girls are captured, by Delaware and Harons. The former takes Cora and the Latter,
Alice. Alice and Uncas manage to escape. Uncas is welcomed at the Camp of the Delaeares
and named successor to the old chief. Magua has laid claim to caotive Cora and he
eventually kills both the young women and Uncas. Hawkeye avenges the death of his
friends and Kill Magua.
Critical Evakuation
It is one of the supreme narratives of adventure in American Literature, and the writer
recognized throughout the world as American first great novelist. D. H. Lawerence says,
"some of the loveliest, most glamouras picture in all literature. "The novel creats a powerful
myth of early America, and its gradual and reluctant acceotance of civilization. The novel is
the second tile published in what was to become a series of five entitled collectively the
Leatherstocking Tales. Romantic love was conventional in the plots of novels in Cooper's
day. In addition to love theme which provides for the marriage of Heyward, and Alice,
Cooper includes others.
Related to the love theme is miscegenation.
American Novels
179
Moby Dick (1851)
Author : Herman Melville (1819-1891)

Time : 19th. Century
Place : Pequod (ship), High seas
Point of view : First person
Theme : Faustian Bargin, An Epic Quest
Type : Adventurous, Poetic, Epic
School : Symbolic, Realistic
Main Characters: 1. Ahab

2. Queequeg
3. Ishmael
4. Starbuck
5. Stubb
6. Fedallah
First Paragraph:
Call me Ishmael. Some years ago, never mind how long
precisely having little or no money in my purse
Plot
The story begins with Ishmael's decision to go to sea. On his way he meets Queequeg an
image of noble savage. Before the set sail, a man delivers mysterious warning about
disaterous voyage and Father Mapple delivers a symbolic sermon about the prophet Jonah
who was swallowed by a whale. Caption Ahab appears after several days. He reveals the
purpose of the voyage: to hunt and kill the White Whale, which took off his leg. Only
Starbuck, the first mate demurs, feeling that Ahab'd mission is a sacrilege. The crew, cast
off and regugees of all races and land is a microcosom of humanity. The narrative is
sometimes naturalistic, sometimes fantastic and shaped into obscure parables. As the men
of the Pequod sail the open sea in search of a single whales, the still occupy themselves
with the regular business of whale hunting. Occasional chases after whales, storms, or
meeting with other skips punctuate the long voyage. The crew captures and processes a
sperm whale; Queequeg has a coffin made when nearly dies of fever. Ahab delivers a
speech to his crew that confirms his mad devotion to the quest. The crew is panic – striken
and Starbuck warns Ahab that God is against him. On the first day the great whale crush
one of boats and nearly kills Fedallah. On the second day it drags Fedallah down in Ahab's
harpoon line an Ahab's artifical leg is snapped off as the whaleboat is wrecked. Finally, on
third day, a striken Moby Dick charges the Pequod and smadhes her sides; Ahab manages
to strike a final blow but himself is caught in the harpoon and drawned, tied to the whale.
The Pequod sinks, taking all of the whaleing boats and their crew down in the suction. The
only survivor is Ishmael, who is short back up, clinging the coffin that had been made for
Queequeg.
Critical Evaluation
The intertangled themes of this mighty novel express the artistic genius of a mind that
according to Hawthorn, "could neither belive nor be comfortable in unbelief."
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Many of those themes are characterstic of American Romanticism: "The isolated self" and
the pain of self discovery, the insufficiency of conventional practical knowledge in the face
of the power of blackness, the demonic center of the world the confrontation of evil and
innocence, the fundamental imperfection of humanity coupled with Faustian heroism, the
search for ultimate truth and the inadequacy of human perception. The conflict between
faith and doubt was one of the major issues of the 19th century and Moby-Dick is a part of
huge exploration of the historical and psychological origins and development of self,
society and the desire to create and destrou gods and heroes. Moby Dick is a work that
eludes classification, combining elements of the psychological and picaresque novel; sea
story and allegory; the epic of literal and metaphorical quest; the satire of social and
religious events. In many ways the great whale may be compared to Spenser's a "blatant
beast" (who in the Faerie Queene, also represents the indeterminable quarry and also
escapes at the end to continue hunting the world). It is not surprising that Moby Dick is
often considered to be the American epic. By surviving Ishmael transcends the Byronic
heroism of Ahab as the whole some overcomes the sinister.
Uncle Tom's Cabim
(Life Among Lowly) (1852)
Author : Harry Beecher Stowe (1811-1896)

Place : Kentucky and Mississipi
Point of view : Third Person
Theme : Racial Discrimination, Slavery
Type : Sentimental Romance
School : Realistic and allegorical
Main Characters:
1. Uncle
2. Arthur Shelby
3. Emily Shelby
4. Dan Haley
5. Aunt Chole
6. Tom Locev
7. Marks
8. Harry
9. Rachel Halliday
10. Phineas Fletcher
Writer's Main Works:

1. Sunny Memories of Foreign Lands (1854)
2. The Minister's Wooing (1859)
3. The Pear of Orr's Island (1862)
First Paragraph:
Late in the afternoon of a chilly day two gentlemen were sitting
alone over their wine.
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American Novels
181
Plot
Uncle Tom is a saintly and faithful slave owned by the Shelby family. When the Shelbys
find themselves in financial straits, Tom is separated from his wife and children and sold to
a slave trader. Young George Shelby sympathizes with Tom and vows to redeem him some
day. Tom is taken to south and the voyage dow the Missisippi he save the life of Evs St.
Clare (known as little Eva) with the result that her father buys him out of gratitude. They go
to the St. Clare hom in New Orleans, where Tom is happy and grows close to Ave and her
black friend Topsy. After two years little Eva dies from a weakend constitution in a highly
sentimental death scene.
Her father is Killed in an accident and Tom is sold at auction to the villainous Simon
Legree, a cruel and drunken Yanket. Two female slaves capitalize on Tom's ever – paient
nature by pretending to escape and going into hiding. Tom will not reveal their whereabouts
and Legree has him brutally whipped to death. As he is dying, George Shelby arrives to
rescue him but it is too late. In despair, Shelby pledges to fight for Abolitionist cause "God
wrote the book", Mrs Stowe once said. I took His dictation.
Critical Evaluation
The publication of this Novel has been called "the most sensational even in the world
History of the novel. When Lincoln met the writer during the Civil War, he commented,
"So you are the little lady who wrote the book that causal the great war." The novel has
many faults of sentimentality, artificiality obviousness. Its construction is bad and its
characterization worse. It is filled with errors and distorations. None of these, however,
lessens the profound effect the book creates. It is passionate and powerful. Even reading it
today one experecess shock, horror, in spite of the melodrama the stereotypes, the bathos.
The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)
Author : Mark Twain (S. L. Clemens 1835-1910)

Place : Along the Missisippi River, St. Petersburg, Missouri
Point of view : First Person
Theme : Quest for Self, Process from Innocence to Experience
Type : Humorous, River Odyssey
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Huckleberry Finn
2. Jim
3. Tom Sawyer
4. Pap
5. King and Duke
6. The wido Douglas
7. Miss Waston
8. Aunt Polly
9. Judge Thatcher
10. The Grangerfords
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182

1. Roughing It (1872)
2. The Gilded Age (1873)
3. Adventure Abroad (1880)
4. A Tramp Abroad
5. Life on Mississippi (1883)
First Paragraph:
You don't know about me, without you have read a book by the
name of The Adventures of Sawyer.
Plot
Huck narrates the entire work in his native Missouri dialect. He has been adopted into the
home of Widow Douglas and her sister Miss Watson. His blackguard father threatens his
relative security by trying to claim the money that Huck and Tom had recovered from the
cave of Injun Joe. Eventually Huck is kidnapped by his father and imprisoned in an isolated
cabin. He frees himself by making it appear as if he has been murdered, and then flees to
Jackson's Island.
While hiding out on the island Huck meets Jim, Miss Watson's goodhearted slave, who has
decided to run away because he has overheard a plan to sell him.
When Huck discovers that his own "death" has been blamed on Jim and that a search party
may be on its way to Jackson's Island, the two runaways resolve to travel down the
Mississippi on a raft. Jim plans to leave the Mississippi at Cariro (the mouth of the Ohio
River) and travel up the Ohio to freedom, but they miss Cairo in a dense fog, continue
floating downstream, and undergo a series of encounters with feuding clans, murderers,
lawless "aristocrats" and numerous mobs, all of which they survive by luck, wil and
determination. The casual cruelty of the river people is often presented, in all its
grotesqueness, in an almost offhand manner for satirical effect.
Finally, in Arkansas, the two scoundrels who have joined Huck and Jim on their raft,
thinking that Jim belongs to Huck and not knowing that there really is a reward on him, tell
a local farmer that he is a runaway and offer him to the farmer for a portion of a fictitious
reward. By coincidence, this farmer and his wife are Tom Sawyer's Uncle Silas and Aunt
Sally Phelps. Huck discovers Jim's whereabouts and tries to free him by posing as Tom.
Tom himself happens to arrive and, catching on to Huck's game. Poses as his own brother
Sid. Tom and Huck free Jim, but only after making him suffer through an absurdly
romantic rescue devised by the unsympathetic Tom. All the time Tom knows that Jim is
actually a free man, having been freed by Miss Watson (who is now dead) in her will. The
rescue goes awry and Tom is shot in the leg. Huck, after fetching doctor for the injured
Tom, becomes separated from him and Jim. Jim gives up his hardwon freedom, or so he
thinks, to make sure that Tom receives the attention he needs. Shortly after Jim, Tom and
the doctor return to Silas and Sally's farm, Tom's Aunt Polly arrives and sets matters
straight. At the novel's end Huck decided to "light out" for the territories rather than face
life with Aunt Sally, who, Huck tellsthe reader, plans to "silvilize" him.
Critical Evaluation
It is father of American Novel. The wirter maintained on almost perfect fidelity to Huck's
point of view in order to dramatize the conflict between Huck's own innate innocence and
natural goodness and the dictates of corrupt society. The Novel revolves around several
major themes, including death, rebirth, freefom and bondage, the search for the father
(identity), individual versus society and the all pervasive theme of brotherhood. Huck's
character reflects a point in Twain's development when he still believed humanity to be
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American Novels
183
innately good byt saw social forces as corrupting influences that replaced with cictates of
the socially determined "conscience" the intuitive sense of right and wrong.
Rise of Silas Laphan (1885)
William Dean Howells (1837-1920)
Author :
Place : Boston
Theme : Social Competition, Commerical Integrity, Greed, Decay of Moral in
Modern life.
Type : Dramatic, Episodic
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Silas Lapham
2. Persis Lapham
3. Irene
4. Tom Corey
5. Jim Rogers
6. Sewell
7. Penelope

1. Their Wedding Journey (1872)
2. A Chance Acquaintance (1873)
3. The Lady of the Aroostook (1879)
4. Undiscovered Country (1880)
5. Dr. Breen's Practice (1881)
6. Indian Summer (1886)
7. April Hopes (1888)
8. Annie Kilburn (1889)
First Paragraph:
When Bartley Hubbard went to interview Silas for the "Solid
Men of Boston" servies which he undertook to finish up in The
Events.
Plot
Silas Lapham, as he appears to a journalist who interviews him, is a solid, self-made man,
perhaps a bit smug but nonetheless shrewd and enterprising. Though the journalist is right,
there is more to Silas Lapham. He has every reason to be satisfied with himself. He is
wealthy because he aggressively and proudly sells a superior paint, manufactured from
minerals he has discovered on the Vermont farm inherited from his father. He has married a
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184
schoolteacher, Persis, who has proved a loyal and loving wife as well as moral guide –
almost a conscience.
Lapham has two affectionate daughters: Irene, the Younger, is not only a beauty but also a
capable "manager" about the house; Penelope, the elder, is a droll and perceptive young
lady. Finally, Lapham has served his country, becoming a colonel during the Civil War.
Lapham suffers from a secret shame, thought he never admits it, despite his wife's
prodding. He once took on a partner, Jim Rogers, whose money helped him exploit the
paint. Then, Partly because Rogers was a drag on the business and partly because Lapham
could not stand sharing the owentship of his beloved paint with anyone, he crowded Rogers
out. The maneuver, while perfectly legal, was morally suspect, as his wife and occasionally
his conscience remind him.
Since Lapham and his family have moved to Boston, he has developed social ambitions.
Three Boston Brahmins – Mrs. Corey and her two daughters – come to call in belated
acknowledgement of the kindness that Mr. Lapham had shown them at a resort where they
had met. While perfectly polite, Mrs. Corey has intimated that none of their friends lived in
Lapham's part of town. The hint is enough. Silas determines to build on a lot he owns in the
fashionable Back Bay area. He is mildly supported by his wife, Persis, but not by Irene or
Prnrlope whose education for fashionable society has been neglected.
Silas intends to build a big house. His excellent architect help him. One day, as they visit
the site of the construction, they see Rogers. Persis is deflated and declares that she will not
live in the house, but Silas grimly denies having wronged Rogers ana persists in his project.
On another occasion, Irene accompanies her parents to the site. They are surprised by the
appearance of Tom Corey, a young Brahmin whom Irene finds extremely pleasant. After
some casual talk, during which Shilas brags a good deal, as in his habit, Corey leaves and
the Laphams return home. Irene confides to her sister, though indirectly, that she is smitten
with Tom Corey.
As for Tom, he tells his father – a charming and cultivated dilettantes who has refrained
ffrom work all his life – that he would like to get a job, preferably with Lapham. Having
received his father's quizzical nlessing, Tom applies to Silas directly, much to the latter's
gratification since his wife regards young Corey as belonging to another social sphere.
Tom's plan is to serve as foreign representative after he has learned the business.
Silas takes Tom to his summer home at Nantasletto discuss the matter. It is the first of
many visits, for even after Tom's proposition has been accepted, he returns frequently. All
the Laphams, invluding Irene, suppose that he admires Irene-although it is Penelope whom
he always talks about and to whom he listens delightedly.
After a while the coreys feel obliged to invite the Laphams to dinner. Penelope, who has
disliked Mrs. Corey form the start, reguses to go, but the others accept eagerly, though they
are uneasy about their social ineptitude. The dinner is a fiasco.
Silas, unused to wine, drinks to excess and begins to brag obnoxiously. The next day, of
course, Silas in desperately unhappy. He is not comforted by Tom's assurances that
everyone at the party understood the reasons for his unseemly behavior. Silas ofters Tom an
opportunity to resign, but he refuses it and will not listen to Silas's self-abasement.
Some hours later Tom comes to the conclusion that he has not shown Silas enough
sympathy, and sets off to visit him. Silas is not home – but Penelope is. She greets him
amiably and, as always, chatters amusingly. Before very long, Tom finds himself telling
Penelope that he loves her. She is amazed, betwildered, but not althogether unhappy. Like
all the Laphams (and the Coreys, too), she supposed that Tom was paying court to her far
more beautiful sister. She sends him away. Next morning Penelope conveys the news of
Tom's preference to her mother who tell Silas. Puzzled about the course they ought to take
and deeply unhappy about the necessity of inflicting pain on one of their daughters, they
recall a ministers, they recall a minister, Mr. Sewell, whom they met at the Corey's dinner
party. His commonsense denunciation of sentimental novels and their false solutions to
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American Novels
185
human problems especially impressed Sailas. They call on him, and his advice immediately
appeals to them. One must suffer rather than three, he says, if none is to blame. The
principle of the economy of pain would be obvious if false tradition did not prevail.
To Persis falls the duty of telling her daughter Irene that Tom loves Penelope.
She performs it bluntly. Irene takes it without tears, presents to Penelope the mementos of
Tom that she has cherished, and returns to her room. She cannot repond to Penelope's
compassionate attempts at reconciliation or her parent's either. As soon as she can, she
leaves for their Vermont farm.
Silas runs into serious financial troubles. To please Perhaps to ease his own conscience, he
has lent Rogers $20,000 on securities worth only a fraction of that amount. Moreover,
Rogers has involved him in disastrous financial speculations.
Especially disheartening to Silas has been his discovery that some mills given to him by
Rogers as collateral for the loan are on the line of a railroad that has been purchased by a
powerful combune that can force sale of the mills whenever it choose, at whaterver price it
sets. Tom offers to lend Silas $30,000, but Silas gallantly refuses.
Silas hipes to get some money to buy out a new company that can produce paint as good as
his but at a lower cost. He decides to sell the elegant house he has been building. But luck
has turned against him. Because of his own carelessness, the house – on which he has
allowed the insurance to lapse – burns down. Rogers meanwhile ha located some
Englishmen who are willing to buy the mills even when they are informed (as Silas insists
they must be informed) that the railroad controls the value of the property. Silas discovers
that English men are acting as agents for wealthy men who would be cheated if he sold
them the mills. He rises to the moral challenge, rejects the deal, and goes bankrupt.
The affair between Tom and Penelope is happily resolved. Tom Irene, who has returned
from Vemont upon hearing of her father's misfortunes, gives the lovers her blessing. After
their marriage, Tom and Penelope leave for Mexico, a move that will minimize family
friction (for the Coreys cannot wholly approve of Penelope nor she of them) and further
Tom's business career.
And Silas, much poorer but not poverty – stricken, retires to his Vermont farm. He finally
seels his mines and works to the firm had once hoped to purchase – but he still produces a
special high – grade paint, the Persis brand. Both he and his wife content with moral choice
that he so courageously made.
Critical Evaluation
The novel has not been exempt from the attack commonly launched against Howell's
fiction. Critics have deplored its lack of passion, its, unvarying restraint, its refusal to
explore the depths. Some, have assailed it for its unfavorable of the modern industrial and
financial order and others for its superficial analysis of the predatory nature of big business.
Howell's double plot, the temptations of Silas Lapham and the winning of Penelope is
expertly constructed. The characters are self made American businessmen, honest,
awakward innocent in social relations despite his shrewdness in business affaris
fundamentally moral despite his single lapse from probity are thoroughly realized. The style
is grateful, flexible tinged with humor. It is ethical theme that is most important.
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186
The Portrait of a Lady (1881)
Author : Henry James (1843-1916)

Time : 1875
Place : England, France, Italy
Theme : Individuality
Type : Psychological Realism
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Isable Archer
2. Caspar Goodwood
3. Lord Warburton
4. Henrietta Stackpole
5. Gilbert Osmond
6. Ralph Touchett

1. Roderick Hudson (1876)
2. The American (1877)
3. The Europeans (1878)
4. Daisy Miller (1879)
5. Washington Square (1880)
6. The Aspem Papers (1888)
7. Golde Bowl (1904)
8. The Sacred Fount (1901)
9. The Outcry (1911)
10. The lvory Twer (Uniginished)
First Paragraph:
Under certain circumstances there are few hours in life more agreeable than the hour
dedicated to ceremony known as afternoon tea.
Plot
Isabel Archer, of Albany, New York, a penniless orphan, becomes the protégée of her
wealthu aunt, Lydia Touchett. She goes to England to stay with her aunt and uncle, a retired
American banker, and their tubercular son, Ralph, who persuades his father to provide for
Isabel in his will. When Mr Touchett dies. Isabel find herself rich and goes to the Continent
with Mrs Touchett and her friend, Madame Merle. In Florence, Madame Merle introduces
her to Gilbert Osmond, a middle aged windower with a young daughter, Preserve her
feedom, Isabel has previously turned down proposals of marriage from Casper Goodwood,
a rich young American, and from Lord Warburton, an English neighbour of the Touchetts.
Now, however, impressed with Osmond's taste and intellectual detachment, she accepts his
proposal, only to discover him to be a selfish and sterile dilettante who has married her for
her money. When she hears that Ralph is dying she prepares to depart for England to be
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with him, but Osmond forbids her to go. It is at this point that she discovers that Madame
Merle is Pansy's mother, and she at last understand the woman's part in her marriage to
Osmond. She goes to England after a final confrontation with Madame Merle and is at
Ralph's side when he dies. Casper Goodwood makes a last attempt to gain Isbel, but
thought she feels an attraction for him she refects him and returns to Osmond and Pansy in
Italy.
Critical Evaluation
The novel is writer's first big novel. His critics have generally agreed and some belived
James never surpassed his achievement in this work of his middle period.
Certainly in plot characterization and technique. Certainly in plot, characterization and
technique the novel deserves high praise. The stages that precced Isabel's becoming an
heiress and choosing Osmond have been carefully plotted to reveal the possibilities before
her: the gentel but colorless charm of Lord Warburton and the attractive but frightening
vittility of Caspar Goodwood. James mounts a stuble setting of American and European
taste, culture and morality against which his young brilliant light and ominous shadow on
Isable as she in turn casts her own luminous glow.
Turn of Screw (1898)
Author : Henry James (1843-1916)

Place : England
Theme : Corruption of Children in a Country Eden by Evil - Frustation
Type : Ghost story – Psychological
School : Symbolic, Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Narrator
2. Governess
3. Miles
4. Flora
5. Peter Quint (A Ghost – Red – devil)
6. Miss Jessel (A Ghost – Red – devil)
7. Douglas
First Paragraph:
The story had hold us round the fire, sufficiently breathless, but except the obvious remark
that it was gruesome.
Plot
The story is about a governess who takes charge of two children at the lonely country house
of Bly. Her employer, the children's uncle, has given her strict orders not to bother him with
any of the deails of their education or behaviour. The children, Flora and Miles, are
attractive and intelligent, but also seem strained and secretive. Shortly after her arrival the
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governess sees two former members of the household, the steward Peter Quint and the
previous governess Miss Jessel; later she learns that both of them are dead. She is
convinced that the children see the ghosts too, but they display a remarkable talent for
evading questions about them. She challengers Flora directly and provokes a hysterical and
provokes a hysterical reaction which makes the girl ill. When she confronts Miles, Peter
Quit appears at the windows. She is determined to exorcize his influence, but despite her
efforts to shield Miles from the apparition, the frantic and terrified boy dies in her arms.
The fact that, after a brief introfuctory section, the story is told from the point of view of the
governess raises doubts about whether the ghosts are "real" or merely her hallucinations.
Critical Evaluation
The story has ovrtones of religious import: innocent children in country Eden corrupted by
evil. The Governess becomes a savior who fails because the force of evil is too great. The
drtails are always wholly realistic and yet the effect is thoroughly romantic, because James
writes about those thing that as he said, "we cannot possible ever directly know": Some
critics belive that the Governess is a sexually frustrated woman suffering from delusions
and able with fatal effect, to persuade others to share her delusion.
Looking Backward (1888)
Author : Edward Bellamy (1850-1896)

Time : 2000-1887
Place : Utopia (Boston)
Theme : Dream of Fortune
Type : Utopian Novel (Fairy Tale)
School : Symbolic - Imperssionistic
Main Characters:
1. Julian West
2. Edith Bartlett
3. Dr. Leete
4. Edit Leete
5. Mrs. Leet

1. Duke of Stockbridge (1879)
2. Dr. Heidenhoff Prcess (1880)
3. Miss Ludington's Sister (1884)
4. Blind Man's World (1898)
First Paragraph:
I first saw the light in the city of Boston in the year 1857.
"What!" you say, eighteen fifty seven? That is an odd slip.
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Plot
It is narrated by Julian West, a Bostonian, who falls asleep in 1887 and wakes in the year
2000. He finds himself in a brilliant new society in which the lot of man has been
drastically transformed. Dr Leete, who revives Julian and takes him into his home, explain
how American society came – through peaceful means – to adopt a rigorous socialist
programme under which labour is performed according to a system similar to military
service. With all basic human needs accounted for and happiness ensured, human ills once
thought to be invitable have simply vanished. Great political, technological and sociological
achievements are described in vivid detail.
At the end of the novel Julian dreams of nightmarish returne to 19th – century Boton but
wakes again in the year 2000 to find that Edith Leete, a descendant of his former fiancée,
returns his love. The effect of Looking Backward was enormous, comparable perhaps only
to that of Uncle Tom's Cabin. Numberous Bellamy clubs were founded; political journals
abd even a Nationalist party all advocated the changes represented in the book.
Critical Evaluation
Writer's practically perfect society to be achieved without class war or even minor
disturbances, appealed deeply to millions of peope. His clam, even conservative prose
embellished with attractive but not starting metaphers and parables contributed enormously
to the book's success. The novel has beer called a fairy Tale of a social felicity. It solutions
to difficult problems, esoecially its description of society's facile transition from laissez fair
capitalism to nationalism have been described as oversimple. Its basic analogy between a
military army and a social army has been judged psychologically false.
Octopus (A story of California) (1901)
Author : Frank Norris (1870-1902)

Time : 19th century
Place : Pacific and Southwester (U. S. A), Bonneville
Theme : Finacial Corruption and Domination of Railroad Industary
Type : Roman Fleure
School : Naturalism
Main Characters:
1. Vanamee
2. Presley
3. Hilma Tree
4. Annixter
5. Magnus Derrick
6. S. Behrman
7. Dyke
8. Shelgrim

1. A Man's woman (1900)
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2. The Joyous Miracle (1906)

3. A Deal With Wheat (1903)
4. Mc Teague (1899)
5. Bix (1899)
6. Moran of Lady Letty. (1898)
First Paragraph:
Just after passing Caraher's saloon, on the Country Road that
ran south from Bonneville and that divided the Broderson
ranch from that of Los Muertos.
Plot
The octopus is the Pacific and southwestern Railroad, which in the course of the story
economically strangles the wheat farmers of California, who are led by Magnus Derrick,
the owner of a large ranch near the town of Bonneville. The railroad is the most powerful
vested interest in the state; it dominates the government. Gains total control of Bonneville,
and is behind the movement of all prices and interest rates.
Many of the farmers hold their land on option from the railroad, and it dispossesses them at
will; it also manipulates freight charges to lower the price of wheat and thereby ruin other
farmers when it wants their land too. Derrick's direct opponent is the railroad agent
Behman, who is eventually suffocated when he falls into the wheat he has plundered from
the ruined and dispossessed farmers, wheat that he was intending to sell at a huge profit.
Derrick himself is ruined when the railroad succeed in bribing his son Lyman, a lawyer on
the state commission, to act against the farmers' interests. Other leading characters are
Dyke, a railroad engineer who wants to be farmer, and Shelgrim, the railroad president,
who blandly tells the protesting poet, Presley, that what has happended has nothing to do
with the people:
It is all matter of economic forces and the law of supply and demand.
Critical Evaluation
This novel is the first part of the writer's uncompleted trilogy. The Epic of the wheat. The
second volume is The Pit (1903); the third volume was never written. If Norris rigorously
had followed the diciplines of naturalistic fiction laid down by Zola, this novel would have
emerged as a purely scientific sociological document.
But though critics continued to disagree about the novel, they are in accord on one point,
that Norris is not detached about the people or the events that fill his board cancas. The
illogical Norris's thinking, his narrative force comples thereader to continue without lose of
enthusiasm to the very last page of the long novel. The Octopus is rich in memorable
episodes, the dance at Annixtes barn, the jock rabbit hunt, the pitched battle between the
farmers and railroad men and the death of S. Behrman, and in a host of unforgettable if
often overdrawn characters. Its greatest weakness is the overly long, rhapsodic passages
about Vanamee and his dead love, Angele. Yet even those have at times a lyric tenderness.
Sister Carrie (1900)
Author : Theodore Dreiser (Herman Albert) (1871-1945)
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Time : 19th century (August 1889)

Place : Midwestern – Columbia - Chicago
Theme : Spiritual Poverty Inside of Financial Poverty
Type : Psychological, Social
School : Naturalistic
Main Characters:
1. Grorge Hurstwood
2. Caroline Meeber
3. Charles Drouet
4. Julia Hurstwood
5. Robert Ames
6. Mr. Vance

1. Jannie Gerhardt (1911)
2. The Financier (1912)
3. The Titan (1914)
4. The Genius (1915)
5. An American Tragedy (1925)
6. Tragic American (1981)
7. Look at Russia (1928)
8. America Worth Saving (1941)
9. Natural and Supernatural (1916) (Play)
10. The Hond of the Porter (1918)
First Paragraph:
When Caroline Meeber boarded the afternoon train for
Chicago, he total outfit consisted of a small trunk a cheap
imitation alligator – skin satchel.
Plot
It tells the story of Carrie Meeber, a Midwestern country girl who moves to Chicago. She
meets a saleman called Charles Deouet, and after a period of unemployment becomes is
mistress. Soon, however, hse becomes disillusioned with him and takes up with his friend
George Hurstwood, a middle – aged, married restaurant manager. He embezzles money and
elopes with Carrie to New York, where he opens a saloon which process failure. Their
liaison continues for some three years, until Carrie is forced by their impoverishment to
work as a chorus girl to support them. Though she makes an impression in a small part and
begins what is to become a successful career, the fails to find happiness. She desert
Hurstwood, who end up a drunken begger on Skid Row. Eventually, and unknown to
Carrie, he commits suicide.
Critical Evaluation
The writer is the first and greatest of America's natiralists. His novels do record the effect
of "Chemisms" inner forces that enslave the wit. He describes the powerful impact of
natural surrounding that produce "desperate results in the soul of man".
Mencken Called this novel a "broken back" novel because cond half for many readers, the
move interesting concentrates upon Hurstwood.
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Babitt (1922)
Author : Sinclair Lewis (1885-1951) (Novel Prize Winner 1930)

Time : 19th century (1920's)
Place : Zenith, American Midwest
Theme : Social Corrupted Life
Type : Social Satire
School : Realistic, Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. G. F. Babitt
2. K. Escott
3. Vergil Gunch
4. Mrya Babitt
5. Zila Reisling
6. Verona Babitt
7. Mrs. Danial (Tanis) Judique
8. Harward Little Field

1. Our Mr. Wernn (1914)
2. The Trail of Hawk (1915)
3. The Main Street (1920)
4. Arrowsmith (1925)
5. Elmer Gantry (1927)
6. Dodsworth (1929)
7. The Prodigal Parents (1938)
8. Bethel Merrday (1940)
9. Giden Planish (1943)
10. World So Wide (1951)
Plot
It depicts the complancency and materialism of G. F. Babbitt, a real estate agent and
representative middle class family man from the city of Zenth in the American Midwest.
After his only real friend the artist turned businessman Paul Riesling, Shoots his wife and is
sent to prison, Babbitt rebels against commonplace values: he begins a love affair with the
widow Tanis Judique, refuses to join the Good Citizen's League and becomes influenced by
the socialist lawyer Seneca Doane. But he soon finds the price of nonconformity too great
and once against resigns himself to superficial values of his business culture. His
reconciliation with society is completed by his acceptance back in booster club. At the end
of the novel, his son (ironically named Theodore Roosevelt Babbit) himself rebels against
the wishes of his family and the town by leaving college and marraying hastily. Babbitt
supports him in his rebellion, hoping that unlike himself, his son will be able to do as he
wants and lead a more independent and fulfilled life.
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Critical Evaluation
Babbitt is a pungent satire about a man who typifies complacent mediocrity.
G. F. Babbitt reveals in his own popularity his ability to make money, his fine automobile
and his peny penching generosity. Constantly discontented Babbitt is one of the most
convincing creations in American Literature.
The Great Gatsby (1925)
Author : F. Scott, Fitzgerald (1896-1940)

Time : 1929
Place : Long Island, New York
Theme : Impossibility of Capturing of the past by money
Type : Social
School : Realism, Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Jay Gatsby
2. Nicl Gatsby
3. Daisy Buchanan
4. Tom Buch
5. Jordan Baker
6. Myrtle Wilson
7. George Wilson

1. Tales of the Jazz Age (1922)
2. The Vegetable (1923) (Play)
3. All the Sad Young Men (1926)
4. The Crack – Up (1945)
5. The Pat Hobby Stories (1926)
6. Tender is the Night (1934)
First Paragraph:
In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me
some advice that. I've been tur ning in my mind ever since.
Plot
The narrator, Nick Carraway, rents a cottage in West Egg, long Island, next door to the
mansion of Jay Gatsby and across the watter from the home of Tom Buchanan and his wife
Daisy, Carraway's cousin. Gatsby's mansion is the secene of extralvagant nightly parties,
attended by many people who are univited and do not know their host. Carraway, both
cynical and curious about Gatsby, soon becomes his confidant.
He learns that Gatsby had met Daisy while he was in the army during World War I, and that
they had fallen in love and planned to marry. Daisy, however, had grown impatient for him
to return and had married Tom, a rich though boring man from Yale. Having risen from his
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lowly origins as Jimmy Gatz through dubious business deals, Gatsby is obsessed with
winnig Daisy back. He persuades Carraway to arrange a meeting between them, and Daisy,
after initial resistance, succumbs to her former lover's generous attentions, impressed by his
newly aquired wealth.
Tom, Daisy, Carraway and Carraway's girlfriend, Jordan Baker, spend a day togther in New
York. Tom, who himself has had a longstanding affair with Myrtle Wilson, the wife of a
Long Island garage owner, becomes aware of Daisy's attentions to Gatsby. Gatsby tries to
convince Daisy to leave Tom. Tom, in turn, tries to discredit Gatsby by revealing that he
has made his money from bootlegging.
Gatsby and Daisy leave in Tom's automobile, with Daisy driving. Myrtle Wilson,
recognizing the car it passes her husband's garage, runs out into the street and is hit and
killed by Daisy, who drives on. Taking revenge on Gatsby, Tom tells Wilson It was Gatsby
who killed his wife, and Gatsby, attempting to protect Daisy, lets the blame fall on himself.
Wilson murders Gatsby and then commits suicide. Carraway is left to arrange Gatsby's
funeral, which hardly anyone attends, and Tom and Daisy retreat "back into their money.
Or their money, or their vast carelessness, or whatever it was that kept them together".
Critical Evakuation
Fitzgerald, the prophet of the Jazz Age, inherited the dream that was American – the
promise that young people could become anything that they choose through hard work. He
said "America's great promise is that something is going to happen but it never does.
American is the moon that never tose. This indictment of the American Dream could well
serve as an epigraph for Great Catsby. Jay Gatsby pursues his dream of romantic success
without ever understanding that it has escaped him.
He fails to understand that he cannot recapture the past (love for Daisy) with money.
The Sun Also (1926)
Author : Erenest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Time : 1920s
Place : Paris – Pamplona - Spain
Theme : Maladjustment, and despair on the Post War weary generation
Type : Social
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Robert Cohn
2. Bill Gorton
3. Mike Camphell
4. Jake Barnes
5. Prdro Romero
6. Montoya

1. Green Hills of Africa (1935)
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2. For Whom Bell Tolls (1940)

3. A Farewell To Arms (1929)
4. To have Not to Have (1937)
5. Island in the Stream (1970)
6. The Garden of Eden (1986)
7. Dangerous Summer (1985)
8. The Old Man amd Sea (1952)
9. Death in Afternoon (1932)
10. Winner Take Nothing (1933)
First Paragraph:
Robert Cohn was once middleweight boxing champion of
Pronceton. Do not think I am very much impressed by that as a
boxing title, but it meant a lot to Cohn.
Plot
The story is narrated by Jake Barnes, as American journalist who has been rendered
sexually important by a wound suffered during world War I. Jake is in love with the queen
of the pleasure – seekers, Lady Brett Ashley. Brett returns his love but, knowing that
consummation is impossible, agrees to marry Mike Campbell. Jake live according to a self
– teaght emotional pragmatism, which is contrasted with the selfpitying sentimentalism of
his acquaintance Robert Cohn. Rober, under Brett' spell, joins her, Mike, and Jake on a
jaunt to Spain to witness the fiesta and bullfights at Pamplona. At the bullring Jake finds
meaning and hope in the ritual which pits man against beast, and life against death; he
especially admires the young matador Pedro Romero, whose skill, bravery, and moral
earnestness charavterize him as a true Hemingway hero. The others in his group, however,
remain true to form, and the fiesta degenerates into a series of brawls. Angered by Brett's
seduction of the matador, Cohn beats up both Remeroand Jake, and the party isintegrates.
Brett runs of with Romero. Jake retreats to a seaide resort in an effort to regain moral
stability, but his recovery is interrupted by a telegram from Brett pleading that he come to
her aid in Madrid. There she tells him that she has sent Romero away because she does not
want to corrupt him further. In a last taxi ride around the city, Brett and Jake face the
hopelessness of their situation. Brett clings to the notion that they "could have had such a
damned good time toghther", but Jake responds that is would be "pretty" to think so, his
word for finally rejecting false hopes.
Critical Evaliation
This early Hemingway's novel reflects the period following world war I, a period of
maladjustment and despair on the part of a war weary generation for whom life had lost its
signigicance. The novel realistically describes life on the Left Bank in Paris and the color
and excitement of a Spanish fiesta. Overal the theme of the novel is indicated by
Hemingway's two epigraphs. Getrude Stien's comment that "you are all a lost generation".
Suggests the ambiguous and pointless lives of Hemingway's exiles as they aimlessly
wander about the Continent drinking, making love and traveling from place and party. The
quote from Ecclesiastes which gives the novel its Title, implies a larger frame of refrence, a
sense of prominence, order and value. The search for values and the eillingness to pay the
price, first to acquire them and then to live by them are what separate some of
Hermingway's exiles from simple pointless hedonism.
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AFarewell To Arms (1929)
Author : Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961)

Time : World War I (1917-8)
Place : Italy - Switzerland
Theme : Absurdity of Life and Love
Type : Social
School : Impressionistic Realism, Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Rinaldi
2. Catherine Barkley
3. Frederic Henry
4. Priest
5. Count Greff
6. Helen Freguson
First Paragraph:
In the late summer of that year we lived in a house in a village
that looked across the river and plain to the mountains.
Plot
The story focuses on Frederic Henry, an American ambulance driver for the Italian army.
He meets a young English nurse, Catherine Barkley, at a military hospital and they begin a
relationship which gradually becomes passionate. When Frederic is severely wounded in an
ene,y mortar attack and is sent to Milan for surgery and therapy, Catherine follows hin and
obtains nursing position in the hospital where he is being treated. Shortly before he is return
to active duty Cathrtine informs him that she is pregnant. The two decide not to marry (as
their private commitment is deemed bond enough), but look forward to the brith of their
first child.
Frederic returns to active duty but, following disastrous engagement with Austrian forces,
the Italians are compelled to retreat. Eventually, Frederic deserts and flees to neutral
Switzerland with Catherine. In Montreux they enjoy and idyllic autumn and winter, remote
from the war. In March 1918 Catherine gives brith, after a difficult labour and emergency
surgery, to a stillborn son; she dies from complications soon after the birth. The story of the
romance is set alongside a powerful portrayal of the horrors of war and its threat of the total
destruction of civilization.
Critical Evaluation
Ernest Hemingway once referred to A Farwell To Aims. As his Romeo and Juliet.
Without insisting on a qualitative comparson several paralles are obvious.
Both works are about "star – crossed" lovers, both sho erotic filrration thatrrapidly develop
into serious, intense mature love affairs and both describe the romances against a backdrop
of social and political turmoil. Whether the novel finally qualifies as tragic is a matter of
personal opinion, but it certainlu represents, for Hemingway, an attempt to broaden his
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concerns from the aimless tragicomic problems of expariates in The sun Also Rises (1926)
to the fundamental question of life's meaning in the face of human mortality.
The Old Man And The Sea
Author : E. Hermingway (1899-1961)

Time : Late 19th century
Place : Latin American
Theme : Challenge With the Fate - Determinism
Type : Navgatory
School : Realistic – Naturalistic - Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Manolin
2. Santiago
First Paragraph:
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf
stream and he had gone eughty – four days now without taking
a fish.
Plot
Luckless but undaunted, old Santiago has fished the Gulf Strean off Havana for eight – four
days without catching a fish. For the first forty days, the boy Manolin went with him, but
now his parents have sent Manolin to another boat. Still the boy serves the old man,
bringing him food, beer, bait, and helping him carry his tackle to the skiff. In the old man's
shack, they discuss baserball, the great Di Maggio, the splendid hauls they have made in the
past. Alone, the old man sleeps and dreams of his youth in Africa and of the lions who
played on the beaches.
At dawn on the eighty- fifth day, Santiago sets again, confident that somewhere in the sea
he loves like a woman is the big fish he must catch. He sails far out into the Stream, baits
and sets his lines, and sets his lines, and drops them into deep water.
Waiting he watches a school of dolphin pursue flying fish and he curses a malevolent
Portugueses man – of – war that drifts near by. He catches a small tuna and waits hopefully
for the big strike. When it comes, it is deceptively gentle, the merest tug, but Santiago
knows that it is a marlin nibbiling his bait 600 feet below. Speaking aloud, the old man
urges the marlin to sample more of the bait. When he senses the right moment, Santiago
pulls hard and settles the hook. The long battle has begun.
With the noon sun high and hot, Santiago feefs his marlin the line it meeds as it swims off
toeing the skiff northwest, away from land. Santiago can do nothing except wait for the fish
to tire. Meanwhile, he grips the heavy line in his callused hands and braces it across his
naked shoulders. All afternoon the fish tows the boat, then after sunset and into the
chillnight. Although he widhes he had Manolin with him to help, the old man is determined
to conquer the fish alone. At the same time he begins to think about the fish at the end of
his line and about other great fish he has caught.
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During the night the fish lurches, pulling Santiago down on his face and cutting his cheek.
But the old man never relaxes his vigil.
By morning the old man is stiff as well as hungry. Still he cannot exert tension on the line
lest the fish break it. As Santiago talks to the birds overhead, the fish suddenly surges and
the line cuts through the old man's hand. Despite his pain, the old man is pleased, for he
senses that his prey has begun to tire. He wonders what the fish intends and what he will
do. He wishes that he might feed the fish, his brother, but knows that his own strength must
be "the greater if he is to prevail, and worries about the paralyzing cramp that stiffens his
left hand.
Suddenly the line grows slack; the fish durfaces, leaping out of the water. It is the largest
marline Santiago has ever seen, longer even than his skiff. Santiago, prays for victory, sure
that he can "show him what a man can do and what a man endures". All afternoon and
again into the night the fish tows the skiff, now to the east. To bolster himself, Santiago
recalls a titanic hand wrestle he won years ago at a tavern. Hungry, he catches and eats a
dilpin. During the night the marline jumps again, cutting Santiago's hands once more. He
dreams of African and the lions.
At sunrise on the third morning, the line almost trars through Santiago's hand as the fish
begins a series of leaps. Now the old man begins to shorten the line even though each tug
lacerates his hands a new. He washes his bleeding hands in the sea, then continues to draw
in his line as the fast-tiring marline circles the skiff in ever narrowing ares. Just before the
fish is close enough to harpoon, the old man pleads with it not kill them both. For a fleeting
moment, in admitation – most in love – he exclaims that he would not care of the noble
creature, at once his brother and his enemy in nature, killed him. But the old man knows
that he must overwhelm the marline. He harpoons the mighty fish and lashest it is the side
of his boat.
The retuen to Havana is a nightmare that begins an hour after the marlin has been tied to the
skiff. A Mako shark attacks the corpse and mutilates it before the old man can kill it. As
other sharks come, the old man fights them off tenaciously, defending not only his own
victory but the dignity of the dead marlin. He wonders whether it was a sin to kill his fish,
but he realizes that man must struggle against defeat by nature. Sorry that the fish is dead, is
corpse ravished, he knows also that he had to do what he did. Although he continues to
battle the sharks, his struggle is in vain. His knives break, and his torn hand will not even
hold the club he tries to wield. All he can do is steer his boat toward harbor as the ravenous
sharks strip the marlin to a skeketon. To himself, Santiago says that he went out too far.
That was why he suffered defeat.
His both beached, only the head and tail of his catch remaining, the old man shoulders his
mast and climbs slowly up the hill to his shack. Once he stumbles and falls, but he rises and
struggles on. He sleeps sprawled face down on his bed, his arms ourstretched, his palms
turned up. Manolin comes to the old man in the morning and tends to him. Despite
Santiago's insistence that his luck has turned bad. Manolin says that it will turn good again
and that he wants so sail again with the old man. As the novel ends, the old man sleeps,
dreaming about his lions.
Manolin sits beside him.
Critical Evaluation
Read literally as an adventure yarn, The Old Man and the Sea grips young and old. The
prose is simple, the approximations of Spanish dialogue poetically affecting and
appropriate, the narrative pattern lucid and economical. Sanriago's stubborn courage,
rugged strength, and marvelous skill sustain suspense till the tragic end. As almost every
critic has noted, however, the reader who casts for subtler meanings may net a more
rewarding haul. Hemingway said of the story that the old man, the boym the sea, the fish,
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and the sharks were all real. "But if I made them good and true enough," he went on, "they
would mean many things."
For some readers the novel has deep, religious implications. Santiago's scared palms, the
crosslike mast he carries up the hill – these symbols suggest the Christian overtones that
sound throughout the tale.
Look Homeward, Angel (1929
Author : Thomas Wolf (1900-1938)

