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A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 48

Short notes on History of English Literature

1.      The style of the Sidney’s pastoral romance, Arcadia is highly “conceited”, full of elaborate analogies balanced parenthetical asides and pathetic fallacies.
2.      Jonson’s comedies are not merely farcical, it is written with a purpose.
3.      Sidney’s pastoral romance Arcadia was famous in its day.
4.      The mariner found in Utopia a far different world from European corruption, crime, waste and war.
5.      Man and Superman is a magnificent philosophical play by Bernard Shaw, described as “A comedy and a philosophy”. 
6.      The description reveals that Shaw has blended in it amusements with seriousness. This is his usual practice to present serious ideas through entertainments.
7.      Shaw’s work, Man and Superman (1905), transformed the Don Juan legend into a play, and play-within-a-play. 
8.     Man and Superman is subtitled “A Comedy and a Philosophy,” and it reverses the standard notion of Don Juan, the seducer of women.
9.      One of the best, the ballad account of the Battle of Brunanburh in 937, was translated by the British poet Alfred, Lord Tennyson into modern verse. 
10.  It is the most controversial novel of our times. If it has a slight similarity with Tristan Sandy, the difference is obvious. 
11.  Joyce took up an almost impossible task of, “giving a shape and significance to the immense panorama of futility and anarchy which is contemporary history”.
12.  Joyce planned Ulysses carefully with parallels in Homer’s Odyssey. 
13.  Pride and Prejudice first entitled ‘First Impression.”
14.  Michael Ondaatje’s The English Patient is modeled in the light of recent diaspora theory, in particular the seminal work of Avtar Brah and Paul Gilroy.
15.  It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife…first line of Pride and Prejudice.
 
16.  Anglo-Saxon Chronicle, common designation of several texts in Old English that record the history of England from the beginning of the Christian era to the middle of the 12th century. 
17.  King Alfred may have ordered the collation of the earlier records and begun the systematic registration of events that characterizes later sections of the Chronicle, especially those dealing with his own reign and with the two and a half centuries that followed it. 
18.  Piers Plowman by Langland is an impressive Middle English alliterative poem and consists of three successive visions. 
19.  Marlowe ranks amongst the greatest. It is not merely that historically he is the head and fount of the whole movement, that he changed blank verse, which had been a lumbering instrument before him, into something rich and ringing and rapid and made it the vehicle for the greatest English poetry after him.
 
20.  In1524, Wyatt was engaged by Henry VIII to fulfill various offices at home and abroad. Wyatt was in and out of jail—and the king's favor—in 1536, either for consorting with Anne Boleyn or for quarreling with the duke of Suffolk, and in 1541, on charges of treason. 
21.  Wyatt, and his contemporary Henry Howard, earl of Surrey, are credited with introducing the sonnet into English poetry; he translated ten of Petrarch's sonnets, composed original sonnets, and worked in other poetic forms, such as the lyric, song, and rondeau. 
22.  Raja Rao’s novel Kanthapura (1938) and the anti-colonial films of Gillo Pontecorvo in the 60s, to illustrate how they are influenced by the ideas of Gandhi and Fanon respectively.
23.  Wyatt's meter was often irregular, a feature that his critics found crude, but 20th-century critics laud Wyatt's rhythms for their vigor and expressiveness.
24.  The Anglo-Saxon Chronicle is the first important proses work in English literature. Although it contains chiefly unadorned annals, it has some vivid descriptive passages and notable poems.
25.  The story of Ulysses begins in the early morning of June 16th , 1904, when Bloom gets up and ends in the early hours of the day. 
26