Time : 1900-1920s
Place : North California
Theme : Artists, alone among crowd, Self – Exiled Artists
Type : Social - Psychological
School : Impressionistic – Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Stere Gant
2. Eliza Gant
3. Oliver Gant
4. Laura James
5. Margaret Leonard
6. John Leonard

1. Welcome To Our City (1923)
2. The Web and The Rock (1930)
3. The Return of Buck Gavin (1923) (Play)
4. A Portaite of Bascome Hawke (1932)
5. Of Time into the River (1935)
6. From Death to Morning (1935)
7. The Story of a Novel (1936)
First Paragraph:
A destiny that the English to the Dutch is strange enough; but
one that leads from Epsom into Pennsylcania and thence into
hills that shut in Altamont over the pound coral cry of the cock.
Plot
Eugene, the Gant family, came into the world Eliza Gant was forty – two years old. His
father, Oliver, went on periodic drinking sprees to forget his unfulfilled wanderlust that had
brought him to Altamont in the hills of old Catawba. When Eugene was born, his father
was asleep in a drunken stupor.
Eliza disapproved of her husband's debauches, but she lacked the imagination to understand
their cause. Oliver, who had been raised amid the plenty of a Pennsylvania farm, had no
comprehension of the privantion and suffering that had existed in the South after the Civil
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War, the cause of the hoarding and acquistiveness of his wife and her Pentland relations in
the Catwba hill country.
Eliza bore the burden of Oliver's drinking and promiscuousness until Eugene was four year
old. Then she departed for St. Louis, taking all the children but the oldest daughter, Daisy,
with her. It was 1904, the yaer of the great St. Louis World's Fair, and Eliza had gone to
open a boardinghouse for her visiting fellow townspeople.
The idea was abhorrent to Oliver; he stayed in Altamont.
Eliza's sojourn in St. Louis ended abruptly when her twelve – year – old son Grover fell ill
of typhoid and lied. Stunned, she gathered her remaining children to her and went home.
Young Wugene was a shy, awkwaed boy with dark, brooding eues. He was, like his
ranting. Brawling father, a dreamer. He was not popular with his schoolmates, who sensed
instinctively that he was different and made him pau the price. At home, he was the cictim
of his sisters' and brothers' taunts and torments. His one champion was his brother Ben,
though even Ben had been conditioned by the Gants' unemotional damily life to give his
caresses as cuffs. Yet there was little time for Eugene's childish daydreaming. Eliza belived
that early jobs taught her boys manliness and self – reliance. Ben got up at three o'clock
every morning to deliver papers. Luke had been an agent for The Saturday Evening Post
since he was twelve; Eugene was put under his wing. Althuogh the boy loathed the work,
he was forced every Thursday to corner customers and keep up a continious line of chatter
until he broke down their sales resistance.
Eugene was not yet eight when his parents separated. Eliza had bought the Dixeland
boardinghouse as a good investment. Helen remained at the old house with her father, and
Diasy married and left town. Mrs. Gant took Eugene with her, but Ben and Luck were left
to shift for themselves, to shuttle back and forth between the two houses. Eugene grew to
detest his new home. When the Dixieland was crowded, there was no privacy, and Eliza
advertised the Dixieland on printed cards that Eugene had to distribute to customers on his
magazine route and to travelers arriving at the Altamont station.
Although life at the boardinghouse was drabness itself, the next four years were the golden
days of Eugene's youth, for he was allowed to go the Leonards' private school. Margaret
Leonard, the tubercular wife of the schoolmaster, recognized Eugene's hunger for beauty
and love, and she was able to find in literature the words that she herself hadnot the power
to utter. By the time that he was fifteen, Eugene knew the best and the greatest lyrics almost
line for line. Oliver Gant, who had been fifty when his youngest son was born, was
beginning to feel his years. Although he was never told, he was slowly dying of cancer.
Eugene was fourteen when World War I broke out. Ben who wanted to join the Canadian
Army, was warned by his doctor that he would be refused because he had weak lungs.
At fifteen, Eugene was sent to the university at Pulpit Hill. It was his father's plan that
Eugene should be well on his way toward being a great statesman before the time came for
old Oliver to die. Eugene's youth and tremendous height made him a natural target for
dormitory horseplay, and his shy, awkward manners were intensified by this ignorance of
the school's traditions and rituals. He roomed alone.
His only friend were four wastrels, one of whom contributed to Eugene's social education
by introducing him to a brothel.
That summer, back at the Dixieland, Eugene met laura James. Sitting with her on the front
potch at night, he was trapped by her quiet smilr and clear, candideyes. He became her
lover on a summer afternoon of sunlit green and gold, but Laura went home to visit her
parents and wrote Eugene that she was about to marry a boy to whom she had been engaged
for nearly a year.
Eugene went back to Pulpit Hill that fall, still determined to go his way alone.
Although he had no intimates, he gradually became a campus leader. Tom commonplace
fellows of his world tolerantly made room for the one who was not like them.
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In October of the following year Eugene received an urgent summons to come home. Ben
was finally paying the price of his parent's neglect and the drudgery of his life: He was
dying of pneumonia. Eliza had neglected to call a comperent doctor until it was too late,
and Oliver, as he sat at the foot of the dying boy's bed, could think only of the expense the
burial would be. As the famiy kept their vigil through Ben's last night, they were touched
with the realization of the greatness of the boy's generous soul. Ben was given, as a final
irony, the best funeral that money could buy.
With Ben went the family's last pretenses. When Eugene came back to the Dixieland after
graduation, Eliza was in control of Oliver's property and selling it as quickly as she could in
order to use the money for further land speculations. She had disposed of their old home.
Oliver lived in a back room at the boardinghouse. His children watched each other
suspiciously as he wasted away, each concerned for his or her own inheritance. Eugene
managed to remain unembroiled in their growing hatred of one another, but he could not
avoid being a target for that hatred. Helen, Luck, and Steve had always resented his
schooling. In September, before he left for Harvard to begin graduate work, Luck asked
Eugene to sign a release saying that he had received his inheritance as tuition and school
expenses. Though his father had promised him an education when he was still a child and
Eliza was to pay for his first year in the North, Eugene was glad to sign. He was free, and
he was never coming back to Altamont.
On his last night at home, he had a vision of his dead brother Ben in the moonlit square at
midnight – Ben, the unlived of the Gants and the most lovable. It was for Eugene as well a
vision of old, unhappy, unforgotten years, and in his restlees imaguination, he dreamed of
the hidden door which he would escape forever the mountain – rimmed world of his
boyhood.
Critical Evaluation
Essentially plotless, Look Homeward, Angel covers roughly the first twently years of the
life of both Thomas Wolf and his autobiographic hero, Eugene Gant. The three sections of
the novel portray the first three stages in Eugene's life: his first twelve years, his four years
at the Leonard's school, and his four years at the university. Wolfe's subtitle. A Story of the
Buried Life, partly suggests the way in which the story is developed. Though there is much
external action, talk, and description, the reafer is frequently taken into the counsciousness
of Eugene as well as into that of Ben, Eliza, and Oliver Gant Eugene's double inheritance,
from his rhetoric – spouting, self – pitying, histrionic father and from his more practical and
dominating mother, brings him into a series of conflicts with family, school, society, and all
that is outside himself. He is the young artist seeking isolatopm from a world that
constantly impinges upon him. Like most highly imaginative and passionately intense
young persons, he reacts through both mind and senses to this external world, and his
responses are often phrased in a lyrical prose that sweeps the reader emotionally along with
Eugene. Young Gant is inclined to take himself very seriously, as when he becomes a hero
in his many fantasies. Yet he is capable of self – mockery, particularly as he is growing out
of adolescence during his university years.
Stylistically, the novel shows an amazing variety: sensuous, evovative descriotion;
symbolism and shifting meanings; realistic, pungent dialogue; bawdy humor; parody and
burlesque; satire; fantasy; and dithyrambic passages in which the author becomes
intoxicated with the flow of his own words. The shifts of styke are often so abrupt that the
reader needs a keem awareness to appreciate what Wolfe is doing. Look Homeward, Angel
is a novel of youth slowly developing into maturitym and perhaps it is best appreciated by
readers who can more or less identify with young Wugene. Yet older readers can also lose
themselves in it, remembering the turmoil, the joys, and the sorrows of their own
maturation.
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The Sound and The Fury (1929)
Author : William Faulkner (1897-1962)

Time : 1928-1910-1928-1928
Place : Mississipi
Point of view : Shift of View – Stream of Consciousness
1. First Chapter: Benjy
2. Second Chapter:Quentin
3. Third Chapter: Jason
4. Forth Chapter: External Point of View
Theme : Time, Fluidity of Time
Type : Reginal
School : Psychological Realism - Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Quentin Compson
2. Caroline Compson
3. Jason Compson (A lawyer and heavy drinking)
4. Benjy Compson
5. Uncle Maury
6. Dilsey (nobles character, A negro servant)
7. Luster
8. Miss Quentin
9. Dalton Ames
10. Candace Compson (Caddy – self sacrified)

1. As I Lay Dying (1939)
2. Mosquitoes (1927)
3. The Marble Faen (1924)
4. Light in August (1932)
5. Flags and Dust (sartoris) (1929)
6. Absolam Absolam (1936)
7. Go Down Moses (1942)
8. Requiem for a Nun (1951)
9. A Fable (1954)
10. The Town (1957)
11. The Mansion (1959)
First Paragraph:
Through the fence, between the curling flower spaces, I could
see them hitting. They were coming to ward where the flag was
and I went along the fence.
Plot
A complex account of the history of the Compson family, it is dicided into four section,
largely reliant on STREAM OF CONCIOUSNESS. The first (7 April 1928) is narrated by
Benjy, the youngest member and an "idiot". Like his brothers Quentin and Jason, he is
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chiefly preoccupied with his sister Caddy. For Benjy, her disappearance amounts to the loss
of the centre of his universe. The second section is told by Quentin, a Harvard freshman, on
the day (2 June 1910) he commits suicide. In the third section (6 April 1928) Jason. The
eldest son, reveals his bitterness and anger at the opportunities he has lost because of the
irresponsibility and selfshness which he feels predominate in his family. The final section
(8 April 1928, Easter Sunday) concentrates on the Compsons' black servant, Dilsey, and her
grandson, Luster. An appendix which Faulkner added in 1946 revoews the history of the
Compson family from 1699 to 1945 and ends with this assessment of the blacks who served
the Compsons: "They endured".
Critical Evakuation
The title is an allusion to Shakespeare's play, Macbeth, Act V, Scene V, lines 19-28. "Life"
say Macbeth, "is a tale told by an idiot" full of the "Sound and Fury, signiging nothing".
Much of the novel is written in the Negro dialect of the Southern Sate of America. The
writer in the Negro dialect of the sounthern State of America. The writer has been
influenced by Don Quixote (1605), Heart of Darkness (1899), Waste Land (1922) and
Ulysses (1920). It is an extremely complex yet rewarding novel from 1910 to 1928 (Benjy's
Brithday, April, 17th, 1928), the decline of once aristocratic but now degenerated Southern
family. Faulkner's method of narration, involving the concisousness of different members
and servants of Compons family, provides four distinct psychological point of view. Other
divices also add density to Faulkner's searching revelation of the fate of modern man. His
fiction is involved with history of the South's decay. Two of his major themes are the white
man's guilt about stavery and the rape of the land, sestruction of old South by the Civil war.
The Catcher in the Rve (1951)
Author : J. D. Salinger (1919- )

Time : Late 1940s
Place : New York City and California
Theme : Isolation – Lonliness – Alone among crowd.
Type : Dramatic
School : Realism - Symbolism
Main Characters:
1. Holden Caulifield
2. Ackley
3. Stradlater
4. Mr. Spencer
5. Phoebe Caulfield
6. Mr. Antolini

1. None Stories
2. Franny and Zooey (1961)
3. Carpenters (1963)
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4. Seymour: An Introduction (1963)

5. Ian Hamilton's Biography (1987)
First Paragraph:
If you really want to hear about it, the first thing you'll
probably want to know is where I was born and what my lousy
childhood was like and how my parents were occupied.
Plot
By the age of sixteen, Holden Caulfield had been dismissed from three private school
because of academic problem; Pencey Prep School, was his fourth such failure. Even more
humiliating was his losing the fencing term's equipment on the subway during a trip into
New York City. His history teacher, Mr. Spencer, tried to talk with him, expressing concern
over Holden's repeated failure, lack of motivation, and nonchalant attitude about his future.
Holden, meanwhile, was thinking of the ducks in the lagoon in Central Park, wondering
where they went during the winter when the pons froze.
That night, Holden learned that his roommate, ward Stradlater, had a date with Jane
Gallagher, a young woman whom Holden liked and admired. Holden knew Ward's
reputation well, and he worried about what might happen to Jane on the date. When Ward
returned hours later, Holden got into a fight with him. After Ward left, Holden tried to talk
to a neighbor, an unpopular student named Robert Ackley, but all that the usually
inquisitive Robert wanted to do was sleep. Instead of waiting the few days before the start
of Christmas vacation to go home, Holden impulsicvely decided to leave the school that
night, take a train to New York, and stay in the city by himself until it was time to go home.
Holden took a taxicab from the train station of the Edmont Hotel, where he would stay for
several days. He wanted to call his little sister, Phoebe, but was afraid that his parents
would find out what he had done; he hesitated to call Jane Gallagher for similar reasons. So
he spent his time in bars, but he felt as out of placr in the upscale nightclubs as in the cheap
hotel lounges. An elecator operator at his hitel persuaded Holden to invite a prostitute to his
room, but Holden and the young womans, Sunny, only talked. A dispute over five dollars
led the elevator operator, Maurice, to beat Holden whiled Sunny took the money.
Increasing depressed, Holden called a girlfriend, Sally Hayes, and they went ti a play
together. While discussing the play, Holden revealed his deep sense of dissatisfaction and
alienation, but Sally could not relate to his feelings. When Holden impulsively suggested
reunning off to New England together, Sally dismissed his ideas as ridiculous, failing to
understand the feelind of desperation that prompted it. Angered, Holden insulted Sally, who
cried before parting from him.
After a meeting with an old schoolmate, Carl Luce, ended in similar disappointment,
Holden decided to sneak home to visit Phoebe. Misquoting a Robert Burns poem, Holden
told Phoebe that he envisioned himself as "the catcher in the rye" – an imagingry 'person
responsible for catching little children and keeping them from falling off a cliff as they
played in a field of rye. Holden gave Phoebe his red hunting hat and slipped out of the
apartment when his parents returned home.
Holden accepted an invitation from one of his former trachers, Mr. Antolini, to spend the
night at his apartment. They had a long talk in which Antolini expressed many of the same
concerns that Mr. Spencer had shared with Holden earlier.
Antolini believed that Holden was "riding for some kind of a terrible, terrible fall".
He foresaw Holden growing more bitter and alienated, "dying nobly, one way or another,
for some highly unworthy cause." When confronted with this prospect, Holden grew tired
and unable to concentrate. He went to bed, and, a short time later, he awakened to find Mr.
Antolini stroking his head. Frightened, he fled the apartment and slep on a bench in Grand
Central Station.
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After experiencing a panic attack while waking down the street, Holden decided to run
away: He would fulfill his misanthropic fantasy by living in a cabin in the woods and
pretending that he could neither speak nor hear. He met Phoebe ome last time. They fought
over her wanting to come with him, but they reconciled quickly, and she persuaded him to
return home with her. She gave him back his red hunting hat to keep the rain off his head as
he watched her ride a carousel, the first gesture of true empathy that he had recived or
responded to since leaving the school.
After returning home, Holden had an emotional breakdown and was institutionalized. He
looked forward to returning to school the following fall, but he displayed as little insight
into his problemd as he had that final day at Pencey Prep.
Critical Evaluation
The Catcher in the Rye is a popular and controversial novel. Its popularity, especially
among young people, attests to the psychological accuracy and insight of Salinger's
portrayal of his teenage protagonist, Holden. The controversy has centered primarily on the
novel's use of language. Because the novel is written in the first person (the only way that
ity could be written), chatacter and language are inseparable: Holden's words perfectly
reflect and expose his sense of alienation, contempt, and depression.
Holden's sense of alienation is profound. Every incident, conversation, and seting in the
novel develops and reinforces this theme. The first – person narrative focuses entirely on
Holsen, and although other people weave briefly in and out of his path, he is unable to
establish real connections with any of them. Fis short conversations with taxicab drivers,
school friends, and women are essentially alike:
No one understands (or seems to care about) what Holden is trying to express. No one
pauses to asl what is behind his musings about the Central Park ducks; no one considers the
extreme sense of loneliness and isolation that would prompt him to invite taxicab driverd
out for drinks or to call acquaintances he has not seen for years. Ward is preoccupied with
getting ready for his date (and with persuading Holden to write an English paper for him).
Robert only wants to sleep, and Sally can think of nothing but the play and the people she
knows in the audience. The places where Holden wanders – a silent dormitory an empty
hotel lobby, deserted city streets – all reinforce his sense of isolation. Yet even in crowded
bars Holden feels alone.
Holden reacts by criticizing everyone around him. Except for Phoebe and his brother Allie,
whom he idolizes, everyone he knows is a "phony," a "jerk", or a "moron". Salinger reveals
Holden's initial criticisms of people such as Ward and Robert seem valid, but by the time
that he is finding fault wish Sir Laurence Oliver and Christ's disciples, the reader that
something is definitely wrong. Holden is particulary sensitive to "phoniness", which he find
every where – in his teachers, in hisfriends, in films. Yet Holden is, in a sense, the real
"phony": He tells lies for no reason, he gives false names to people he meets, and he
pretends to be sexually experienced although he is a virgin. Holden is a study in
contradiction. He clamis to hate films, but he loves to imitate, as when he tap dances in the
bathroom a Pencey. "I'm quite illiterate, but I read a lot", he says, oblivious to the paradox.
Most important, while he obsessively critizes other, he strenuously resists any critical
examination of himself. When Spencer, Antolinr, and Phoebe try to make him face his
problems, his mind wanders, he cannot concentrate, and he becomes suddenly tired. His
resistance is not deliberate, but rather a defensive barricade that his subconscious has set up
to shelter him from the pain of self – awarness.
Holden attempts to retreat from a world that he fears and cannot understand – and adult
world that includes sex, acceptance of loss, and responsibility for self and others – by
adopting an idealized, romantic outlook. He veritably worships Phoebe and Allie
(significantly, his younger siblings); he views Jane Gallagher through a hazy mixture of
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memory and romantic illusion, remembering little more than how she kept her kings on the
back row when she played checkers. Fearing change (and, therefore, growth), he takes
comfort in museum exhibits that always stay the same, and he is horrified by obscence
graffiti scrawled on the walls of Phoebe's school, a brutal intrusion of adult reality into a
child's world. Yet Holden's romanticism, like his "catcher in the rye" fantasy, ultimately
fails him, resulting in disillusionment and depression. "I don't get hardly anything out of
anything", be says. "I'm in bad shape".
Critical reaction to the novel has been mixed, with much of the negative commentary
centering on the book's language. Holden's use of phrases such as "don’t hardly" has led
some critics to question the book's status as "serioius literature", and the numerous
profanities that pepper Holden's speech have kept the novel on banned or censored book
lists across the United States since its publication. Yet Salinger os accurate in his
representation of the speech of a sixteen – year – old boy, particularly one as bitter and
cynical as Holden. For Holden, everything is "corny", "crumby", or "lousy"; everyone is
"dopey", "scraggy", or worse – that ios how he view life. It is, in fact, difficult to imagine
the book being written any other way.
The Catcher in the Rye is characteristic of much of the literature of the early to mid –
1900's. These decades, knows in art and literature as the modern period, saw the horrors of
World War I and its aftermath, which was not only economic disaster but also a prevailing
mood of despair, disillusionment with traditional social institutions, and a profound sense
of the meaninglessness of life. Salinger's novel, which was published in 1951 but written
over the previous ten years, reflects this world – view. Seen in this light, Holden's story is
not a case history of an emotionally disturbed boy but a representative account of modern
life. In a world that gave rise to chemical weapons, the Great Depression, and the Nazi
death camps, Salinger suggests that the sensitive, intelligent person – the person who sees
the world as it is – is doomed, condemned to aliemation, paranoia, and anger. The
insensitive, self – centered, "phony" people survive and prosper, while the Holden
Caulfields remain forever trapped between fragile illusion and overwhelming despair.
Holden, who dreams of being the catcher in the rye, is rerally like one of the children
headed for the cliff – and no one is there to catch him and keep him from falling off.
The Adventures of augie March (1953)
Author : Saul Bellow (1915- )

Time : 1920-1950
Place : Chicago
Theme :Lack of Communication – Lack of Understanding
Type : Picaresque
School : Realistic - Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Augie March
2. Simon March
3. Georgie March
4. Grama Lausch
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5. William Einhorn

1. Dangling Man (1944)
2. The Victim (1947)
3. Seize The Day (1956)
4. Henderson the Rain King (1959)
5. Dean December (1982)
6. Herzog (1964)
7. Humboldt's Gift (1975)
First Paragraph:
I am an American, Chicago born – Chicago, that somber City,
and go at things as I have tought myself free – syle, and will
make the record in my own way.
Plot
Augie March is one of three sons born to a feebleminded Jewish woman on Chcago's West
Side. He attends but does not finish college, becomes involved briefly union organizing,
travels to Mexico, returns to the USA and joins the navy, marries and, after leaving the
service, goes to Eruope to write his "memoir". In it he records his encounters with the
people who have shaped (or tried to shape) his life.
The first, and perhaps most important, is his Grandma Lausch, a Machiavellian grande
dame who lives with the Marches. There are also William Einborn, the brilliant and wealty
cripple for whom the teenaged Augie works; the wealthy Renlings from Evanston, who
want to adopt him; Mini Villar the tough waitress who becomes pregnant by another man
and whom the helps to obtain an abortion; Thea Fenchel, the rich marries woman who
taked him with her to Mxico, where she plans to divorce her husband; the millionaire
Robey, who thires Augie to help him write a masterwork defining the nature of man; Stella
Chesney, the showgirl he marries; and the lunatic scientist Bateshaw, with whom he shares
a lifeboat after their ship has been torpedoed.
Critical Evaluation
Unlike many naturalistic novelists, however, Saul Bellow seeks meaning in facts; he is not
confined to the novelist is simply an objective, amoral reporter of life as one finds it, a
recorder of life among the lowly, the immoral, the poverty – stricken. Morecover, he does
not permit his character Augie March to be merely a creature of environment, molded by
forces outside himself, or within himself, over which he has no control. The Adventures of
Augie March can be read at a deeper level than environmental determinism. Augie is
capable of intellectual activity of a reiatively high order, of knowing what he is struggling
with and struggling for. Throughtout his life, he learns that other people want to make him
over. Grandma Lausch, an elderly Russian Jew of fallen fortunes who lives with the
Marches, tries to form the boy, and be rebels, Later Mr. and Mrs. Renling, well-to-do
shopkeepers in a fashionable Chicago suburb and Augie's employers, want to make him
over, even adopt him, but he rebels. Augie's brother Simon, who achieves wealth and
considerable respectability, tries to make a new man of Augie and finds Augie rebellious.
Varioius. Varioius women in Augie's life, including Tea Fenchel, Augie's erstwhile mistress
(whom he follows to Mexico to hunt iguanas with an eagle), try to recast Augie's nature.
They, too, fail, for above all Augie reguses to be molded into someone else's image of what
he oufht to be.
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What does augie want to be, that he refuses to be cast in any mold suggested by the peoplw
about him? He wants to become something, for he is always searching but he never
seriously accepts any goal. He want always to be independent in act and spirit, and he
achieves some sort of independence, empty though it is. He wants to be someone, to
achieve all of which he is capable, but he never finds a specific goal or pattern. By refusing
to commit himself to anythind, he ends up accomplishing virtually nothing. It is a sad fact
of his existence that he comes to be a bit envious of his mentally deficient brother Georgie,
who has mastered some of the elements of shoes repairing. Bellolw seems to be saying
through Augie that it is passible to have a fate without a function. Yet, as he presents the
character, Bellow shows that without a function no one, including Augie March, can have a
fate. The reader cannot be sure whether the irony is intentional.
Another view of the novel that is both logical and fruitful is to regard it at the level of social
comment. Most remarkable at this level is the section of American society in which Augie
March moves. The fact that Augie is Jew is literally beaten into him by neighborhood
toufhs, including those among the Gentiles he thought his friends, while he is a child. As be
grow up, takes jobs, find friends and confidants, and seeks out women to love, Augie
moves almost always in the company of Jews. The respectability toward which he is pushed
is always the respectability of the Jewish middle classes, particularly that of Jews who have
lost their religion and turned to wordhiping the quick success in moneymaking, which is
mirrored in their passion for fleshy women, flashy cars, and too much rich food. While in
one sense Bellow's novel is a novel of an adolescent discovering the world, it is a restricted
world.
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English Novels
Robinson Crusoe (1719)
(The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson

Crusoe of York, Mariner, Written by Himself)
Author : Daniel Defore (1666-1731)
Time : 1651
Place : Hull (Fland)
Theme : Lonliness – Self quest - Individuation
Type : Adventurous
Main Characters:
1. Robinson Crusoe
2. Friday

1. Hymn to the Pillory (1703)
2. Reason Against the Succession of House of Hanover (1712)
3. Moll Flander (1722)
4. Roxana (1724)
5. A Tue Realation of the Apprition of One Mrs.
Veal (1706)
First Paragraph:
I was born in the year 1632, in the city of yourk, of a good
family, tho'not of that country, my father being a foreigner of
Bremen, who setted first at Hill.
Plot
Robinson Crusoe (The Life and Strange Surprising Advantures of Robinson Crusoe of
York, Mariner, Written by Himself) A novel by DANIEL DEFOE, when he was pravtically
60, and the most enduring of his many works. Although is subsequently assumed a near –
mythological status, the story is based squarely upon the true account published by
Alexander Selkirk, a fugitive sailor who went to sea in 1704 under WILLIAM DAMPIER
and was put ashore (at his own request) on an uninhabited island in the Pacific, where he
survied until his rescues in 1709 by WOODES ROGERS. An unsubstantiated rumout has
Defore meeting Selkitk in person in 1711.
In Defoe's imaginative reworking of the story, Crusoe is a mariner who takes to the sea
despite parental warnings, and suffers a number of misfortunes at the hands of Barbary
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pirates and the ele,ents, finally being shipwrecked off South America. A combination of
systematic salvaging, resourcefulness and good fortune enables him to exist on his island
for some 28 years, two months and 19 days (according to the painstaking journal in which
the adventures are recorded). During this time he needs to adapt to his alien environment,
demonstrate the selfsufficiency so admired by Defoe himself, and come to terms with his
own spiritual listlessness. If as a psychological study in isolation, the book now seems
inconsistent and even unconvincing, it should be remembered that the novel was then
barely in its infancy, and Robinson Crusoe owes more to the previous literary pedigree of
Puritan spiritual autobiographies and allegories (BUNYAN'S Grace Abounding was a
strong influence). It is at any rate a deliberate amalgam of the specific and the general. The
narrative interest combines typical characteristic of the adventure story (for instance,
Cruoe's horrified discovery of strange footprint in the sand) and the exotic factination of
travel literature with a fable more widely representative of human behaviour under
conditions of difficulty and pressure.
Robinson Crusoe enjoyed instant and permanent success, and has become one of those
classic of English literature which (lije GULLIVER'S TRAVELS, perhaps, or PILGRIM'S
PROGRESS) appeal at various levels to adults and children alike. It draws its strength from
acombination of disparate echoes and shapes: Jonah, Job, Everyman, the Prodigal Son, the
colonial explorer and the proto – industrialist are all elements in Crusoe's character. Defoe
continued the story in The Farther Adventures of Robinson crusoe (1719), in which he
revisits the island and loses Frigay in an attack savages, and The Serious Reflections, of
Robinson Crusoe (1720), neither of which has achieved wide recognition.
Critical Evaluation
This novel has influenced many authors including Swift (Gulliver's Travels), Stevenson
(Treasure Island) and Wyss (The Swiss Family Ronionson). Defp wrote his most famous
book, couched in so plain and unadorned a narrative style that it appeared to be true when
Friday appears on the scene, Crusoe, a slaveholser, naturally makes him a servant and
forms a two – man colonial system. But Friday is also a valued friend who shows his
loyalty and gratituded to his master in countless way.
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Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Author : J. Swift (1667-1754)

Time : May, 4, 1699
Place : 1. Anteploe (ship)
2. Lillipute
3. Brobdingang
4. Laputa
5. Houyhnhnms (whinnims)
Theme : Essence of Humanity
Type : Satiric, Allegorical
School : Symbolic, Surrealistic
Main Characters:
1. Lemuel Gulliver
2. Flimnap
3. The Emperor of Lilliput
4. Glumdalitich
5. Pedro de Mendez
6. Reldresal
7. Lord Munodi
8. The Yahoos
9. The Houyhnhnms
10. The Struldbrugs

1. The Battle of Books (1697)
2. Discourse of the Contents and Dissensions in
Athense and Rome (1701)
3. Tale of a Tub (1704)
4. Argument Against Abolishing Christianity (1711)
5. A Modest Proposal (1729)
First Paragraph:
My father had a small estate in Nottingham shire. I was the
third of live sons. He sent me to Emanuel College in
Cambridge at fourteen years old where I resided three years.
Plot
Swift probably began work on this book in 1721, and its original conception seems to have
been as part of the MEMOIRS OF MARTINUS SCRIBERUS. It is divided into for books,
but the third was written last of all Books I and II are the best known, but usually in an
abridge form, since there is a degree of physical coarseness in the original, which has
become misleadingly notorious.
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In Book I lemuel Gulliver, the ship's surgeon who narrates the story, is shipwrecked on the
island of Lilliput, where he is taken prioner by the population, who are only six inches tall.
The Emperor and his diminutive court offer a physical counterpart to the small – minded
attitudes shown as underlying human behaviour, for they are suspicious, deceitful and petty.
There are several specific satires on contemporary topic such as religious disputes (which
end an egg should be opened) and in – fighting at court (rope – dancing).
In Book II Gulliver's next voyage sees him stranded in Brobdingnag, a kingdom where the
gigantic inhabitants are twelve time taller than himself. His own attitudes and pomposity
are exposed when after a series of undignified adventures, he is interviewed by the King
about European civilization. The swaggering description by Gulliver of thr marvels of
gunpowder and the splendours of the judicial system, to his sutprise, fill the monarch with
horror and he end the audience with this verdict:
"I cannot but conclude the Bulk of your Natives, to be the most pernicious Race of little
odioius Vermin that Nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the Earth".
Book III is less unified, and has always held least appeal. Gulliver visits Laputa, a flying
island where the nobels quite literally have their head in the coulds. So immersed are they
in impractical theories of knowledge that nothing works properly.
He visit nearby Lagado and its Academy (a satire on the Royal Society), which is full of
"projectors" working on outlandish scientific schemes – breeding sheep with no wool,
extracting sunbeams – from cucumbers – several on which had real counterparts im Swift's
age. Gulliver visits Gulliver visits Glubbubrib, the Island of Sorceres, where famous
historical figures are summoned from the past, to his disillusionment. He also meets the
terrifying race of immoratals, the Struldbruffs, whose fate is to become increasingly
decrepit and despised.
Book IV is perhaps the most intellectual in concept, describing the country of the
Houyhnhms, coldy rational horse – like creatures who goverm their nature dispassionately
and keep in subservince the filthy brutes called Yahoos, in whom Gulliver distastefully
finds a resemblance to himself. The two race represent the extremes of human potential,
bestial and remote rationality. Gulliver returns home thoroughly imbalanced in outlook, and
passes most of his time in the stable, preferring the company of his horse to that of his
family.
From the earliest days of its popularity, Gulliver's Travels has fooled readers into agreeing
with attitudes it satirizes: one contemporary readear declared he didn't believe a word of it.
It is a serioiusly reductive work, a satire on pride and folly; Gulliver himself is a human
ambassador, gullible, snobbish and servile, and his opinions are often ridiculous, yet
common. The book is also lastingly funny, the hero's antics arising entertainingly from the
bizarre proportions of his various surroundings.
Critical Evaluation
A satirical fantasy in the form of a travel book, Gulliver's Travels is known both as a
delightful children's book and as the most bitter attack on human depravity in the English
Langauge. In his four travels to disant parts of the earth, Culliver discovers that for all their
physical and cultural differences men everywhere are basssically the same. Stating out as
an easy going optimist Gulliver eventually comes to the conclusing that in the words of the
King of Brobdingnag, human beings are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin
that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth. The novel is represemtatove
of Swift's satiric genious at its best. Each country Gulliver visits thinks itself the greates on
earth inhabited by the lords of creation. But everyone largo or small, apes or horses, suffers
from gross human defects. Swift believed that man's inhumanity to man is made even
more detestable because he is capable of reason but either misuses it or doesn't use it at all
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and because he takes in ordinate pride in himself, pride harldy justified by his love for war.
Cruely and bloodshes.
Tristram Shandy
The Life and Options of Gentleman (1759-7)
Author : Laurence Sterne (1713-68)

Time : The First Sunday and the First Monday od March, 1718
Place : Shandy Hall - London
Theme : Self Quest
Type : Picaresque
School : Realistic – Symbolic - Psychological
Main Characters:
1. Tristram Shandy
2. Walter Shandy
3. Toby Shandy
4. Corporal Trim
5. Mr. Yorick
6. Dr. Slop
7. Window Wadman

1. A Sentimental Journey (1768)
2. Letters from Yorick to Eliza (1775)
3. The Sermons of Mr. Yorick (1760-9)
First Paragraph:
I wish either my father or my mother or indeed both of them, as
they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what
they were about when they begot me.
Plot
Tristram Shandy distributes its narrative content across a bafflingly idiosyncratic time –
scheme interrupted by digrssions, authorial comments and rnterferences with the printed
fabric of the book. The comically fromented storyline is a reaction against the linear
narratives od HENRY FLELDIG and the epistolary artifice of SAMUEL RICHARDSON;
it aims instead at a realistic impressionism, a shape determined by association of ideas.
The story does manage to start ab ovo, with the narrator – hero describing his own
cinception. But he is not actually born for several volumes and disappears from the book in
Volume VI. In the meantime, the circumstances surrounding his birth are described in an
apparently random fashion. His father is Walter Shandy, the science – smitten but
benevolent head of Shandy Hall, where he lives in continuous exasperation with his wife.
He has elaborate theories about society, the education of his son, and such topic as baptism
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by injection. His brother, "my uncle Toby", is an old soldier wouded in the groin at the
siege of Namur. Today's obsessional hobby is the recreation of various military sieges, a
pastime in which he is assisted by the devoted Corporal Trim (who received a wound in the
knee, at Carden) whose reflections on morality comprise Volume V. These are some of the
characters whose behaviour can be understood in term of their personal "hobby – horses".
Dr Slop is the man – mid wife delayed in delivering the infant Tristram by a complex knot
on his bag, the Widow Wadman is the neighbour with amorous designs on Uncle Toby, and
Yorick is the amiable local paeson. (Sterne published his own sermons and his journal to
Eliza Draper under Yorick's name, and made him the ficitional narrator of A
SENTIMENTAL JOURNEY).
After Tristram is born, Volume IV opend with the story of Slawkenbergius (a mock –
ENCOMIUM on noses) and an account of how he baby came to be christened "Tristram"
instead" instrad of the intended "Trismegistus". After Trim's discourse thee is a fine
dialogue between Tristram's parents in Volume VI, about the "breeching" (or dressing) of
their child, and the story of le Fevre (a "sentimental" set – piece of great popularity), after
which the novel arbitrarily abandons the English village setting and follows the author's
travels to France reverting to an account of the Widow Wadman's designs on Uncle Toby in
Volume IX.
With its black pages, wiggly lines, misplaced chapters and other surprises, Tristram Shandy
stands in part against the idea of literature as finished produt, its surface capable of
reflecting with accuracy the conditions of life. That is one reason why it has proved so
fertile an ifluence on 20th – century fiction. Yet Sterne's achievement was not the act of
revolutionary isolation or iconoclasm that is sometimes suggested. Tristram Shandy was
also very much un keeping with the mood of an age caught in the cults of "sensilitiy" and
the PICTURESQUE, with its love of ruins, exciting fragments and the formally imprecise.
Aside from his debt to LOCKE'S theory of the association of ideas, Sterne was working in
a long tradition of intellectual SATIRE emnracing Montaigne, Rabelais, ERASMUS and
SWIFT, as well as drawing on a mass od PICARESQUE and travel literature.
Critical Evaluation
It is no accident then that Tristran Shandy should have exerted a profound influenced on the
fiction of James Joyce for both Sterne and Joyce are irrepressible jokers who delight in
exploding the possibilities of prose fiction in to something very different from the ordinary
novel, perhaps best called the comic epic in prose. By means of caricature, digressions
absutdly inflated language to describe the most mundane things, puns and a panoply of
widly eccentric characters. Sterne makes glorioud fun in Tristran Shandy of such a sober
predecessor as Samuel Richardson and even of the more eorldly Fielding. Beneath the
practival jokes, Strene has laid, a very solid substratum which gives Tristram Shandy for all
its seeming chaos, a strength of from and theme that has made it endure long after most
practical jockes are forgotten. This substratum consists of the very human story, told in
loving, even sentimental detail of technical virtuosity of the novel are a complex and very
modern philosophy of time (it take the hero fourbooks in which to be born) and a
sentimentality about the sacredness of life and individuality that give emotional coherence
to an otherwise seemingly slapdash effory of the imagination.
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Pride and Prejudice (first Impression) (1796-7)
Author : Jane Austen (1775-1817)

Time : 18th century
Place : Netherfield Park
Theme : Money, Love and Marriage
Type : Gothic – Social Comely
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Mr. Bennet
2. Jane, Elizabeth, Mrs. Bennet
3. Charles Bingley
4. Fitz William
5. George Wickham

1. Mansfield Park (1811)
2. Emma (1814)
3. Persuasion (1815)
4. Lady Susan (Epistolary)
5. The Walsons
First Paragraph:
It is a high truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in
possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife.
Plot
Mr and Mrs Bennet of Longbourn are an ill – matched couple, he detached and ironic, she
vulgar, gossipy and mainly engaged in seeking husbands for their five daughters.
Netherfield, house near Longbourn, is leased by the wealthy Charles Binglry, who stays
there with his sisters and his friend, the still wealthier Fitz William Darcy. To Mrs Bennet's
delight, Bingley falss in love with her eldest daughter, Jane. But the witty and high –
spirited Elizabeth Bennet, next in age of the Bennet children, frankly diskikes Mr Darcy for
his cold and superior manner; her prejudice against him is increased by the story she hears
from George Wickham, an engaing young militia officer, of the unjust treatment he has
received from Darcy.
For their part the Bingley sister and Darcy find Mrs Bennet and the younger Bennet sister
impossibly vulgar, and prevail on Bingley to detach himself from Jane.
The Bennet family is visited by William Collins, a rector, a rector under the partronage of
Lady Catherine de Bourgh, who will inherit Mr Brnnet's entailed property on his death.
With great pomposity Mr Collins proposes to Elizabeth but she refuses him, depite the
financial convenience of such a marriage. Mr Collins transfers his attentions to Elizabeth's
friend, Charlotte Lucas, who accepts him out of expediency.
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Elizabeth goes to visit the newly married couple and finds that Darcy is in the
neighourhood visiting visiting Lady Catherine, his aunt. He falls in love with Elizabeth but
phrases his proposal in so condescending a manner that she refuses. Taking the opportunity
to upbraid him for his treatment of Wickham and for his role in separating Jane and
Bingley. In a latter, Darcy exposes Wickham as an adventure who had once cherished
designs on Darcy's 15 – year – old sister Georgian, and protests that he had never been
convinced of Jane's love for Bingley.
Elizabeth leave on a tour of Derbyshire with her aunt and uncle, the Gradiners.
They visit Pemberley. Darcy's seat, in the belief he is absent but accidentally meet him. He
welcomes them, and his charm and grace begin to impress Elizabeth. Then comes the news
that her sister Lydia has eloped with Wickham. Darcy helps trace the runaways and makes
sure that they marry. Bingley renews his courtship of Jane and, despite insolent attempts at
interference from Lady Catherine, Darcy persists in his courtship of Elizabeth. Both
couples are finally united.
Critical Evaluation
A more complex instance of ironu is the famed sentence with which Jane Austen opens her
novel:"It is a truth universally knowledged that a single man in passion of a good
forthune must be in want of a wife"part of the ironic implication is that a single woman is
in want of a rich husband. Despite its surface wit and lightness, the novel has on underlying
pathos. It seems largely from Jane's acceptance of Brigley's supposed indifference and from
the plight of Elizabeth's friend. Charlotte Lucas, a symbol of any girl on the brink of
spinsterhood who makes the best of a bad bargain in chooding a spouse. The conflict is the
basis for exquisite play of wit between hero and heroine, reminiscent of the ironic conflict
between Beatrice and Benedick in Shakespeare's Much Ado about Nothing. The Novel is
a perfect example of a social comedy based on the interaction of love and money. The
conflict that gives the novel its title centers around Darcy's aristocratic pride and Elizabeth's
instinctive feminine prejudice – against a man who has snubbed her at a dance.
David Copperfield (1849)
Author : Charles Dickens (John Huffam) (1812-70)

Time : Early 19th century
Place : Blunderstone - Suffolk
Theme : Self analysis, Self – Quest - Marriage
Type : Autobiography – Love Romance – Meldranatic – Sentimental
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. David Copperfield
2. Mr. Murdstone
3. Betsey Trout Wood
4. Peggotty
5. Barkis
6. Little Emily
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217
7. Ham
8. Mr. Creakle
9. Tommy Traddles
10. James streerforth

1. Sketches By Boz (1837)
2. Pickwick Papers (Papers of the Pickwick club 1836)
3. Oliver Twist (1837-9)
4. Nicholas Nickleby (1838)
5. Master Humphery's Clock (1839)
6. The Old Curiousity Shop (1840-1)
7. Barnaby Rudge (1841)
8. American Notes (1842)
9. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843)
10. A Christmas Carol (1843)
11. Bleak House (1852)
12. Hard Times (1854)
13. Little Dorrit (1855-7)
14. A Tale of Two Cities (1859)
15. Great Expectations (1860)
16. Our Mutual Friend (1864)
17. Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
First Paragraph:
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my life or whether
that starion will be held by anybody else these pages must
show.
Plot
David traces his childhood and youth, marred by his widowed mother's remarriage to Mr
Murdstone and death, and by his distressing experience working in a London factory (an
incident modeled on Dickens's own boyhood suffering).
Escaping from London, David takes refuge at Dover with his aunt, Betsey Trotwood, and,
after a period of conventional schooling and a brief legal career, becomes a novelist. His
marriage to Dora Spenlow proves unhappy but David is none the less devastated by her
early death. His friendship for Kames Steerforth is equally disturbed by Steerforth's
elopement with Emily, the niece of the Yarmouth fisherman, Mr Prggotty. The novel
gradually reveals David's slow geaps of the meaning of his "Experience", and the
disciplining of his heart. He finally finds happiness with the faithful Agnes Wickfield,
whom he has known since childhood and whose own future had seemed to be threatened by
the wiles of her father's sometimes clerk, Uriah Heep. The improvidence and verbal
extravagance of Wilkins Micawber, with whom David lodges during his unhappy London
days, is to some extent modeled on that of the novelist's own father, John Dickens. Dikens
himself proclaimed that this novel was his own "favourite child".
Critical Evaluation
Like the Victorian age itself, with its surface of exuberant confidence and its undersurface
of uncertainty, the appearance of Dicken's happy position was a deceptive and invomplete
indication of his state of mind. The writer was the greatest dramatic writer that the English
had since Shakespeare and he created the largest and most varied world. His fictional world
is populous but tidy a world with abundant poetic justice problems solved and no loose
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ends. Among the best loved novels of Dickens this one is a huge, sprawling
autobiographical work filled with characteristic Dickensian touches. Superimposed on the
autobiograohical elements is a portraite gallery of eccentrics form the cryptic Barkis to the
only villian Uriah Heep. These could have come only from Dicken's increadibly fertile
imagination. In this novel he shows his early childhood, idyllic and innocent. This novel is
typical of middle period Dickens. The high humor, and fierce indignation, the almost
uncontrolled complexity of plot, the sheer number of characters are all Dickensian
hallmarks, never combined to better effect than in this interpretation of the novelist's own
youth.
Great Expectations (1860)
Author : Charles Dickens (John Huffam) (1812-70)

Place : London
Theme : The Corrosive effect of Snobbery
Type : Autobiography
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Pip
2. Miss. Havisham
3. Joe Gargery
4. Mrs. Joe Gargery
5. Estella
6. Abel Magwitch
7. Arthur Compeyson
8. Biddy
9. Mr. Jaggers
10. Herbert Pocket

1. Sketches By Boz (1837)
2. Pickwick Papers (Papers of the Pickwick club 1836)
3. Oliver Twist (1837-9)
4. Nicholas Nickleby (1838)
5. Master Humphery's Clock (1839)
6. The Old Curiousity Shop (1840-1)
7. Barnaby Rudge (1841)
8. American Notes (1842)
9. Martin Chuzzlewit (1843)
10. A Christmas Carol (1843)
11. Bleak House (1852)
12. Hard Times (1854)
13. Little Dorrit (1855-7)
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219
14. A Tale of Two Cities (1859)

15. Great Expectations (1860)
16. Our Mutual Friend (1864)
17. Mystery of Edwin Drood (1870)
First Paragraph:
My father's family name being Pirrip, and my Christian name
Philip, my infant tongue could make of both names longer or
more explicit that Pip.
Plot
Narrated in the first person by Philip Pirrip (Pip) as he reflects on the three stage of his
"gret expections", the novel opens on the Kentish marshes where he lives an orphaned
childhood under the harsh hand of his sister and her kinly blacksmith husband, Joe Gargery.
One day Pip helps a starving concict, Abel Magwitch, who is soon recaptured and taken
back to the nearby prison hsip ("The Hilks"). Pip is later summoned to Satis House, home
of the wealthy eccentric Miss Havisham, who has lived in seclusion since being jilted by
her fiancés. He quickly becomws dwcoted to Miss Havisham's ward Estella, who treats his
developing love only with deliberate coldhearteness. Pip is aided in his ambition of
becoming a gentleman by generous allowance, paid through the lawyer Jaggers, which he
mistakenly assumes to come from Miss Havisham. He relinquishes his humble companions
and goes to London to aquuire polish, good manner and a smattering of education with the
help of his roommate Herbert Pocket. Urban life leads him into vain and extravagant
ways.
Magwitch reappears, having illegally returneds to England after being transported, and
reveals that he is Pip's benefactor, bent on using the fortune he has amassed in Australia to
repay the boy's kindness. Pip plans to get Magwithch safely out of the country but the
convict is mortally hurt, arrested and brough to trial; he dies before the sentence is carried
out. Estella, dramatically recealed as Magwitch's daughter, marries an upper – class lout,
Bentley Drummle, who gravely mistreats her before his early death. Pip, learning both
loyalty and Christian humility from his experienxes, returns to England after a successful
career and meets Estella. In the book's original ending the two still remain separate, but at
the urging of EDWARD BULWER LYTTON Dickens altered the conclusion to give Great
Expectations a conventional happy ending.
Despite its neatly melodramatic plotting richly stocked gallery of comic minor characters –
the histrionic Wopsle, the pompous Pumblechook, the eccentric Wemmick - Great
Expectations is a book of sober and sustained purpose. The gradual discovery of human
values Pip makes as he passes through the various stages of his "great expectations" wnacts
a familiar Dickensian dable, enriched here by the presence of Pip's narrative voice to trace
the processes of memory.
Critical Evaluation
The psychological insight into rhese thwarted lives shows Dickens at the zenith of his
powers. The plot of this novel is more spare and austere than most of his others.
All is subordinated in the novel to the theme: a devasting commentary on the moral
perversions that wealth and the expetaion of it can create in the human heart. In many ways,
the novel is Dicken's finest novel. Although it lacks the high spirits and wild incenticeness
of his earlier fiction, it is less diffuse and better organized. Above all it has a real theme, the
corrosive effect of snobbery, treated in a serious and profound way. The title is ironic. The
expectations of wealth that Jaggers present to Pip seem great indeed but turn out to be
ashed in the mouth as Pip scorns his old friend Joe, loses Estella to Drammle (an even more
consummate snob than he is) loses Magwitch and is unable even to rescue Miss Havisham.
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This novel is a brilliant commentary on the deadening influence that the past can exert on
the present if one allows an ancient injury to poison one's life. Beacause she was julted by
Compeyson on her wedding day, Miss Havisham has vowed vengeance on all man.
Jane Eyre (1847)
Author : Charlotte Bronte (1816-1855)

Time : 18th century
Place : Gateshead – Lowood School
Theme : Lonliness – Lack of Communication and Understanding
Type : Gothic – Sentimental – Social
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Jane Eyre
2. Mrs. Reed
3. St. John Rivers
4. Mr. Mason
5. Blunche Ingram
6. Grance Poole
7. Mrs. FairFax
8. Adele Varens
9. Edward Fairfax Rochester

1. Shirely (1849)
2. Villette (1853)
3. The Professor (1846)
First Paragraph:
There was no possibility of taking a walk that day. We had
been wandering indeed in the leafless shrubbery an hour in the
morning
Plot
An orphan living with her unpleasant aunt, Mrs Reed, and cousins, Jane is too independent
– minded to fit in to the household. As pupil and then tracher at Loowood Asylum she
suffers appling physical conditions, palliated by the friendship of the gentel, long –
suffering Helen dies of consumption, but not before Jane has learned from her that self –
control is the surest means of retaining self – respect in adversity. She leaves Lowood to
become a governess at Thornfield Hall. Her pupil is Adele Varens, the ward of Edward
Rochester. Soon she finds herself drawn to hm and he, attracted by her wit, and self –
possession, finally asks her to become his wife. Their wedding is interrupted by the
unexpected arrival of Richard Mason, who reveals the Rochester is already married to his
sister Bertha, a raving lunatic secretly confined at Thornfield. Hall. Jane leaves the Hall and
wanders, destitute, until she is finally taken in by a clergyman, St John Rivers, and his sister
Diana and Mary. Though she has assumed the name of Jane Elliott, a slip discloses her true
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name and leads to the revelation that the Ricerses are her cousins and she sole heir to
fortune which she joyfully shares with them. St. John, dedicated but narrow – minded,
proposes that Jane should accompany him as his wife in his mission to India. She is nearly
brought to consent when a voice, recofnizably Rochester's, calls to her out of the air.
Resolved to discover his fate, she returns to Thornifield to find it a blackenend ruin and the
master maimed and blind – the result of his vain effoets to save his made wife from the
flames. At last she can contract a marriage which includes spiritual equality, intellectual
companionship and sexsual passion.
Jane Eyre attracted immediate attrention, but praise for its narrative force and the vivid way
Jane's feelong are rendered was mixed with criticism. The merciless portrait of Lowood and
its headmaster, Brocklehurst offended Evangelicals. Above all, contemporaries were made
uneasy by the book's morality: thought Jan's actions observe the conventional code of
female behaviour they still embody a powerful statement of woman's claim to
independence.
Critical Evaluation
The style of the novle is highly charged with emotion almost feverish in its intensity. The
prose style of the novel fits very well with head strong emotional character of the narrator,
Jane Eyce. The language is emotionally powerful, we are able to identify with Jane Eyre
instead of simply pronouncing judgements on her perdonality. This novel is a love story
and there is a deep feministic message in it.
The Critics point to the strong femnity views expressed by Jane: "Woman are supposed to
be very calm generally; but women feel just as men feel. The element make the book a
romantic dantacy. Reality deep significant reality is the great charactertics of the novel. It is
an autobiography not in the naked facts and circumstances but in the actual suffering and
circumstances but in the actual suffering and experience.
Wuthering Heights (1847)
Author : Emily Bronte (1818-48)

Place : Wuthering Heights, Thrushcross Grange - Yorkshire
Point of view : Omniscent narrator: 1. Lockwood 2. Catherine 3. Zillah
4. Heathchliff 5. Cathy
Theme : Revenge
Type : Gothic
Main Characters:
1. Earnshaw
2. Catherine
3. Heathcliff
4. Mr. Linton
5. Edgar
6. Hindley
7. Isabella
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8. Frances and Hareton Earnshaw

9. Cathy
10. Lockwood
First Paragraph:
1801.-
I have just returned from a cisit of my landlord the solitary
neighbor that I shall be troubled with.
Plot
The story is told by Lockwood, agentleman visiting the Yorkshire moors, and Mrs Dean,
sevant to the Earnshaw family. Heathcliff, a foundling from the streets of Liverpool, is
brought to Wuthering Heights by Mr Earnshaw to be treated like his own children,
Catherine and Hindley. But after Mr Earnshaw's death Heathcliff is bullied and degraded by
Hindley by Hindley, now married and head of the household.
Heathcliff, who is of a passionate and ferocious nature, falls in love with Catherine, who
returns his affection even though she feels it would be humiliating to marry him. Upon
learning this Heathcliff slips quietly away. Meanwhile Hindley's wife has died, leaving him
a son, Hareton. Catherine is attracted to the soft, luxurious life of the Lintons of
Thrushcross Grange and marries Edgar Linton.
When Heathcliff returns to Wuthering Heighs his vengeful nature begins to assert itself. His
first victim is his beloved Catherine, whose death he hastens by incressant and vehement
accusations of betrayal, of contempt for himself and of cruelty; she dies giving birth to a
girl, another Catherine. A further victim is Edgar's sister Isabella, whom Heathcliff marries
and mistreats until she runs away. He also destroys Hindley, a heavy drinker and gambler,
and gains control of the Heights. To scure the Linton family property he forces a marriage
between young Catherine and Linton, his sickly son by Isabella. When Linton dies the
young widow develops an interest in Hareton, Hindley's son, whom Heathcliff has brought
up in brutish ignorance. By now Heathcliff, all passion spent, long for death and union with
Catherine. Increasingly alienated from daily life, he experiences visions and supernatural
portents of reconciliation with his beloved Catherine. He dies having failed to extirpate the
Earnshaws and the Linton, and leaves to the younger generation, Catherine and Hareton,
hopes of a richer life.
The novel's stern power, which disturbed and shocked contemporaries but has impressed
later generatins of reafers, owes much to the deliberately enigmatic portrait of Heathcliff.
Hardly less remarkable is the way that the tortuous and violent plot, instead of seeming
merely melodramatic, is given solidity by the precisely realized Yorkshire location and
subtley by the shifting narrative viewpoints.
Critical Evaluation
The conflict between these two ways of life causes great suffering until the marriage
between Cathy and Hareton a marriage in which both approaches to life are recongnised
and accepted. The prose is unusual rhythmic, often violent and abrapt. The verbs
themselves are hysterical until the final paragraph in which the moths flutter and the soft
winds breathe. The book is full of doubles. There are two generation, each occupying half
the chapters. There are two households each with distinctive qualities. And the actions
revolve around the pairs of children.
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Adam Bede (1859)
Author : George Eliot (Mary Ann Evan) (1819-80)

Place : Midland Village, Hayslope
Theme : Morality, Love
Type : Pastoral, Romantic
School : Realistic
Main Characters:
1. Adam and Seth Bede
2. Dinah Morris
3. Martin and Mrs. Poyser
4. Herry Sorrel
5. Arthur Donnithorne
6. Jonathan Burge

1. Silas Marner (1861)
2. Middlemarch (1871-2)
3. Essence of Christianity (1854)
4. Scenes of Clerical Life (1858)
5. Felix Holt the Radical (1866)
First Paragraph:
With a single drop of ink for a mirror, the Egyptian sorcerer
under takes to reveal to any chance comer fatreaching visions
of the past.
Plot
The idea for the story came from the account her aunt Elizabeth Evans, a Methodist
preacher, gave of the night she had spent in the condemned cell at Nottingham jail with a
girl awaiting execution for the murder of her child.
Adam Bede, a carpenter in the Midland village of Hayslope, is in love with Hetty Sorrel,
niece of the farmer Martin Poyser. The squire, Arthur Donnithorne, is attracted to Hetty and
she is vian enough to dream of becoming the squire's wife.
Adam watches Arthur's flirtation with growing anxiety and tries unsuccessfully to
intervene. Arthur abandons Hetty after seducing her. Adam earns the reward of his loyalty
to Hetty when, bearbroken at Arthur's desertion, she agrees to marry him.
But she find herself pregnant and flies from home in a desperate search for her lover. Adam
is supported in his grief by Dinah Morris, a young Methodist preacher, with whom his
brother Seth is hopelessly in love. Unable to find Arthur Donnithorne, the unfortunate Hetty
is arrested, charged with the murder of her child and convicted. Dinah becomes her
comforter and the close of the novel. Dinah help, face her final ordeal. But she is reprieved
and her sentence commuted to transportation. Adam later marries Dinah.
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The novel was exceptionally well received by contemporary reviewrs, who praised its
evocation of English rural life and its character srudies, particularly Martin's wife, Mrs
Poyser.
Crirical Evaluation
All of the writer's characteristic concerns and skills appear in Adam Bede. Her brooding
compassion for weak humanity caught in moral traps of its own devising is mocingly set
forth in the tragedy of Hetty sorrel, a sensuous girl of great sensitivity to life whose sin and
expiation from the moral backbone of the novel. As one who had herself sinned or at least
flouted the conventions of society, George Eliot was keenly aware of the temptations of
love and at the same time sharply perceptive of its morally destructive qualities. Another
achievenment of Eliot's in Adam bede is her ability to portray with gentle, uncondescending
humor the uncomplicated lives of the rural lower middle class. Mrs. Poyser, Hetty's
bumbling officious aunt is a triumph of comic art. Her sayingd, folk wisdom mingled with
self-important sententiousness remain a delight. In her portrayal of rural types, Eliot is
matched in English literature only by Shakespeare and her follower. Thomas Hardy, whose
Tess of the D'Urbervilles in many ways resembles Adam Bede. Central to Eliot's moral
doctrine is the influence of one soul another.
Alice in Wonderland (1865)
Author : Lewis Carrol (Charles Lutwidge Cheshire) (1832-98)

Time : A summer Afternoon
Place : Wonderland
Theme : Processes from Innocence to Experience
Type : Fantastic – Dream Vision – Social Satire
School : Surrealistic - Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. The White Rabbite
2. Alice
3. The Queen of Hearts
4. The Duchess
5. The Cheshire Cat

1. Through the Looking, Glass (1872)
2. What Alice Found there
3. The Hunting of the Snark (1876)
First Paragraph:
Alice was beginning to get very tired of sitting by her reading.
Sister on the bank and od having nothing to do:
Once or twice she had peeped into the book her sister was
reading.
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Plot
Beginning famously as a story told to children on a boating picnic in 1862, it is half dream,
half nightmare and always highly diverting. Plunging down a rabbit hole the seven – year –
old Alicegrows first too large and then too small. When turning fot help or enlightenment
from the strange characters around her she usually becomes caught up in logic – chopping,
PARODY or pun, whether this be with the Cheshire Cat, the Mad Hatter, the March Hare
or the King and Queen of Hearts.
Finally she lose her temper, bringing down this dream world and som waking up.
IIIustrated by SIR JOHN TENNIEL, this unique book was an immediate best – seller –
much to the surprise of its, reclusive author. Its effect on CHILDREN'S LITERATURE, in
particular the way it favored goodhumoured iconoclasm at the expense of the conventional
didacticism of the time, can hardly be exaggerated.
Favourite moments include the parodies "You are Old, Father William" and "Twinkle
Twinkle Little Bat", the Lobster Quadrille, the Hatter's Tea Party and Alice's own
understandable comment, "Curiouser and curiouser". See also THROUGH THE
LOOKING – GLASS AND WHAT ALLICE FOUND THERE.
Critical Evakuation
Most of the creatures Alice meets are abominably condescending. The White Rabbite, the
caterpillar, the Mad Hatter, and the Queen all belive devoutely in the topsy – turvy logic
which they hold superior to Alice's simple, pragmatic values and which they are usually too
busy or too full of their own superiority to explain. To a child the rigid rules and seemingly
meaningless regulation of the adult world must be what they seem to Alice, arbitrary,
unreasonable and foolish. The world in both Alice Books is essentially a looking glass
world. Holding a glass up tothr foibles and conventions of society, the very conventional
Carrol shows how absurd they must appear to the clear, unspoiled intelligence of a child. In
sense Alice in Wonderland is as much a book about the problems of growing up as is David
Copperfield, The Way of All Flesh, or Sons and Lovers.
The Way of All Flesh (1903)
Author : Samuel Butler (1835-1902)

Time : Victorian Period
Place : Battersby, Cambridge
Theme : Attack to Religioius Hypocrisy
Type : Autobiographic
Main Characters:
1. Ernest Pontifer
2. Mr. Overtone
3. John Pontifex
4. George Pontifex
5. Ellen
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1. A First Year in Canterbury Settlement (1863)
2. Erewhom (1872)
3. The Fair Haven (1873)
First Paragraph:
When I was a small boy at the beginning of the century I
remember an old man who wore knee breeches and worstrd
and who used to hobble about the street of our village with the
help of a sick.
Plot
The hero, Ernest Pontifex, endures an unhappy upbringing in the Evangelical parsonage at
Battersby. His father, Theo, re-enacts the tyrannical ways of his own father, George, a
religious publisher, but justifies them with the sanctimonioius dictates of a spiritually
bankrupt religious piety. At Cambridge Ernest is converted and then ordained, in
accordance with his parents' wishes. As a curate, Ernest falls prey to the conglicting
influences of a duplicitions Tractarian and a free – thinking tinker, before breaking out in
an incident where his naivety makes him mistake a respectable girl for a prostitute. The
sudden shock of his subsequent imprisonment enables him to cast off his faith, his family
and his class in an attempt to revert to the simple life of his artisan great – grandfather.
Another false start lead him to marry a former maidservant at the Rectory, sacked when she
was found to be pregnant. This freedom is achieved when his drunken wife is discovered to
be already married. Anxious to avoid a repetition of the Pontifex paternal tyranny, Ernest
farms out the children of his union. Having inherited an income from his aunt Alethea, he
embarks upon a solitary life, a literary vocation and ecletic interest much resembling
Butler's own adult career.
The fortunes of the Pontifex familly, as unfolded by the narrator, Overton, are designed to
show that personal happiness stems from the liberating effect of acting upon inherited and
largely unconscious stores of vitality. The play between the conscious and unconscious also
fuels the thrust of the novel's attack upon the conventions and hypocrisies of Victorian
familu life.
Butler started writing the novel in 1873, began revision in 1880, but abandoned it when his
friend Miss Savage, model for Alethea, died in 1885. Although the realistic details,
including actual letters from the Butler, are taken from his own mid century up bringing, for
many of its first readers.
Critical Evaluation
The book begins unpromisingly with a long somewhat tedious account of the early
Pontifexes, John and George. Ernest is not even born until chapter 17. One of his deepest
interest in the story ways the question of heredity. The inherited characteristics can skip one
or even two generations. Thus Ernest is interested in carpentry and music like his great
grandfather John and unlike his grandfather and father. Because traits can skip generations,
Butler felt that parents and their children may have little in common and thus rarely
understand each other. Generations of rebellious youths felling themselves trapped in an
oppressive home environment, have drawn spiritual aid and comfort from Butler's furioius
assult on the hypocrisies of parents and the life denying rigors of a puritanical houshold.
The "Way of All Flesh" is to seek freedom and self fulfillment. Butler feels but to often in
practices is to lyrannize over the young. Whole chapters of the novel are merely extended
diatribes on the follies of Victorian life with very little plot holding them together.
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The brilliantly rendered portrayal of Ernest's soul destroying youth and education remains
the classic picture in English of family life as its worst.
Return of the Native (1817)
Author : Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Place : The Wasteland of Egdon Heath - Wessex
Point of view : Third Person (Ambiguous)
Theme : Fate, Absurdity of Life, and Determinism
Type : Regional (Tragic story based to large extent on coincidental events)
Main Characters:
1. Thomasin Yeobright
2. Damon Wildeve
3. Diggory Venn
4. Eustacia Vye
5. Clym Yeobright
6. Mrs. Yebright

1. Desperate Remedies (1871)
2. Under the Greenwood Tree (1872)
3. A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873)
4. Far From the Madding Crowd (1874)
5. The Hand of Ethelberta (1876)
6. The Trampet Major (1880)
7. Alaodicean (1881)
8. Two on a Twer (1882)
9. Mayor of Gasterbridge (1886)
10. Jude the Abscure (1895)
First Paragraph:
A Saturday afternoon in November was approaching the time
of twilight and the vast of tract of uneclosed wild known as
Egdon Health embrowned itself moment by moment.
Plot
Doman Wildeve, an engineer turned pupblican, is proprietor of "The Quiet Woman" of
Egdon Eeath. He is engaged to the fentle Thonasin Yeobright but carrying on an affair with
Eustacia Vye, who lives with her grandfather at nearby Mistover Knap and whose dedire in
life is "to be loved to madness". Wildeve, "to wring the heart" of Eustacia, marrier
Thomasin. Meanwhile, Clym Yeobright, the latter's cousin, wearying of his meretricious
life as Parisian jeweler, returns to his native hearth intending to become a schoolmaster.
Greatly to his mother's disapproval the falls in love with and marries Eustacia, who has
unwisely accepted him in the hope he will take her away to the more exciting life of a city,
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preferably Parsi. But Clym's sight fails and he is reduced to furze-cutting for a livelihood, a
catastrophe that drives his wife to despair. Then, out of her renewed association with
Wildeve, Eustacia becomes partially, but unknowing, responsible for Mrs Yeobright's
death; a quarrel with Clym which arises from that tragedy cause her to leave home. In
desperation Eustacia drowns herself is Shadwater Weir and Wildeve loses his life trying to
save her. Some 18 months later Clym, remorseful over the dearths of Eustacia and his
mother, becomes an open – air preacher and Thomasin marries Diggory Venn, the "iso;ated
and weird" reddleman who moves in and out of the narrative at psychologically suitable
times.
Critical Evaluation
The novel looks like a typical 19th century novel: long, with several plots, and set in a wide
landscape. But this tale is really very compact. The major action thakes place in a year's
time. All the characters live in the Egdon area, and the outside world does not intrude. All
of major characters are bound together in a dense knot of relationship. The action is
organised around seasonal celebrations, beginning and ending with the autumn binfires.
Inspite of the fact that the agonies edured by Hardsy's characters are not arbitrarily inflicted
by gods or Fate or the President of the Immortals.
The Mayor of Casterbridge (1886)
Author : Thonas Hardy (1840-1928)

Time : Early 20th Century
Place : Weyodn Priors - Wessex
Theme : Pessimism – Fate - Determinism
Type : Social – Regional – Tragic Romance
Main Characters:
1. Susan Henchard
2. Michael Henchard
3. Richard Newson
4. Elizabeth - Jane
5. Donald Farfrae
6. Lucetta Le Sueur
7. Josha Jopp
First Paragraph:
One evening of late summer, before the nineteeth century had
reached one – third of its span, a young man and woman, the
latter carrying a child, were approaching the large village of
Weydon – Priors, in Upper Wessex.
Plot
It endows the rise and fall in its hero's fortunes with the inevitability of tragic process.
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Michael an out – of – work hay trusser, gets drunk at Weydon Priors fair and sells his wife,
Susan, and child for five guineas to a sailor named Newson.
Sobert the next morning, Henchard swears an oath to abstain from alcohol for 21 years.
After 18 years Mrs Newson, believing her sailor – husband drowned at sea, come with her
daughter, Elizabeth – Jane, to seek out Henchard, now a prosperous grain merchant and
mayor of Casterbridge. He receives them generously and, at a clandestine meeting with
Sudan, arranges to court and marry her anew so that respectability may be maintained. A
complication factor, however, is his commitment to Lucetta Le Sueur, a woman of means
he was supposed to be marrying; but upon hearing the mayor's true explanation of affairs
their engagenment is terminated, although Lucetta comes to Casterbridge to live.
Meanwhile, Henchard has engaged as his manager the newly – arrived Scitsman, Donald
Farfae, an energetic young man of commercial acumen. Henchard marries Susan, who soon
dies but leaves a letter telling him Elizabeth – Jane is really Newson's daughter; this
alienates him from Elizabeth – Jane and this bitterness rises to such a point that she leaves
hime to live as hiusekeepr – companion with Lucetta. And now Farfrae, who has show an
interest in Elizabeth – Jan, marries Lucetta. Because of Henchard's pigheadeness a rift
opens between him and the Scotsman who, going into business for himself, thrives as
Henchard declines to the point of bankruptcy. The old liaison between Henchard and
Lucetta is publicized and she dies of shame. Newson returns, Elizabeth – Jane and Farfrae
marry, and the lonely, embittered Henchard, reduced even below itinerant labour, dies one
Egdon Heath cared for by the loyal but simple Able Whittle.
Critical Evakuation
The novel is dominated by one character Michael Henchard, the itinerant hay trusser who
become mayor of a Wessex town, Hardy substitle the novel "A Story of a Man of
Character". The character indicates energy and pride of personal being.
The word character implies summarise Michael Henchard Hardy focuses carefully on the
architecture and historic nature of the town. The town itdelf seems to be a character in the
novel. It is a place of ancient artefacts, rustic customs and 19th century archietecture and life
style. The feeling of pessimism is evident throughout.
Jude the Abscure (1895)
Author : Tomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Time : Victovian Period
Place : Wessex
Theme : Pessimism – Determinism - Fate
Type : Tragic – Social – Ronance - Regional
School : Naturalistic - Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Drudilla Fawley
2. Jude Fawley
3. Arabella Donn
4. Little Father Time
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5. Sue Bridehead
6. Richard Philloston
First Paragraph:
The school master was leaving the village, and everybody
seemed sorry. The miller at Cresscombe lent him the small
white titled cart and horse to carry his goods to the city of his
destination.
Plot
Jude Fawley, a stonemason with a talent and passion for scholarship, is trapped into
marriage by Arabella Donn. It is only after Arabella him that Jude, resurrecting his old love
of learning, makes his way to Christminster (Oxford), where he earns his living as a
labourer while aspiring to be a student. He meets and is attracted to his intellingent,
untelligent, unstable cousin Sue Bridehead. She marries Phillotson, Jude's former
schookmaster, but finding the sexual aspects of her marriage repellent, flees her husband
and lives with Jude. Two children are born to them and they also take care of Jude's son by
Arabella, the uncannily adult "Father Time". As social outcasts living in abject poverty,
they are bitterly unhappy; she retreats into morbid Christianity and he moves towards
atheism. When Sue tells "Father Time" that she is expecting another baby he kills the two
children and himself, "because we are too many". In a misguided attempt at expiation Sue
returns to Phillotson. Jude declines resentfully cared for by Arabella, and eventually dies
alone, neglected both by her and the city of learning which had once epitomized the scope
of his ambition.
Many contemporary readers and reviewers were outraged by the pessimism of the novel
and its depiction of the "deadly war waged between flesh and spirit". Hardy wrote ni more
fiction afterwards.
Critical Evaluation
With this novel, Hardy reached the pinnacle of his art and the depth of his pessimism.
Unlike his other novels, it is not illiminated by the fainest ray of light or hope. Even the
rough pasant humor that relieves the tragedy of The Return of the Natives is missing here
The novel led to such a hue and cry about its outspoken treatment of sex and so called "now
woman" that Hardy decided to return to his first love poetry. The world view of the novel is
symbolized by the grotesque of Little Father Time. Much of the novel disturbing effect
stems too from the savagery of its assult on the instiruations of marriage and the university
as Hardy saw them operating in Victorian England.
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
(A Pure Woman Faithfully Presented) (1891)
Author : Thomas Hardy (1840-1928)

Place : Southern England – Wesser – Dorset Country
Theme : Fate – Pessimism – New and old orders – Processes from
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Innocense to Experisnce – Men and Women

Type : Reginol – Social – Tragic – Romance - Poetic
School : Naturalistic - Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Tess D'Urbeyfield
2. Abgel Clare
3. Alec D'uberville
4. The D'ubrtyfield
First Paragraph:
On an evening in the latter part of May a middle aged man was
walking homeward from Shostor; the village of Marlott
im the adjoining Vale of Blakemore of Blackmoor.
Plot
Unwisely, Parson Tringham tells John Durbeyfield, a haggler (local carrier) of Marlott, that
he is desecended from the Norman family of d'Urbervilles. Fortified by this information, he
and his wife Joan encourage their daughter Tess to seek the kinship of the parvenu Stoke
d'Urbervilles who have adopted the ancient name. She is seduced by their son, the vulgar
rake Alec, and bears a child that mercifully dies.
To make a fresh start, Tess goes to work in southern wessex at the fertile Talbothays farm.
There she meets Angle Clare, younger son of a parson, and after a struggle within herself
accepts his offer of marriage. On their wedding night Tess confesses her unhappy past to
Angle, who recoils in puritanical herror. He goes off to Brazil and Tess seeks emploument
at the grim upland farm, Flintcomb Ash, belonging to the tyrannical Farmer Groby. There
she is again afflicted by the advances of Alec d'Urberbille, now an itinerant preacher. He is
insistent that Tess is more his wife than Angel's and relentless in his pursuit of her. Angel
returns to England a wiser man and traces tess to Sandbourne, where she is living as Alec's
wife. She considers it too later for reconciliation and sends him away. In her despair and,
after a brief idyllic period with Angel, is arrested at Stonehenge, tried, and hanged in
Wintoncester (Winchester) jail.
Critical Evaluation
Tess is an exploration of love and passion. Hardy was disturbed by Victorian hypocrisy
toward sex. Most people hide their sexual impulses, expectrd good woman not to have any,
and applied a double standard to the sexual practices of men and women. This standard
condemns Tess of having premarital sex. Hardy explores sex as both a painful and
pleasurable experience. Many readers see the novel as a social novel in which the heroine
represents the old agrarian order battling the new industrial order. The novel is about
natural imagery. Few books are as lush with descriptions of natural life, To Hardy nature,
like sexuality and society, has its good and bad points. Although this is a novel, we can
look at it as a poem. The novel is written from omniscient narrator's point of view. The
femal in her was indomitable, unchangeable, she waes utterly constant to herself. But she
was, by long breeding, intact from mankind. By constructing the Tess – universe on the
soild ground of the earth as Final Cause mysterious cause of causes, Hardy does not allow
to forget that what is most concrete in experience is also what is most inscrutable that an
overturned cold in a field.
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The Picture of Dorian Gray
Author : Oscar wilde (1856-1900)

Place : London
Theme : Everlasting greed and desire to be immortal and young
Type : Ronance - Social
Main Characters:
1. Lord Henry Wotton
2. Dorian Gray
3. Basil Hallward
4. Sibyl Vane
5. Alan Campbell
6. James Vanc

1. The Happy Prince and other tales (1888)
2. A House of Promegranates (1891)
3. Lord Arthur Savile's Crime (1891)
4. The Duchess of Padua (Tragedy in Vese) (1891)
5. Lady Winfermere's Fan (1892)
6. Salome (1894)
7. Importance of Being Ernest (1895)
8. A woman of No Importance) (1893)
9. An Ideal Husband (1895)
10. The Ballad of Reading Goal (1898)
First Paragraph:
The studio was filled with the rich odor of roses and when the
light summer wind stirred amid of the garden there came
through the open door of the heavy scent of the lilac ot rhe
more delicate performe of pink flowering thorn.
Plot
The Picture of Dorian Gray, A novel by OSCAR WILDE, serialized by Lippincott's
Magazine in 1890 and expanded in book form the same year. Once regarded as daringly
modern in its portrayal of fin – de – siècle decadence, it draws on tradirional motifs to
create a powerful GOTHIC NOCEL. In an updated version of the Faust story, Dorian sells
his soul to keep his youth and beauty. The tempter is Lord Henry Worron, who lives
selfishly for amoral pleasure; Dorian's good angel or conscience is Basil Hallward, the
portrait painter, whom Dorian murders. The book highlights the tension between the
polished surface of hight life and the life of secret vice. Although sin is punisheh in the
book has a strong flavour of the elegantly preface asserts; "There is no such thing as a
moral or an immoral book. Books are well written or badly written. That is all."
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Critical Evaluation
This novel is Wilde's only full – lengh novel. It is a curious reworking of the Faust legend
in which Dorain is Faust. The major difference is that while Faust wishes for eternal youth
in order to experience all that life has to offer including unselfish work for good, Dorain
wishes to remain young only to be admired and to experience all the lusts of the flesh. A
very debased Faust his end is appropriately sordid and essentially meaningless. Like
Dorian's portrait the novel has aged badly.
The plotting is heavy handed the charecters one dimensional. Whetever rigor the novel has
today stems not from its allegorical treatment of the wages of sin but from its sparkling
epigrams and its charm as a period piece of Late – Victorian London.
The only way to get rid of a temptation is to yield to it he says to Dorian, "A man can be
happy with any woman as long as he does not love her".
Heart of Darkness (1899)
Author : Joseph Conrad (1857-1924)

Time : 19th century
Place : Africa (Congo)
Theme : Self – Quesr, Loss of Morality, Race Discrimination.
Type : Navigatory
School : Realism – Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Kurtz
2. Kurtz's Intended
3. Charles Marlow
4. Fresleven
5. The Russian
6. The Manager
7. The Brickmaker
8. The Pilgrims

1. The Mirror of the Sea (1906)
2. The Arrow of Gold (1919)
3. Youth (1902)
4. The Nigger of the Narcissus (1897)
5. Shadow Line (1917)
6. Lord Jim (1900)
7. Under the Western Eyes (1911)
8. Typhoon (1903)
9. Nostromo (1904)
10. The secret Agent (1907)
11. The Secret Sharer (1910)
12. Chance (1913)
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13. The Rover (1923)
First Paragraph:
The Nellie, a crusing yawl, swung to her anchor without a
flutter of the sails, and was at rest. The flood had made, the
wind was nearly calm and being bound down the river.
Plot
This dark and ridding parable of imperialism, self – discovery and self – destructions is told
mainly by Marlow to his friends as they wait on a yacht for the tide to turn in the Thames
estuary. He had been employed by a European trading company to replace a steamship
capitan on a great Aftivsnm river (clearly the Congo).
The Westerners he meets at the trading post and the Central Station are interested only in
extracring ivory and do not notice the suffering of the native workers. Marlow is sent
upriver to rescue Kurtz, an agent, now seriously ill, whose commercial success is matched
by his reputation for idealism. Expecting to meet an apostle of Western civilization, he
finds a man who has made himeself the natives's god. His depravity is signaled by the
human heads which decorate the posts outside his hut. Marlpe retaoms a paradoxical
admiration for Kurtz, whose deathbed cry- "The horror! The horror! – intimates a kind of
desperate self – knowledge. Having left a native woman grieving Kurtz's departure on the
bank of the river, Marlow returns to the European city where the company has its
headquarters and lies to Kurtz's "Intended" by telling her that Kurtz had spoken her name as
he died.
Critical Evaluation
Marlow is Conrad's alter ego. His opinions do not differe signigicantly from what we know
about the autor's own. By using an actual speaking sailor to tell the story, Conrad goes just
about as far away as you can get from the typical 19th century novel's omniscient narrator
the all knowning voice of an impersonal author who told you not only what happened to the
characters but also what went on in their minds.
What is the most unusual about the point of view in Heart of Darkness is not the use of
Marlow as narrator, but that his tale is framrd by the narration of another nameless
observer.
What facinates Conrad is the sool of man straggling desperately with the vast indifferent
forces of nature, and more than that with the lures of his own spirit. The romantic nature of
idealism is intensified by the exotic backgrounds. His interst is not in the txpical human
being, but in the exceptional, whether in moral heroism or moral degeneration.
Lord Jim (1900)
Author : Joseph Conrad (1857-1927)

Time : 19th century
Place : Congo – Africa – Panta (ship)
Theme : Second chance – Everlasting – Salvation, Racial Discrimination
Type : Navigatory
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School : Realistic – Symbolic – Impressionistic
Main Characters:
1. Charles Marlow
2. Jim
3. Stein
4. Cornelius
5. Jewel
6. Doramin
7. Dain Waris
8. Gentleman Brown
First Paragraph:
He was an inch, perhaps two, under six feet, powerfully built
and he advanced straight at you with a dlight stoop of the
shoulders, head forward, and a fixed from under stare which
made you think of charging bull.
Plot
Jim is chief mate on the steamship patnza. During a voyafa towards Mecca with a cargo of
pilgrims the ship strikes a submerged object. Watching the small crew lowering a lifeboat
to save their own skins, Jim appears to be an idealistic onlooker but then, impulsively, he
jumps. The significance of his action is the crux of the novel. In Aden the narrator, Marlow,
observes Jim at the Court of Inquiry.
Ironically, the Patna had not sunk, but only Jim has elected to face the official
consequences of his action. Marlow is interested in Jim's private consciousness of disgrace:
being stripped of his master's certificate proves a public but not a spiritual atonement. With
Marlow's assistance Jim moves throught a variety of jobs ashore, but the promise of real
freedom "talkers" (those who know of his sullied reputation) is provided only by a position
as agent at the remote tranding post of Pautusan.
Jim's life at Patusan, recalled by Marlow, has an active and practical character: to the
people. Including the elderly chief Doramin, he is Tuan, or Lord Jim. His relationship with
the woman he called Jewel, stepdaughter of his corrupt predecessor, contributes to his
partial serenity. This is violently disrupted by the arrival of Gentleman Brown and his
fellow thieves. Jim plerdges to Doramin that Brown will leave the island without
bloodshed; he is proved horribly wrong.
Doramin's son killed as a result of Jim's misplaced trust. Taking responsibility for his
action, Jim allows himself to be shot by an angry and grieving Doramin.
Critical Evaluation
Friendship is a subtle theme that runs like a thread through the novel. Marlow immediately
feels his kinship with Jim, and keeps referring to him as "one of us". He also sees in Jim
reflection of his younger, more naïve self. His prose is very rich complicated and sensual. It
frequently verges on excess. His reputation as an impressionist novelist stems from his
dependence on sense impressions to create his images and make his points. He employs a
wide ranging vocabulary much of it dream sea life or the exotic easter regions that from the
setting of the novel. Jim is the cictim of his own vivid imagination. He tends to freeze in
difficult situations because he is so adept at picturing the worst possible outcomes. He is a
romantic idealist, that is, he thinks perfection is really within his grasp, and so he's doubly
hard on himself when he fails to he perfect. He may not live up to his vision of himself, but
he is not hypocrite, either he strives to live up to it. He is naïve, even immature.
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Old Wives' Tale (1908)
Author : Arnold Bennet (1867-1931)

Time : 1860-1906
Place : Potteries
Theme : Lonliness and Isolation
Type : Social Satire
School : Realistic – Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Constance, Sophia, Mr., Mrs., Baines
2. Samuel, Daiel, Cyril Povey
3. Gerald Scales
4. Mr. Chirac
5. M. Chirac

1. A Man from the North (1898)
2. Anna of the Five Towns (1902)
3. The Grand Babylon Hotel (1902)
4. The Gates of Wrath (1903)
5. Tales of Five Towns (1905)
6. Roll Call (1998)
7. Milestones (1912)
8. The Card (1911)
9. Lord Raingo (1926)
10. Riceyman Steps (1923)
First Paragraph:
Those two girls, Constance and Sophia Baines, paid no heed to
the manifold interst of their situation of which indeed they had
never been condcious.
Plot
The lives of two sisters, Constance ans Sophia, are the focus of a study of the Baines
family, prosperous drapers of Bursley in the Potteries. The story start in 1860 and ends in
about 1906 with the sister's deaths "Mrs Baines", the first of four parts, shows the domestic
and commercial struggles of a family in which the father is bedridden. Constance's
restricted ambitions, her marriage to the Baines's apprentice, Samuel Povey, and
motherhood, are densely elaborated through parts One and Two.
The parallelism between her life and Sophia's, whose ambirion to become a teacher is
frustrated, is one component of a higly structured novel.
Constance is left in lonely widowhood when hwe son Cyril departs to a London art college.
Part Three recapitulates the life of Sophia. We are told of her elopement with Gerald
Scales, a glamorous commercial traveler; his desertion of her in Paris: her survival of the
Siego of Paris in the Franco – Pussian War; and her achievement of independence as
proprietor of the Pension Frensham.
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After an exchange of letters, an elderly Sophia returns to the same house in Brusley to live
with her sister. Sophia's journey to Manchester, where she is too late to speak to the dying
Gerald Scales, strikes a grim keynote to this concluding section, "what Life Is".
Critical Evaluation
The triumph of the novel is in its subtle meticulous study of time's erosions. Ever so
gradually the girls become less frolicsome, less self assured, but better able to take care of
themselves and more injured to lonliness in their very different environments. Time works
its havoc on them and in the end wind a halloe vivotry over these two indimitable women.
With quiet confidence in his power to keep two plot moving simultaneously Bennett set out
quite deliberately in the novel to write what he knew would be his masteripiece. The novel
combimes ruthlessly accurate detail of French Realism.
Sons and Lovers (1913)
Author : D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930)

Time : Turn of 20th century
Place : Midlands
Theme : Oedipus Compex
Type : The Romance of Clef - Autobiographical
Main Characters:
1. Paul, Walter, Gertrude Morel
2. William Morel
3. Lily Western
4. Clara Dawes
5. Baxter Dawes

1. The White Peacock (1911)
2. The Trespasser (1912)
3. The Rainbow (1915)
4. Woman in Love (1917)
5. Look, We Have Come Through (1917)
6. Aaron's Rod (1922)
7. Mr. Noon (1920-1) (Incomplete)
8. Kangroo (1923)
9. The Plumed Serpent (1926)
10. Lady Chatterley's Lover (1928)
First Paragraph:
The "bottoms" succeeded to "Hell Row". Hell Row was a block
of thatched, bulging cottages that stood by the brooksides on
Greenhilllane.
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Plot
Gertrude Coppard becomes a schoolteacher to escape her harsh and overhearing father.
Sheis fascinated by the miner, Walter Morel, whose earthy liveliness is in strak contrast to
the Puritan atmosohere of her home. She and Morel are married and live happily for a time;
but he is a heavy drinker and resists her of forts to change him. Mrs Morel concentrates all
her energies on her children, three sons and a daughter, and seeks some stimulus for her
mind at the Co- operative Women's Guild. Her eldest son, William, goes to work and brings
in a little more money for the family. Later he moves to London and dies there. Mrs Morel
is stunned by William's untimely death, but when Paul, her second son, also falls ill she
nurses him back to health and transfers her emotions and aspirations to him. Walter Morel
is scorned and exvluded by his wife and children. Paul starts work as a jounior clerk in
Nothingham. He falls in love with Miriam Leivers, and intense, reserved and "spiritual" girl
(a character based on Lawrence's friend Jessie Chambers). Mrs Morel becomes possessive
and jealous of Paul's relationship with Mirriam. Eventually Paul meets and has an affair
with Clara Dawes, a married woman, and is also powerfully draw to her husband Baxter.
Mrs Morel suffers a long and painful illness, which Paul relieves by administering morphia.
After her death, at the end of the novel, he determines to set out and make his own life.
Critical Evakuation
This is a story of the unnatural deveotion of Paul Morel to his possessive mother.
It is a fictional study of Oedipus Complex. Paul Morel seems very much like a man
suffering from a Oedipus Complex. At times Paul's relationship with Gertrude is
disturbingly passionate. Hr hates his father and dreams of living exclusively with his
mother. Paul has grave problems finding a satisfying relationship with any woman other
than his mother. The novel traces his unsuccessful attempts to reconcile spiritual love
sexual passion and filial decotion. Mrs. Morel encourages her son's dependence and is
envol is an investigation of love between men and women. Paul has a spiritual love Miriam
and a sexual one with Clara. Both relationships; leave him unfulfilled Paul needs a love that
combines both spiritual and sexual elements in one woman. Sex is bone of contention
between Paul and his two loves, Miriam and Clara. Both woman want a personal emotional
relationship, whereas Paul view sex an rather impersional. The novel tells the story of an
individual growing up to become a talented painter and a deeplu sensitive, troubled
Youngman. The novel traces Paul's discovery of his need and ability to paint. Art for Paul
is inspired by nature and woman. The artist's mission in life is to help others see beyond the
common place and into life's mystery and wonder.
A Portrait of The Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Author : Jame Joyce (1882-1941)

Time : 19th century
Place : Irennland - Dublin
Point of view : Third Person Limited Omniscient
Theme : Sacific – Sacraments – Mortal Sin – Holy Trinity
Type : The Bildungsromn (Novel of Formation – Education)
School : Symbolic
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Main Characters:
1. Stephen Dedalus
2. May Dedalus
3. Uncle Charles
4. Dante Riordan
5. John Casey
6. Eileen Vance
7. Emma
8. Father Dolan
9. Father Arnall
10. Father Conmee
11. Vincent Heron
12. Lynch

1. Dubliners (1922)
2. Exile (1918)
3. Ulysses (1922)
4. Finnegans Wake (1939) (Dream Vision)
First Paragraph:
Once upon a time and a very good time it was there was
moocow coming down along the road and this moocow that
was coming down along the road met a nicens little boy named
tuckoo … .
Plot
StephenDedalus (repressing Joyce), an intellingent but frail child, struggles towards
maturity in Ireland at the turn of the century. The novel traces his intellectual, moral, and
artistic development from babyhood to the completion of his education at University
College, Dublin. His individuality is stifled by many levels of convention, dictatrd by the
family, Catholicism and Irish nationalism. As a child he witness a fiery political dispute
between supporters of Parnell and anti-Parnellites, and suffers unjust punishment at the
hands of a stupid and brutal priest, Father Dolan. Adolescent sexuality causes him moral
torment, and this is excerbated at a school "retreat" where he hears a sermon on "hellfire"
from Father Arnall. Rejecting the call to the priesthood, Stephen begins to assert his own
identily. At University college he embraces the winder and more rewarding world of
literature, philosophy and aesthrtics, and by the end of the novel he has freed himself from
the claims of family, church and state. He resolves to leave Ireland for Paris to encounter
"the reality of experience" and to forge "the uncreated conscience" of his race.
The novel was developed from Stephen Hero, begun in 1904. Stephen Dedalus reappears in
ULYSSES.
Critical Evaluation
Joyce fled from Dublin to the mainland of Europe, but Dublin never left him.
Dublin is more than the backdrop of Poereait of the Arist. It is also the symbol of Stephen's
discontent. Despite any momentry feeling of coummunios, Stephan must reject the dull
phenomenon of Dublin and Ireland as an environment suitable for aritistic growth, although
both city and country will remain a rich source of the art itself. The terrors of the hell that
awaits unrepentant sinners are described in vivid detaily by Father Arnall. The name of
Dedalus was chosen by Joyce to link his hero with the mythical Greek hero, Daedalus. The
Latin epigraph is from the Roman poet Orid's.
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A Passage to India (1924)
Author : E. M. Forster (1879-1970)

Time : 19th century
Place : India
Theme : Self – Quesl, Love
Type : Social – Regional
School : Naturalism
Main Characters:
1. Dr. Aziz
2. Dr. Callender
3. Ronnie Heaslop
4. Mrs. Moore
5. Adela Quested
6. Cyril Fielding
7. Professor Narayan Godbole

1. Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905)
2. The Road from Golonus
3. The Longest Journey (1907)
4. A Room with a View (1908)
5. Howards End (1910)
First Paragraph:
Except for the Marabar Caves – and they are twenty miles off –
the city of Chandrapore presents nothing extraordinary.
Plot
Adela Quested visit Chandrapore with Mrs Moore in order to make up her mind whether to
marry the latter's son, Ronny. He is a city magistrate who exemplifies the narrow anti-
Indian prejudices of the imperial bureaucrat. Adela's desire to understand the "real India",
an interest shared by Mrs Moore, annoys the whole white community apart from Cyril
Fielding, principal of the government college. Fielding's liberal views have set him apart
from his compatriots, and he has nurtured a close relationship with Dr Aziz, assistant to the
British Civil Surgeon.
Visiting a mosque, Mrs Moore encounters Aziz and a friendship is established. She and
Adela accept his invitation to visit the renowned and musterious Marabar Caves, but
Fielding, who was to have escorted them, misses the train and the party proceeds without
him. The expedition proves to be an unmitigated disaster. Mrs Moore undergoes a traumatic
and nihilistic psychic experience from which she never recovers, and Adela belives herself
to have victim of a sexual assault by Aziz. He is arrested and committed to prision to await
trail, and the entire community and Chandraphore is sharply divided into opposing racial
factions. Only Fielding amongst the British continues to assert Aziz's innocence, but their
friendship is irrevocably compromised.
Mrs Moore dies on the voyage home, and Adela, under extreme psychological pressure,
admits that she was mistaken. Some time afterward, Aziz and Fielding meet for the last
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241
time and discuss the future of India. Aziz, who has now adopted an entrenched radical
stance, insists that only when the British are driven out of India can he and Fielding be
friends.
Critical Evaluation
The title is an allusion to W. Whitman's Songs of Leaves. In a sense the novel is wry,
ironic commentary on American poet's hopeful 19th c. vision of a world unified by technical
progress. The tragedy of the novel lies in the breakdown of communication both between
races and between individuals.The novel is pessimistic about the inability of man to
communicate with or understand his fellows. The center of the novel is in the mysterious
caves at Marabar. Whatever one says in the caves the answer is the same.
Mrs. Dalloway (1925)
Author : Virginia Woolf (1882-1941)

Place : London
Point of view : Stream of a Salvation
Theme : Death as a Salvation
Type : Social – Feministic
School : Symbolic – Surrealistic
Main Characters:
1. Clarissa Dalloway
2. Richard Dalloway
3. Peter Walsh
4. Sally Seton
5. Elizabeth
6. Eptimus Warren Smith

1. Night and day (1919)
2. Jccob's Room (1922)
3. To the Lighthouse (1927)
4. The Waves (1931)
5. The Years (1937)
6. Between the Acts (1941)
7. A Room of Ons's Own (1927)
8. Three Guineas (1938)
9. The Voyage Out (1913)
10. Orlando (1928)
First Paragraph:
Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself. For
Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken
off their hinges.
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Plot
Clarissa Dalloway, the wife of Richard Dalloway MP and a fashionable London hostess, is
to give an important party. Her character is gradually revealed through her thoughts on that
day and through her memories of the past, tendered by interior monologue and STREAM
OF CONSCIOUSNESS. The other people who have touched her life are: her one – time
suitor peter Walsh, lately returned from India after five years' absence; her childhood friend
Sally Seton; her daughter Elizabeth and spinster tutor Miss kilman; and a political hostess,
Lady Bruton. A complementary character is Septimus Warren Smith, a shell – shock victim
who has retreated into a private world and ends the day by committing suicide. He and
Clarissa Dalloway never meet, but their lives are connected by external events and news of
his death is casually mentioned by a guest at Clarissa's party. It provokes in her thoughts of
her own isolation and loneliness: Death was defiance. Death was defiance. Death was an
attempt to communicate, people feeling the impossibility of reaching the centre which,
mystically, evaded them; closeness drew apart; rapture faded; one was alone."
Critical Evaluation
Perhaps it should be stated that Classia Dalloway is not, as many critics have taken her to
ve a character whom Virginia Woolf simply admires and endores. The treatment of her as
od her society is consistently critical. However the novel is rather a portrait of Mrs.
Dalloway's society than of the lady herself. The material of which it is made is the life in
London following the Great War of a small segment of English sociery, the British ruling
class as it is called in the book. And this life is brought into focus in the character of
Clarissa. Dalloway. At the same time she is a criticism of her society. If her life is kind of
non life so too is the life of her society as a whole.
Virginia Woolf rebelled against what she called the "materialism" of such novelist as A.
Bennet, and J. Glasworthy.
Brave New World (1932)
Author : Aldous Huxlex (1894-1963)

Time : 20th century
Place : The Central London Hatchery – Conditioning Center
Theme : Facts of Life
Type : Utopian
School : Surrealistic - Symbolic
Main Characters:
1. Lenina Crowne
2. Bernard Marx
3. Fanny Crowne
4. Henry Foster
5. The Director
6. Mustaph Mond
7. Linda
8. Pope
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9. Helmholtz Watson
10. John

1. Limbo (1920)
2. Crome Yellow (1921)
3. Antoc Hay (1923)
4. Point Counter Point (1928)
5. Those Bareen Leaves (1925)
6. Eyeless in Gaza (1936)
7. After Many a Summer (1939)
8. Ape and Essence (1948)
9. The Genius and Goddess (1955)
10. Doors of Perception (1954)
11. Heaven and Hell (1956)
12. The Devils of Loudun (1952)
First Paragraph:
A squat grey building of only thirty four storeys. Over the main
entrance the words, Central London Hatchery and Conditioning
Center and in a shield the world state's motto Community, I
dentity, Stability.
Plot
The title is taken from Miranda's words in THE TEMPEST; "O brave new world/ that
has such people in't!"
In the year 632 After Ford (i.e. the 26th century) the wold has attained a kind of Utopia, in
which the means of production are in state ownership and the principle "from each
according to his need" is rigorously applied. Biological engineering fits different categories
of work. Ers –Alogas, Betas, Gammas, etc. – to their stations in life, and universal
happiness in preserved by psychotropic druds. As a sreanger into this world comes the
Savage, raised in a reservation of American Indian primirives. He takes up the argument
introduced by the disaffectuals Bernard Marx and Helmboltz Watson, debating the merits
of freedom and passion with World Controller Mustapha Mond. In the end, though, the
Savage yields to the temptation of the carefree world, and kills himself in disgust.
Brave New World is frequently cited as horrific work, though it is really a black comedy. It
provides a scathing criticism of the values implicit in the myth of social salvation through
rechnological expertise. Modern developments in biological engneering and psycho –
chemistry have preserved, and perhaps increased, its relevance as an exercise in alarmism.
Critical Evaluation
With characteristic cynicism Aldous Huxley takes her words for the title of a novel that
describes a future that is anything but brave. Unable to face realistically such facts of life as
pain, grief and death, protected against anything disagreeable by ever present some Living
for the sensation of the moment the people of Huxley's brave new world are a grotesque
projection of civilized life in the 1920's. It merely projects into the future the tendencies of
the presents. It has been described by some as a satire of hopelessly drifting age. Mystical
religion was one of the preoccupations of Huxley's later life. The civilization Huxley
depicts represents the magnification of negathive ideals. While Utopias from Plato to Sir
Thomas More tended to project an idealized vision of what society could be like if human
reason were employed to its utmost, more recent Utopias which Brave New World has been
most influential are a nightmare vision of the future. In Huxley's projection, civilization has
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been drained of love, vitality and irrational excess. Everything is machine – made, mass
prodyced and sterile.
Lord of the Files (1954)
Author : William Golding (1911-93)

Time : World War III
Place : An Isolated Island
Point of view : Third Person (Shift of Point of view)
Theme : Allegory of Humanity's Fallen Nature – Need for Civilization
Type : Allegorical – Social Satire - Adventurous
Main Characters:
1. Piggy
2. Ralph
3. Simon
4. Jack Marridew
5. Samneric
6. Roger

1. Inheritoris (1955)
2. Pincher Martin (1956)
3. Free Fall (1959)
4. The Spire (1964)
5. The Pyramid
6. The Scorpion (1971)
7. Darkness Visible (1979)
8. The Paper Men (1984)
9. The Ends of the Earth (1991)
10. Close Quarters (1987)
11. Fine Down Below (1989)
12. The Brass Gates (1958)
First Paragraph:
The boy with fair hair lowered himself down the last few feet
of rock and began to pick his way toward lagoon.
Though he had taken off his school sweater and trailed it now
from one hand his grey shirt to him and his hair was plastered
to his for head.
Plot
His first published novel, it is an inverted Victorian boy's adventure story, whose regular
allusion to R. M. BALLANTYNE'S CORAL ISLAND stress Golding's choice of svage
knowledge rather than blithe innocence at the conclusion of his fable.
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Marooned on a desert island after a plane crash, a party of schoolboys quickly degenerates
into vindictive barbarism. The roguish Jack emerges as a calculating and ruthless dictator,
while the fat and clumsy Piggy is taunned and eventually killed with the Christilike Simon.
It is only when the boys are rescued by a British desreoyer that Piggy's well – meaning
friend Ralph realizes the true extent of their depravity.
Golding has said that the genesis of his novel lay in the brutalities he witnessed during his
service at sea in World War II and in his experiences teaching small boys for 13 years. His
use of an obvious but effective symbolism throughout the story allows it to work as an
ALLEGORY of humanity's fallen nature as well as a graphically realistic scenario.
Critical Evaluation
The title is a translation of Greek Term of Devil in Beelzebab. The island setting works as
a metaphor for the world. The boys are trapped on the island we are trapped on this planet.
What happens there becomes a commentary on our world. The most obvious of the themes
is man's need for civilization. Contrary to the belief that man is innocent and society evil,
the novel shows that laws and rules policemen and schools are necessary to keep the darker
side of human nature in line. Civilizatioin separate man from the animals by traching him to
think and make choices. When civilization slips away and man reverts to his more primitive
nature his identity disintegrates. Fear of the unknown on the island revolves around the
boy's terror of the beast. Fear is allowed to grow because they play with the idea of it. They
cannot fully accept the notion of a beast nor can they let go of it.
Throughout much of literature the natural world has been portrayed as "Mother Nature", the
protector of man. In Lord of the Files, natural world has been shown to be indifferent to
humanity's existence. Being blind and having special sight are interwoven themes. One who
is blind to his immediate surrounding usually has special understanding of things which
others cannot fathom. Irony breaks out between contrasted scenes some what distant from
one another and even as far apart as the beginning and the end of the story. For instance,
when we first catch the sight of Ralph, he is neat, handsime and laughing but when last see
him, he is durty, in rages and sobbing.
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CHAPCHER 6
Literary Schools
Neoclassicism (1660-1780)
It refers to the favt that some writers, particulary 18th c modeled their own writing on
classical, especially Roman literature. Neockassic writers are very varied in their style,
attitudes and aspitation. It as a lable is applied to a period of English literature lasting from
1660, the Restoration of Charles II until 1880. The generalized beliefs of the Neoclassical
writers are based on the premise that the world is God's carefully ordered creation with
man, midway in the great chain of being, a rational being cpable of living harmoniously in
society. In spite of his reason, man was a limited being who should not aspire beyond
sensible, limited aims: pride, vulgarity, excess extremes of all kinds even enthusiasm were
to be distrusted. Balance, correctness, decorum, a sense of the innate rightness of the golden
mean, of measure in life and art, these were the route to human excellence.
Unlike Romantics, then, Neoclassical writers did not value crearivity, or orifinality highly.
Literature reflected life; art was Mimetic. Poetry demanded long study and practice.
Horace's Ars Poetica, was approved and was their best model. Poetry demanded the polish
of the craftman's skill. Neoclassic writers valued the various Genres, such as epic, tragedy,
pastoral, comedy. Aristotle's view on tragedy, concerning unities were regarded as
essential. The metre for almost all these worlks was the Heroic Couplet. The Roman writer
Cicero was much admired in this school. Man and his activiries were regarded as the main
subject of poetry. The 18th c has been called Augustan age, Age of Reason and Age of
Dryden.
Elements:
1. Nature : universal and intellectual experience of Man
2. Ancients : Limitation from the perfect models
3. The Rules : Art and artist must have plan and must follow principles
4. Genius : A poet must be born a poet, not be made
5. Wit : The intellectual sharpness and brightness of mind
Main Writers:
1. A. Pope A Essay of Man – An Essay on Criticism
2. J. Dryden All for Love – Translation of Aeneid
3. J. Swift Gulliver's Travels
4. B. Jonson
5. O. Goldsmith
6. Addison
7. Gibbon
Poetry
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Quitations:
1. Pope : Follow the Nature
Nature and Truth are the Same
True wit us what oft was thought but ne'er so
Well expressed
Romanticism (1789-1890)
Romantic is a word which is bafflingly vague. Yet for the last two centuries, since its first
rather vague use as a literary term by the German philosopher critic Schlegel, it has been
constantly redefined by writers and critics. It begins from the French Revolution to about
1830. Romantic in its weakest sense means "to do with love". There are a large number of
literary interests which might loosely be labeled romantic often in contrast to the contrary
conception of literature labeled Neoclassic. Romantic stands for subjective, personal,
irrational and emotionality.
Many of the writers of this period were inspired by the apparent idealism of French
Revolution (1789). The roots of many of Romantic ideas can clearly be seen in the 18th. C.
cult of Sensibility. The Romantic movement came into existence as a consequence of the
spiritual and metaphysical implication of the scientifid and technological revolution which
began in 17th.c. Many writers identified poetry as the expression or exhibition of emotion;
and writers expressed their personal experiences and ideas. Romantics see Nature through
senses of emotion, usually coloured with melancholy, nosralgia, and regret. The favorite
season is Automn.
Romantic nature poems are in fact descriptive, meditative, personal, and subjective.
The concept of individuality as a principle of Romantic factor is influenced by Rousseaus
philosophical ideas.
Elements:
1. Individuality and lonliness
2. Interest in nature
3. Spontaneity in thought and action
4. Subjectivity
5. Nostalgic
6. Mysterical
7. Emotional
8. Quest for Self
9. Common Man
10. Common Language
11. Rustic Life
12. Exotic
13. Regration
14. Meditation
15. Inspiration
16. Irrational
17. Nature
18. Supernatural elements
Main Works and Writers:

1. S. T. Coleridge The Rim of the Ancient Mariner
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2. P. B. Shelley Ode to the West Wind

3. W. Wordsworth The Perlude, Tintern Abbey
4. Keats Ode to Nightingle
5. W. Whitman Song of Myself
Realism
Realism amounts to a general tread or drift in the focus of literature, rather than a coherent
literary movement. It tries to portray event realistically in all of genres especially in the
Novel. More problematical is the relationship of relism with subject matter. Often such
realistic writer seeks to show up the false hopes and fanciful aspirations of their characters:
realistic novels may be contrasted with romantic or escapist ficrion which depicts life a full
of thrilling advententure and gratified desire. Claarly realism as applied to subject matter is
an exceptionally elastic and elusive term, to be used with care. Much of the world's
literature can be accounted realistic. In literature realism the portroyal of life with fidelity.
It is not concerned with idealization with rendering rhings a beautiful when they are not.
Realism rejects Classicism, Romanticism and doctrine of "Art for Art Sake": Therealist
thught an artist should concern himself with here, now, with everyday events with his own
environment and with the moments of his time. Realism was a literary movement in the last
half of 19th c. and early years of the 20th. C. The movement origicated in France and valued
actual experience to hight degree. It was an attempt to portray life as it is and describe as
accurately and honestly as possible what is observed through the senses. The writers
recommended a return to medival form of social cooperation and manual work attacked the
values of the new industrial middle class. Realistic works reacted against the new
industurial way of living and rejected the dominace of the middle – class bourgeoisie's
morality and beliefs. Relaism is the attempt to show life as it is, where as idealism
represents life as it should be.
In England the realistic movement was latent in Defoe, Fielding and Richardson Realistic
movement begins in earness charles Dickens. He created a panorama of early 19th. C.
Btitish society. D. Defoe was the first novelistic realist.
Elements:
1. Objectiviy
2. Plausible events
3. Detail in description
4. Selective
5. Observation (No comment)
6. Impersonality
7. Frankness
Main Writers:
1. H. Fielding Tom Jones
2. J. Austen Emma
3. D. Defore Robinson Crusoe
4. T. Dreiser An American Tragedy
5. S. Crane Red Badge of Courage
6. J. Steinbeck The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
7. E. Hemingway The Sun also Rises (1926)
8. C. Sandburt
9. O'Niell
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10. B. Shaw
11. James The Ambassadors (1903)
12. W. D. Howells The Rise of Silas Lapham (1885)
13. A. Trollope The Warden (1855)
14. W. M. Thackerey Vanit / Fair
Dirty Realism
A term coined by Bill Buford, editor of Granta, as the title for a special 1987 issue of the
magazine devoted to new American fiction. It denotes a comparatively small school of
downbeat, minimalist American short ficrion represented by authors such as R. Carver, R.
Ford and T. Wolff. Dirty Realism owes its laconic prose and elliptical narrative style to
Hemingway, but further pares down its range to concentrate on shabby, rootless
communities and inconclusive encounters.
It has been linked with Post-Modernism to the inqualities of the Reagan era. The term Dirty
Realism is usually reserved for short Story, the form which best suits its brevity and
selectivity.
Natiralism
A more particularized branch of Realism Naturalism, expresses a post Darwinian view of

life in which man is seen as fundamentally no more than a specialized animal, subject
wholly to natural forces such as heredity and environment. Man's Spiritual or intellectual
aspirations are seen as meaningless. In his work Zola called himself a naturalist and
discussed his view of the novelists role a kind of pathologist dissecting life, with the novel
as a kind of experiement. The naturalist selects and orders his materials to illustrate his
world view. His typical subject matter is the miserable and poverty – stricken or those
driven by animal appetites, such as hunger or sexuality. Life is seen as a squalid and
meaningless tragedy, with man in society like a caged wild aminal. Naturalists try to
present their subjects with scientific objectivity and with elaborate documentation
sometimes including an almost medical frankness about activities and bodily functions
usually unmentioned in ealier literature. Those in favour of a naturalistic approach to and
interpretation of life concentrated on depicting the social environment and dwelt
particularly on its deficiencies and on the shortcoming of human beings. The Man's
charavter and fortunes are determined by two kinds of natural forces, heredity and
environment.
According to it man is passive of his environment and heredity as well a slave of his
biological instinct. The naturalist tries to be as objective as a laboratory scientist. They try
to show that people are trapped by general forces surrounding them over which they have
no control. They choose their materials from the ugly side of life. The author does not
attempt to comment on the characters' action and merely inserts them into a crucial
situation only to watch them impassively. This school is scientific or pseudo – scientific in
its approach.
The typical settings are slum, factory, and farm. The naturalistic author selects brutal and
the degraded. Noturalism doesnot regard human as agents of free will. It is less interested in
character and more in the conflict of soxial forces.
Elements:
1. Objectivity
2. Scientific views
3. Determinism
4. Fight for Survival
5. Conflict (internal, external)
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6. Unheroic life
7. Common life
Main Writers:
1. E. Zola
2. Flaubert Madam Bovary
3. T. Hardy Jude the Obscure
4. N. Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter (1850)
5. F. Norris The Octopus (1901)
6. U. Sinclair The Jungle (1906)
7. T. Dreiser An American Tragedy (1925)
8. S. Crane The Open Boat (1897)
Symbolism
Several English Romantics notably, Blake and Shelley, used both conventional and private
symbols persistently in their poetry, and they might loosely be called symbolist poets. This
movement refers to French poets of the second half of the 19th. C. Whose poems exploit the
mysterious suggestiveness of private symbols; they concentrated on achieving a musical
quality in their verse and believed that throught blurring the senses and mixing images they
depicted a higher reality. A symbolist manifesto was published by the French poet Jean
Moreas in 1886. The symbolists attacked the descriptive tendencies of Realist theater and
Naturalistic novels because they belived in the individuality and free will of human being.
Symbolistic elements were applied most successfully to the novel by Huyman and to the
theater by Maeterlinck. Many Symbolist poets composed prose poems and free verse. The
formal qualities and the suggestive power of language were streesed, images were
presented in startling ways and the device of symesthesia. They believed that task of poerty
is to create impression in the mind, and opposed didacticism, eloquence, political reference,
sentimentality, objective description, impersonality and descriptive Realism. A. Strinberg
and W. B. Yeats were influenced by Symbolist belief.
However the principel Symbolist playwright is Materlinck.
Elements:
1. Subjective
2. Allegorical ideas
3. Private Signs and symbols
4. Walking in a forest of Symbols
5. Truth (internal)
6. Correspondece between visible and invisible world
7. Inventing a new language to express subjects
8. Pure Poerty
Main Writers and Works:

1. Ibsen When We Dead Awaken (1900)
2. A. Symons
3. M. Maeterlink
4. W. B. Yeats
5. W. Joyce Ulysses
6. W. Faulkner The Sound and The Fury
7. D. Thomes
8. P. Verlaine
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9. Ch. Baudelaire Les Fleurs du Mal (1857)

10. Rimbaud
11. S. Mallarme
Expressionism
A European artistic movement which started in 1900 in Germany. It was a revolt against
Realism. Instead of attempting to represent the world conventionally and objectively,
Expressionist writers and painters show reality distorted by an emotional or abnormal state
of mind even by madness. In literature Stindberg is a notable exponent of Expressionism.
His "Dream Play" (1901) dislocate the ordinary sequence of time and converys a view of
the unreality of man's existence through a collection of dream like fragments. thThis
departure from the rigidities of realism in the theater has been highly influential in 20 . C.
dramatic writing though the Expressionist movement as such was short lived. It avoids the
representation of external reality and instead to project themselves and a highly personal
vision of the world. The man principle involved is that expression determines form and
therefore imagery, punctuation syntax. It dominated the theater for a time in the 1920s, and
aimed show inner psychological realities. In England and America the dramatists are really
the only writers to have bean affected. This drama is a theme, rather than plot or conflict –
centered and genuine antogonits do not exist. Expressionism advocates the primacy of
emotion, and because it wished to express the subconscious and unconscious mind freely
they suppressed exterior forms in favor of inner reality. An Expressionist accompolishes his
aim through distortion exaggeration, primitive and fanyacy. He also makes use of the vivid
shocking, violent or dynamic application of formal elements and rejects the tradition of
well made play and plausibility in art.
He wrote about human being's search for God and jusic in the nightmarish works, and
projected the repressed content of the mind into mysterious events.
Expressionist drama often showed the ingluence of modern psychology by revealing the
inner frustrations of the dramatist. Grotesque is a main feature of this school.
The theater of Absurd has its roots in this scholl.
Elements:
1. Emotional Shock
2. Rejection of Realism
3. Grotesque
4. Search for Inner Peace
5. Inner Frustration
6. Violent and Fear
7. Distorted Stage and images
8. Nightmarish Society
9. Mask – Like Make up
10. Lonliness
11. Reflection of Inner Vision
12. Subjectivy
13. Bizarre Events
14. Repetition

1. A. Strinberg The Ghost Soneta (1908)
To Damascus
A Dream Play (1902)
2. Kaiser Morn to Midnight (1916)
3. J. Joyce Ulysses
4. F. Kafka The Castle (1926)
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The Trail
5. E. O'Neill The Hairy Ape (1923)
Emperor Jones (1925)
6. T. Wilder The Skin of Our Teeth (1942)
7. B. Brecht The Threepenny Opera (1928)
8. G. M. Hopkins Poems
9. T. S. Eliot The Waste Land (1922)
10. E. Poumd Canto
Surrealism
An artistic and literary movement starting in France in the 1920s. The poem A. Breton drew
up his Manifeste du surrealism in 1924.
It was anti – rational and anti – relist. It advocated the liberation of the mind from logic:
insteads, art should grow out of confrontation with the unconscious mind. Dreams,
hallucinating states, automatic writing and even nonsense are the inspiration and subject
matter of art. Especially in the art world it has been widely if diffusely influential. They
tried to express in art and literature the working of unconscious mind of synthesize these
working with the unconscious mind. The writer allows his work to develop non – logically
so that the results represent the operation of the unconscious. Their work represents a quest
of sorts, a quest of sorts, a quest for a innerself and wiadom or quality of experience it
could offer. This school stepped beyond the nihilism that had brought Dada to self
destriction, and influenced by symbolists, they created super reality and used art against the
evils and restrictions in society. It broke up with the accepted reules of creativity and
personal conduct in order to liberate their sense of inner truth. They recorded their dreams
and many of them practiced automatic writtig, and followed Freud's free association
technique and ignored the conscious mind, In their poetry choice of words determined not
by logical but by psychological thought processes. By about 1940s, this school declined.
Elements:
1. Subjectivity
2. Rekection of Realism
3. Free art
4. Automatic Writing
5. Hallucination
6. Dream like
7. Grotesque themes
8. Quest for Inner Truth
9. Nihilisitc Protest

1. A. Breton
2. P. Eluard
3. R. Char
4. F. Kafka
5. F. G. Lorca Blood Wedding
6. L. Carrol Alice's Adventure in Wonderland
Through the Looking Glass
7. H. Miller Remember to Remember
8. S. Becket End Game
9. D. Thomas Under Milk Wood
10. W. Burroughts Naked Lunch
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Impressionism
The term derives from C. Monte's painting Impression: Soleil Levant 1874. The
Imperssionists were a school of painters who were particularly concerned with the
transitory effects of light and they wished to depic the fleeting impression from a subjective
point of view. French symbolist poets have been called impressionist; So have English
poets like O. Wilde and A. Symons. This has been used to describe the novelist's technique
of concentrating on the inner life of the main character rather than on external reality. This
school was conceived as a revolt against Romanticism. It rejects the syntax and grammar
of ordinary fiction and creates, not only a new language but also a new literature. The
writers of this school are concetned with the way the human brain reacts to its external
stimulations. Their attitude is entirelu an individual and subjective. Their purpose was to
achieve a spontaneous undetailed picture of the world through carful representation of the
effect of natural light on objects.
Elements:
1. Subjectuve Reality
2. Mental Process
3. IIIogical
4. No External Incidences of Life
5. Description of Transitory Mental Impression
6. Disjointed, Intuitive and Associative Life
7. Psychological Association
8. Rejecte ordinary Syntax
9. Tonal Values
10. The Importance of Perspective
11. Centrality of Experience of Time
1. J. Conrad Heart of Darkness
2. V. Woolf To The Lighthouse
3. J. Joyce Ulysses
4. M. Proust
5. T. Mann The Magic Mountain (1924)
6. H. Hesse Steppenwolf
7. O. Wilde
8. A. Symons
9. D. Richardson
Existentialism
Most philosophies and theologies have supposed that man's actual existence in the world is
less significant some preexistence essence. Exisentialism is a philopophical trend which
stresses the importance of existence. It originates with the work of S.Kierkegaard and
finds full expression in the works of German philopher M. Heidegger and the French
philosopher and novelist J. P. Sartre. Though Kierkeggard elaborated a Christian version of
the philosophy in general it takes the view that the universe is an inexplicable, meaningless
and dangerous theatre for the individual's being his existence. Everyone has to assume the
responsibility of making choices that determined the nature of this existence. This freedom
puts man into a state of anxiery surrounded as he is by infinite possibilities, while
remaining ignorant of the future, except for the fact that life is finite and will finish just as it
254
began in nothingness. Existential thinkers differ about whether it is possible for individuaks
to transcend their particular sityations. They argue whether some kinds of existence may be
more authentic than others. In his succinct guide to existialist doctrine L'Existentialisme est
un Humanisme (1946) Sartre expresses the view that man can become committed to
political and social action by an act of will. His novel La Nausee (1938) is fictionalized
autobiography focusing on his concern with the freedom of the will and nature of existence
which is given full philosophical Expression in L'Etre et le neant (1943). Another French
exponent of existentialism was the writer A. Camus, whose short novel L'Estranger (1942)
is a famous expression of the absurdity of life. The depiction of theth ABSURD especially in
the theatre, almost amounts to a literary movement in the mid – 20 . C.; its protagonist is S.
Becket whose celebrated play Waiting for Godot (1956) is considered another key work of
existentialism. The action or lack of action is absurd both in its irrationality and in the
grotesque comedy occasioned by the tramps' dialogue and slaostick. The movement is
called Existentialism because most of its members have been interested in the nature of
existence or being. The term suggests one main issue: the stress on individual existence and
consequently onthsubjectivity, individual freedom and choice that have influenced carious
writers in the 19 and 20th. C. Existentialists refuse to subordinate personal self – awarmess
to abstract concepts or dehumanizing social structures and advocate rebellion against
established ideas and institutions that inhibit personal freedom and negate responsibility.
Kierkegaard asserted the ambiguity and absutdity of the human situation and believed that
the individual's response to this situation must be to live a totally commited life and this
commitment could only be undertood by the individual who has made it. Therefore the
individual must always be prepareds to reject the norms of society for the sake of the higher
authority of a personally valid way of life. Kierkegaard attacked the theologians of his
times for attemping to show that Christianity was thoroughly rational religion. He rejected
the possibility of understanding the world and humanity from the standpoint of a detached,
rational spectator. Heideggar argues that a person's usual understamding is dictated by the
public and that individual reality requires distancing oneself from the public and creating
one's own projects and view of things. The most important theme in Exostentialist writing
is choice According to Sartre, the primary distinction of human being is the freedom to
choose. They believe that human neings do not have a fixed nature (essemce) as other
animal and plant do; each human being makes choices that create his or her own nature.
Therefore, choice is central to human existence and it is inescapable.
Even the refusal to choose os a choice. Freedom of choice implies commitment and
responsibility. They see human life as being basically a series of decisions to make without
knowing, in any way, what the correct choices are. The individuals must decide what is true
and what is false. For Sartre, the heart of Existentialism is not gloom or hoplessness but a
renewed confidence in the signigicance of being human.
For Existentialists responsibility is the dark side of freedom. Since man's choices cannot be
rationally based, they do not porpose an ethic; i. e., a set of rules or values, but a framework
in which action and choice are to be viewed.
Elements:
1. Choice
2. Freedom
3. Absurdity of Life
4. Self assertion
5. Unpredictablity and Self - destruction
6. No Purpose in Life
7. No Meaning in Life
8. Problem of Liberty and Responsibility
9. Indifference of the Universe
10. Anxiety
11. Rejection of Rationalism and Idealism

1. F. Kafka Tail (1925)
Castle (1926)
2. J. P. Sartre Nausea
No Exit (1944)
The Wall
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Dirty Hands (1948)

3. A. Camus Stranger
Myrh of Sisyphus
The Plague
The Rebel
4. E. lonesco The Bald Soprano (1953)
5. S. Becket Waiting for Godot (1953)
6. A. Miller Death of Salesman
7. Heidegger Being and Time (1927)
8. Nietzche Thus Spoke Zarathustra
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POSTMODERNISM
Basic Premises
Postmodernism is hughly debated even among postmodernists themselves. For an initial
characterization of its basic premises, consider anthropological critic Melford Spiro's
excellent synopsis of the basic thenets of postmodernism:
"The postmodernist critique of science consists of two
interrelated arguments, epistemological and ideological. Both
are based on subjectivity. First, because of the subjectivity of
the human object, anthtropology, according to the
epistemological argument cannot be a science; and in any event
the subjectivity of the human subject precludes the possibility
of science discovering objective truth. Second, since
objectivity is an illusion, science according to the ideological
argument, subverts oppressed groups, females, ethnics, third –
world peoples (Spiro 1996)".
Modernity Modernity came into being with the renaissance. Modernity implies "the
progressive economic and administrative rationalization and differentiation of the social
world" (Sarup 1993). In essence this term emerged in the context of the development of the
capitalist state. Anthropologists have been working towards studying modern times, but
have now gone past that. The fundamental act of modernity is to question the foundations
of past knowledge.
Postmodernity Logically postmodernism literally means "after modernity. It refers to the
incipient or actual dissolution of those social forms associated with modernity" (Sarup
1993)
Modernalization "This term is often used to refer to the stages of social development which
are based upon industrialization. Modernization is a diverse unity of socioenconomic
changes generated by scientific and technological discoveries and innovations …" (Sarup
1993).
Modernism is an experiment in finding the inner truths of a situation. It can be
characterized by self – consciousness and reflexiveness. This is very closely related to
Postmodernism (Sarup 1993).
Postmodernism (For more information see Comments Section)
"There is a sense in one sees modernism as the culture of modernity, postmodernism is the
culture of postmodernity" (Sarup 1993).
"Modern, overloaded individuals, desperately trying to
maintain rootedness and integrity … ultimately are pushed to
the point where there is little reason not to believe that all value
– orientations are equally well- founded. Therefore, increasing,
choice becomes meaningless.
According to Baudrillard (1984: 38-9), we must now come to
terms with the second revolution. "that of the Twentieth
Century, of postmodernity, which is the immense process of
the destruction of meaning equal to the earlier destruction of
appearances. Whoever lives by meaning dies by meaning"
(Ashley 1990).
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257
Ryan Bishop, in a concise article in the Encyclopedia of Cultural Anthropology (1996),

defines post – modernism as an electic movement, originating in aesthetics, architecture
and philosophy. Postmodernism espouses a systematic skepticism of grounded theoretical
perspectives. Applied to anthropology, this skepticism has shifted focus fro, the observation
of a particular society to the observation of the (anthropological) observer.
Postmodernity concentrates on the tensions of difference and similarity eruoting from
processes of globalization: the accelerating circulation of people, the increasingly dense and
frequent cross – cultural intreractions, and the unavoidable intersections of local andglobal
knowledge.
"Postmodernists are suspicious of authoritative definitions and singular narratives of any
trajectory of events." (Bishop 1996: 993). Post – modern attacks on ethnography are based
on the belief that there is no true objectivity. The authentic implementation of the scientific
method is impossible.
According to Rosenau, postmodernists can be divided into two very broad camps, Skeptics
and Affirmatives.
*Skeptical Postmodernists – They are extremely critical of the modern subject.
They consider the subject to be a "linguistic convention" (Rosenau 1992: 43).
They also reject any understanding of time because for them the modern understanding of
time is oppressive in that it controls and measures individuals. They reject Theory because
theories are abundant, and to theory is considered more correct that any other. They feel
that "theory conceals, distors, and obfuscates, it is alienated, disparated, dissonant, it mean
to exclude, older, and control rival powers" (Rosenau 1992: 81).
* Affirmative Postmodernists – Affirmatives also reject Theory by denying claims of truth.
They do not, however, feel that Theory needs to be abolidhed but merely transformed.
Affirmatives are less rigid than Skeptics. They support movements organized around peace,
environment, and feminism (Rosenau Here are some proposed differences between modern
and postmodern thoufht.
Contrast of Modern and Postmodern Thinking
Modern Postmodernq
Multiple factors of
Reasoning From foundation upwards multiple levels of
reasoning. Weboriented.
Science Universal Optimism Realism of Limitations
Part/Whole Parts comprise the whole The whole is more than
the parts
Acts by violating "natural"
God laws or by "immanence" in Top – Down causation
everythind that is
Language Referential Meaning in social context
through usage
Source: http:/// private. Fuller. Edu/~clameter/phd/postmodern.html
Points of Reaction
"Modernity" takes its Latin origin from "modo", which means "just now". The Postmodern,
then literally means "after just now" Appignanesi and Garratt 1995).
Points of reaction from within postmodernism are associated with other "posts":
Postcolonialism and poststructualism.
Postcolonialism
Postcolonialism has been defined as:
1. A description of institutional conditions in formerly colonial societies.
2. An abstract representation of the global situation after the colonial period.
3. A description of discourses informed by psychological and epistemological
orientations.
258
Edward Said's Culture and Imperialism (1993) represents discourse analysisn and
postcolonial theory as tools for rethinking forms of knowledge and the social identities of
postcolonial systems. An important feature of postcolonialist thought is its assertion that
modernism and modernity are part of the colonial project of domination.
Schematic Differences between Modernism and Postmodernism
Modernism Postmodernism
Romanticism/symbolism Play
Design Chance
Hierarchy Anarchy
Matery, logos Exhaustion, silence
Art object, finished word Process, performance
Distance Participation
Creation, totalization Deconstruction
Synthesis Antithesis
Presence Absence
Centering Dispersal
Genre, boundary Text, intertext
Semantics Rhetoric
Paradigm Syntagm
Hypotaxis Parataxis
Metaphor Metonymy
Selection Combination
Depth Surface
Interpretation Against interpretation
Reading Misreading
Signified Signifier
Lisible (readerly) Scriptable
Narrative Anti-narrative
Grande histoire Petite histoire
Master code Idiolect
Symptom Desire
Type Mutant
Genital, phallic Polymorphous
Paeanoia Schizophrenia
Origin, cause Difference – difference
God the Father The Holy Ghost
Metaphysics Indeterminacy
Determinacy indeterminacy
Transcendence Immanence
In reaction to the abstraction of cultural data characteristic of model building, cultural
relativists argue that model building hindered understanding of thought and action. From
this claim arose poststructuralist concepts such as developed in the work of Pierre
Bourdiew (1972). He asserts that structural models should not be replaced but enriched.Post
structuralist like Bourdieu are concerned with reflexivity and the search for logical practice.
By doing so, accounts of the participants' behavior and meanings are not objectifield by the
observer. (For definition of reflexivity, see key concepts)
Jean – Francois Lyotard "The Postmodern would be that which in the modern invokes the
unpresentable in presentation itself, that which refuses the consolation of correct forms,
refuses the comsensus of taste permitting a common experience of nostalgia for the
impossible, and inquires into new presentations-not to take pleasure in them, but to better
produce the feeling that there is something unpresentable." Lyotard attacks many of the
modern age traditions, such as the "Grand" Narrative or what Lyotard termed the Meta
(master) narrative (Lyotard 1984).
In contrast to the ethnographies written by anthropologists in the first half of the 20th
century, Lyotard states that an all encompassing account of a culture cannot be
accomplished.
Jean Baudrillard Baudrillard is a sociologist who began his career exoloring the Marxist
critique of capitalism (Sarup 1993: 161). During this phase of his work he argued that,
"consumer objects constitute a system of signs that differentiate the population" (Sarup
Poetry
259
1993: 162). Eventually, however, Baudrillard felt that Marxist tenets did not effectively
evaluate commodities, so he turned to postmodernism.
Rosenau labels Baudrillard as a skeptical postmodernist because ofstatements like,
:everything has already happened … nothing new can occur, "or" there is no real world"
(Rosenau 1992: 64, 110). Baudrillard breaks down modernity and postmodernity in an
effort to explain the world as a set of models. He identifies eaely modernity as the period
between the Renaissance and the lndustrial Revolution, modernity as the period at the start
of the lndustrial Revolution, and postmodernity as the period of mass media (cinema and
photography). Baudrillard states tht we live in a world of images but images that are only
simulations. Baudrillard implies that many people fail to understand this concept that, "we
have now moved into an epoch … where truth is entirely a product of consensus values,
and where 'science' itself is just the name we attach to certain modes of explanation,"
(Norris 1990: 169).
Jacques Derrida (1930- ) Derrida is identified as a poststructuralist and a skeptical
postmodernist. Much of his writing is concerned with the deconstruction of texts and
probing the relationship of meaning betweem texts (Bishop 1996: 1270). He observes that
"a text employs its own strategems against it, producing a force of dislocation that spreads
itself through an entire system." (Rosenau 1993: 120). Derrida directly attacks Western
philosophy's understanding of reason. He sees reason as dominated by "a metaphysics pf
[resence." Derrida agrees with structuralism's insight, that meaning is not inherent in signs,
but he proposes that it is incorrect to infer that any thing reasned can be as a stable and
timeless model (Appignanesi 1995: 77). "He tries to problematize the griunds of reason,
truth, and knowledge … he questions the highest point by demanding reasoning for
reasoning itself," (Norris 1990: 199).
Michel Foucalt (1926-1984) Fouvault was a French philosopher who attempted show that
what most people think of as the permanent truths of human nature and society actually
change throughout the course of history. While challenging the influences of Marx and
Freud, Foucault postulated that everyday practices enabled people to define their identities
and systemize knowledge. Foucault's study of power and itd shifting patterns is one of the
foundations of postmodernis. Foucault is considered a postmodern theorist precisely
because his work upsets the conventional understanding of history as a chronology of
inevitable facts.
Alternatovely, he depicts history as underlayers of suppressed and underlayers of
suppressed and unconscious knowledge in and throughout history. These underlayers are
the codes and assumptions of order, the structures of exclusion, that legitimate the
epistemes by which societies achieve identities.
Mancy Scheper – Hughes (1944- ) She is a professor of Anthropology at the University of
California, Berkeley. In her work "Primacy of the Ethical" Scheper – Hughes argues that,
"If we cannot begin to think about social institutions and practices in moral or ethical terms,
then anthropology strikes me as quite weak and useless. " (1995: 410).
She advocates that ethnographies be used as tools for critical reflection and human
liberation because she feels that" eithics" make culture possible. Since culture is preceded
by ethics, therefore ethics cannot be culturally bound as argued by anthropologists in the
past. These philosophies are evident in her other works such as, "Death Without Weeping."
The crux of her postmodern perspective is that, "Anthropologists, no less than any other
professionals, should be held accountable for how we have used and how we have failed to
use anthropology as a critical tool at crucial historical moments. It is the act of "witnessing"
that lends our world its moreal, at times almost theological, character." (1995: 419)
Realism" … is the platonic doctrine that universals or abstractions have being
independently od mind" (Gellner 1980: 60).
Realism is a mode of writing that seeks to represent the reality of the whole world or form
of life. Realist ethnographies are written to allude to a whole by means of parts or foci of
analytical attention which can constantly evoke a social and cultural totality. (Marcus and
Fischer 1986, p. 23).
Self – Reflexivity can be defined as "The scientific observer's objectification of structure as
well as strategy was seen as placing the actors in a framewoerk not of their own making but
260
one produced by the observer," (Bishop 1996: 1270). Self – Reflexivity leads to a
consciousness of the process of knowledge creation (Bishop 1996: 995)/ It emphasizes the
point of theoretical and practical questioning changing the ethnographers' view of
themselves and their work. There is an increased awareness of the collection of data and the
limitation of methofological systems. This idea underlies the postmodernist affinity for
studying the culture of anthropology and ethnography.
Relativism Gellner writes about the relativistic – functionalist view of thought that goes
back to the Enlightment: "The (unresolved) dilemma, which the thought of the
Enlightenment faced, was between a relativistic – functionalist view of thought, and the
absolutist claims of enlightened Reason. Viewing man as part of nature … requires (us) to
see cognitive and evaluative activities as part of nature too, and hence varying from
organism to organism and context. (Clofford & Marcus (eds), 1986, p. 147)/
Anthropological theory of the 1960's may be best understood as the heir of relativism.
Contenporary interpretative anthropology is the essnence of relativism as a mode of inquiry
about communication in and between cultures (Marcus & Fischer, 1986, p. 32).
One of the essential elements of Postmodernism is that it constirutes an attack against
theory and methodology. In a sense proponents claim to relinquish all attempts to create
new knoeledge in a systematic fashion, but substitutes an "antirules" fashion of discourse
(Rosenau p. 117). Despite this claim, however, there are two methodologies characteristic
of Postmodernism. These methodologies are interdependent in that Interpretation is
inherent in Deconstruction. "Post-modern methodology is post – positivist or anti-
positivist. As substitutes for the scientific method the affirmatives llook to feeling and
personal experience … the skeptical post modernists most of the substitutes for method
because they argue we can never really knoe anything (Rosenau 1993, p. 117).
Deconstruction Deconstruction emphasizes negative critical capacity.
Deconstruction involves demystifying a text to reveal internal arbitrary hierarchies and
presuppostitions. By examining the margins of a text, the effort of deconstruction examines
what it represses, what it does not say, and its incongruities. It does not solely unmask
error, but redefines the text by undoing and reversing polar opposites. Deconstruction does
not resolve inconsistencies, but rther exposes hirarchies involved for the distillation of
information.
Rosenau's Guidelines for Deconstruction Analysis:

 Find an exception to a generalization in a text and push it to the limit so that this
generalization appears absurd. Use the exception to undermine the principle.
 Interpret the arguments in a text being deconstructed in their most extreme form.
 Avoid absolute statements and cultivate intellectual excitement by making
statements that are both startling and sensational.
 Deny the legitimacy of dichotomies because there are always a few exveptions.
 Nothing is to be accepted, nothing is to be rejected. It is extremely difficult to
criticize a deconstructive argument if no clear viewpoint is expressed.
 Write do as to permit the greatest number of interpreations
Possible … Obscurity may "protect from serious scrutiny" (Ellis 1989: 148). The
idea is "to create a text without finality or completion, one with which the reader
can never be finished" (Wellberg, 1985: 234).
 Employ new and unusual terminology in order that "familiar positions may not seem
too familiar and otherwise obvious scholarship may not seem so obviously
relevant" (Ellis 1989: 142).
 Never consent to a change of terminology and always insist that the wording of the
deconstructive argument is sacrosanct." More familiar formulations undermine
any sense that the deconstructive position is unique (Ellis 1989: 145). (Rosenau
1993, p. 121)
Intuitive Interpreatation "Postmodern interpretation is introspective and anti – objectivist
which is a form of individualized understanding. It is more a vision than data observation.
In anthropoloty interpretation gravitates toward narrative and centers on listening to and
talking with the other, "(Rosenau 1993, p. 119). For postmodernists there are an endless
number of interpretations. Foucault argues that everything is interpretation (Dreyfus and
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261
Rabinow 1983: 106). "There is no final meaning for any particular sign, no notion of
unitary sense of text, no interpretation can be regarded as superior to any other (Latour
1988: 182-3). Anti – positivists defend the notion that every interpretation is false.
"Interpretative anthropology is a covering label for a diverse set of reglections upon the
practices of ethnography and the concept of culture" (Marccus and Fisher 1986: 60)
Demystification Perhaps the greatest accomplishments of postmodernism is the focus upon
uncovering and criticizing the epistemological and ideological motivations in the social
sciences.
Critical Ecamination of Ethnographic Explanation The unrelenting re-examination of the
nature of ethnography inevitably leads to a questioning of ethnography itself as a mode of
cultural analysis. Postmodernism adamantly insists that anthropologists must considet the
role of their own culture in the explanation of the "other" cultures being studied.
Postmodernist theory has led to a heightened sensitive ity within anthropology to the
collection of data.
Roy D'Andrade (1931-) In the article "Moral Models in Anthropology," D'Andrade
critiques postmodernism's definition of objectivity and subjectivity by examining the moral
nature of their models are purely subjective. D'Andrade argues that despite the fact that
utterly value – free objectivity is impossible, it is the goal of the anthropologist to get as
close as possible to that ideal. He argues that there must be a separation between moral and
objective models because "they are counterproductive in discovering how the world
works." (D'Andrade 1995: 402). He states that objectivity is in no way dehumanizing nor is
objectivity impossible. He states "Science works not because it produces unbiased accounts
but because its accounts are objective enough to be proved or disproved no matter what
anyone wants to be true." (D'Andrade 1995: 404).
Rosenau (1993) identifies seven contracrions in Postmodernis:
1. Its anti-throretical position is essentially a theoretical stand.
2. While Postmodernism stresses the irrational, instruments of reasin are freely
employed to advance its perspective.
3. The Postmodern prescription to focus on the marginal is itself an evaluative
emphasis of precisely the sort that otherwise attacks.
4. Postmodernism stress intertextuality but often treats text in isolation.
5. By adamantly rejecting modern criteria for assessing theory, Postmodernists cannot
argue that threre are no valid criteria for judgement.
6. Postmodernism criticizes the inconsistency of modernism, but refuses to be held to
norms of comsistency itself.
7. Postmodernists contradict themselces by relinquishing truth claims in their own
writings.
Melford Spiro argues that postmodern anthropologists do not convincingly dismiss the
scientific method. If anthropology turns away from the scientific method then anthropology
will become the study of meaning not the discovering of causes which shape what it is to be
human. Spiro further states that "the causal account of culture refers to ecological niches,
modes of production, subsistence techniques, and so forth, just as a causal account of mind
refers to the firing of neurons, the secretions of hormones, the action of
neurotransmitters…."
Spiro critically addresses six interrelated propositions from John Searle's 1993 work,
"Rationality and Realism":
1. Reality exists independently of human representations. If this is true then, countrary
to postmodernism, this postulate supports the existence of "mind-independent
external realoty" Which is called "metaphysical realism".
2. Language communicates meanings but also refers to objects and situations in the
world which exist independently of language. Contrary to postmodernism, this
postulate support of language as have communicative and referential functions.
3. Statement are true or false depending on whether the objects and situations to which
they refer correspond to greater or lesser degree to the statements. This
"correspondence theory" of truth is to some extent the theory of truth for
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postmodernists, but this concept is rejected by many postmodernists as

"essentialist".
4. Knowledge is objective, This signifies that the truth of a knowledge claim is
independent of the motive, culture, or gender of the person who makes the claim.
Knowledge depends on empirical support.
5. Logic and rationality provide a set of procedures and methods, which conturary to
postmodernism, enables a researcher to assess competing knowledge claims
through proof, validity, and reason.
6. Objective and intersubjective criteria judge the merit of statements, theories,
interpretations, and all accounts.
Spiro specifically assaults the assumption that the disciplines that study humanity, like
abthropology, cannot be "scientific" because subjectivity renders observers incapable of
dicoverung tryth. Spiro agrees with postmodernists that the social sciences require very
different techniques for the study of humanity than do the natural sciences, but "while
insight and empathy are critical in the study of mind and culture … intellectual
responsibility requires objective (scientific methods) in the social sciences. Without
objective procedures ethnography is empirically dubious and intellecturally irresponsible
(Spiro 1996)."
"The Postmodernist genre of ethnography has been critized for
fostering a self-indulgent subjectivity, and for exaggerating the
esoteric and unique aspects of a culture at the expense of more
prosaic but significantquestions." (Bishop 1996: 58)
Christopher Norris belives that Lyotard, Foucault, and Baudrillard are too caught up in the
idea of the primacy of moral judgments (Norris p. 50). Also in reaction to the Postmodern
movement Marshall Sahlins addresses several post-modern issues which includes the
definition of power. "The current Foucauldian – Gramscian – Nietzschean obsession with
power is the lastest incarnation of anthropology's incrutable functionalism … Now 'power'
is the interllectual black hole into which all kinds of cultural contents get sucked, if before
it was social social solidarity or material advantage." (Sahlins, 1993, p.15).
CHAPCHER 7
Poetry
Alliteration
َ ◌ َA
◌ figure of speech in which consonants especially at the beginning of words or stressed
syllables are repeated. The term is applied only to consonants and when the recurrent sound
occurs in conspicuous position of the beginning either of a word or of a stressed syllable
within a word. In Old English poetry alliteration was a continual and essential part of
metrical part of metrical scheme and until the late Middle Ages used then.
Five miles meandering with a mazy motion
(Kabla Khan)
In a somer season, whan soft the sonne.
(Piers plowman)
The Fair breeze blew, the white foam flew.
Consonance:is the repetition of a sequence of two or more consonants, but with a change
in the intervening vowel.
Assonance: is the repetition of identical or similar vowel sounds, especially in stressed
syllables, in a sequence of near by words.
Thou still unravished bride of quietness
Thou foster child of silence and slow time
(Ode on a Grecian Urn)
َ ◌ َ ◌ َ ◌ Altar
َ ◌ َ ◌ Poem
It is a poem which the verses or stanzas are so arranged that they form a design on the
page and takes the shape of the subject of the poem. The deviced belived to have been first
used by Persian poets. Herbert's The Altar, and Easter Wings are well Known instances. A
well known recent example is Dylan Thomas's Vision and Prayer.
Amobean
This term relates to verses, couplets or stanza spoken alternately by two speakers.
It is common is pastroral and not unusual in drama.
Spenser's Shepherd's Calender (October, the tenth Eclogue)
Amphiory
A kind of burlesque or parody, especially a kind of nonsense verse which appears to be
going to make sense but does not. A well known example is Swinburn's Nephelidia.
Anarcusis
One or more initial syllables in a line of verse which are unaccented as in Blake's The
Tygere:
When the stars threw down their spears
And Watered heaven with their tears.
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Ballad
Ballad is a song transmitted orally which tells a story. They are the narrative species of
folk songs. The narrator begins with climatic episode, tells the story tersely by means of
action and dialogue. The popular ballad is dramatic, condensed, impersonal, in simple and
colloquial language. The most common stanza form called the ballad stanza, is a quatrain in
alternate four and three stress iambic lines.
1. W. Scott : Proad Maisie
2. Keats : La Belle Dame Sans Merci
3. Wordsworth : we are Seven
4. Coleridge : Rime of the Ancient Mariner
Bland Verse
Unrhymed iambic pentameter. One of the commonest English meters. This was
introduced by the Eorl of Surrey in the 16th century in his translation of the Aeneid (1540)
and is the closest to the rhythms of everday English speech. This is one of the reasons why
it has been particularly favoured by dramatists.
1. Milton Paradise Lost (1667)
2. Wordsworth The Perlude (1805), Tintern Abbey
3. Tennyson Idylls of the King (1859), Tears, Idle Tears
4. Coleridge Frost at Midnight
5. W. Stevens Sunday Morning.
Byronic Hero
A Character type portrayed by Byron in many of his early narrative poems especially Child
Harold's Pilgrimage (1812), The Giaour (1813) Manfred (1817) and Cain (1812). The
Byronic hero is a brooding solitary who seeks exotic travel and wild nature to reflect his
suporthuman passions. He is capable of great suffering and is guilty of some terrible,
unspecifies, crime but bears this guilt with pride as it sets him apart from societ, revealing
the meaninglessness of ordinary moral values.
Carpe Diem
Carpe Diem meaning "seize the day", is a Latin phrase from one of Horace's Odes, which
has become the name for a very common ligterary motif especially in lyric poetry.
1. E. Spenser The Faerie Queen (1590-6)
2. R.Herrick To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time
3. A. Marvells To His Coy Mistress
Cavalier poets
English lyric poets of the reign of Charles I, (1625-49). They are also termed the
sons or Tribe of Ben. Cavalier poetry is concerned with love.
Major writers:
1. Lovelace
2. Suckling
3. Carew
4.Waller
5. Herrick
6. R. Crashaw
Chiasmus
َ ◌ َA
◌ common fiqure of speech consisting of inverting of inverting order of similar
phrases in a sentence. It is common is 18th century verse:
Smooth flow the waves, The Zephyrs gently play.
Love's fire heats water, water cools not love.
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Shakepeare (154)
Complaint
A common motif or minor genre in lyric poetry: the poet complais of ill-luck,
poverty, of the cruelty or faithlessness of his mistress or of the rotten state of the world.
1. Surrey Complaint by night of the Lover not Belved.
2. Chaucer A Complaint Unto Pity
Complant of Chaucer to his Purse
3. Spenser The Ruines of Time.
4. Sir D. Lundsay The Dreme
Conceit
Originally conceit meand simply a thought of an opinion. It can be used in a
derogatory way to describe a particular kind of far- fetched metaphorical association.
Derogatory way to describe a particular kind of far- fetched metaphorical association.
English poets of 16th and 17th centuries adapted the term from the Italian "concetto". The
Petrarchan conceit is a type of figure used in love poems. The Metaphysical conceit is a
chavacteristic figure in J. Donne (1572-1631) and other metaphysical poets of the 17th
century. By 1660 the term was still being used as a synonym of though and as roughly
equivalent to "concept", idea and conception. The pleasure we get from conceit is
intellectual rather than sensuous.
Concrete Verse:
A recent development of the altar poem The object is to present each poem
asdifferent shape. It is thus a matter of pictorial typography which produces "visual poetry".
It may be on the page, or on the glass and other materials.
Confessional Poetry
A form of poem which has a relaxed and fairly informal syle and tone may even be
chatty, tends to display a personal mood, but nevertheless has quits serious subject
matter.
1. Horace Epistles
2. S.T. Coleridge This Limetree Bower My Prison
3. W. Wordsworth Thintern Abbey
4. W. H. Auden Letter To Lord Byron
Couplet
Two successive rhyming lines. The couplet is one of the main verse unites in
Western Lierature and is a form of great antiquity The octasyllabic couplet (iambic
tetrameter) has been much used. It was used for heroic drama during the
Restoration perios The couplet in all forms of meter has proved an extremely
adaptable unite.
1. Chaucer The Legend of Good Women
2. Shakespear
3. Marlowe
4. Chapman
5. Donne
Couleyan Ode
An ode in which the stanza or verse paragraphes are irregular in rhyme, line length
and number of lines . It is named after A. Cowley (1618-67)
1. Dryden Song for St Cecilia's Day
2. W. Wordsworth Intimations of immorality
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Crown of Sonnets
A sequence of seven sonnets with the last line of the first the same as the firt line
of second and so on until the last line of 7th is the same as the opening line of the whole
sequence J. Donne's La Corona is an example standing as the Introduction to his Holy
Sonnets (1633)
Dirge
Originally the religious service in the honour of the dead . A dirge is now any song
of mourning and less formal than an elegy.
Doggerel
A term applied to rough heavy footed and jerky versification. It is usually the
result of ineptitude on the part of the versifier but is sometimes deliberately employed by
poets for satiric, comic or rollicking effect.
1. J. Skelton Colin Clout
2. S. Butler Hudibras (1663-78)
Dramatic Monologue
A monologue is a lengthy speech by a single person. In lyric poetry that
wasperfected by R. Browning, it expresses the character's private thought and feelings.
1. R.Browning My Last Duchess
Adrea del Sarto
2. J. Donne Canonization
The Flea
3. A. Tennyson Ulysses (1842)
4. T.S.Eliot The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock (1915)
5.W.Wordsworth Tintern Abbey (1798)
Dream Vision
A mode of narrative widely employed by medival poets: the narrator falls sleep
usually in a spring landscape and dreams the events he goes on to relate; often he is
led by a guide, human or animal and the events which he dreams are at least in part an
allegory.
1. Dante Divine Comedy.
2. Langland Piers Plowman
3.Chaucer The Book of Duchest
The House of Fame
4. Keats Fall of Hyperion: A Dream (1819)
5. L. Carroll Alice's Adventure in Wonderland (1865)
6. J.Joyce Finnegans Wake (1939)
Elegy
A Poem of lamentation concentrating on the death of a single person with alternating
Hexameter and pentameter lines. It is a formal and sustained lament in verse for the death
of a particular person usually ending in a consolation.
1. A. Tennyson In Memoriam (1850)
2. W.H. Auden In Memory of W.B. Yeats (1940)
3. T. Gray Elegy Written in a country Churchyard.(1751)
Epic
It is applied to a work that meets at least the following criterial: it is a long narrative
Poem on a serious subject told in a formal as elevated style and contered on a heroic or
Quasi- divine figure on whose actions depends the fate of a tribe, a nation or human rare.
The traditional epics were written versions of what has originally been oral poems about a
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267
Tribal or national hero that developed in a warlike age. Literary epics were composed by
Individual poetic craftsmen in deliberate imitation of the traditional form. The epic was
Ranked by the Greek highest of all genres. Epic should have the following features:
1.The hero is a figure of national or even cosmic importance. (Illiad)
2. The setting of the poem is ample and may be worldwide or even larger (Odysseus,
Mediterranean)
3. The action involves superhuman deeds in battle ()Achillies')
4. In these great actions the gods and other supernatural beings take an interest or an
active part (The Olympian gods in Homer)
5. An epic poem is ceremonial performance and is narrated in a ceremonial style.
6. The narrator begins by stating his argument or epic theme invokes a muse.
7. The narrative starts in medials res, that is in the middle of things.
8. There are catalogues of some of the principal characters introduced in formal
detail.
Major Works:
1. Homer Illaid – Odyssey
2. Anglo- Saxon Beowlf
3. Milton Paradise Lost (1667)
4. Dante Divine Comedy
5. Spenser The Faerie Queene (1590-6)
Epigram
Originally an inscription an a monument; now used of witty saying in general but
Particularly of any short poem which has a sharp turn of though or point. In English poetry
it has been popular form from the 17th century onwards. It is species of light verse which
was much cultivated in England.
Major Writers:
1. J.Donne
2. B.Jonson
3. R. Herrick
4. M.Prior
5. W.S.Landor (1775-1864)
Epithalamion
A poem celebrating marriage, traditionally sung outside the bedroom of the
newly- weds.
1. Spenser Epithalamion (1594)
2. Tennyson In Memoriam (1850)
3. Housman He is Here, Urania's Son
4. Auden Epithalamion
5. Shelly Epithamium
Figurative Language
It is a departure from what users of language apprehend as the standard meaning of
words or elso the standard order of words in order to achieve some special meaning
or effect.
Simile: a comparison between two disticnctly different things some special meaning
or effect.
Metaphor: In it a word or expression which in literal usae genotes one kind of thing or
action is applied to a distinctly different kind of thing or action without asserting a
comparison.
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Dead metaphor: is one which has been so long used and become so sommon that we have
Ceased to be aware of the discrepance between vehicle and tenor.
Metonym, the literal term for one thing is applied to another with which it is associated,
Because of contiguity in common experience.
associated, because of contiguity in common experience.
The crown  king
The scepter  king
Milton  the writing of Milton
Synecdoche a part of something is used to signify the whole.
Ten hands  ten workmen
A hundred  ships
Personification, in which either an inanimate object or an abstract concept is spoken of as
thought is were endowed with life of with human attributes or feelings.
Kenning , denotes the standard use, in the Anglo- Saxon Beowulf and poems
Written in other Old Germanic Languages of a descriptive phrase in place of the ordinary
name for something.
The whale road  sea
The ring giver  king
The ringed prow  ship
Storm of swords  battle
Free Verse
It is verse released from convention of meter with its regular pattern of stresses and
Line lengths and it is often very rhythmical. A poem in free verse cannot be resolved into
the regular lines of repeated feet of traditional versification.
1. King James Translation of the Biblical Psalms and Songs of
Solomon.
2. W. Blake
3. M. Arnold
4. W.Whitman Leaves of Grass (1855)
5. T.S.Eliot The Waste Land
6. E. Pound
7. E.E.Cummings
8. W.C.Williams
Georgian Poetry
The term usually refers to poets who wrote during the reign of George V (1910-36).
Between1912 and 1922 E. Marsh published four anthologies called Georgian Poetry
including poet such as H.Davies, R. Hodgson, R.Brooke. The poems, Marsh selected
tended to be metrically conventional lyrics on rural theme.
Graveyard Poets
Several 18th contury poets wrote mourinfully pensive poems on the nature of death,
Which were set in graveyards or inspired by gloomy nocturnal meditations. It was part of a
Reaction against Augustan principles of decorum.
Major Works:
1. T. Parnell Night Piere on Death (1721)
2. E. Young Night Thoughts (1742)
3. R. Blair The Grave (1743)
4. T. Gray Elegy (1750)
5. U.Foscolo De' Sepolcri (1807)
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Haiku
A Japanese lyric form consisting 17 syllables in three lines:5/7/5.
Each haiku is a complete idea: their common method is to describe a natural scene
or object as a way of implying feeling. Several 20th. Century English and American
poets have experimented with the form including E.Pounds whose interest in the form
coincided with his theories of Imagism.
O fan of white silk
Clear as forst on the grass- blade
You also are laid aside.
Heptastich (Rhyme Royal)
A stanza of seven line, much used by English poets.
1. Chaucer Troilus and Criseyde.
2. Spenser The Ruins of Time, Daphnaida
3. Cowly The Lover to his Lyre.
4. Shelley To Night and Mutability
5. R.Browning A Lover's Quarrel
Heroic Couplet
Lines of iambic pentamenter rhymed is pairs. A common meter in 18th c. Pople
brought the meter to a peck of polish and wit, using it in satire.
Heroic Quatrain
Lines of iambic pentamenter rhymed abab, cd cd, and so on. T. Gray's Elegy Written
in a Country Churchyard,(1750) is a notable example.
Hexameter
1. Spenser The Faerie Queene
2. M.Drayton Poly Olbion
3. Coleridge
4. Kingsley
5. Longfellow
Hudibcastic Verse
S.Bultler's Hudibras (1663-78) is a satire chiefly against Puritanism but also crected
against nearly all things serious. It is a Mock- Heroic episodic narrative of a?adventure.
Hymn
A religious song praising God. The 18th, and 19th c. were rich periods for writing of
hymns.
Idyll
A short poem describing a picturesque rustic scene or incident. Hence idyll comes to
Refer to poems or parts of poems which deal with ideal state of calm, happiness or
enlightment. Tennyson Idylls of the King (1885) (Authorion Romantic)
Internal Rhyme
A pari of words rhyming within a line of verse rather than at the end of lines.
Lake Poets
W.Wordsworth, Coleridge and Southey came to the known as the Lake School as
result of the abusive articles written by F.Jeffrey.
Light Rhyme
When one of a pair of rhyming syllables is unstressed. Common in balled.
Light Verse.
A vague term for verse which doesnot aspire to be treated very seriously either
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Because it deals with trivial matters or because it adopts a light hearted approach to give a
Subject. It is usually colloquial in tone, employing the grammar and vocabulary of the
ordinary speaking voice. Often it is comic or mildly satiric.
1. W.S.Gilbert
2. H.Belloc
3.O.Nash
4. Sir J.Betjeman
5.W.H.Auden
6.E.E.Cummings
7. E.Pound
8.T.L.Peacock
Limerick
A type of light verse and a popular fixed verse form in English. It consists of five
predominantly anapaestic line rhyming aabba. From this is will be seen that the first,
second and fifth lines are trimeters and the third and fourth dimeters though these two may
be printed as a single line with internal rhyme as in this limerick by E.Lear:
There was a Young Lady of Lucca
Whose Lovers completely forsook her
She ran up a tree and said Fiddle- de- dee!
Which embarrassed the people of Lucca.
1. Tennyson
2. W.S.Gilbert
3.Swinburne
4.Kipling
5.R.L.Stevenson
Lyric
In Greek verse a song to be accompanied by the lyre, a harp like instrument . The
word lyrics is still applied to the words of a song-Lyric poetry in its widest sense
encompasses a large number of other more secialised kinds of poetry including
sonnet, elegy, ode, and hymn. A lyric is usually fairly short, not often longer than fifty or
sixty lines and often only between a dozen and thirty lines; speaker in a personal and
subjective fashion.
1. W.Wordsworth Tintern Abbey (1798)
2. S.T. Coleridge Frost at Midnight (1798)
3. J.Donne Canonization
4. A. Marvell To His Coy Mistress
Masculine Rhyme
A single monosyllabic rhyme like thorn/ scorn at the end of a line. It is the
commones type of rhyme in English verse.
Metaphysical Poets
J. Drydon said in his Discourse of Satire (1693) that J.Donne in his poetry " affects the
metaphysics," meaning that Donne employs the terminology and abscruse arguments of the
medival Scholastic philosophers. The name is now applied to a group of 17th.c. poets who
whether or not directly influenced by Donne, emplay similar poetic procedures and imagery
both in secular poetry (Cleveland, Marvell, Cowley ) and in religious (Hervert, Vaughan,
Crashaw).The beginnings of four of Donne's poems will illustrate the shock tactice,the
dramatic form of direct address, the rough idiom and the rhythms of the living voice which
are characteristic of his metaphysical style.
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Mock Heroic (Mock-epic)

Refers to the style of mock-epic or at any work which treat a trivial subject with
Ridiculous comic grandeur. An example is T. Gray's Ode on the Death of Favourite
Cat.(1748)
1. A. Pope Rape of the Lock (1712), Duncid (1728)
2. T. Parnell Battle of the Fogs and the Mic (1717)
3. Dryden Mack Flecknoe (1982)
4. S.Garth The Dispensary (1699)
Occasional Verse
Poems written to celebrate or lament a particular occasion: a triumph birth, death,
anniversary, wedding and so on.
1. Milton Lycidas(1637)
2. Tennyson The Charge or the Light Bridge (1854)
3. A.Pope An Epistle to Miss Blount on her
Leaving Town (1717)
4. G.M. Gopkins The Wreck of the Deustchland (1875)
5.Marvell Horation ode upon Cromwell's Retun from
Irland (1650)
6. Dryden Alexander's Feast (1697)
7. Yeats Easter 1916
8. Auden Sptember lst 1939
Octosyllabic Verse
A tetrameter line containing eight syllables and usually consisting of iambic and/or
trochaic feet, Often used in couplets, It was established in England by the 14th. C. when it
was used by Chaucer and Gower.
1. Milton
2. Coleridge
3. Byron
4. Scott
But let me due feet never fail
To walk the studious cloister's pale
And love the high embowed roof.
(Milton's Il Penseroso)
Had we but World enough and Time.
This coyness, Lady were no crime,
(Marvell's To His Coy Mistress)
Ode
The ode is a form of Lyric poem, characterized by its legth, intricate stanza forms,
grandeur of style and seriousness of purpose with a venerable history in classical and post-
Renaissance poetry. Some odes in English are learned copies of Pindar's stanza form:
Grauy's "The Progress of Poesy" (1754) is a good example of the regular or Pindaric Ode.
Cowley is usually credited with the invention in the 1650s of a modified form of
The Pindaric ode, called the irregular ode: each stanza follows its own pattern with varied
line length, rhyme schemes and numbers of lines, and was devebped in England in the 17 th
co by Abraham Cowley.
272
Organic Form
That form which derives from the nature and materials of a writer's subject and
thems as opposed to mechanic form which derives from rules and conventions imposed on
the nature and materials. If a potes chooses to express himself by means of a fixes form, or
by means of an established stanzaic or metrical scheme, then the result may be a
coalescence of organic and mechanic form. This idea is found in Plato's Works.
Ottava Rima
An eight line iambic stanza rhyming ababacc. Used by various Renaissace Italian
epic poets. It was introduced into English poetry by Wyatt. It is the metre of Byron's Dun
Juan (1819-24),Keats' Isabella (1820) and Yeats's Sailing to Byzantium (1928).
Oxymoron
A figure of speech in which contradictory terms are brought together in what is at
first sight an impossible combination. A special variety of the Paradox. Typical examples
are poems written in the Petrarchon tradition which express the pangs of love via
contradictory states:
I burn and freeze like ice
Paradox
An apparently self- contradictory statement or one that seems in conflict with all
logic and opinion: yet lying behind the superficial absurdity is a meaning or truth, Common
in metaphysical Poetry.
"Death thou Shalt die."
Parody
An imitation of a specific work of literature or style devised so as to ridicule its
Characteristic features. Exaggeration or the application of a serious tone to an absurd
Subject are typical methods.
Pastoral (Pastoral Elegy)
It describes an imaginary world of simple, idealized rural life, in which shepherds
and shepherdesses fall in love and while away their time in blissful, singing songs, playing
the flute.Aspects of the pastrol elegy and its convention include the lament of all nature, a
procession of mourners, contrcs between the fixity of death and reawakening of spring and
the idea that the dead poet is immortal.
1. Marlowe The Passioinate Shepherd to his Love (1660)
2. Theocritus Idylls
3. Virgil Eclogues (42-37-BC)
4. Shakespeare As you Like It (1599-1600)
5. Spenser Shepherd;s Calender (1579)
6. Sideny Arcadia (1580-93)
7. Wordsworth Michael (1800)
8. Milton Lycidas (1637), Comus (1637)
9. Shelley Adonais (1821)
10. J.Fletcher The Faithful Shepherdess (1608)
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273
Pathetic Fallacy
Invented by J. Ruskin in 1856. According to him a writer was phathetically
fallacious when he ascribed human feelings to intimate. Such a form of personification has
been used countless times from Homer onwards and still is. It used to describe the habit,
common and legitimate in poets, of assuming an equation bet ween their own mood and
world about them.
They rowed her in across the rolling foam.
Them cruel, crawling foam.
(Kingsley's The Sands of. Dee)
The one red leaf, the last of its clan.
That dances as often as dance it can.
(Coleridge's Christabel)
Pattern Poetry
The name of verse such as Herbert's Easter Wings 1633, which is written in a stanza
form that creates a picture of pattern on the page.
1. e.e. cumming
2. D. Thomas Vision and Prayer
Pentameter
In Versification a line of five feet. The jambic pentameter is the commenest meter in
English verse, either rhymed (Heroic Couplet) or unrhymed (Bland Verse). It was probably
introduced by Chaucer.
1. E.Pound
2. R. Lowell
3. Coleridge
Periphrasis:
A roundabout away of speaking or arriting; Known also as circumlocution; thus,
using many or very long words where a few or simple words will do. Much of it c
omes from an over nice regard for "polifeness", in the pejorative sense. Semi literate people
are tempted to this sorf of pomp and verbosity.
Petrarchan Sonnet:
Or Italian falls into two main parts: an octave (8 lines) rhyming abbabba and a
sestert (6 lines) rhyming cdecde or some variant, such as cdccdc
Prose Poem
A composition printed as prose but distinguished by elements common in poetry:
Such as elaboratery contrived rhythms, figures fo speech, rhyme. Bertrand (1807-41)
appears to have been one of the first writers to establish it. It is likely that his work had
influence on Symbolists and Surreslists.
1. Rimbaud
2. O. Wolde.
3. A. Lowell
4. T.S. Eliot
5. P.Redgrove
6. D.Wevill
7. Baudelairetits poems en prose (1869)
Quatrain
A stanza of four lines. A very common form in Englsih, uses with various meters
and Rhyme schemes.
274
Refrian
Words as lines repeated in the course of a poem recurring at intervals sometimes
with slight variation. Usually at the and of stanza. They are common in songs or ballads.
Rhetorical Question
A Question asked not for the sake of enquity, but for emphasis: The writer or
speaker experts his audience to be totally convinced about the appropriate reply.
1. Shelley Ode to West Wind
2. Arnold The Scholar Gipsy (1853)
3. Sir Ph. Sideny Arisophil and Stella (47th Sonnet)
4. Shakespear King Henry IV Part I.V,i. 131.
Rhyme
Though by no means all verse is rhymed, it is one of the most striking differences
of between verse and prose. It has two functions:
1. It echoes sounds and is thus a source of aesthetic satisfaction.
2. It assists in the actual structure of verse. It helps to organize the verse,
simultaeouly opening up and concluding the sense. It helps to make verse easier to
remember.
Gather ye Rose buds while ye may
Old time is still a flying
And this same flower that smiles to day
To morrow will be dying
(Herric, to the Virging 1648)
Most rhymes in Englsih verse chim on the last syllable of a line and their syllable
bears a final stress: these strong on- syllable rhymes are called Masculine Rhyme; May,
day. A different effect is created when the final syllable of a line is unstressed:
this called a Feminine Rhyme: Flying, dying, All the examples so far have been End-
Rhymes. Internal Rhyme, words rhymed within a line.
While the Lilly white shall in Love delight
(Blake, The Lilly 1824)
Rhymes which appear exact because of their spelling, but which are pronounced
differently are called Eye-Rhymes:
So we'll go no more a roving
Though the heart be still as loving.
(Byron, 1817)
Inexact or imperfect rhymes are variously called Half- Rhyme, Slant or
Pararhyme:
It seemed that out of battle I escaped
Down some profoud dull tunnel long sincescooped
Through granites which titanic war had groined
Yet also there encumbere sleepers groaned
(W. Owen, Strange Meeting 1920)
They are exceptionally common in 20th. C. verse, becoming a special feature of the
verse of certain poets such as W. Owen, D. Thomas, T. Hughes.
Rhythm
In English verse and prose the chief element of rhythm is the variation in the levels
of Stress accorded to the syllables in any stretch of language. The play of long and short
syllables may also be a factor in creating variation in enunciation.
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275
Running Rhythm
A term used by G. M. Hopkins, it denotes a rhythm measuned by feet of two or three
syllables. Each foot has one main stress or accent. The remaining one or two unaccented
syllables are known as the "slack". This is synonymous with Common Englsih rhythm.
Run On Line (Enjambement)
A line of verse which runs into the next line without any grammatical break. It is
common in English poetry. It is not end stopped.
Sestet
The Sub- division or last six lines of the Italian sonnet following the octet or
octave.
Shakespearean Sonnet
A 14 line poem in iambic pentamenters consisting of three quatrains and
concluding couplet. It also known as the English sonnet, it is a variant of the Petrarchan
sonnet. The rhyme scheme is abab, cdcd, efef, gg or abba, cddc, effe, gg.
Sick Verse
It is kin to black comedy; it is queasily, uneasily funny mordant sardonic and
Macabre. Its themes are misfortune, death, disease, cruelty, love sickness.
1. J. Thomson City of Dreadful Night
2. W.S. Gilbert Nightmore
3. E.A.Poe The Ravan
4. R.Browning Madhouse Cells
5. W.H. Auden Miss Gee
6. Keats Isabella (1820)
7. Hood Faithless Nelly Gray (1826)
Sonnet
A lyric poem of fixed form: Fourteen lines of iambic pentameter rhymed. Love
was the dominant theme of 16th. c.sonneteers. It is written in a single stanza. There are
three basic sonnet forms ; 1-Italian or Petrachan sonnet. (abbaabba, cdecde or cd cc dc) 2.
Shakes pearean (ababcdcd efefgg) 3. Spenserian sonnet (abab bcbc cdcdee)
Spenserian Stanza
A form invented by E. Spenser for The Faerie Oueene (1590-6). Eight lines of
iambic pentameter are followed by one lone of iambic hexameter, rhymed ababbcbce.
Sprung Rhyme
A term invented by Hopkins to explain his own metrical system. The Basic idea is
to accentuate a certain number of syllables per line very strongly, and not to worry how
many weakly stressed "slack" syllables intervenes.
Synaesthesia
The description of a sense impression in terms more appropriate to a different
sense; the mixing of sense impressions in order to create a particular of metaphor. Not
uncommon in poets who dwell on sense impression, like Keats. The following example
from his Ode to a Nightngle (1820) describes the taste of wine in terms of colour, action,
song, sensation and feeling.
O, for a draught of vintage
Tasting of Flora and the country green.
Dance and Provencal song and sunburnt mirth.
276
Terza Rima
A rhyme scheme as used by Dante in his Divine Comedy (1300). Tercets are
interlocked in the following manner; aba, bcd,cdc,
Shelley The Triumph of Life (1822)
Ode to the West Wind (1822)
Tetrameter
In prosody a line of four feet. Iambic and trochaic tetrameter are common meters
in all ages of English verse.
Topographical Poetry:
Writing of Denham in lives of the Poets (1779-81) Johnson aptly described this genre as
local poetry, of which the fundamental subject is some particularer Landscape, to be
poetically described, with the addition of such embellishments as may be supplied by
historical retrospection. Or incidental meditation.
Triple Rhyme
A Rhyme of three syllables as quivering / shivering, comparision. It is most often
used for comic effect.
Triplet
A stanza of three similer lines or three consecutive rhymed lines: Heroic couplets
one diversified by appearance of occasional triplets.
A.Pope Essay of Criticism (1711)
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
Ca. 1343-1400
FROM THE CANTERBURY TALES
The General Prologue
Whan that April with his° showres soote° its / fresh
The droughte of March hath perced to the roote,
And bathed every veine in swich licour,1
Of which vertu 2 engendred is the flowr;
5 Whan Zephyrus° eek ° with his sweete breeth the West Wind I also Inspired hath in every
holt° and heath breathed into / grove / field
The tender croppes, and the yonge sonne shoots
And smale fowles maken melodye birds

That sleepen al the night with open ye°--- eye
So priketh hem° Nature in hir° corages --- them I their I hearts
Thanne longen folk to goon° on pilgrimages, go
And palmeres for to seeken straunge strondes
To feme halwes, 4 couthe in sundry londes; known I various
And specially from every shires ende
Of Engelond to Canterbury they wende,
The holy blissful martyr5 for to seeke
That hem hath holpen whan that they were seke. Helped! Sick
Bifel° that in that seson on a day, it happened
In Southwerk 6 at the Tabard as I lay,
Redy to wenden on my pilgrimage
To Cnaterbury with ful° devout corage, very
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277
At night was come into that hostelrye

Wei nine and twenty in a compaignye
Of sundry folk, by aventure yfalle chance
In felaweshipe, and pilgrims were they alle
That toward Canterbury wolden ride. Would
The chambers and the stables weren wide,
And wel we weren esed at the beste.
And shortly, whan the sonne was to reste,8
So hadde I spoken with hem everichoon every one.
That I was of hir felaweshipe anon, at once
And made forward 9 erly for to rise,
To take oure way ther as I you devise.1
But nathelees, whil I have time and space, 2 nevertheless
Er° that I ferther in this tale pace, before I proceed
Me thinketh it accordant to resoun3
To telle you al the condicioun
Of eech of hem, so as it seemed me,
And whiche they were, and of what degree, social rank
And eek in what array that they were inne:
And at a knight thane wol I first biginne. Then
A Knight ther was, and that a worthy man.
That fro the time that he first bigan
To ridden out, he loved chivalrye,
Trouthe and honour, freedom and curteisye.4
Ful worthy was he in his lordes werre,° war.
And therto hadde he riden no man ferre, further
As wel in Cristendom as hethenesse, heathen lands
And 5 evere honoured for his worthinesse
At Alisandre 6 he was whan it was wonne;
WILLIAM LANGLAND
Ca. 1330-ca.1400
Piers Plowman1
In a somer seson, whan softe was the sonne,
Sun
I shoop me into shroudes as I a sheep were,2
In habite as an heremite unholy of werkes,3
Wente wide in this world wonders to here. Hear
Ac on a May morwenynge4 on Malverne Hilles but; and
Me bifel a ferly, of Fairye me thoghte.5
I was wery [of] wandred and wente me to reste
Under a brood bank by abournes side; stream's
And as I lay and lened and loked on the waters,
I slombred into a slepyng, it swayed so murye.° merry
Thanne gan [me] to meten° a merveillous swevene--- dream I dream
That I was in a sildernesse, wiste I nevere where . knew
As I biheeld into the eest an heigh to the sonne,6
I seigh a tour° on a toft trieliche y maked , 7 tower I knoll
278
A deep dale bynethe, a dungeon therinne, valley I dungeon

With depe diches and derke and dredfulle of sighte.
A fair feeld ful of folk fond 8 I ther bitwene---
Of alle manere of men, the meene and the riche , kinds I lowly
Werchynge and wandrynge as the world asketh. Working I requires Somme putten hem° to
the plough, pleiden ful themselves I flaying selde, seldom
In settynge and sowynge swonken ful harde, planting/ toiled
And wonnen that thise wastours with glotonye destroyeth9
And somme putten hem° to pride, apparailed hem themselves therafter,
THOMAS WYATT*
1503-1542
The Long Love, That in My Thought Doth Harbor1
The long love, that in my thought doth harbor,
And in mine heart doth keep his residence,
Into my face presseth with bold pretense,
And therein campeth, spreading his banner. 2
She that me learneth to love and suffer,
And wills that my trust and lust's negligence
Be reined 3 by reason, shame and reverence,
With his hardiness taketh displeasure.
Wherewithal, unto the heart's4 forest he fleeth,
Leaving his enterprise with pain and cry;
And there him hideth, and not appeareth.
What may I do when my master feareth
But in the field with him to live and die?
For good is the life, ending faithfully.
EDMUND SPENSER
FROM THE FAERIE QUEENE
The First Booke
Contayning
The Legende of the
Knight of the Red Crosse,
Or
Of Holinesse
Lo I the man, whose Muse 2 whilome did maske, formerly
As time her taught, in lowly Shepheards weeds, 3
Am now enforst a far unfitter taske,
For trumpets sterne to change mine Oaten reeds,4
5And sing of Knights and Ladies gentle deeds; noble
Whose praises having slept in silence long,
Me, all too meane, the sacred Muse areeds5
To blazon6 broad emongst her learned throung:
Fierce warres and faithfull loves shall moralize my song.
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279
SIR PHILIP SIDNEY

1554-1586
Ye Goatherd Gods1
STREPHON.2Ye goatherd gods, that love the grassy mountains,
Ye nymphs which haunt the springs in pleasant valleys,
Ye satyrs3 joyed with free and quiet forests,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music,
5 Which to my woes gives still an early morning,
And draws the dolor on till weary evening.
KLAIU. O Mercury, foregoer to the evening,
O heavenly huntress 4 of the savage mountains,
O lovely star, entitled of the morning,
10 While that my voice doth fill these woeful valleys,
Vouchsafe your silent ears to plaining music,
Which oft hath Echo5 tires in secret forests.
STREPHON. I, that was once free burgess of the forests, citizen
Where shade from sun, and sport I sought in evening,
15 I, that was once esteemed for pleasant music,
Am banished now among the monstrous mountains
Of huge despair, and foul affliction's valleys,
Am grown a screech owl6 to myself each morning.
MICHAEL DRAYTON
1563-1631
Since there's no help, come let us kiss and part;
Nay, I have done, you get no more of me,
And I am glad, yea glad with all my heart
That thus so cleanly I myself can free;
5Shake hands forever, cancel all our vows,
And when we meet at any time again,
Be it not seen in either of our brows.
That we one jot of former love retain.
Now at the last gasp of love's latgest breath,
Io When, his pulse failing, Passion speechless lies,
When Faith is kneeling by his bed of death,
And Innocence is closing up his eyes,
Now if thou wouldst, when all have given him over,
From death to life thou mightst him yet recover.
CHRISTOPHER MARLOWE
1564-1593
Hero and Leander
First Sestial1
On Hellespont, 2 guilty of true love's blood,
In view and opposite, two cities stood.
Sea – borderes, disjoined by Neptune's might; god of the sea
The one Abydos, the other Sestors hight. Called
280
5 At Sestos Hero dwelt; Hero the fair,

Whom young Apollo courted for her hair, god of the sun.
And offered as a dower his burning throne, wedding gift
Where she should sit for men to gaze upon.
The outside of hergarments were of lawn,3
Io The lining purple silk, with gilt stars drawn;
Her wide sleeves green, and bordered with a grove
Where Venus in her naked glory strove
To please the careless and disdainful eyes
Of proud Adonis,4 that before her lies;
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
257
1564-1616
1
From fairest creatures we desire increase,
That thereby beauty's rose might never die,
But as the riper should by time decease,
His tender heir might bear his memory; young
5 But thou, contracted 2 to thine own bright eyes,
Feed'st thy light's flame with self- substantial3 fuel,
Making a famine where abundance lies,
Theyself thy foe, to thy sweet self too cruel.
Thou that art now the world's fresh ornament.
10 And only herald to the gaudy spring, principal; solitary
Within thine own bud buriest thy content,
And, tender churl,s mak'st waste in niggarding. Hoarding
Pity the world, or else this glutton be,
To eat the world's due, by the grave and thee
15
When I consider everything that grows
Holds in perfection but a little moment,
That this huge stage presenteth nought but shows2
Whereon the stars in secret influence comment; 3
When I perceive that men as plants increase,
Cheered and checked ev'n by the selfsame sky,
Vaunt in their youthful sap,4 at height decrease,
And wear their brave state out of memory,5
Then the conceit of this inconstant stay
Sets you most rich in youth before my sight,
Where wasteful time debateth with6 decay
To change you day of youth to sullied nigh;
And all in war with time for love of you,
As he takes from you, I engraft you new.7
Repressed
Conception, idea
Soiled; darkened
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281
1;
Shall I compare thee to a summer's day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds to shake the darling buds of May,
And summer's lease.hath all too short a date;
Some times too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And oftren is his gold complexion dimmed;
And every fair from fair sometimes declines,
By chance or nature's changing course untrimmed;8
But thy eternal summer shall not fade,
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow'st; 9
Nor shall death brag trhou wand'rest in his shade,
When in eternal lines to Time thou grow'st:1
So long as men can breathe, or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
30
When to the sessions of sweet silent thought
I summon up 8 remembrance of things past,
I sigh the lack of many a thing I sought,
And with old woes new wail my dear time's waste:
5 Then can I drown an eye, unused to flow,
For precious friends hid in death's dateless night, endless
And weep afresh love's long since canceled woe,
And moan the expense of many a vanished sight: loss
Then can I grieve at grievances foregone, past
10 And heavily from woe to woe tell o'er count
The sad account of fore- bemoaned moan, report; financial record
Which I new pay as if not paid before,
But if the while I think on thee, dear friend,
All losses are restored and sorrows end.
33
Full many a glorious morning have I seen
Flatter the mountain 0 tops with sovereigng eye,° sunglight
Kissing with golden face the meadows green,
Gilding pale streams with heavenly alchemy,
5Anon permit the basest clouds to ride soon
With ugly rack9 on his celestial face,
And from the forlorn world his visage hide,
Stealing unseen to west with this disgrace:
Even so my sun one early morn did shine
O With all- triumphant splendor on my brow;
But, out, alack! He was but one hour mine, also
The region coud1 hath masked him from me now.
Yet him for this my love no whit disdaineth;
Suns of the world may stain 2 when heanven's sin staineth.
282
JOHN DONE*
1572-1631
The Good-Morrow
I wonder, by my troth, what thou and I
Did, till we loved? Were we not weaned till then.?
But sucked on country1 pleasures, childishly?
Or snorted we in the Seven Sleepers'd en? 2 snored
5 Twas son; but this, all pleasures fancies be. Except far
IOf ever any beauty I did see,
Which I desired, and got, twas but a deream of thee.
And now good- morrow to our waking souls,
Which watch not one another out of fear;
10 For love, all love of ther sights controls,
And makes one little room an every where.3
Let sea –discoveres to new worlds have gone,
Let maps4 to others, worlds on worlds have shown,
Let us possess one 5 world, each hath one, and is one.
15My face in thine eye, thine in mine appears,
And true plain hearts do in the faces rest;
Where can we find two better hemispheres,
Without sharp North, without declining West?
Whatever dies was not mixed equally;6
20 If our two loves be one, or, thou and I
Love so alike that none do slacken, none can die.
BEN JONSON
1572-1637
To the Reader1
On My First Daughter
Here lies, to each her parents' ruth, ° sorrow
Mary, the daughter of their youth;
Yet all heaven't gifts being heaven's due,
It makes the father less to rue.
5 At six months end she parted hence
With safety of her innocence;
Whose soul heaven's queen, whose name she bears,
In comfort of her mother's tears,
Hath placed amongst her virgin0 train:2
10 Where , while that severed doth remain,3
This grave partakes the fleshly birth;
Which cover lightly, gentle earth!
ROBERT HERRICK
1591-1674
The Argument of His Book1
I shing of brooks, of blossoms, birds, and bowers,
Of April, May, of June, and July flowers.
I sing of Maypoles, hock carts, wassails, wakes, 2
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283
Of bridegrooms, brides, and of their bridal cakes.

5 I write of youth, of love, and have access
By these to sing of cleanly wantonness.
I sing of dews, of rains, and, piece by piece,
Of balm, of oil, of spice, and ambergris.3
I sing of times trans- shifting, and I write
10 How roses first came red and lilies white.
I write of groves, of twilights, and I sing
The court of Mab4 and of the fairy king.
I write of hell; I sing (and ever shall)
Of heaven, and hope to have it after all.
The Vine
I dreamed this mortal part of mine
Was metamorphosed to vine,
Which crawling one and every way
Enthralled my dainty Lucia.5 imprisoned
5Methousght her long small legs and thighs slender
I with my tendrils did surprise;
Her belly, buttocks, and her waist
By my soft nervelets were embraced. Tendrils
About her head I writhing hung,
10 And with rich clusters (hid among)
The leves) her temples I behung,
So that my Lucia seemed to me
Young Bacchus ravished by his tree.6
My curls about her neck did crawl,
15 And arms and hands they did enthrall,
GEORGE HERBERT
1593-1633
FROM THE TEMPLE: SACRED POEMS AND PRIVATGE
EJACULATIONS1
The Altar2
A broken A L T A R, Lord, thy servant rears,
Made of a heart, and cemented with tears:
Whose parts are as thy hand did frame;
No workman's tool hath touched the same.3
5 A H E A R T alone
Is such a stone,
As nothing but
Thy power doth cut.
Wherefore each part
10 Of my hard heart
Meets in this frame,
284
To praise thy Name:

That, if I chance to hold my peace,
These stones to praise thee may not cease.4
15 Oh let thy blessed S A C R I F I C E be mine,
And sanctify this A L T A R to be thine.
JOHN MILTON*
1608-1674
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity1
This is the month, and this the happy morn,
Wherein the Son of Heaven's Eternal King,
Of wedded maid and virgin mother born,
Oru great redemption from above did bring;
5 For so the holy sages 2 once did sing,
That he our deadly forfeit3 should release,
And with his Father work us a perpetual peace.
2
That glorious form, that light unsufferable,
And that far- beaming blaze of majesty,
10 Wherewith he wont° at Heaven't high council- table was accustomed
To sit the midst of Trinal Unity,4
He laid aside, and, here with us to be,
Forsook the courts of everlasting day,
And chose with us a darksome house of mortal clay.5
3
15 Say, Heavenly Muse, 6 shall not thy sacred vein
Afford a present to the Infant God?
Hast thou no verse, no hymn, or solemn strain,
To welcome him to this his new abode,
Now while the heaven, by the Sun's team untrod, 7
20 Hath took no print of the approaching light,
And all the spangled host8 keep watch in squadrons bright?
4
See how from far upon the eastern road
The star – led wizards9 haste with odors swett!
Oh urn, prevent them with thy humble ode, 1 go before.
25 And lay it lowly at his blessed feet;
Have thou the honor first thy Lord to greet,
And join thy voice unto the angel choir
From out his secret altar touched with hallowed fire.
ANDREW MARVELL*
1621-1678
The Coronet
When for the thorns with which I long, too long,
With many a piercing wound,
My Savior's head have crowned,
I seek with garlands2 to redress that wrong;
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5 Through every garden, every mean, meadow

I gather flowers (my fruits are only flowers)
Dismantling all the fragrant towers high headdresses
That once adorned my shepherdess's head.
And now when I have summed up all my store,
Thinking ( so I my self deceive)
So rich a chaplet thence to weave garland
As never yet the king of glory3 wore;
Alas I find the serpent old4
That, twining in his speckled breast,
About the flowers disguised does fold,
With wreaths of fame and interest. 5 coils
Ah, foolish man, that wouldst debase with them,
And mortal glory, heaven's diadem! Crown
But Thou6 who only couldst the serpent tame,
Either his slippery knots at once untie,
And disentangle all his winding snare;
Or shatter too with him my curious frame, elaborate/ structure
Though set with skill and chosen out with care,
That they, while Thou on both their spoils dost tread,
May crown Thy feet, that could not crown Thy head.
JOHN DRYDEN
1631-1700
Song from The Indian Emperor
Ah, fading joy, how quickly art thou past!
Yet we thy ruin haste.
As if the cares of human life were few,
We seek out new:
And follow fate, which would too fast pursue. See how on every bough the birds express
In their sweet notes their happiness.
They all enjoy and nothing spare;
But on their mother nature lay their care.
10 Why then should man, the lord of all below,
Such troubles choose to know
As none of all his subjects undergo?
Hark, hark, the waters fall, fall, fall,
And with a murmuring sound
Dash, dash upon the ground,
To getle slumbers call.
JONATHAN SWIFT
1667-1745
A Description of the Morning
Now hardly here and there a hackney- coach1
Appearing, showed the ruddy morn's approach.
Now Betty from her master's bed had flown,
And softly stole to discompose her own;
286
5 The slip- shod prentice from his master's door

Had pared the dirt and sprinkled round the floor.
Mow Moll 2 had whirled her mop with dext'rous airs,
Prepared to scrub the entry and the strairs.
The youth with broomy stumps began to trace
The kennel – edge,3 where wheels had worn the place.
The small- coal man4 was heard with cadence deep,
Till drowned in shriller notes of chimney- sweep:
Duns at his lordship's gate began to meet; bill collectors
And brickdust Moll5 had screamed through half the street.
The turnkey now his flowck retrurning sees, jailer
Duly let out a – nights to steal for fees:6
The watchful bailiffs7 take their silent stancs,
And schoolboys lag with satchels in their hands.
A Description of a City Shower

Careful observers may foretell the hour
(By sure prognostics) when to dread a shower:
While rain depends, the pensive cat gives o 'er
Her frolics, and pursues her tail no more.
Returning home at night, you'll find the sink
Strike your offended sense with double stink.
If you be wise, then go not far to dine;
You'll spend in coach hire more than save in wine.
A coming shower your shooting corns presage,
Old aches throb, your hollow tooth will rage.
Sauntering in coffeehouse is Dulman seen;
He damns the climate and complains of spleen.
Meanwhile the South, rising with dabbled wings, a wind I spattered
A sable cloud athwart the welkin flings,
That swilled more liquor than it could contain,
And, like a drunkard, gives it up again.
Brisk Susan whips her linen from the rope,
Whele the first drizzling shower is borne aslope:
Such is that sprinkling which some careless quean.
Flirts on you from her mop, but not so clean:
You fly, invoke the gods; then turning, stip
To rail; she singing, still whirls on her mop.
Not yet the dust had shunned the unequal strife,
But aided by the wind, fought still for life,
And wafted with its foe by violent gust,
Twas doubtful which was rain and which was dust.
Ah! Where must needy poet seek for aid,
When dust and rain at once his coat invade?
Sole coat, where dust cemented by the rain
Erects the nap, 8 and leaves a mingled stain.
Now in contiguous drops the flood comes down,
Threatening with deluge this devoted town.
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287
ALEXANDER POPE
1688-1744
From An Essay on Criticism
PartII
Of all the causes which conspire to blind
Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind,
What the weak head with strongest bias rules,
Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
205 Whatever Nature has in worth denied,
She gives in large recruits of needful pride; supplies
For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find
What wants in blood and spirits swelled with wind: lacks
Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defense,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense.
If once right reason drives that cloud away,
Truth breaks upon us with resistless day.
Trust not yourself: but your defects to know,
Make use of every friend- and every foe.
Lucy has agreed to help Macheath escape, and
A little learning is a dangerous thing;
Dring deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.1
There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain,
And drinking largely sobers us again.
Fired at first sight with what the Muse imparts,
In fearless youth we tempt the heights of arts, attempt
While from the bounded level of our mind
Short views we take, nor see the lengths behind;p
But more advanced , behold with strange surprise
New distant scenes of endless science rise!
So pleased at first the towering Alps we try,
Mount o er the vales, and seem to tread the sky, valleys
The eternal snows appear already past,
And the first cloud and montains seem the last;
But those attained , we tremble to survey
The growing labors of the lengthened way,
The increasing prospect tires our wandering eyes,
Hills peep o er hills, and Alps on Alps arise!
A perfect judge will read each work of wit
With the same spirit that its author writ:
Survey the whole, nor seek slight faults to find
Where Nature moves, and rapture warms the mind;
Nor lose, for that malignant dull delight,
The generous pleasure to be charmed with wit.
But in such lays as neither ebb nor flow,
Correctly cold, and regularly low,
That, shunning faults, one quiet tenor keep,
We cannot blame indeed --- but we may sleep.
In wit, as nature, what affects our hearts
288
Is not the exactness of peculiar parts; particular

Tis not a lip, or eye, we beauty call,
But the joint force and full result of all.
Thus when we view some well- proportioned dome
(The world's just wonder , and even thine, O Rome!2),
No single parts unequally surprise,
All comes united to the admiring eyes:
No monstrous heigh, or breadth, or length appear;
The whole at once is bold and regular.
Whoever thinks a faultless piece to see,
Thinks what neer was, nor is, nor e'er shall be.
In every work regard the writer's end,
Since none can compass more than they intend;
And if the means be just, the conduct true,
Applause, in spite of trivial faults, is due.
As men of breeding, sometimes men of wit,
To avoid great errors must the less commit,
Neglect the rules each verbal critic lays,
For not to know some trifles is a praise.
WILLIAM BLAKE
1757-1827
FROM POETICAL SKETCHES
To the Muses1
Whether on Ida's 2 shady brow,
Or in the chambers of the East,
The chambers of the sun, that now
Form ancient melody have ceas'd;
5 Whether in Heav'n ye wander fair,
Or the green corners of the earth,
Or the blue regions of the air,
Where the melodious winds have birth;
Whether on chrystal rocks ye rove,
10 Beneath the bosom of the sea
Wand' ring in many a coral grove,
Fair Nine, forsaking Poetry!
How have you left the ancient love
That bards of old enjoy'd in you!
15 The languid strings do scarcely move!
The sound is forc's, the notes are few!
Song
How sweet I roam'd from field to field,
And tasted all the summer's pride,
Till I the prince of love beheld,
Who in the sunny beams did glide!
5 He she w' me lilies for my hair,
And blushing roses for my brow;
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289
He led me through his gardens fair,

Where all his golden pleasures grow.
With sweet May dews my wings were wet,
10 And Phoebus fir'd my vocal rage;
He caught me in his silken net,
And shut me in his golden cage.
WILLIAM WORDSWORTH
1770-1850
Expostulation and Reply1
Why, William, on that old gray stone,
Thus for the length of half a day,
Why, William, sit you thus alone,
And dream your time away?
5 "Where are your books?--- that light bequeathed
To Beings else forlorn and blind!
Up! Up! And drink the spirit breathed
From dead men to their kind.
"You look round on your Mother Earth,
10 As if she for no purpose bore you;
As if you were her first- born birth,
And none had lived before you!"
One morning thus, by Esthwaite lake,
When life was sweet, I knew not why,
15 To me my good friend Matthew spake,
And thus I made reply,
" The eye--- it cannot choose but see;
We cannot bid the ear be still;
Our bodies feel, where'er they be,
20 Against or with our will.
"Nor less I deem that there are Powers
Which of themselves our minds impress;
That we can feed this mind of ours
In a wise passiveness.
25 "Think you, mid all this mightly sum
Of things for ever speaking,
That nothing of itself will come,
But we must still be seeking?
"---Then ask not wherefore, here, alone,
30 Conversing 2 as I may,
I sit upon this old gray stone,
And dream my time away."
Spring 1798
The Tables Turned

An Evening Scene on the Same Subject
Up! Up! My Friend, and quit your books;
Or surely youll grow double:
290
Up! Up! My Friend, and clear your books;

Why all this toil and trouble?
5 The sun, above the mountain's head,
A freshening luster mellow
Through all the long green fields has spread,
His first sweet evening yellow.
Books! Tis a dull and endless strife:
10 Come, hear the woodland linnet, a songbird
How sweet his music! On my life,
There's more of wisdom in it.
And hark! How blithe the throstle sings! Sone thrush
He, too, is no mean preacher:
Is Come forth into the light of things,
Let Nature be your Teacher.
She has a world of ready wealth,
Our minds and hearts to bless---.
Spontaneous wisdom breathed by health,
20 Truth breathed by cheerfulness.
One impulse from a vernal wood
May teach you more of man,
Of moral evil and of good,
Than all the sages can.
25 Sweet is the lore which Nature brings;
Our meddling intellect
Mis-shapes the beauteous forms of things:---
We murder to dessect.
Enough of Science and of Art;
30 Close up those barren leaves;
Come forth, and bring with you a heart
That watches and receives.
1798
Lines
Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey on Revisiting the Banks of
The Wye during a Tour.* July 13 ,1798
Five years have passed; five summers, with the length
Of five long winters! And again I hear
These waters, rolling from their mountain – springs
With a soft inland murmur. Once again
5 Do I behold these steep and lofty cliffs,
That on a wild secluded scene impress
Thoughts of more deep seclusion; and connect
The landscape with the quiet of the sky.
The day is come when I again repose
10 Here, under this dark sycamore, and view
These plots of cottage ground, these orchard tufts,
Which at this season, with their unripe fruits,
Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves
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291
Mid groves and copses. Once again I see small woods

15 These hedgerows, hardly hedgerows, little lines
Of sportive wood run wild; these pastoral farms,
Green to the very door; and wreath of smoke
Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!
With some uncertain notice, as might seem
20 Of vagrant dwellers in the houseless woods,
Or of some Hermit's cave, where by his fire
The Hermit sits alone.
SAMUEL TAYLOR COLERIDGE

1772-1834
Kubla Khan8
Or a Vision in a Dream. A Fragment
In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure some decree:
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
5 Down to a sunless sea.
So twice five miles of fertile ground
With walls and towers were girdled round:
And there were gardens bright with sinuous rills, curving I streams
Where blossomed many an incense- bearing tree;
10 And here were forests ancient as the hills,
Enfolding sunny spots of greenery.
But oh! That deep romantic chasm which slanted
Down the green hill athwart a cedarn cover!
A savage place! As holy and enchanted
15 As e er beneath a waning moon was haunted
By woman wailing for her demon lover!
And from this chasm, with ceaseless turmoil seething,
As if this earth in fast thick pants were breathing,
A mighty fountain momently was forced:
20 Amid whose swift half- intermitted burst
Huge fragments vaulted like rebounding hail,
Or chaffy grain beneth the threshers flail:
And mis these dancing rock at once and ever
It flung up momently the sacred river.
25 Five miled meandering with a mazy motion
Through wood and dale the sacred river ran,
Then reached the caverns measureless to man,\
And sank in turmult to a life less ocean:
And mid this tumult Kubla heard from far
30 Ancestral voices prophesying war!
The shadow of the dome of pleasure
Floated midway on the waves;
Where was heard the mingled measure
From the fountain and the caves.
292
35 It was a miracle of rare device,

A sunny pleasure dome with caves of ice!
A damsel with a dulcimer9
In a vision once I saw:
It was an Abyssinian maid,
40 And on her dulcimer she played,
Singing of Mount Abora.
Could I revive within me
Her symphony and song,
To such a deep delight twould win me,
45 That with music loud and long,
I would build that dome in air,
That sunny dome! Those caves of ice!
And all who heard should see them there,
And all should cry, Beware! Beware!
50 His flashing eyes, his floating hair!
Weave a circle round him thrice,
And close your eyes with holy dread,
For he on honey – dew hath fed,
And drucn the milk of Paradise.
GEORGE GORDEN, LORD BYRON

1788-1824
She Walks in Beauty
She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that's best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.
One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Io Or softly lightens o er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.
And on that cheek, and o'er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
15 The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent
PERCY BYSSHE SHELLEY

1792-1822
Ode to the West Wind3
O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn's being,
Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead
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293
Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,
5 Pestilence- stricken multitudes: O thou,
Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed
The winged seeds, where they lie cold and low,
Each like a corpse within its grave, until
Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow
10 Her clarion 4 o'er the dreaming earth, and fill
(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)
With living hues and oders plain and hill:
Wild Spirit, which art moving every where;
Destroyer and preserver; hear, oh, hear!
2
15 Thou on whose stream, mid the steep sky's commotion,
Loose clouds like earth's decaying leaves are shed,
Shook from the tangled boughs of Heaven and Ocean,
Angels 5 of rain and lightning: there are spread
On the blue surface of thine aery surge,
20 Like the bright hair uplifted from the head
Of some fierce Maenad, 6 even from the dim verge
Of the horizon to the zenith's height,
The locks of the approaching storm. Thou dirge
Of the dying year, to which this closing night
25 Will be the dome of a vast sepulcher,
Vaulted with all thy congregated might
Of vapors, from whose solid atmosphere clouds
Black rain, and fire, and hail will burst: oh, hear!
3
Thou who didst waken from his summer dreams
30 The blue Mediterranean, where he lay,
Lulled by the coil of his crystalline streams,
Beside a pumice isle in Baiae's bay,7
And saw in sleep old palaces and towers
Quivering within the wave's intenser day,
35 All overgrown with azure moss and flowers
So sweet, the sense faints picturing them! Thou
For whose path the Atlantic's level powers
Cleave themselves into chasms, while far below
The sea- blooms and the oozy woods which wear
40 The sapless foliage of the ocean, know
Thy voice, and suddenly grow gray with fear,
And tremble and desoil themselves:oh, hear!8
4
If I were a dead leaf hou mightest bear;
If I were a swift cloud to fly with thee;
45 A wave to pant beneath thy power , and share
The impulse of thy strength, only less free
Than thou, O uncontrollable! If even
I were as in my boyhood, and could be
294
The comrade of thy wanderings over Heaven,

50 As then, when to outstrip thy skyey speed
Scarce seemed a vision; I would ne'er have striven
As thus with thee in prayer in my sore need.
Oh, lift me as a wave, a leaf, a cloud!
I fall upon the thorns of life! I bleed!
55 A heavy weight of hours has chained and bowed
One too like thee: tameless, and swift, and proud.
Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:
What if my leaves are falling like its own!
The tumult of thy mighty harmonied
60 Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,
Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,
My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!
Drive my dead thoughts over the universe
Line withered leaves to quicken a new birth!
65 And, by the incantaiion of this verse,
Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth
Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!
Be through my lips to unawakened earth
The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,
70 If Winter comes, can Spring be far bdhind?
Ozymandias
I met a traveler from an antique land
Who said: Tow vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert…. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,
5 And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold commands,
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,
The hands that mocked them, and the heart that fed:
And on the pedestal these words appear:
Io" My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare
The lone and level sands stretch far away.
England in 1819
An old, mad, blind, despised, and dying king 6---
Princes, the dregs of their dull race, 7 who flow
Through public scorn--- mud from a muddy spring;
Rulers who neither see, nor feel, nor know,
5 But leechlike to their fainting country cling,
Till they drop, blind in blood, without a blow;
A people starved and stabbed in the unfilled field---
An army, which liberticide 8 and prey
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295
Makes as a two-edged sword to all who wield;

10 Golden and sanguine laws9 which tempt and slay;
Religion Christless, Godless--- a book sealed;
A Senate--- Time's worst statute 1 unrepealed---
Are graves, from which a glorious Phantom2 may
Burst, to illumine our tempestuous day
JOHN KEATS
1795-1821
On First Looking into Chapman's Homer1
Much have I traveled in the realms of gold,
And many goodly states and kingdoms seen;
Round many western islands have I been
Which bards in fealty to Apollo 2 hold . allegiance
5 Oft of one wide expanse had I been told
That deep- browed Homer ruled as his demesne; domain
Yet did I never breathe its pure serene atmosphere
Till I heard Chapman speak out loud and bold:
Then felt I like some watcher of the skies
10 When a new planet swims into his ken;
Or like stout Cortez3 when with eagle eyes
He stared at the Pacific--- and all his men
Looked at each other with a wild surmise---
Silen, upon a peak in Darien.
Ode on a Grecian Urn

Thou still unravished bride of quietness,
Thou foster child of silence and slow time,
Sylvan historian, who canst thus express
A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:
What leaf- fringed legend haunts about thy shape
Of deities or mortals, or of both,
In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?4
What men or gods are these? What maidens loath?
What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?
What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?
Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard
Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;
NMot to the sensual ear, but more endeared,
Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:
Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave
Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;
Bold Lover, never never canst thou kiss,
Though winning near the goal--- yet, do not grieve;
She cannot fade, thought thou hast not thy bliss,
Forever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
3
Ah, happy, happy boughs! That cannot shed Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;
296
And, happy melodist, unwearied,

Forever piping songs forever new;
More happy love! More happy, happy love!
Forever warm and still to be enjoyed,
Forever panting, and forever young;
All breathing human passion far above,
That leaves a heart high- sorrowful and cloyed,
A burning forehead, and a parching tongue
Who are these coming to the sacrifice?
To what green altar, O mysterious priest,
Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,
And all her silken flanks with garlands dressed?
35 What little town by river or sea shore,
Or mountain- built with peaceful citadel,
Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?
And, little town, thy streets foreverore
Will silent be; and not a soul to tell
40 Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.
5
O Attic5 shape! Fair attitude! With brede woven pattern
Of marble men and maidens overwrought,
With forest branches and the trodden weed;
Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought
45 As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!
When old age shall this generation waste,
Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe
Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,
"Beauty is truth, truth beauty," 6--- that is all
50 Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.
May 1819 1820
To Autumn
Season of mists and mellow fruitfulness,
Close bosom- friend of the maturing sun;
Conspiring with him how to load and bless
With fruit the vines that round the thatch- eaves run;
5 To bend with apples the mossed cottage – trees,
And fill all fruit with ripeness to the core;
To swell the gourd, and plump the hazel shells
With a sweet kernel; to set budding more,
And still more, later flowers for the bees,
10 Until they think warm days will never cease,
For Summer has oe'r- brimmed their clammy cells.
Who hath not seen thee oft amid thy store?
Sometimes whoever seeks abroad may find
Thee sitting careless on a granary floor,
15 Thy hair soft- lifted by the winnowing 7 wind;
Or on a half- reaped furrow sound asleep,
Drowsed with the fume of poppies, while thy hook8
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297
Spares the next swath and all its twined flowers:

And sometimes like a gleaner9 thou dost keep
20 Steady thy laden head across a brook;
Or by a cider- press, with patient look,
Thou watchest the last oozings hours by hours.
Where are the songs of Spring? Aye, where are they?
Think not of them, thou hast thy music too---
25 While barred cloud bloom the soft-sying day,
And touch the stubble- plains with rosy hue;
Then in a wailful choir the small gnats mourn
Among the river sallows, borne aloft low- growing willows
Or sinking as the light wind lives or dies;
30 And full- grown lambs loud bleat from hilly bourn; field
Hedge crickets sing; and now with treble soft
The redbreast whistles from a garden- croft;1
And gathering swallows twitter in the skies.
RALPH WALDO EMERSON

1803-1882
CONCORD Hymn
Sung at the Completion of the Battle Monument, 1 July 4, 1837
By the rude° bridge that arched the flood, roughly made
Their flag to April's breeze unfurled,
Here once the embattled farmers stood
And fired the shot heard round the world.
5 The foe long since in silence slept;
A like the conqueror silent sleeps;
And Time the ruined bridge has swept
Down the dark stream which seaward creeps.
On this green bank, by this soft strea,
10 We set today a votive stone, offered in gratitude
That memory may their deed redeem,
When, like our sires, our sons are gone.
Spirit, that made those heroes dare
To die, and leave their children free,
15 Bid Time and Nature gently spare
The shaft we raise to them and thee.
1837,1876
The Rhodora2
On Being Asked, Whence Is the Flower?
In May, when sea- winds pierced our solitudes,
I found the fresh Rhodora in the woods,
Spreading its leafless blooms in a damp nook,
To please the desert and the sluggish brook.
The purple petals, fallen in the pool,
Made the black water with their beauty gay;
Here might the red- bird come his plumes to cool,
298
And court the flower that cheapens his array.

Rhodora! If the sages ask thee why
10 This charm is wasted on the earth and sky,
Tell them, dear that if eyes were made for seeing,
Then Beauty is its own excuse for being:
Why thou wert there, O rival of the rose!
I never thought to ask, I never knew:
15 But, in my simple ignorance, suppose
The self – same Power that brought me there brought you.
1834 1839,1847
EDGAR ALLAN POE

1809-1849
Sonnet-To Science
Science! True daughter of Old Time thou art!
Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes.
Why preyest thou thus upon the poet's heart,
Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?
5 How should he love thee? Or how deem thee wise?
Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering
To seek for treasure in the jeweled skies,
Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?
Hast thou not dragged Diana1 from her car?
10 And driven the Hamadryad2 from the wood
To seek a shelter in some happier star?
Hast thou not torn the Maiad from her flood, nymphy
The Elfin from te geen grass, and from me
The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?3
1829 ,1829,1845
To Helen4
Helen, thy beauty is to me
Like those Nicean barks5 of yore,
That gently, oer a perfumed sea,
The weary, way- worn wanderer bore
To his own native shore.
On desperate seas long wont to roam, accustomed
Thy hyacinth hair, 6 thy classic face,
Thy hyacinth hair, 6 thy classic face,
Thy Naiad airs have brought me home nymphlike
To the glory that was Greece
And the grandeur that was Rome.
Lo! In you brilliant window- niche
How statue- like I see thee stand,
The agate lamp within thy hand!
Ah! Psyche,7 From the regions which
Are Holy Land!
Poetry
299
ALFRED, LORD TENNYSON

1809-1892
The Lady of Shalott
Part I
On either side the river lie
Long fields of barley and of rye,
That clothe the wold° and meet the sky; rolling plain
And through the field the road runs by
5 To many towered Camelot;6
And up and down the people go,
Gazing where the lilies blow bloom
Round an island there below,
The island of Shalott.
10 Willows whiten, aspens quiver,
Little breezes dusk and shiver
Through the wave that runs for ever
By the island in the river
Flowing down to Camelot.
15 Four gray walls, and four gray towers,
Overlook a space fo flowers,
And the silent isle imbowers
By the margin, willow- veiled,
20 Slide the heavey barges trailed
By slow horses; and unhailed
The shallop flitteth silken- sailed light open boat
Skimming sown to Camelot:
But who hath seen her wave her hand?
25 Or at the casement seen her stand?
Or is she known in all the land,
The Lady of Shalott?
Only reapers, reaping early
In among the bearded barley,
30 Hear a song that echoes cheerly
From the river winding clearly,
Down to towered Camelot:
And by the moon the reaper weary,
Piling sheaves in uplands airy,
35 Listening, whispers " Tis the fairy
Lady of Shallot".
PartII
There she weaves by night and day
A magic web with colors gay.
She has heard a whisper say,
40 A curse is on her if she stay
To look down to Camelot.
She knows not what the curse may be,
And so she weaveth steadily,
300
And little other care hath she,

45 The Lady of Shalott.
And moving through a mirror clear7
That hangs before her all the year,
Shadows of the world appear.
There she sees the highway near
50 Winding down to Camelot:
There the river eddy whirls,
And there the surly village- churls,
And the red cloaks of market girls,
Pass onward from Shalott.
55 Sometimes a troop of damsels glad,
An abbot on an ambling pad,° easy- paced horse.
Sometimes a curly shepherd – lad,
Or long- haired page in crimson clad, Goes by to towered Camelot;
60 And sometimes through the mirror blue
The knights come riding two and two:
She hath no loyal knight and true,
The Lady of Shalott.
But in her web she still delights
65 To weave the mirror's magic sights,
For often through the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead.
70 Came two young lovers lately wed;
" I am half sick of shadows," said
Par III
A bow – shot from her bower- eaves,
He rode between the barley- sheaves,
75 The sun came dazzling through the leaves,
And flamed upon the brazen greaves 8
Of bold Sir Lancelot.
A red- cross knight for ever kneeled9
To a lady in his shield,
So That sparkled on the yellow field,
Beside remote Shalott.
The gemmy bridle glittered free,
Like to some branch of stars we see
Hung in the golden Galaxy.
85 The bridle bells rang merrily
As he rode down to Camelot:
And from his blazoned baldric slung shoulder belt
A mighty silver bugle hung,
And as he rode his armor rung,
90 Beside remote Shalott.
All in the blue unclouded weather
Poetry
301
Thick- jeweled shone the saddle- leather,

The helmet and the helmet- feather
Burned like one burning flame together,
95 As he rode down to Camelot.
As often through the purple night,
Below the starry clusters bright,
Some bearded meteor, trailing light,
Moves over still Shalott.
IOO His broad clear brow in sunlight glowed;
On burnished hooves his war- horse trode;
From underneath his helmet flowed
His coal- black curls as on he rode,
As he rode down to Camelot.
105 From the bank and from the river
He flashed into the crystal mirror,
"Tirra lira," by the river
Sang Sir Lancelot.
She left the web, she left the loom,
110 she made three paces through the room,
She saw the water- lily bloom,
She saw the helmet and the plume,
She looked down to Camelot.
Out flew the web and floated wide;
Ii5 The mirror cracked from side to side;
"The curse is come upon me," cried
The Lady of Shaloot.
Part IV
In the stormy east- wind straining,
The pale yellow woods were waning,
120 The broad stream in his banks complaining.
Heavily the low sky raining
Over towered Camelot;
Down she came and found a boat
Beneath a willow left afloat,
125 and round about the prow she wrote
And down the river's dim expanse
Like some bold seer in a trance,
Seeing all his own mischance—
130 With a glassy countenance
Did she look to Camelot.
And at the closing of the day
She loosed the chain, and down she lay;
The broad stream bore her far away,
135 The Lady of Shalott.
Lying, robed in snowy white
That loosely flew to left and right---
The leaves upon her falling light---
302
Thrughh the noises of the night

140 She floated down to Camelot:
And as the boat- head wound along
The willowy hills and fields among,
They heard her singing her last song,
The Lady of Shlott.
145 Heard a carol, mournful, holy,
Chanted loudly, chanted lowly,
Till her blood was frozen slowly,
And her eyes were darkened wholly,
Turned to towered Camelot.
150 For ere she reached upon the tide
The first house by the water- side,
Singing in her song she died,
Under tower and balcony,
155 By garden- wall and gallery,
A gleaming shape she floated by,
Dead-pale between the houses high,
Silent into Camelot.
Out upon the wharfs they came,
160 Knight and burgher, lord and dame,
And round the prow they read her name,
The Lady of shallot.
Who is this? And what is hee ?
And in the lighted palace near
165 Died the sound of royal cheer;
And they crossed themselves for fear,
All the knights at Camelot:
But Lancelot mused a little space;
He said, " She has a lovely face;
No God in his mercy lend her grace,
The Lady of Shalott."
ROBERT BROWNING
1812-1889
My Last Duchess4
Ferrara
That's my last duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
10 The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)
Poetry
303
And seemed as trhey would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first
Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, twas not
Her husband's presence only, called that spot
15 Of joy into the Duchess cheek: perhaps
Fra Pandolf chanced tio say " Her mantle laps
Over my lady's wrist too much, "or" Paint
Must never hope to reproduce the faint
Half- flush that dies along her throat": such stuff
20 Was courtesy, she thought, and cause enough
For calling up that spot of joy. She had
A heart--- how shall I say?—too soon made glad,
Too easily impressed; she liked whate'er
She looked on, and her looks went every where.
25 sir, twas all one! My faovor at her breast,
The dropping of the daylight in the West,
The bough of cherries some officious fool
Broke in the orchard for her, the white mule
She rode with round the terrace--- all and each
30 Would draw from her alike the approving speech,
Or blush, at least. She thanked men--- good! But thanked
Somehow--- I know not how--- as if she ranked
My gift of a nine – hundred – years – old name
With any body's gift. Who'd stoop to blame
35 This sport of trifling? Even had you skill
In speech--- which I have not--- to make your will
Quite clear to such an one, and say, " Just this
Or that in you disgusts me; here you miss,
Or there exceed the mark" --- and if she let
40 Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set
Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse,
---E'en then would be some stooping; and I choose
Never to stoop. Oh sir, she smiled, no doubt,
Whene 'er I passed her; but who passed without
45 Much the same smile? This grew; I gave commands;
Then all smiles stopped together.There she stands
As if alive. Will 't please you rise? We 'll meet
The company below, then. I repeat,
The Count your master's known munificence
50 Is ample warrant that no just pretense
Of mine for dowry will be disallowed;
Though his fair daughter's self, as I avowed\
At starting, is my object. Nay, we 'll go
Together down, sir. Notice Neptune, though,
55 Taming a sea-horse, thought a rarity,
Which Clause of Innsbruck cast in bronze for me!
304
HENRY DAVID THOREAU

1817-1862
I Am a Parcel of Vain Strivings Tied
I am a parcel of vain strivings tied
By a chance bond together,
Dangling this way and that, their links
Were made so loose and wide,
Methinks,
For milder weather.
A bunch of violets without their roots,
And sorrel intermixed,
Encircled by a wisp of straw
Once coiled about their shoot,
The law
By which I'm fixed
A nosegay which Time clutched from out
Those fair Elysian fields,1
With weeds and broken stems, in haste,
Dothe make the rabble rout
That waste
The day he yields.
And here I bloom for a short hour unseen,
Drinking my juices up,
With no root in the land
To keep my branches green,
But stand
In a bare cup
WALT WHITMAN
1819-1892
From Song of Myself
I celebrate my self, and sing myself,
And what I assume you shall assume,
For every atom belonging to me as good belongs to you.
I loafe and invite my soul,
5 I lean and loafe at my ease observing a spear of summer grass.
My tongue, every atom of my blood, form'd from this soil, this air,
Born here of parents born here from parents the same, and their
Parents the same,
I, now thrity- seven years old in perfect health begin,
Hoping to cease not till death.
[o creeds and schools in abeyance,
Retiring back a while sufficed at what they are, but never forgotten,
I harbor for good or bad, I permit to speak at every hazard,
Nature without check with original energy.
Poetry
305
MATTHEW ARNOLD
1822-1888
Shakespeare
Others a bide our question. Thou art free.
We ask and ask—Thou smilest and art still,
Out – topping knowledge. For the loftiest hill,
Who to the stars uncreowns his majesty,
1088/ MATTHEW ARNOLD
5 Planting his steadfast footsteps in the sea,
Making the heaven of heavens his dwelling- place,
Spares but the cloudy border of his base
To the foiled searching of mortality;
And thou, who didst the stars and sunbeams know,
10 Self – schooled, self- scanned, self- honored, self- secure,
Didst tread on earth unguessed at—better so!
All pains the immortal spirit must endure,
All weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow,
Find their sole speech in that victorious brow.
1849
To Marguerite
Yes! In the sea of life enisled,
With echoing straits between us thrown,
Dowtting the shoreless watery wild.
We mortal millions live alone.
The islands feel the enclasping flow,
And then their endless bounds they know.
But when the moon their hollows lights,
And they are swept by balms of spring,
And in their glens, on starry nights,
The nightingles divinely sing;
And lovely notes, from shore to shore,
Across the sounds and channels pour---
Oh! Then a longing like despair
Is to their farthest caverns sent;
For surely once, they feel, we were
Parts of a single continent!
Now round us spreads the watery plain---
Oh might our marges meet again ! margins
Who ordered, that their longing's fire
Should be, as soon as kindled, cooled?
Who renders vain their severance rulled!
And bade betwixt their shores to be
The unplumbed, salt, estranging sea
EMILY DICKINSON*
1830-1886
39(49)
I never lost as much but twice-
306
And that was in the sod.

Twice have I stood a beggar
Before the door of God!
5Angels- twice descending
Reimbursed my store-
Burglar! Banker-Father!
I am poor once more!
112(67)
Success is counted sweetest
By those who ne'er succeed.
To comprehend a nectar
Requires sorest need.
5 Not one of all the purple Host army
Who took the Flag today
Can tell the definition
So clear of Victory
As he defeated-dying-
10 On whose forbidden ear
The distant strains of triumph
Burst agonized and clear!
1859 1890
124 (216), first version2

Safe in their Alabaster 3 Chambers-
Untouched by morning
And untouched by noon-
Sleep the meek members of the Resurrection-
5 Rafter of stain,
And Roof of stone
Light laughs the breeze
In her Castle abobe them-
Babbles the Bee in a stolid Ear,
10 Pipe the sweet Birds in ignorant cadence-
Ah, What sagacity perished here!
ALGERNONCHARLESSWINBURNE
1837-1909
C h o r u s from Atalanta in Calydon
When the Hounds of Spring Are on Winter's Traces
When the hounds of spring are on Winter's traces,
The mother of months 1 in meadow or plain
Fills the shadows and windy places
With lisp of leaves and ripple of rain;
5 And the brown bright nightingale amorous
Is half assuaged for Itylus,2
For the Thracian ships and the foreign faces,
The tongueless vigil, and all the pain.
Come with bows bent and with emptying of quivers,
Poetry
307
10 Maiden most perfect, lady of light,

With a noise of winds and many rivers,
With a clamor of waters, and with might;
Bind on thy sandals, O thou most fleet,
Over the splendor and speed of thy feet;
15 For the faint east quickens, the wan west shivers,
Round the feet of the day and the feet of the night.
Where shall we find her, how shall we sing to her,
Fold our hands round her knees, and cling?
O that man's heart were as fire and could spring to her,
20 Fire, or the strength of the streams that spring!
For the stars and the winds are unto her
As raiment, as songs of the harp- player;
For the risen srars and the fallen cling to her,
And the southwest wind and the west wind sing.
25 For winter's rains and ruins are over,
And all the season of snows and sins;
The days dividing lover and lover,
The light that loses, the night that wins;
And time remembered is grief forgotten,
30 And frosts are slain and flowers begotten,
And in green undersood and cover
Blossom by blossom the spring begins.
The full streams feed on flower of rushes,
Ripe grasses trammel a traveling foot,
35 The faint fresh flame of the young year flushes
From leaf to flower and flower to fruit;
And fruit and leaf are as gold and fire,
And the oat is heard above the lyre, musical pipe
And the hoofed heel of a satyr 3 crushes
40 The chestnut- husk at the chestnut- root.
And Pan by noon and Bacchus by night, 4
Fleeter of foot than the fleet- foot kid,
Follows with dancing and fills with delight
The Maenad and the Bassaris;
45 And soft as lips that laugh and hide
The laughing leaves of the trees divide,
THOMAS HARDY
The Darkling Thrush
I leant upon a coppice gate7
When Frost was spectre – grey,
And Winter's dregs made desolate
The weakening eye of day.
5 The tangled bine- stems8 scored the sky
Like strings of broken lyres,
And all mankind that haunted nigh
Had sought their household fires.
The land's sharp features seemed to be
308
10 The Century's corpse outleant, 9

His crypt the cloudy canopy,
The wind his death- lament.
The ancient pulse of germ and birth
Was shrunken hard and dry,
15 And every spirit upon earth
Seemed fervourless as I.
At once a voice arose among
The bleak twigs overhead
In a full- hearted evensong
20 Of joy illimited;
An aged thrush, frail, gaunt, and small,
In blast- beruffled plume,
Had chosen thus to fling his soul
Upon the growing gloom,
25 So little cause for carolings
Of such ecstatic sound
Was written on terrestrial things
Afar or nigh around,
That I could think there trembled through
30 His happy good- night air
Some blessed Hope, whereof he knew
And I was unaware.
GERARD MANLEY HOPKINS

1844-1889
God's Grandeur
The world is charged with the grandeur of Gos.
It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;1
It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. 2 Why do men then now not reck his rod?
5 Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
And all is seared with trade; bleared, smeared with toil;
And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.
And for all this, nature is never spent; despite
10 There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs---
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings
A.E HOUSMAN
1859-1936
Loveliest of Trees, the Cherry Now
Loveliest of trees, the cherry now
Is hung with bloom along the bough,
And stands about the woodland ride
Poetry
309
Wearing white for Eastertide.

5 Now, of my threescore years and ten,
Twenty will not come again,
And take from seventy springs a score,
It only leaves me fifty more.
And since to look at things in bloom
10 Fifty springs are little room,
About the woodlandsI will go
To see the cherry hung with snow.
1896
Revelle
Wake : the silver dusk returning
Up the beach of darkness brims,
And the ship of sunrise burning
Strands upon the eastern rims.
5 Wake : the vaulted shadow shatters,
Trampled to the floor it spanned,
And the tent of night in tatters
Straws the sky – pavilioned land. Strews
Up, lad, up, tis late for lying:
10 Hear the drums of morning play;
Hark, the empty highways crying
"Who 'll beyond the hills away?"
Towns and countries woo together,
Forelands beacon, belfries call;
Never lad that trod on leather
Lived to feast his heart with all.
Up, lad; thews that lie and cumber limbs
Sunlit pallets never thrive;
Morns abed and daylight sluymber
Were not meant for man alive.
Clay lies still, but blood's a rover;
Breath's a ware that will not keep.
Up, lad: when the journey's over
There'll be time enough to sleep.
When I Watch the Living Meet

When I watch the living meet,
And the moving pageant file
Warm and breathing through the street
Where I Iodge a little while,
5 If the heats of hate and lust
In the house of flesh are strong,
Let me mine the house of dust
Where my sojourn shall be long.
In the nation that is not
10 Nothing stands that stood before;
310
There revenges are forgot,

And the later hates no more;
Lovers lying two and two
Ask not whom they sleep beside,
15 And the bridegroom all night through
Never turns him to the bride.
WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS*

1865-1939
The Lake Isle of Innisfree2
I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles 3 made:
Nine bean – rows will I have there, a hive for the honey – bee,
And live alone in the bee- loud glade.
5 And II shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all a glimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings. A songbird's
I will arise and go now, for always night and day
10 I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on gthe pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.
1890 1892
When You Are Old4

When you are old and grey and full of sleep,
And nodding by the fire, take down this book,
And slowly read, and dream of the soft look
Your eyes had once, and of their shadows deep;
5 How many loved your moments of glad grace,
And loved your beauty with love false or true,
But one man loved the pilgrim soul in you,
And loved the sorrows of your changing face;
And bending down beside the glowing bars,
10 Murmur, alittle sadly, how Love fled
And paced upon the mountains overhead
And hid his face amid a crowd of strars.
EDWIN ARLINGTON ROBINSON

1869-1935
Richard Cory
When ever Richard Cory went down town,
We people on the pavement looked at him:
He was a gentleman from sole to crown,
Clean favored, and imperially slim,
5 And he was always quietly arrayed,
And he was always quietly arrayed,
Poetry
311
And he was always human when he talked;

But still he fluttered pulses when he said,
"Good- morning," and he glittered when he walked.
And he was rich—yes, richer than a king—
10 And admirably schooled in every grace:
In fine, we thought that he every thing.
To make us wish that we were in his place.
So on we worked, and wited for the light,
And went without the meat, and cursed the bread;
15 And Richard Cory, one calm summer night,
Went home and put a bullet through his head.
Miniver Cheevy
Miniver Cheevy, child of scorn,
Grew lean while he assailed the seasons;
He wept that he was ever born,
And he had reason.
5 Miniver loved the days of old
When swords were bright and steeds were prancing;
The vision of a warrior bold
Would set him dancing.
2 . In classical Greece, laurel was associated with prophecy and poetry; laurel wreath
crowned poets as
Miniver sighed for what was not,
10 And dreamed , and rested from his labors;
He dreamed of Thebes and Camelot,
And Priam's 3 neighbors.
Miniver mourned the ripe renown
That made so many a name so fragrant;
15 He mourned Romance, now on the town,
And Art, a vagrant.
Miniver loved the Medici,4
Albeit he had never seen one;
He would have sinned incessantly
20 Could he have been one.
Miniver cursed the commonplace
And eyed a khaki suit with loathing;
He missed the medieval grace
Of iron clothing.
25 Miniver scorned the gold he sought,
Rut sore annoyed was he without it;
Miniver thought, and thought, and thought,
And thought about it.
Miniver Cheevy, born too late,
30 Scratched his head and kept on thinking;
Miniver coughed, and called it fate,
And kept on drinking.
312
ROBERT FROST
1874-1963
Mending Wall
Some thing there is that doesn't love a wall,
That sends the frozen – ground- swell under it,
And spills the upper boulders in the sun;
And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.
5 The work of hunters is another thing:
I have come after them and made repair
Where they have left not one stone on a stone,
But they would have the rabbit out of hiding,
To please the yelping dogs. The gaps I mean,
10 No one has seen them made or heard them made
But at spring mending- time we find them there.
I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;
And on a day we meet to walk the line
And set the wall bet ween us once again.
15 We keep the wall bet ween us as we go.
To each the boulders that have fallen to each.
And some are loaves and some so nearly balls
We have to use a spell to make them balance:
" Stay where you are until our backs are turned!"
20 We wear our fingers rough with handling them,
Oh, just another kind of outdoor game,
One on a side. It comes to little more:
There where it is we do not need the wall:
He is all pine and I amd apple orchard.
25 My apple trees will never get across
And eat the cones under his pines, I tell him.
He only says, "Good fences make good neighbors."
Spring is the mischief in me, and I wonder
If I could put a notion in his head:
30 "Why do they make good neighbors? Isn't it
Where there are cows? But here there are no cows.
Before I built a wall I'd ask to know
What I was walling in or walling out,
And to whom I was like to give offense.
Something there is that doesn't love a wall,
That wants it down."I could say "Ellves" to him,
But it's not elves exactly, and I'd rather
He said it for himself. I see him there
Bringing a stone grasped firmly by the top
In each hand, like and old- stone savage armed.
He moves in darkness as it seems to me,
Not of woods only and the shade of trees.
He will not go gehind his father's saying,
And he likes having thought of it so well
He says again, " Good fences make good neighbors."
1914
Poetry
313
Home Burial
He saw her from the bottom of the stairs
Before she saw him. She was starting down,
Looking back over her shoulder at some fear.
She took a doubtful step and then undid it
5 To raise herself and look again. He spoke
Advancing toward her. "What is it you see
From up there always--- for I want to know."
She turned and sank upon her skirts at that,
And her face changed from terrified to dull.
10 He said to gain time: " What is it you see,"
Mounting until she cowered under him.
"I will find out now --- you must tell me, dear."
She, in her place, refused him any help
With the least sitiffening of her neck and silence.
15 She let him look, sure that he wouldn't see,
Blind creature; and awhile he didn't see.
But at last he murmured, " Oh," and again, "Oh."
"What is it--- what? " she said.
"Just that I see."
"After Apple- Picking

My long two –pointed ladder's sticking through a tree
Toward heaven still,
And there's a barrel that I didn't fill
Beside it, and there may be two or three
5 Apples I didn't pick upon some bough.
But I am done with apple- picking now.
Essence of winter sleep is on the night,
The scent of apples: I amd drowsing off.
I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight
10 I got from looking through a pane of glass
I skimmed this morning from the drinking trough
And held against the world of hoary grass.
It melted, and I let it fall and break.
But I was well
15 Upon my way to sleep before it fell,
And I could tell
What form my dreaming was about to take.
Magnified apples appear an ddisappear,
Stem end and blossom end.
20 And every fleck of russet showing clear.
My instep arch not only keeps the ache,
It keeps the pressure of a ladder- round.
I feel the ladder sway as the boughs bend.
And I keep hearing from the cellar bin
25 The rumbling sound
Of load on load of apples coming in.
For I have had too much
314
Of apple- picking: I am overtired

Of the great harvest I myself desired.
30 There were ten thousand thousand fruit to touch,
Cherish in hand, lift down, and not let fall.
For all
That struck the earth,
No matter if not bruised or spiked with stubble,
35 Went surely to the cider- apple heap
As of no worth.
One can see what will trouble
This sleep of mine, whatever sleep it is.
Were he not gone,
40 The woodchuck could say whether it's like his
Long sleep, as I describe its coming on,
Or just some human sleep.
1914
Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening
Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.
5 My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Bet ween the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.
He gives his harness bells a shake
10 Top ask if there is some mistake.
The only other sound's the sweep
Of easy wind and downy flake.
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
15 And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
Acquainted with the Night
I have been one acquainted with the night.
I have walked out in rain--- and back in rain.
I have out walked the furthest city light.
I have looked down the saddest city lane.
5I have passed by the watchman on his beat
And dropped my eyes, unwilling to explain.
Ihave stood still and stopped the sound of feet
When far away an interrupted cry
Came over houses from another street,
10 But not to call me back or say good-by;
And further still at an unearthly height,
One luminary clock against the sky
Proclamied the time was neither wrong nor right.
I have been one acquainted with the night.
Poetry
315
WALLACE STEVENS
1879-1955
The Snow Man
One must have a mind of winter
To regard the frost and the boughts
Of the pine-trees crusted with snow;
And have been cold a long time
5 To behold the junipers shagged with ice, shaggy
The spruces rough in the distant glitter
Of the January sun; and not to think
Of any misery in the sound of the wind,
In the sound of a few leaves,
10 Which is the sound of the land
Full of the same wind
That is blowing in the same bare place
For the listener, who listens in the snow,
And, nothing himself, beholds
15 Nothing that is not there and the nothing that is.
The Emperor of Ice-Cream
Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
5 As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month's newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice- cream.
Take from the dresser of deal. Pine or firwood
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once fantail pigeons
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice- cream.
EZRA POUND
1885-1972
Portrait d'une Femme1
Your mind and you are our Sargasso Sea,2
London has swept about you this score years
And bright ships left you this or that in fee:
Ideas, old gossip, oddments of all things,
5 Strange spars of knowledge and dimmed wares of price.
Great minds have sought you—lacking someone else.
You h ave been second always. Tragical?
No You preferred it to the usuall thing:
One dull man, dulling and uxorious,
316
10 One average mind--- with one thought less , each year.

Oh, you are patient, I have seen you sit
Hours, where something might have flwated up.
And now you pay one. Yes , you richly pay.
You are a person of some interest, one comes to you
15 And takes strange gain away:
Trophies fished up; some curious suggestion;
Fact that leads nowhere; and a tale or two,
{Pregnant with mandrakes, 3 or with something else
That might prove useful and yet never proves,
20 That never fits a corner or shows use,
Or finds its hour upon the loom of days:
The tarnished, gaudy, wonderful old work;
Idols and ambergris4 and rare inlays,
These are your riches, your great store; and yet
25 For all this sea- hoard of deciduous things,
Strange woods half sodden, and new brighter stuff:
In the slow float of differing light and deep,
No! there is nothing! In the whole and all,
Nothing that's quite your own
30 Yet this is you.
T.S. ELIOT
1888-1965
The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock
S'io credesse che mia risposta fosse
A persona che mai tornasse al mondo,
Questa fiamma staria senza piu scosse.
Ma perciocche giammai di questo fondo
Non torno vivo alcun, s'I odo il vero,
Senza tema d' infamia ri rispondo.
Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;
Let us go, through certain half- deserted streets,
5 The muttering retreats
Of restless nights in one- night cheap hotels
And sawdust restaurats with oyster- shells:
Streets that follow like a tedious argument
Of insidious intent
10 To lead you to an overwhelming question…
Oh, do not ask, "What is it?"
Let us go and make our visit.
In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
15 The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window- panes,
The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes
Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,
Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,
Poetry
317
Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,
20 Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,
And seeing that it was a soft October night,
Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.
And indeed there will be time 2
For the yellow smole that slides along the steet,
25 Rubbing its back upon the window- panes;
There will be time, there will be time
To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;
There will be time to murder and create,
And time for all the works and days 3 of hands
30 That lift and drop a question on your plate;
Time for you and time for me,
And time yet for a hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions,
Before the taking of a toast and tea.
35 In the room the women come and go
Talking of Michelangelo.
And indeed there will be time
To wonder, "Do I dare?" and, "Do I dare?"
Time to turn back and descend the stair,
40 With a bald spot in the middle of my hair---
[They will say: " How his hair is growing thin!"]
My morning coat, my collar mounting firmly to the chin,
My necktie rich and modest, but asserted by a simple pin---
[They will say: "But how his arms and legs are thin!"]
45 Do I dare
Disturb the universe?
In a minute there is time
For decisions and revisions which a minute will reverse.
For I have known them all already, known them all---
50 Have known the evening, morning, afternoons,
I have measured out my life with coffee spoons;
I know the voices dyhing with a dying fall4
Beneath the music from a farther room.
So how should I presume?
55 And I have known the eyes already, known them all---
The eyes tghat fix you in a formulated phrase,
And when I am formulated, sprawling on apin,
When I am pinned and wriggling on the wall,
Then how should I begin
60 To spit out all the butt – ends of my days and ways?
And how should I presume?
And I have known the arms already, known them all---
Arms that are braceleted and white and bare
[But in the lamplight, downed with light brown hair!]
65 Is it perfume from a dress
That makes me so digress?
Arms that lie along a table, or wrap about a shawl.
318
And should I then presume?

And how should I begin?
70 Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow seets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt0 sleeves, leaning out of windows?...
I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.
75 And the afternoon, the evening, sleeps so peacefully!
Smoothed by long fingers,
Asleep… tired … or it malingers,
Stretched on the floor, here beside you and me.
Should I, after tea and cakes and ices,
So Have the strenghth to force the moment to its crisis?
But though I have wept and fasted, wept and prayed,
Thought I have seen my head [grown slightly bald] brought in upon
Platter,5
Iam no prophet—and here's no great matter;
I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker,
85 And I have seen the eternal Footman hold my coat, and snicker,
And in short, I was afraid.
And would it have been worth it, after all,
After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,
Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,
90 Would it have been worth while,
To have bitten off the matter with a smile
To have squeezed the universe into a ball 6
To roll it toward some overwhelming question,
To say:" I am Laarus, 7 come from the dead,
95 Come back to tell you all, I shall tell you all"---
Of one, settling a pillow by her head,
Should say:" That is not what I meant at all.
That is not it, at all."
And would it have been worth it, after all,
100 Would it have been worth while,
After the sunsets and the dooryards and the sprinkled streets,
After the novels, after the teacups, after the skirts that trail along the floor—
And this, and so much more?---
It is impossible to say just what I mean!
105 But as if a magic lantern threw the nerves in patterns on a screen:
Would it have been worth while
If one, settling a pillow or throwing off a shawl,
And turning toward the window, should say:
"That is not it at all,
No That is not what I meant, at all."
No! I am not Prince Hamlet, nor was meant to be;
Am an attendat lord, one that will do
To swell a progress, 8 start a scene or two,
Advise the prince; no doubt, an easy tool,
Ii5 Deferential, glad to be of use,
Poetry
319
Politic, cautious, and meticulous;

Full of hight sentence, but a bit obtuse; sententiousness
At times, indeed, almost ridiculous---
Almost, at times, the Fool.
120 I grow old… I grow old…
I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolles.
Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?
I shall wear white flannel trousers, and walk upon the beach.
I have heard the mermaid singing, each to each.
125 I do not think that they will sing to me.
I have seen them riding seaward on the waves
Combing the white hair of the waves blown back
When the wind blows the water white and black.
We have lingere in the chambers of the sea
BO By sea- girls wreathed with seaweed red and brown
Till human voices wake us, and we drown
ARCHIBALD M A C L E I SH
1892-1982
Ars Poetica
A poem shoul be palpable and mute
As a globed fruit,
Dumb
As old medallions to the thumb,
5 Silent as the sleeve- worn stone
Of casement ledges where the moss has grown—
A Poem should be wordless
As the flight of birds.
Apoem should be motionless in time
10 As the moon climbs,
Leaving, as the moon releases
Twig by twig the night- entagled trees,
Leaving, as the moon behind the winter leaves,
Memory by memory the mind---
15 A poem should be motionless in time
As the moon climbs.
A poem shouls be equal to:
Mot true.
For all the history of grief
20 An empty doorway and a maple leaf.
For love
The leaning grasses and two lights above the sea---
A Poem should not mean
But be
WILFRED OWEN
1893-1918
Anthem for Doomed Youth
320
What passing – bells for these who die as cattle?1

--Only the monstrous anger of the guns.
Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons. Prayers
5 No mockeries now for them, no prayers nor bells;
Nor any voice of mouning save the chorirs,--
The shrill, demented choirs of wailing shells;
And bugles calling for them from sad shires. Counties
What candles may be held to speed them all?
10 Not in the hands of boys but in their eyes
Shall shine the holy glimmers of good byes.
The pallor of girls brows shall be their pall;
Their flowers the tenderness of patient minds,
And each slow dusk a drawing – down of blinds.
E.E.C U M M I N G S
1894-1962
All in green went my love riding
On a great horse of gold
Into the silver dawn.
Four lean hounds crouched low and smiling
5 the merry deer ran before.
Fleeter be they than dappled dreams
The swift sweet deer
The red rare deer.
Four red roebuck at a white water
10 the cruel bugle sang before.
Horn at hip went my love riding
Riding the echo down
15 the level meadows ran before.
Softer be they than slippered sleep
The lean lithe deer
The fleet flown deer.
Four fleet does at a gold valley
20 the famished arrow sang before.
Bow at belt went my love riding
Riding the mountain down
25 the sheer peaks ran before.
Plaler by they than daunting death
The sleek slim deer
The tall tense deer.
Four tall stags at a green mountain
30 the lucky hunter sang before.
Poetry
321

On a great horse of gold
35 my heart fell dead before.
1923
The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls

The Cambridge ladies who live in furnished souls
Are unbeautiful and have comfortable minds
(also, with the church's protestant blessings
Daughters, unscented shapeless spirited)
They believe in Christ and Longfellow, 1 both dead,
Are invariably interested in so many things---
At the present writing one still finds
Delighted fingers knitting for the is it Poles?
Perhaps. While permanent faces coyly bandy
Scandal of Mrs. N and Professor D
….the Cambridge ladies do not care, above
Cambridge if sometimes in its box of
Sky lavender and cornerless, the
Moon rattles like a fragment of angry candy
W.H. AUDEN
1907-1973
Their Lonely Betters
As I listened from a beach- chair in the shade
To all the noises that my garden made,
It seemed to me only proper that words
Should be withheld from vegetables and birds.
5 A robin with no Christian name ran through
The Robin- Anthem which was all it knew,
And rustling flowers for some third party waited
To say which pairs, if any , should get mated.
Not one of them was capable of lying,
10 There was not one which knew that it was dying
Or could have with a rhythm or a rhyme
Assumed responsibility for time.
Let them leave language to their lonely betters
Who count some days and long for certain letters;
15 We, too, make noises when we laugh or weep:
Words are for those with promises to keep.
1950 1951
The Shield of Achilles

She looked over his shoulder
For vines and olive trees,
Marble well- governed cities
322
And ships upon untamed seas,

But there on the shining metal
His hands had put instead
An artificial wilderness
And a sky like lead.
A plain without a feature, bare and brown,
10 No blade of grass, no sign of neighbourhood,
Nothing to eat and nowhere to sit down,
Yet, congregated on its blankness, stood
An unintelligible multitude,
A million eyes, a million boots in line,
15 Without expression, waiting for a sign.
Out of the air a voice without a face
Proved by statistics that some cause was just
In tones as dry and level as the place:
No one was cheered and nothing was discussed;
20 Column by column in a cloud of dust
They marched away enduring a belief
Whose logic brought them, somewhere else, to grief.
She looked over his shoulder
For ritual pieties,
25 White flower- garlanded heifers,
Libation and sacrifice,1
But there on the shining metal
Where the altar should have been,
She saw by his flickering forge- light
30 Quite another scene.
Barbed wire enclosed an arbitrary spot
Where bored officials lounged (one cracked a joke)
And sentries sweated for the day was hot:
A crowd of ordinary decent folk
35 Watched from without and neither moved nor spoke
As three pale figures were led forth and bound
To three posts driven upright in the ground.
The mass and majesty of this world, all
That carries weight and always weighs the same
40 Lay in the hands of others; they were small
And could not hope for help and no help came:
What their foes liked to do was done, their shame
Was all the worst could wish; they lost their pride
And died as men before their bodies died.
45 She looked over his shoulder
For athletes at their games,
Men and woen in a dance
Moving their sweet limbs
Quick, quick, to music,
50 But there on the shining shield
His hands had set no dancing – floor
But a weed- choked field.
Poetry
323
A ragged urchin, aimless and alone,

Loitered about that vacancy, a bird
55 Flew up to safety from his well- aimed stone:
That girls are raped, that two boys knife a third,
Were axioms to him, who'd never heard
Of any world where promises were kept,
Or one could weep because another wept.
60 The thin- lipped armourer,
Hephaestos hobbled away,
Thetis of the shining breasts
Cries out in dismay
At what the god had wrought
65 To please her son, the strong
Chapter 8
Short Story
Enjoyment and understanding is the result of working on the fiction. It refinds our minds or
quickens our sense of the life.
The truest history is full of falsehoods and romans is full of the truth. The Fiction may be
classified in TWO catagories:
Literature of escape and literature of interpretation. The former has been written purely
for entertainment, but the latter is written for deepen and sharpen our awarness of life. The
first one takes us away from real world, but the second one takes us, through imagination,
deeper in to the real world. The ESCAPE literature has only object of pleasure but
INTERRPRATIVE has as its object pleasure plus understanding. Interpretive may have no
moral at all in any conventional sense. The difference doesnot lie in the absence or presence
of facts.
READERS…….. IMMATURE\ INEXPERIENCED
………. MATURE\EXPERIENCED \DISCROMINATING
READER
PLOT: is sequence fo incidents or events which a story is composed.
CONFLICT; Clsh of actions, ideas, desires or will
, emotional, mental, physical, natural, social, moral.
ANTAGONIST: The negative forces against the main hero of the story, whether persons,
things, conventions of the society,
PROTAGONIST: The centeral charater in the conflicts of the story.
SUSPENSE: The quality in the story that makes reader asks" what's going to happen
next?" in love stories we ask " will the lovers be reunited and how?
MYSTERY: An unusual set of circumstnces for which the reader craves and explanation.
DILEMMA: a position in which the protagonistmust choose two or more courses of action
that all of them are undesirable.
SURPRISE: CLOSELYU CONNECTED WITH THE ELEMENTS OF SUSPENSE in a
short story is the element of surprise. The surprise is proportional to the unexpectedness of
what happens.
UNHAPPY ENDING: First: many situations in a real life have unhappy endings. If
fictions illuminate life it must present defeat as well as the triumph.
A.DIRECT PRESENTATION:
Tells us straight out by exposition or analysis, what character is like, or has someone else in
the story tell us what he is like.
B.INDIRECT PRESENTATION:
Tests
325
The author shows us the characters in action. A story will be successful only when the
characters are dramatized., shows speaking and acting as in a drama.
Characters must be:
(1) Consistent in their actions and
Behaviours.
-(2) Clearly motivated in whatever they do.
(3) Plausible or lifelike.
FLAT: is characterized by one or two traits, he can summed up in one sentence.
A.STOCK: stereotyped figure who has occurred so often in fiction that his\her nature is
immediately known.
B.ROUND: is complex and many sided; he might require an essay for full analysis.
C.STATIC: character is the same sort of person at the end of the story as he\ she was at the
beginning.
D.DEVELOPING or DYNAMIC: undergoes a permanent change in some aspects of his\
her character, personality or outlook. The change may be large or small; it may be for better
or for worse.
THEME:
Of a piecd of fiction is its controlling idea or its centeral insights. It is unifying
generalization about the life stated or implied by the story. To derive the theme of a story
we must ask what its centeral purpose is.
The theme exist only:
1. When an author has seriously attempted to record life accurately or to reveal truth
about it or
2. when he has mechanically introduced some concept or theoryu of life into it, that he
uses as a unifying element and that his\her story is meant to illustrate.
3. Theme exist in all interpretrive fictionbut only in some escape fictions.
CHAPCHER9
Mythology
1. Abdiel In Milton's Paradise Lost, he is the faithful angel

Who opposes Satan
2. Abraham The first patriach and founder of the Hebrew nation
3. Abraham's Bosom Paradise, Symbolically
4. Achelous In Greek mythology, the river- god Achelous, son
Of Oceans and Tethys
5. Achilles Son of Peleus and Thetis
6. Achitophel In Old Testamet, achitophel was one of the prominent
Cousellors of King David
7. Acedalia Venus
8. Arcrisius King of Argons
9.Adam The First Man
10. Aditti Goddess of Idea, infinity
11. Adityas The gods of ineffable light
12. Adrastea The goddess of Fate
13. Aeacus The son of Zeus
14. Aegaeon The moster with 100 arms and 50 heads was the son
Of Uranus (Heaven) and Gaea (earth)
15. Aegis The Shield of Zeus made by Vulcan was called
Aegis.
16. Aeneid Vergil's epic poem
17.Aeolus A god of the winds
18.Aesculpius God of medical arts
19.Aesop Traditionally the famous writer of fables mainly
About animals
20. Agamemnon Son of Atreus hashand of Clytemestra, father of
Orestes, Electra and Iphigenial brother of Menelaus
21.Agathodeaemon The diety of Good fortune
22.Agyiens Apollo
23. Ahab The King of Israel
24. Ajax Greek warrior in Torjan War
25. Alastor Zeus
26. Alcides Herculous
27. Alcinous Grandon of Neptune
28. Alcmena The mother of Herculous
29. Amphiaraus The famous soothsayer
30. Amphion The son of Zeus
Tests
327
31. Amphitrite Agoddess of the sea, daughter of Nereus

32. Anaxarate A noble Lady of Cyprus
33. Andromache The wife of Hector
34.Anthropophagi Cannibals
35. Antigone Daughter of Oedipus and Jocasta
36. Anu The chief god of Babylonians
37. Aphrodite Venus, Goddess of love
38. Artemis Diana, Daughter Zeus, and Leto
39. Athena Minerva, Goddess of Wisdom
40.Atlas One of the race of Titans
41.Attis Afertility god
42. Autolycus Son of Mercury and the grandfather of Ulysses
43. Bacchus Dionysos
44. Beatrice The Beloved of Dante, and symbol of dinine love
45.Beelzebub Lord of Flies
46.Bellona Goddes of War
47. Belus The founder of Babylon
48. Bromius The Noisy God, Dionysus
49. Briareus A giant with fifty heads and one hundred hands
50. Britomartis The daughter of Zeus
51. Cacodaemon The12th House of Heaven
52. Cacus Athree heeded, firebreathing giant
53. Cadmus Founder of the ancient Greek city of Thebes and its
First ruler
54. Calchus The wisest of the Greek seers at the time of the Torjan
War
55. Canaon Of the three sons of Noah
56. Cecrope The first king of Attica, was the founder of Athens
57. Chaos The condition of the world in its original state
58. Charon son of Erebus; ferryman who transported the souls
Of the dead across the River Styx to Hades
59.Chimaera A creature who was lion in her fore- third goat in
Her middle – third, and serpent in her hind third.
60. Clytemnestra Agamemnon's wife
61. Crones son of Uranus and Gaea, Saturn
62. Dionyson Bacchos, son of Zeun, God of vegetation
63. Eos The goddess of dawn, Aurora
64. Eteocles The son of Oedipus and Jocasta
65. Euphrosyne Dauther of Zeus, one of the three Graces epitone
Of joy and beauty
66. Fates Three sisters goddesses who preside over brith, life
And death of men
67. Faunus Gos of nature and fertility, Pan
68. Forbidden Fruit The fruit of the Tree of knowledge of good and evil
69.Caea or Gaia Greek personification of the earth as goddess. Gae is
The mother or source of Uranus.
70. Hebe Daughter of zeus and Hera., goddess of ough;
Cuphearer of the Gods
71.Helen of Troy Daughter of Zeus and Leda
328
72. Helios Sun God

73. Heracles (Hercules) Hercules
74. The Hesperides The Daughters of Evening daughters of night or of
Atlas and Hesperis
75. Horae The Daughters of Zeus and Themis and were the
Goddesses of the nature and seasons.
76. Horus (Hor) God in the form of a falcon, whose eyes were the
Sun and the moon.
77. Hydra A mythical with nine head
78. Hygeia (Hygiea) Goddess of health
79.Iris Rainbow, messenger of gods
80. Lemures The spirit of dead
81.Lenaus Dionysus
82. Letha The River of forgetfulness
83. Lucina The goddess of light
84.Lyceus Apollo
85.Lycius Apollo
86.Magi The three wise men of the East
87.Melpomene Muse of tragedy
88.Medusa One of the three Gorgons, the only one who was moral,
With appearance so terrible that everyone who looked
Upon her was turn to stone.
89. Mobs God of Death, Thanatos
90. Moneta Juno, Protectoress of money
91.Morpheus The god of sleep and dreams
92. Mount of Olives East fo the old city of Jerusalem
93.Musae Goddess of song
94. Muses The nine muses the patron goddesses of man's
Intellectual and creative endeavors
95.Necessitas Anak, goddess of Necessitas
96. Neptune Poseidon, god of the sea
97.Nestor A wise and venerable old man
98.Nike Victory, Statues of goddess, Victory
99. Oceanus God of the great ocean
100. Oedipus Swell – foot. Son of Laius and Jucasta (and her
Husband) and King of Thehes.
101.Ops Goddess of plenty, fertility, was wife of Saturnus
102. Orestes The son of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra and
Brother of Iphigenia and Electra
103.Orion The hunter of Gereek mythology, Artemis
104. Orpheus The master of musician and Lyre players son of
Apollo and Calliope
105. Palici The twin sons of Jupiter
106. Pan Faunus, God of Nature, fertility, wild animals
107. Pandora The first mortal woman
108. Panomphaeus Jupiter, the auther of all signs and omens
109. Parsifal The hero fo Arthurian Legend
110.Pelides Achilles, the son of Peleus
111. Penelope The wife of Odysseus and mother of Telemachus
Tests
329
Who waited for her husband ten years

112. Phlegethon A River in the lower world in whose channel flowed
Flames instead of water
113. Phoebe The first moon goddess
114, Pilate, Pontius The Roman governer in Jerusalem at the time of
Crucification
115.Pomona The goddess of fruit trees and bride of Vertumnus
The god of seasons
116. Priam The King of Troy, husband of Hecuba and father of
Hector, and Paris
117.Proserpina Goddess of the underworld
118.Proteus A lesser sea god, son of Occeanus and Tethys
119. Psyche A mortal girl loved by Eros, god of Love
120. Pygmalion A youthful sculptor who spurned the the love of all
Women, thereby incurring the wrath of Aphrodite. To
Satisfy his own demand for ideal beauty he created a
Perfect woman in marble, naming her Galatea
121. Phygmies A legendary race of dwarts
122. Pyriphlegethon The name of one the rivers in the lower world
123.Pythen The great serpent, born in the mephitic waters left
By the great deluge sent by Zeus
124.Round Table King Arthur and his 150 knights sat around a table,
Supposedly made round by the magician Merlin
125. Salus Goddess of health, prosperity and the public
Welfare, Hygieia
126.Saturnalia The Roman harves festival of celebration, god of
Agriculture
127.Satyrs Lesser gods of the forest with bodies of men, legs
And feet of goat, hair over all their bodies and short
Horns on their heads
128.Scheherazade The narrator of the Arabian Nights tales
129.Selene A moon goddess, daughter of Hyperion she fell in
Love with the beautiful shepherd boy Endymion
130.Seven Last Words The seven Last Words of Jesus upon the cross are
Not single words, but the seven last sentences he
Uttered, compliled from all Gospels
131. Sibyls Prophetesses whose origin was ascribed to the East
132. Silenus Minor Greek gods of forest
133. Sospita The saving goodess, Juno
134. Sphinx Strangler, a monster with the body of a lion, wings
Breasts and face of a woman
135. Stator Jupiter
136.Styx The river which flows around Hades. The deads are
Ferried across the river by the boatman Charon.
Stygian thus denotes darkness and dread.
137.Swan of Avon William Shakespeare
138.Syria Dea Astarte of Aphrodite
139. Tartarus A region of the underworld , where Zeus imprisoned
330
The Titans and sent the worst of the sinner for

punishementr
140. Teiresias Blind phrophet
141. Thalia The muse of comedy
142.Thor Donar, God of Thunder, war
143.Thoth God of wisdom and magic
144. Titans Children of Uranus and Gaea, the Titans, often
Called the Elder Gods were deities of the early Greeks
145.Triton Son of Posedon and Amphitrite, a huge sea god in
The shape of a merman, a fish below the waist and a
Above it
146.Urania Muses, the daughter of zeus by Mnemosyne. The
Ancient bard Linus is said to be her son by Apollo and
Hymenaeus also is said to be her son. Urania was
Regardedas the Muse of Astronomy
147.Uranus Personification of the Heavens
148. Xanthus One of Achilles talking horses
149. Yggdrasil A gigantic ash tree symbolic of the world
150.Zeus The most powerful god of the Greeks, ruler of the
Heavens. Identified with Jupier (Jove)
CHAPCHER 10
TESTS
1. Literature is a form of ............... , illustration& illuminating of human nature":
SJOHNSON.
1) knowledge 2) morality 3) instruction 4) ethic
2. ............... insists upon the novel as art rather than as a slice of life.
1) Eliot 2) Richards 3) James 4) Arnold
3. ............... 's original interests were in aewthetic& psyohology.

1) Eliot 2) Richards 3) James 4) Arnold
4. ............... seeks to prove falseness of the Romantic emphasise on the

"Originality & personality" of the poet.
1) Eliot 2) Freud 3) Richards 4) Jones
5. ............... "writing is a kind of therapy for those with neurotic tendencies!

1) Eliot 2) freud 3) Richards 4) jones
6. ............... declares himself to he "bound by my own definition of criticism: a

disinterested endeavor to learn & propagate the best that is known & thought
in the world.
1) Darwin 2) Arnold 3) Eliot 4) Richards
7. "Poet diffuses a tone & spirit of unity that blends each in to each by that
synthatifc & magical power":
1) Arnold 2) Coleridge 3) Shelley 4) Eliot
8. Er. Johnson says:"Shakespeare seems to write without any ............... purpose"

1) natural 2) emotional 3) ethical 4) psychological
9. Sainte-Beuve advocated a style of ............... .

1) literary identification 2) literary autobiography
3) literary theorty 4) literary biography
10. Freud exclusively concerned with ............... of literature.

1) genre 2) style 3) form 4) content
332
11. ............... 's distinction as a critic lies in resucing English fiction from neglect.
1) Fielding 2) James 3) Arnold 4)Jones
12. ............... :literature moves or attracts us because it deals symbolically with
Patterns of emotional experience.

1) Marx 2) Richards 3) James 4) Freud
13. Taine is father of the ............... of literature, advocating the study of author &
Texts in a qusi- scientific.

1) morality 2) socioloty 3) biology 4) psychology
14. "The poet writes under one restrication only, namely, necessity of giving
immediate pleasure to humen beings possessed of that information which may
be expected him as a Man."
1) Arnold 2) Coleridge 3) Eliot 4) Wordsworth
15. Goethe stands as ............... ' moder of the ideal author.

1) Arnold 2) Eliot 3) James 4) Richards
16. ............... Wants a return to what he saw as the virtues of classical"Greek

Civilisation"; "They regard the whole, we regard the parts":
1) Arnold 2) Eliot 3) James 4) Richards
17. "Organic unity of a poem is not something which can imposed by adherence to
mechanical rules but must derive from the poete imagination".
1) James 2) Arnold 3) Sideny 4) Coleridge
18. Poet is " a man speaking to men" ............... says.

1) Coleridge 2) Shelley 3) Eliot 4) Wordsworth
19. ............... insists on the poem as a self- contained, self- justified, self- defining
organism.
1) Arnold 2) Coleridge 3) Wordsworth 4) Eliot
20. For ............... meter is as a superadded charm to poetry.

1) Arnold 2) Coleridge 3) Wordsworth 4) Eliot
21. Man for classical& Neoclassical writers was ............... & for Romantics
was.............
1) crowd- individual 2) individual-crowed
3) people-society 4) individual- society
22. "Unacknowledged legislators" is from ...............

1) Keats 2) Wordsworth 3) Shelley 4) Eliot
23. Arnold insisted that a great literary work must possess ...............
1) sublimity 2) high morality
Tests
333
3) high serioiusness 4) high philosophy
24. "True wit is Nature to advantage dressed What often was thought, but never so
well expressed" is form,...............
1) Sideny 2) Eliot 3) Pope 4) Dryden
25. Sideny believes that from & content are separated& ............... is superior.
1) form 2) content
26. Nothing can please many & please long,but just representatioin of general
nature ............... Shakespeare is above all writers, at least above all modern
writers, the poet of nature."
1) Wordsworth 2) Dryden 3) Johnson 4) Sideny
27. According to Johnson Shakespear's main aim is ............... than to ...............

1) please- instruct 2) instruct- please
3) convenience-virtue 4) morbid-morality
28. For Dryden in tragedy- comedy, comedy heightens the ............... of tragedy by
...............
1) pain- simplification 2) sympathy- complexision
3) fear- relif 4) pathos- contrast
29. For Sideny ............... is superior to...............

1) knowledge- invention 2) imitation- invention
3) poetry-philosophy 4) history – poetry
30. Pope attacks to Donne & Cowley for their ...............

1) attention to nature 2) disregared of nature
3) lively style 4) flamboyant style
31. ............... were follower of Horace.

1) Romantists 2) Classicists 3) Greek 4) Romans
32. Horace work as a whole is ...............

1) original 2) moral 3) prescriptive 4) descriptive
33. According to Horace, aim of poet is to give ...............

1) profit/delight 2) truth/ reality
3) originality/universality 4) all of them
34. According to Horace poet must born with some ability, but ............... is
dangerous.
1) philosophy 2) poetry 3) originality 4) imitation
35. Central to Horaces instance on art is concept of...............

1) sublimity 2) decorum 3) practicality 4) theory
36. Longinus asserts that ............... is what marks out true greatness.
334
1) decay of eloquence 2) utopia

3) tragedy 4) sublimity
37. Classics were interested in ...............

1) Aristotle 2) Horace 3) Longinus 4) Plato
38. Romantics were interested in ...............

1) Aristotle 2) Horace 3) Longinus 4) Plato
39. England's literary Renaissance found its perfect spokesman in ...............

1) Milton 2) Sideny 3) Dante 4) Gosson
40. According to Pope, "Nature "means:

1) wildness 2) Mysterious 3) moderation 4) originality
41. The "Therory of Multiple Perspective" belongs to.............. His ideal novel
would use the discrimination & selection of art.
1) Eliot 2) Arnold 3) James 4) Empson
42. Freud, Sideny & Arnold interested in ............... of literature.

1) form, content, content 2) content, form, content
3) form, content, form 4) content, content, form
43. ............... Not only the best but the most individual parts of a work may be those
in which the dead poets, his ancesters, assert their immortality most vigorously.
1) James 2) Eliot 3) Empson 4) Arnold
44. If ............... was Guiding spirit the trail- blazwer of the new critical theories
was...............
1) Marx-Freud 2) Eliot-Richards
3) Empson-Jones 4) Freud –Darwin
45. "The rule of the critics is, or should be work as much as possible in termws of
particular analysis, analysis of poems or passages- and to say nothing that
cannot be related immediately to judgements about produciable texts."
1) Leavis 2) Hophkins 3) Brooks 4) Wellek
46. "Tradition ............... involves ............... the historical sense",

1) Richards 2) Freud 3) Jonse 4) Eliot
47. ............... 's most influential contribution to criticism have been attempts to
define the validity of literary value- judgements.
1) Empson 2) Eliot 3) Arnold 4) Richards
48. " The design or intention of the author is neither available not desirable as a
standard for judging the success of a work of literary art" by this Wimsatt
means:
1) Lemon squeezer school 2) Affective fallacy
3) Intentional fallacy 4) Sense of tradition
Tests
335
49. ............... looks for an almost mystical blending of the temporal & timless in the
poet's perception, a sense that past & present confront each other endlessly.
1) Jonse 2) James 3) Empson 4) Eliot
50. "Trying to derive the standard of criticism form psychological effect of the
poem in impressionism & relativism".
1) Correlative objective 2) Intentiional fallacy
3) Dissociation of sensibility 4) Affective fallacy
51. "Art of the poet is thus not one of self- expression but one of self- denial".
1) Marx 2) Richard 3) Empson 4) Eliot
52. "Try to be one of the people on whom nothing is lost."

1) James 2) Jones 3) Richards 4) Eliot
53. Which of the following authors are in Metaphsical school?

1) G.Herbert-J.Donne-King 2) H.King- Marlow-Spenser
3) Donne, King, Marlow, Peele 4) Hooker; Sidney- Spenser, Herbert
54. Many of ............... 's poem are pure epigrams as their great comparison & their
Sharp, hard defilition show.

1) Donne 2) Johnson 3) Bacon 4) Spenser
55. ............... 's Upon Appleton House, can be seen as an enlarged estate epigram
1) Davies 2) Donne 3) Marlow 4) Herrick
56. The culmination of epigram came with ............... (1591-1674) who best
exploited the genre's freedom of subject & power of cumulated effect.
1) Donne 2) Bacon 3) Sideny 4) Herrick
57. What changes and what losts is ............... 's great subject: "Time 's Trans
shifting"
1) Davies 2) Spenser 3) Marlow 4) Herrick
58. The coinage is one of many huniting words in ............... for her was almost the
first poet to make single works.
59. The ............... transformation amounted to a foundemetal change; a revoluation

in literature.
1) concetial 2) elegical 3) Allegorical 4) epigrammatic
60. A large part of medieval rhetoric had been concerned with ...............
composition.
1) elegy 2) epigram 3) sermon 4) conceit
61. ............... 's sermons although sufficiently acute, are less consistently rational.
1) Andrews 2) Browne 3) Bonne 4) Felltham
336
62. Many of ............... 's sermons draw matter form the Psals (Bible)
1) Andrews 2) Browne 3) Bonne 4) Felltham
63. ;............... is a master of the cumulative of urgency.

1) Browne 2) Sideny 3) Nash 4) Donne
64. Who is the writer of Garden of Cyrus & Urn- Burial?

1) Donne 2) Browne 3) Milton 4) Marlow
65. ............... is the earliest master of prose of the exact but unexpected words.
1) Browne 2) Johnson 3) Spenser 4) Bacon
66. ............... is the finest work of T.Browne.

1) Christopher Marlow 2) the Garden of Cyprus
3) Resolves
67. ............... greatly raise the aspiration o the essay, while at the same time
tightening its form.
1) Bacon 2) Donne 3) Herric 4) Johnson
68. Engligh literary criticism in the modern sense could be said to being in
with...............
1) characters 2) Timber
3) Maxim 4) Microcosmpraphy
69. The biographer's own presence is another distinctive feature in ............... 's
work.
1) Herrick 2) Sideny 3) Walton 4) Davies
70. ............... was one of the most difficult achievements of 17th century and called
for prolonged study of classical models.
1) Cicerionian 2) directness 3) unifigurative 4) plain style
71. Most ealier 17 th century ............... writers were vociferiously hostile to

figurative language ands indeed to philogogical study generally.
1) figurative 2) poets 3) scientific 4) prose
72. ............... 's loose Senecan prose in the anatomy of Melancholy shows one of the
pitfalls in the way achieving an expository plain style.
1) M. Capella 2) M.Murry 3) R.Burton 4) W.Ralegh
73. A feature of ............... literature is the quality of informal letters ranging from
innumberable verse epistles of friendship of letter essays to what may be called
natural letters, written without thought of publication.
1) Augustan 2) Restoration 3) Stauart 4) Jacobean
74. ............... took from Cicernian rhetoric whatever was useful to him.
1) Donne 2) T.Browne 3) Fellthem 4) Herrick
Tests
337
75. The tone of ............... 's Resoves is personal that one is surprised when he
recognizes the substance as a traditional commonplace.
1) Felltham 2) Andrewes 3) Howthorden 4) Browne
76. The 17th century was one of ............... 's great period with a larger, more
educated reasership, the appetite for classical & European works.
1) translation 2) prose 3) verse 4) drama
77. Who are the authors of following works?

Gos frey of bulloigne
Ovids Metaorphosis
1) Fairfax- Sidney- Florio 2) Milton- Sidney- Fair fax
3) Sidney – Dryden- Halifax 4) Sylvester- Sidney- Florio
78. For the first time finding ex pression in the vernacular almost as much as in
............... Thus English ............... was from one point of view as side effect of the
1) Latin, prose- Reformation 2) Latin- verse- Renissance
3) English- verse- Restoration 4) English- prose- Augustan
79. ...............'s Achievement may be seen as part of a lage 17th century triumph of
lucid plain style Senecan style with its significant darkness.
1) Flutrach 2) Dryden 3) J.Mabbe 4) King James
80. ............... 's essay is no mere imitation of breeding: he unites grace of manner
with reason and robust morality in a firm, challenging way. He is perhaps the
earliest critic still capable of persuding.
1) J.Donne 2) Dryden 3) Cowely 4) Pope
81. the ............... device was rarely used before Spender & Shakespeare, Milton was
exploring a new world of stylistic possibility.
1) pastoral 2) Georgic 3) objective 4) elegic
82. The profound influence of ............... largely ended on its being he first modern
epic to rival the ancient classics stylistically.
1) Aeneis 2) Paradise Lost 3) All for Love 4) Macflecknoe
83. A truer generalization might describe ............... verse as fascinated with

valuation and revaluation.
1) Reformation 2) Reniassance 3) Restoration 4) Augustan
84. Grace Abounding (1665)............... 's spiritual autobiography is equally single

minded and has more formal originally and economy.
1) Pope 2) Dryden 3) Bunyan 4) Milton
85. Excellent critics valued ............... as the first to venture at length into
descriptive criticism.
1) Pope 2) Shelly 3) Dryden 4) J.Donne
338
86. In the Enlightment ............... 's endlessly bifurcating style is best known & most
often imitated ............... from his Rambler essays.
1) Lock 2) Hume 3) Reynold 4) Johnson
87. Which of the following translators translators is the best translator or verse in
the Restoration?
1) Waller 2) R. Herrick 3) T. Stanely 4) R. Fanshaw
88. The introduction of femal actresses after the ............... and increasing use of
Scenery were new steps of the drama in this perios.
1) Reformation 2) Augustan 3) Reniassance 4) Restoration
89. When critics discuss ............... drama, it is most often the 1670 s fashion for sex
comedies that they are concerned with
1) Refomation 2) Augustan 3) Reniassance 4) Restoration
90. Much ............... criticism tended to be narrower in conception. Often it was

based on the assumption that ancient authors had already scaled the heights.
1) Reformation 2) Renaissance 3) Auguatan 4) Restoration
91. The challenge of ............... in the Auguatan period had become over formidable
for other reasons, such as difficulties in its mythological parts.
1) sonnet 2) epic 3) ballad 4) elegy
92. Which of the following translators is the translator of Anead in Augustan

period?
1) Dryden 2) Johnson 3) Pope 4) R.Blackmore
93. Throughout the age informed by Augustan idea attempts to reach the heights of
............... continued.
1) epic 2) ballad 3) elegy 4) sonnet
94. The strongly prospective character of ............... classicism had more than
aesthetic concerns.
1) Jacobean 2) Elizabethan 3) Augustan 4) Enlightment
95. ............... writers determined to address the generality of men; they were to
first ever to aim at a readership so various.
1) Jacobean 2)Enlightment 3) Augustan 4) Elizabethan
96. In turning to ............... we approach one of our greatest prose stylists and who
had remarkable influence of the other writers.
1) J.Augustan 2) Gibbon 3) S,Johnson 4) Hazlitt
97. In the Enlightment all writers use parallel phrase; but ............... multiplies them
rhetorically.
1) Barkely 2) Lock 3) Hume 4) Johnson
Tests
339
98. Many as ............... satirist were imitation, that is recreation of older, often
classical works.
1) Reformation 2) Augustan 3) Renaissance 4) Restoration
99. The Augustan period opend great critics ............... and it closed with ...............
1) Dryden- Cowly 2) Bosewell- Cowly
3) Dryden- Johnson 4) Johnson- Bosswell
100. The best late classical ............... was content to aim at a lower style height.
1) drama 2) essay 3) prose 4) verse
101. ............... 's English dictionary was the first on a historical plan.
1) Dryden 2) Cowly 3) Johnson 4) Boswell
102. To the ............... age in large measure we owe the enduring heritage of classical
values- because of balance, harmony, clarity, naturalness & beauty of style.
1) Enlightment 2) Jacobean 3) Augustan 4) Elizabethan
103. ............... was the domionent verse genre in the Enlighment period.
1) elegy 2) balad 3) sonnet 4) ode
104. ............... was the dominant verse genre in the later Classicism perios.
1) elegy 2) ballad 3) sonnet 4) ode
105. It was only in the ............... th century that literature made a sustained attempt
to express the individual feelings of those with the leisure to discover
themselves.
1) 18 2) 17 3) 16 4) 15
106. In the later classicism many of the Georgics used ............... This, from its
association with exemplary Milton, came to be an alternative from appropriate
for the experimental subjects and serious themes.
1) blank verse 2) free verse 3) heroic couplet 4) ode
107. The rise of the .............. is often connected with the individualism of emergent
bourgeois class.
1) novel 2) drama 3) essay 4) autobiography
108. In the Enlightment. & ............... 's time, long narrative letters were common, so
that as epistolary Novel could plausibly consist of a series of first person
narrative.
1) Richardson 2) H. James 3) Fielding 4) Austan
109. ............... (1707-54) who brought to novel writing the very difficult and different
experience of a dramatist, journalist and magistrate.
1) Austan 2) James 3) Fielding 4) Richardson
110. Since ............... th century novelistic developments were largely in comic

irection.
340
1) 19 2) 18 3) 17 4) 16
111. The ............... originated both the novel of ideas and the type in which
authorical mediation is noticeably intrusive.
1) Austan 2) Fielding 3) James 4) Stern
112. ............... was also the first novelist to achieve detailed third person narration
inextense.
1) Stern 2) Richardson 3) Fielding 4) James
113. ............... in vented the importance of idea of a narrative that draws attention
to its own fictionality.
1) Stern 2) Richarndson 3) Fielding 4) Austan
114. Which of the following work belong to Milton & Bunyon?

1) Grace abounding- Antony& Clepatra
2) Hudibrae- Paradise Regained
3) Paradise Lost- The Pligrim's Progress
4) Lusiodas – The Scornful Lady
115. Which of the following works belong to Augustan Classicism?

1) Aneid 2) The Plain Dealer
3) Duncid 4) Country Wife
116. Which of the following statements indicates the features of Restoration period?
1)1700-1745, The brillian literature, with famous authours such as Swift, Pope
2) 1798-1832, Between the death of Alexander Pope & publication of Wodsworth
and Coleridge's Lyrical Ballads
3)1660-1700, At the end of Commonwealth, Theaters came back to the stage.
117. " Myth is the fundamental, the dramatic representation of our deepest
instinctual life of a primary awarness of man in the universe, capable of many
configrations, upon which all particular opinions and attitudes depends",
1) Alan W. Watts 2) G. Whelly 3) Mark Schorer 4) Ph, Wheel Wright
118. "Myth is to be define as a complex of stories- some no doubt fact & some
fantacy- which for various reasons, human beings regard as demonastration of
the inner meaning of the universe and human life."
1) Alan W. Watt 2) George Whally 3) Mark Schorer 4) Ph. W.Wright
119. Myths are by the nature ............... & ............... ; they bind tribe or a nation in
that people's common psychological & spiritual activities.
1) science& biology 2) Fundemental- instinctual
3) inner- external 4) collective – communal
120. "Mtyh is the expression of a profound sense of togetherness of feeling and

action & of whole of living.
1) A.W.Watt 2) G. Whally 3) M.Schorer 4) Ph. Wright
Tests
341
121. Myth is a direct metaphysical statement beyond science. It embodies in an

articulated structure of symbol or narrative a version of reality."
1) J.Compell 2) H.Hugh 3) S.Wilbur 4) G.Whally
122. With brilliant audacity ............... identifies Myth with literature, asserting that
myth is "structural organizing principle of literary form"
1) Rand 2) Ph. Wheel Wright 3) J.C.Cirlot 4) N.Frye
123. The rapid advancement of modern ............... since the end of 19th century has
been the most important signle influence of the growth of myth criticism."
1) psychology 2) biography 3) autobiography 4) anthropology
124. ............... mian contribuation was to demonstrate the "essential similarity of

Man chief want every where and at all times."
1) J.G. Frazer 2) T.S.Eliot 3) J.Joyce 4) G.Murcy
125. Jung indicated that archetypes reveals themselves in the dream of individuals
so that we might say that dreams are ............... myths and myths are ...............
dreams.
1) personalized- depersonalized 2) depersonalized – personalized
3) personalized- personalized 4) depersonalized- depersonalized
126. In Young Good Man Brown, his social mask & stan are symbol of ...............
1) persona- shadow 2)_ shadow & anima
3) persona& persona 4) persona & anima
127. Postmodernists went toward a radical restructing of literature. Sometimes they

removes so much as to reach ............... in which functioning of remaining
elements is enhanced by their ironic isolation on a principle of "less mean
more."
1) minimalism 2) animism 3) concision 4) detachment
128. ............... distinguish the genre, stresses plot rather than character of diction
and emphsise the mimetic role of literature.
1) Genere Criticism 2) Aristoteliam Criticism
3) Formalism 4) Phenomelogical approach
129. The ............... is concerned with the addressee, style, arrangement and
argument in a literary work.
1) stylistic 2) Rethorical 3) linguistic 4) structuralist
130. The ............... climax of tragedy is an essential element in the archetypal

patern of sacrifice – atonement- catharsis,
1) revenge 2) kingship 3) bloody 4) self=- destruction
131. Enhancing the motif of the sacrificial scapegoat in Hamlet's long and
difficult............... journey.
132. An archetype is essentially an " element of one's literary experience".

342
1) Rank 2) Wheel wrigh 3) N.Frye 4) G. Whally
133. Hamlet is an ............... night time play dominated by the images of darkness
and blood the hero appropriately wears black the archetypal colour of...............
1) winteral- darkeness 2) summeral- tragedy
3) spring- irony 4) autumnal- meloncoly
134. In the " To his Coy Mistress" ............... governed by the inexorable laws of
nature the laws of the decay, death, & physical extinction.
1) myth 2) space 3) love 4) time
135. ............... are the means by which archetype essentially conscious forms,
because mainifests and articulate to the conscious mind.
1) loves 2) times 3) scapegoat 4) myths
136. One major contribuation in Jung's theory of ............... as related to archetype

designed as the shadow, the persona, and the anima.
1) primordial 2) myth
3) individuation 4) primordial vision
137. The Americal Adam is the center of other corrolarty myth of the American
Dream of ...............
1) heaven 2) Christ 3) success 4) Western Hero
138. Thomas Connally has argued that "Young Good Man Brown" is an attack on
...............
1) Theological 2) virtues 3) Calvininsm 4) Bibliocal echoes
139. A Symbolic view stress "Young Good Man Brown" from a strict adherence to
............... concept fo election and convention in the faith, so that the story
becomes more universally concerned with Young Good Man Brown as...............
brown.
1) Allegorical- faithful 2) Theological- evil
3) calvanistic- Everyman 4) Bibiocal echoes- virtues
140. One of the most encomposing ideas in the "Huckelbery Finn" is that of
...............
1) maturing 2) aristocracy 3) civilization 4) conscience
141. The position developed by Crance is valuable for its emphasise upon...............
heory, historical perspective and scholary discipline.

1) Feminist 2) Neo- Aristotelian
3) History of ideas 4) linguistic
142. ............... approach is criticism of kinds and types.

1) Gener 2) linguistic 3) stylistic 4) Genetics
Tests
343
143. Hirsch insists on the ............... of any given work, shows how the readers
understands of meanings is dependent on the reader's accurate perception of
the ............... that the author intended as he wrote the work.
144. ............... approach, is above all method, a method of changing our relation to
the world for becoming more actually aware of it ...............
1) Historical 2) phenomenological
3) rhetocial 4) genetic
145. ...............as a philosophical discipline has investigated these things and within
its powers has developed, analysed,& described their operation & structures.
1) History of ideas 2) phenomenology
3) Rhetoric 4) genetic
146. W.Iser's "Implied Reader" indicated to ............... approach.

1) History of ideas 2) phenomenology
3) Rhetoric 4) Genetic
147. Miller:"literature is a form of consciusness, and literary criticism is the

analyisis of this form in all its varieties. " This definition indicates to ............... .
1) stylistic 2) linguistic 3) phenomenology 4) genetic
148. .............. criticism is that mode of internal criticism which considers the
interaction between the work, the author and the audience. It is more
interested in a literary work for what it does than for what it is.
1) phenomenological 2) sociological
3) Rhetoric 4) structuralism
149. A ............... approach helps us to stay inside the work, although we may go out
side for terms and strategies.
1) phenomenological 2) Rhetoric
3) Sociological 4) stylistic
150. ............... is a methos of criticism that treat how the work" come into being"
and what influences were at work to give it exactly the qualities that it has.
1) Rhetorical 2) Genetic 3) Generic 4) Stylistic
151. Dorthy B. Selz."............... is a study of laws composion both of nature and

Man's creation."
1) genetic 2) linguistic 3) structuralism 4) stylistic
152. ............... is not the study of the words grammar that an author uses, but the
study of the way the author uses his words and grammer within the sentence.
1) Structuralism 2) Rhetorical 3) Linguistic 4) stylistic
153. In ............... we study the particular choices on anthor makes from "available
material" choices that are largely culture oriented and situation bound.
1) linguistic 2) genetic 3) structuralism 4) stylistic
344
154. Stylistic concerns ............... rather than ............... but the linguistic emphasise on
............... and structuralism regards ...............
1) text- words- grammar – structure 2) words- text- structure- grammar
3) grammar- sentence- text- text 4) text- sentence- words- structure
155. The ...............is less concerned with the question of value than is the critic who
undertakes to combine analysis with evalyuation.
1) structuralism 2) Rhetorician 3) Stylitician 4) genetics
156. Saporta " A view suggests that where as ............... is concerned with the
description of a code,............... is concerned with differences among the message
generated in accordance with the rules of that code."
1) Rhetoric- linguistic 2) linguistic – Rhetoric
3) linguistic- stylistic 4) stylistic- Rhetoric
157. New critics maintain that literature has an/a ............... worth.
1) moral 2) biographical 3) historical 4) exrinsie
158. Traditional approach often led to the study of literature as essentially...............
r ............... rather than as...............

1) history, moral, text 2) history, biography, method
3) biography, art , history 4) history, biography, art
159. Litrature is primarily ............... & it can't exist in a vaccume.

1) ethic 2) science 3) history 4) art
160. "Textual criticism has as it ideal the estabilishment of an authentic text or the
text which author intended".
1) Eliot 2) Pound 3) Corgill 4) Thrope
161. The ordinary history of the transmission of a text, without the intervention of
author or editor , in one of progressive degeneration.
1) Thrope 2) W.Greg 3) A. W.Pollard 4) T.S.Eliot
162. R.D.Altick: "almost every literary work is attended by a host of outside

circumstances which once we expose & explore them, suffuse it with additional
meaning." It indicates to ............... approach.
1) moral 2) historical 3) formalistic 4) psychological
163. ............... refused to rank Chausar among the very great Englsih poets, Because
be lacked high seriousness.
1) T.S.Eliot 2) M.Arnold 3) A.E.Housman 4) J.Thrope
164. The critics who employs ............... approaches insists on the ascertaining &
stating what is taught.
1) historical- biographical 2) moral – philosophical
3) textual 4) formalistic
Tests
345
165. The basic position of such critics such as Johnson, Plato, Horace is that large
function of literature is to teach ............... & to prob ............... issues.
1) scientific-ethical 2) moral- philosophical
3) philosophical- artistic 4) artistic- scientific
166. "Shakespeare's play (Hamlet) is highly autobiographical"

1) Waller 2) Thomas Hobbs 3) A.L.Rowes 4) J.Thrope
167. T.S.Eliot's famous theory of the impersonality of poetry is warning against
he pitfalls of ............... criticism.

1) historical 2) moral 3) textual 4) biographical
168. Analysing of literary terms (themes, allusions, images ............... ) is related to

............... approach.
1) traditional 2) psychological 3) mythological 4) formalistic
169. By the "theory of heresy of paraphrase" Breeks indicates to the ddangerous of

...............
1) internal logic 2) external logic
3) logic of metaphor 4) logical structure.
170. S.T.Coleridge brought to England the Conception of a ............... as the shaping

power & unifier of vision.
1) legitimate poem 2) attue shape
3) dynamic imagination 4) apostasy
171. The theory of "logic of methapher" belongs to ...............

1) Pound 2) Crane 3) Brooks 4) Warren
172. The moral philosophical approach is as old as classical Greek & Roman critics.
Plato emphasized ............... & ............... Horace stressed ............... &
1) 1ience, art, pleasure, moral
2) morlaism, utlitraianism, delight, instruction
3) pleasure, moral instruction, delight
4) utliturianism, pleasure, delight, teaching
173. The process of ............... analsis is complete only when everything in the work
has been accounted for in terms of its overall form.
1) formalistic 2) psychologistic 3) historical 4) moral
174. ............... comprises the particular details& devices of the work.

1) local texture 2) external form
3) internal logic 4) dissociation of sensibility
175. Understanding of interrelationship, structures, patterns, words, allusions all

are indicate to ............... approach.
1) formalistic 2) psychological 3) historical 4) biographical
346
176. ............... refers to the argument at the concept within the work.
1) logical structure 2) logic of metaphor
3) local textual 4) objective correlative
177. ............... approach is analysis the context (for example, the nature, personality
of speaker in a poem).
1) Historical 2) formalistic 3) stylistic 4) philosophical
178. ............... has been the favored genre for formalistic analyses.
1) Novel 2) Lyric 3) Drama 4) Ode
179. "Form in fiction is an embodiment of meaning just as in poety, not merely a

fram work fro context."
1) R.B.Heliman 2) PH.Sterick 3) W.Handy 4). J.Barth
180. When that ............... has been established the reader is very close to identifying
the overall form of the work. Hart Crane says.
1) logic of metaphor 2) logical structure
3) local textual 4) internal logic
181. "Textual criticism is a science of discovering error in text & the art of
removing it".
1) J.Thrope 2) W.Greg 3) Richards 4) Housman
182. T.S.Eliot called ............... an "innovation, a new discovery in English language."

1) A young Good Man Brown 2) Hamlet
3) Huckleberry Finn 4) Cat in the Rain
183. "When all words, hrasaes, metaphors, images are examined in terms of each
other & of the whole, any literary text will display what si called ...............
1) objective correlative 2) local texture
3) logic of metapher 4) explicator
184. ............... criticism shown that to speak of context as such is not to speak of art
at all, but of experience & that it is only when we speak of the achieved context
the form, the work of art as a work of art, that we speak as critics.
1) Histocial 2) Biographical 3) Modern 4) Psychological
185. ............... approach see a literary work chiefly as a reflecting of it author's life &
times or the life & times of the characters in the work.
1) Textual 2) Formalistic 3) Historical 4) Moral
186. The theory of logical structure & local texture is from ...............
1) Whitman 2) Ransom 3) Browing 4) Tiresias
187. "Technique is the only means of discovering, exploring, developing his subject,
of conveying its meaning and finally, of evaluating.
1) Whitman 2) Schorer 3) Ransom 4) Hardy
Tests
347
188. The ............... critic is only moderatelt interested in external forms.

1) historical 2) psychologistic 3) formalistic 4) mtyhologistic
189. E.Hemingway:............... is father of modern American literature.

1) Hawthorn 2) O'Nill 3) Twain 4) e.e. cummings
190. One reason for popularity of Hamlet with Elizabethan audiences was that it
dealt with a theme. That were familiar with & fascinated by it ...............
1) incest 2) melancholy 3) revenge 4) disloyalty
191. "No poet, no artist of any art has his own meaning alone.
1) Housman 2) Thrope 3) Eliot 4) H.James
192. ............... is the theme of "To his Coy Mistress"

1) love 2) love & time 3) carpe diem 4) death
193. According to formalistic approach, the lyric poem generally embrases

a...............
1) Realistic condition 2) larger implication
3) dramatic situation 4) Romantic setting
194. The circular patterns of Hawthorn's story, withdrawal & return provides a
narrative structure with a generally ............... context.
1) realistic 2) romantic 3) melodramatic 4) gothic
195. The short hair in Hemingway's "Cat in the Rain" is symbol of ...............
1) Political disillusionment 2) love
3) hate 4) sexual disillusionment
196. The femal character in Hemingway's story is nameless and it indicats the
............... story.
1) morality 2) juxtaposion 3) universality 4) setting
197. What is the point of view in Huckleberry Finn?

1) Third person 2) First person 3) Omniscient 4) Omnipresent
198. The theme of Hawthorn's "a Young Goodman Brown" is ...............

1) mankind's faith 2) depravity of manking
3) humanity 4) hounesty
199. In 19th century the most common point of view was ...............
1) first person 2) third person 3) omniscient 4) foculizing
200. "Instead of insisting upon literary work's autonomy, we must resume relating
to life & ideas.
1) G.Stein 2) H, Holman 3) Langbaum 4) Bollingen
201. "A YOUNG GOOD MAN BROWN'S"journey is comparable to ...............

1) Rapacceinis' daughter 2) Alice in Wonderland
348
3) Minever Cheevy 4) Mary Jones
202. "The new criticism took us for a time outside the main stream of Criticism but
we should return with tools of explication and analysis.
1) Holman 2) Langbaum 3) Stein 4) Dolliagen
203. The theme of "CAT IN THE RAIN" is ...............

1) money 2) Lack of understaning
3) sexual disillusionment 4) desire
204. Jane Austen & J.F. Cooper have made, ............... technique (point of view) serve
their purpose.
1) Third person 2) omniscient 3) first person 4) omnipresent
205. One of the most basic motifs of "TO HIS COY MISTRESS" is ...............
1) defiance toward mortality 2) sexual pleasure
3) mortality of life 4) human limitation
206. "Poems are little dramas, exhibiting actions in comples."

1) Ransome 2) Marvell 3) Anouilh 4) Heller
207. In Hemingway's "CAT IN THE RAIN", cat is symbole of ...............

1) cravenness 2) sexuality 3) frigility 4) misogyny
208. The point of view in Twain's "TOM SAWYER" is ...............

1) omniscient 2) first person 3) omnipresent 4) focoulized
209. "All men are evil, all engage compulsively in evil, all sanctity is merely
appearance." Is the theme of ...............
1) A Younf Good Man Brwon 2) Cat In The Rain
3) To His Coy Mistress 4) Hamlet
210. In Hemingway's "CAT IN THE RAIN", what is the surrogate of child?

1) cat 2) public garden 3) war monument 4) rain
211. New criticism, " dead – dead of its very success, we are all New critics nowday
whether we like it or not, in that we cannot avoid discerning and appreciating
with in poetry, or reading with close words, images,ironies & so on.
1) Holman 2) Langbaum 3) Stein 4) Bollingen
212. The dark forest has exposed the tragic view of discrepancy between ...............
&............... to the young man in Hawthorn's story.
1) morality and immortality 2) reality and appearance
3) illusion & disillusion 4) religion and blasphemy
213. Hemingway's "CAN IN THE RAIN" is a/an ............... story.

1) autobiographical 2) biographical 3) religious 4) political
214. In a YOUNG GOOD MAN BROWN, forest is symbol of ...............

Tests
349
1) New England 2) satanic setting

3) A Young Good Man Brown 4) Hamlet
215. "............... belief in the goodness of man is gone foreverand with less of that
belief comes virtual alienation form human kind. "this is the motif of...............
1) Cat In The Rain 2) To His Coy Mistress
3) A Young Good Man Brown 4) Hamlet
216. In Twain's "Huckleberry finn" Huck is a/an ............... narrator.

1) subjective 2) limited 3) objective 4) unlimited
217. One of the main motifs of Hemingway's "CAT IN THE RAIN " is ...............
1) lack of desire 2) frigidity
3) social disillusionment 4) martrital isillusiionment
218. The mase of humanity is hopelessly depraved, and the genuinely honest
individual is constantly being victimized, betrayed and threatened. This is the
theme of ...............
1) Hamlet 2) To His Coy Mistress
3) Cat in the Rain 4) Huckleberry Finn
219. One of the limitation of the ............... approach lies in its tendency to overlook
the structural intricacies of the work.
1) formalistic 2) psychological 3) new criticism 4) traditional
220. Foundation of Freud's contribution of modern psychology is his emphasise on

the ............... aspects of the human psyche.
1) conscious 2) preconscious 3) unconscioius 4) latent
221. Freus: " Law of logic- above all, the law of contradiction – do no hold for
processes of the ............... Contradictory impulses exist side by side without
neutralizing each other or drawing a part ............... Naturally the ...............
knowns no values, no good and evil, and no morality."
1) ego-id 2) id- id 3) ego-ego 4) ego- superego
222. In "Huckleberry Finn, "Miss Waston and pap may be said to represent ………
& ……….
1) superego – id 2) superego – superego
3) id – id 4) ego - superego
223. "That all human behavior is motivated by what we would call ……… "Freud
designed the prime psyche force as ……….
1) libido – id 2) id – ego
3) sexuality – libido 4) sexuality - ego
224. Water in any from is generally interpreted by psychoanalsts as a ………

symbol, more specifically as a ……… symbol.
1) femal – social 2) male – misogyny
3) femal – maternal 4) male - social
350
225. Huckleberry Finn is a story of the child ……… embodying the ……… theme
that has become on of the chief motifs in American fiction.
1) tortured – betrayed of purity 2) unhappy – victim
3) victim – betrayed of innocence 4) sacrred – violence of death
226. The crucial limitation of the ……… approach is its aesthetic inadequacy.
1) traditional 2) structural 3) formalistic 4) psychological
227. The complete gentelman of the English Renaissance, Sir Philp Sidney, with his
statement about the moral effects of poetry, was ……… literature.
1) formalizing 2) structuralizing 3) moralizing 4) psychololizing
228. The ……… approach often neglects historical and sociological contexts that
may provided important insights into the meaning of the work.
1) traditional 2) psychological 3) formalistic 4) moralistic
229. The frme work of the plot of ……… is a journey from north to south, and a
journey from relative innocence to horrifying knowledge.
1) Hamlet 2) Huckleberry Finn
3) Tom Sawyer 4) A young Good Man Brown
230. That most of the individual's mental processes are ……… is that Freud major
premise.
1) conscious 2) unconscious 3) preconscious 4) latent
231. From ……… milieu of society Huck & Jim flee to the river, where they find
freedom.
1) egoistis 2) super egoistic 3) repressed 4) misogynistic
232. The tension between land and water may be seen as analogous to that between
the ………& ……… .
1) unoconscious – conscious 2) ege – superego
3) concioius – unconscious 4) superego - ego
233. In Hawthorn's "A Young good Man Brown" village & forest are respectively
symbols of ……… .
1) ego – conscious 2) unconscious – repressed
3) conscious – unconscious 4) unconscious - conscious
234. The whole lurid scene of the forest in Hawthorn's "A Young good Man Brown"
many interpreted as the projection of Brown's formely ……… impulses.
1) conscious 2) repressed 3) preconscious 4) unconscious
235. Like Freud, Hawthorn saw the dangerous of an over active suppression of
……… & the consequent development of a tyrannous ……… .
1) ego – libido 2) libido – superego
3) libido – ego 4) superego - libido
Tests
351
236. Good Man Brown is tragic victim of ……… that has shut its eyes to the
inevitable naturalness of sex.
1) society 2) religious 3) politics 4) mental
237. The ……… grnre around 1598 eas beining to replace the romantic coneoy of
shakespeare's middle period.
1) dramatic 2) allegorical 3) allusive 4) satirical
238. Which of the following works is play within play?

1) Philaster 2) Maid's tragedy 3) Bratholomen Fair 4) faithful
239. Who are the authors of the following works Malcontxnt, Taming of show?
1) Middleton, Marlow 2) Peel, Enjonson
3) chapman, Marston 4) webester, Shakespeare
240. The quotation: All the world is a stage, and all the men & women merely
……… players" is from: ……….
1) Hamlet 2) Kinglear
3) As you like it 4) Antony & Cleopatra
241. Shakespeare's lost play is ……… .?

1) Hamlet 2) Winter's tale
3) Antony & Cleopatra 4) Richard III
242. Who are the authors of the following works? Faithfull Shepherdess, The
changeling, Winter's Tale, Malcontent
1) bakepeare, Chapan, Ben Boson, Kyd
2) Fletcher, iddleton, Shakespeare, Marston
3) Marston, Kyd, Shakespeare, chapman
4) chapman, Shakespeare, Marlow, larstone
243. Every man, the 15th century morality, was translated from ……… .
1) Italian 2) Dutch 3) German 4) French
244. A know ledge of Sixteen century mysticism is necessary for a through

understanding of ……… .
1) Lyrical baalds 2) Found Quarters
3) Contenbery Tales 4) leaves of grass
245. Critics say that epic become unwritable after ……….

1) Marlow 2) chapman 3) Milton 4) Draton
246. Most attempts at long poems were dull failures.

1) eniasance 2) Middle age
3) Restoration 4) Elizabetian
247. Edwards Fair fax's Tasso……… was the greatest verse Translation from a
vernacular original in Elizabethan period.
1) Devines weeks & works 2) Roland
352
3) Hero & Leander 4) Godfery of Bulloinge
248. The great exception among Elizabethan long works is Spenser's ……… epic,
Faerie Queen.
1) Symbolic 2) Alliterative 3) Allusive 4) Allegorical
249. George Peelas ……… is amiably ironic in its exaggeration of the popular
romantic plays favored by the adult companies.
1) Midsummer Night's Dream 2) Alchemist
3) Old wives Tale 4) Pandosto
250. Who are the authors of the following works? David & Bethsabe, Alchemist,
Suppose?
1) Roit, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson 2) Green, Peele, Shakespeare
3) Peele, Benkonson, Gascoigne 4) Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Green
251. To most Elizabethan, classical tragedy meant ……… This kind of tragedy is a
form of ……… drama, such as …, …
1) Webester, closet. The white devil, the Revenger's tragedy
2) Marlow, Five Act, king Lear, Corbuduce
3) Seneca, closet, Gorbuduce, the Spanish Tragedy
252. …'s style is the most elevated, after Shakespeare's, & in some ways the most
consistently elevated of all in Elizabethan Age.
1) Marlow 2) Chappan 3) T. Kyd 4) Webster
253. Who is the author of the Conspiracy & Tragedy?

1) T. Kyd 2) Chapman 3) Seneca 4) Marlow
254. Among the English genres ……… is nearest to tragedy in the classicalness; …
shows many characteristic family resemblance.
1) revenge tragedy, Spanish tragedy
2) revenge tragedy, Hamlet
3) Historical tragedy, Tamburlain
4) tragedy of Blood, white Devil
255. ……… is a regular rvenge of Elizabethan Age.

1) King lear 2) Hamlet 3) Jew of Malte 4) Tamburlain
256. English tragedy was in a more than … sense a tragedy of …. Blood

1) historical 2) depressed 3) verbal 4) conical
257. Who is the author of the Spanish Tragedy & what is his masterpiece?
1) Marlow, Tamburlain 2) Webster, The White Devil
3) Shakespear, Hamlet 4) Thomas Kyde
258. Which are the works of the following authors? Shakespeare, Marlow, ………
Web ester, Marston.
1) King Lear, Tamburlaine, The white Devil, Succes Fou
Tests
353
2) Hamlet, Tyestes, the Revenger's Tragedy, Tamburlain, Malcontent

3) Richard III, Jew of Malta, The White Devil, The Malcontent
4) Macbeth, Titus Andronicus, Suchess of Malfi, Spanish Tragedy
259. A Striking feature of the Conterbury Tales is the ……… diversity of its genres.
1) moral 2) encyclopedic 3) symbolic 4) courtly
260. ………'s greatness at once shows in his historical mastery of common places.
1) Chaucer 2) Bede 3) Gower 4) Marlory
261. ……… was one great formal principle of medieval literature.

1) romance 2) interlace
3) symbolic 4) classic
262. ………'s work is the first great prose style in English Litrature.
1) Dante 2) Maory 3) Alcyon 4) coyx
263. Generally the Romances reflected ……… & were ……… in orientation.
1) court values, Nomadic 2) court values, French
3) Arthurian cucle, French 4) Aurthurian cycle, Anglo – Saxon
264. ……… ands are characteristic of romances of Middle Aged.

1) rhythmic 2) loose 3) stressed 4) unstressed
265. Several 14th century ……… revived the alliterative tradition of angio – Saxso
1) lyrics 2) paratactic 3) romance 4) narrative prose
266. The romance have often been spoken of as ……….

1) unrealistic 2) realistic 3) wishless 4) moralistic
267. The court poetry, so called ……… revival was highly traditional & belongs to
Middle Ages.
1) alliterative 2) morally 3) Christstian 4) Half line
268. The kinds of writing in Middle Ages naturally reflects literature's

………character.
1) Shivalric 2) oral 3) loose 4) rugged
269. The favourite genre of Middle Ages was ……….

1) moral 2) philosophical 3) debet 4) biographical
270. Most of the Canterbury Tales is not in native alliterative verse but in smooth
……….
1) couplet 2) heroic from
3) secular from 4) metre
271. Chaucer's favourit metre was ……….

1) fabliau 2) hexameter 3) heroic couplet 4) pentameter
354
272. Chaucer's finest romance is ……… a working of Boccaccio's II Filostrato.

1) Miller 2) Reeves's Tale
3) Knight's Tale 4) Trouilus & Crisegde
273. The allegorical interpretation often related a text to the Christian scheme of
salvation by a system of forould Senses:
1) Moral, literal, mysterical, religious
2) anachronival, allegorical, religious, satirical
3) literal, allegorical, tropological, anagogical
4) gothic, tropological, religious, mysterical
274. The great allegorical achievent of English Middle Ages was ………'s.
1) Chaucer 2) Spenser 3) Langland 4) T. Usk
275. ………'s the line of intense writers – among them Spenser, Black, & Beckett
who seem to penetrate to the very bedeock of experisnce.
1) Flower 2) T. Usk 3) Chaucer 4) Langland
276. In the 15th century the proportion of ……… detail in descrition increased not
just in low – comicwritings but in relings but in religious prose.
1) emotional 2) stylistic 3) physical 4) spiritual
277. A/An ……… was meant to verbalize grif in a way that not only analysed but
alleviated.
1) motivated 2) compliant 3) anagogical 4) tropological
278. ………'s Brillent sequence Astrophil & Stella set a new standard of
achievement and fully naturalized the genre.
1) Shakespeare 2) Wayatt 3) Sideny 4) Hooker
279. The Elizathan & Jacobean cultivated a contrary taste tor pure ……….
1) epigram 2) lute song 3) lyric 4) sonnet
280. ……… Who was more outstanding as a poet than a musician wrote against
automatic rhyme in his Art of English Poesie.
1) Daniel 2) T. Campion 3) j. Dowland 4) S. Daniel
281. ……… composed in quantitative metre a classicizing system where by syllable

length and accentual strees generally comcide.
1) Spense 2) T. Campion 3) Dowland 4) S. Daniel
282. ……… as an epigrammer sonneteer, could himself in another mood be lyrical.

1) Dryton 2) Spenser 3) Dowland 4) Wyatt
283. In "Epithalamion", ……… celebrates his own wedding day.

1) Spenser 2) Shakespeare 3) Sideny 4) Hooker
284. ………'s original departure was to mix opposite modes deliberately, especially
in Shepheards Calender (1579).
Tests
355
1) Compian 2) Spender 3) Douglas 4) Marlow
285. ……… was one of the first of a line of poets, in Elizabethan Age, who attempted
to overgo painting.
1) Pope 2) Crashow 3) Marlow 4) Milton
286. The poet who introduced the Elizabethan Age proper was ……….
1) Shakespeare 2) Spenser 3) Surry 4) Sir Walter
287. John Lydgate's best work is ……… which is in the form of narrative poem.
1) complaint 2) Troy Book 3) siego of Thebes 4) Dead
288. In all of his works Henryson depends on ………'s work for the antecedents of
his story, for his characters' rememmberrd post, and indeed largely for the
characters' remembered past, and indeed largely for the characterization itself.
1) Langland 2) Chaucer 3) Lydgate 4) Hoccleve
289. The 15th century literariness could also take the shape of various rhetorical
refinments. One was ………, or the heightening of diction with gorgeous
Latinism, often polysyllabic.
1) tragedy 2) erratic 3) auteation 4) recrudescene
290. The finest lyric poet of the century is ………'s.

1) Henryson 2) Gower 3) Orlean 4) dbaucer
291. For, so far as ……… is concerned, edieval Ages are one of the most productive
and accompolished periods we know of.
1) ode 2) romance 3) lyric 4) epic
292. With Douglas ……… (1513) we move to a new cultural place and to a startling
original work, in it he ivented verse translation.
1) Aureation 2) House of Fame 3) Enead 4) Nature
293. ……… is quite as good in parts of the erotic allegory the Castle of love and in
fairy romance Huon of Brdeux.
1) Douglas 2) Wyth 3) Henryson 4) Berner
294. ………'s vis palise of Honour (1501) remains for the most part as an epitome of
traditional dream vision.
1) Henryson 2) More 3) Wytt 4) G. Douglas
295. In Elizabethan version mannerist rhetoric had a surface that depended on

……… rather than ……….
1) ode – lyrics 2) tropes – schemes
3) lyrics – odes 4) scheme – tropes
296. Except for Malory ……… is the English prose writer to achieves the authentio
simplicity of medieval romance.
1) Douglas 2) Wytt 3) Marlony 4) Henryson
356
297. Medieval ……… embodies a great varity of kinds, many of them religious, like
the complaints of Christ.
1) ode 2) lyric 3) sermon 4) hymn
298. Art is an itself and it need not be didactic and propagandist. This movement is
called.
1) decadence 2) aestheticism 3) symbolic 4) active
299. ……… defined as the error of evaluating a poem by its effects on the reader.
1) affective fallacy 2) objective correlative
3) doctrine of sensibility 4) masque
300. A original pattern from which copies are made, therefore a prototype is ……….
1) myth 2) archaism 3) history 4) archetype
301. The Rape of the Lock is an example of ……….

1) epic 2) burlesque 3) mock epic 4) bank verse
302. Any phrase, metaphore or any idea used so often and has lost its original
inventiveness or appeal is called ……….
1) cliché 2) chronicle 3) stereotype 4) revival
303. ……… attacks the disorders of society by making ridiculous the violators of its
standards of morals or manners.
1) romantic comedy 2) comedy of manners
3) farce 4) satiric comedy
304. An extended comparison between dissimilar objects associared in particular

with metaphysical poetry is ……… .
1) conceit 2) comic relief 3) commonwealth 4) parody
305. ……… is the branch of study concerning with defining, classifying and
evaluating works of literature.
1) criticism 2) convention 3) denotation 4) connotation
306. ……… is that one imaginary speaker addressing an imaginary audience in a

poem he is not the poet.
1) dramatic monologue 2) drama
3) voice 4) tone
307. ……… is like lifting jeg when a man is jumping.

1) empathy 2) pathos 3) dream vision 4) doggerel
308. ……… is the liberation of mankind from his self – caused state of minority and
the achievement of maturity.
1) caroline 2) enlightenment 3) jacobian 4) reniassance
309. ……… was a formal and elaborate prose style which had a great vogue in the
1580's.
Tests
357
1) euphony 2) euphuism 3) cacophony 4) assonance
310. ……… dislocated the time sequence used masked characters and distorted
stage set and special effects in lightning and sound.
1) realists 2) naturalists 3) romantics 4) expressionists
311. ……… is a key element introduced by Coleridge.

1) fabliau 2) assimilation 3) fiction 4) fancy
312. ……… is lines of iambic pentameter which rhyme in pairs: aa, bb, and so on
introduced by Chaucer.
1) ferr verse 2) heroic couplet 3) blank verse 4) heroic drama
313. hyperbole is ……… .

1) exaggeration for effect 2) represented as sth less
3) imagery 4) a theory of poetry
314. intention fallacy is ……….

1) evaluating a work by reference to the decision of the authors
2) intention of an author that is err
3) a form of imitation
4) an 18th century rhetorical device
315. ……… is a difference between what is asserted and what is actually the case.
1) imitation 2) satire 3) irony 4) epithet
316. ……… is an example of literature of absurd.

1) To the lighthouse 2) waiting for godot
3) Romeo and Juliet 4) My lust Duchess
317. "unrest" is an example of ……….

1) iambic 2) anapestic 3) trochaic 4) dactylic
318. "Welcome" is ……….

1) iambic 2) anapestic 3) trochaic 4) spondaic
319. ……… is a traditional story connected with the religion of a people usually
attempting to account for sth in nature.
1) archytype 2) allegory 3) myth 4) allusion
320. ……… is an example of a bildungsroman.

1) Clarrisa 2) A Portrait of the Artists as a Youngman
3) A Tale of Two Cities 4) Jude the Obscure
321. ……… denotes the I or an alter ego who speakes in a poem or novel or other
form of literature.
1) tone 2) persona 3) monologue 4) dialogue
322. ……… is a play on words identical in sound or similar in sound.

358
1) assonance 2) pun 3) consonance 4) prose
323. ……… is coming of Charles II to the English Throne in 1660 at the end of the
commonwealth.
1) Elizabethan Age 2) Restoration 3) Humanism 4) Jacobian Age
324. ……… rhyme is rhyme of one syllable like boat / coat.

1) masculine 2) femine 3) triple 4) eye
325. Soliloquy is ……….

1) calling forth emotions 2) act of talking to oneself
3) grammatical relation 4) liberty poets assumed to themselves
326. ……… is anything which signifies sth else e. g. an idea.

1) symbol 2) irony 3) style 4) poetic justice
327. The hero in tragedy is ……….

1) worse than we are 2) like us
3) the best of all 4) better than we are
REFRENCE
1. Abrams, M. H. A Glossary of Literary Terms, Rinehart London, 1971.
2. Alinodn, T. M. C English Renaissance Tragedy MacMillan Press, London, 1988.
3. Barasch, F. K. The Romantic Poets, Monarch Press, New York, 1966.
4. Beyad, Maryan Testing Literature. Fatemi Publishing Co. Tehran, 1998.
5. Bressler, Ch, E. Literary Criticism. New Jersey, 1994.
6. Brustein, R. Theater of Revolt: An Approach to the Modern Drama. Boston Little,
Browon, 1962.
7. Carter. R. Language Discourse and Literature: An Introductory Reader in Discourse
stylistics, Allen and Unwin, London 1987.
8. Carter, R. Language and Literature: An Introductory Reader in stylistics, Allen and
Unwin, London, 1982.
9. Cudden, J. A. A Dictionary of Loterary Terms, Penguin, London 1979.
10. Davie, D. Thomas Hardy and British Poetry Routledge, London 1973.
11. Easterling, P. E. Greek Tragedy, Cambridge Press, Cambridge, 1997.
12. Easthope, Antony, contemporary Poetry MeeT Modern Theory. Harvester
Wheotsheaf Hertfordshire, 1991.
13. Gardener, Helen. The Art of T. S. Eliot, Clesset Press: 1968.
14. Guerin, W. L. A Handbook of Critical Approaches to Literature, Harper and Row
Publishers, New York 1990.
15. Haghighi, Manoochehr, Literary Schools Avaye Noor Publication Co. Tehran
1993.
16. Hall, Vernon, A Short History of Literary Criticism. The Merlin Press, London,
1963.
17. Hynes, S. Thomas Hardy, Oxford Press, Oxford 1984.
18. Lawrence, Karen.thGuide to English Literature Vo. I and II Mc Graw Hill. 1985.
19. McCall, John, 18 Century Restoration Plays, Monarch Press, New York, 1980.
20. McFarlane, James. Ibsen. Cambridge Press, Cambridge 1998.
21. Magill, Frank, Masterplost Salem Press New Jersey, 1976.
22. Ousby, Iran, Guide to Literature in English, Cambridge Press, Cambridge, 1993.
23. Pishkar, Kian, A Reader's Guide to English Literature, Sib – E – Sorkh, Tehran
2000.
24. Pishkar, Kian, love and Death in Shakespeare's Major Works, Tehran, 1997.
25. Pishkar, Kian, Guide to Practical English literary Analysis, Jieropt, 2007.
26. Pishkar, Kian, The Preparation Course for M. A. (E. L. L.) Entrance Examiation,
Rahnama Tehran,
27. Ratner, L. Guide to Literature in English Literature, MacGrwa Hill, 1985.
28. Rogers, Pat, A Dictionary of Modern Critical Terms Routelge, New York, 1987.
29. Rogers, Pat The Oxford IIIustrated History of English Literature, Oxford Press.
30. Stape, J. H. Joseph Conrad, Cambridge Press, Cambridge, 2000.
31. G. Verdonk; Peter, Twentieth – Century Poetry from Text to Context, Routlege,
London 1993.
32. Van Peer, The Taming of the Text: Exploration to Language :Literature and
Culture, Routledge London, 1988.
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Basic summary of English and American literature

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‫اﻧﺘﺸﺎرات ﺳﯿﺐ ﺳﺮخ ‪1. Lion King‬‬

Absurd, Literature (Theatre)

Major Work and Writers:

Major Works and Writers

Varieties of High Burlesque:

1. J. Philips The Splendid Shilling (1705) → Paradise Lost

2. H. Fielding Joseph Andrews (1742) → Pamela (1740)

Varieties of Low Burlesque:

Chivalric Romance (Medival Romance) th

4. O. Wild The Importance of Being Earnest

Connotation and Denotation

Distance and Involvement

Empathy and Sympathy

Euphony and Cacophony

Cacophony or dissonance, language which seem harsh, rough and unmusical.

Fancy and Imagination

Creat Chain of Being

Elizabethen and metaphysical poees liked to pun.

Writer Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main

Writer Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Nationality Main works

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer /Work Writer Date Style – Genere Nationality Main works

Writer Writer Date Style – Nationality Main works

Writer Writer Date Style – Nationality Main works

Writer Writer Date Style – Nationality Main works

Writer Writer Date Style – Nationality Main works

Individualism. Belief in the importance and autonomy of individual human beings a

Middle Age (1485)

established in the previous century, continued to be performed widely. G. Chaucer's

Major Writers and works of Middle Age

1. Beowulf : The greatest Germanic epic

Author: G. Chaucer (1340-1400) (He is the father of English poetry)

5. The Pardoner's tale (Sermon, Exemplum)

Renaissance (1500-1660) Elizabethan (1558-1603)

Italian Epics of Ariosto and Tasso

Sir Thomas Wyatt, The Elder (1503-1542)

Sir Philip Sidney (1554-1586)

Sideny's Main Works

Edmund Spenser (1552-1599)

Spenser's Main Works

Christopher Marlow (1564-1593)

Marlow's Main Works

William Shakesoeare (1564-1616)

Shakespeare's Main works:

Sir Thumas More (1478-1535)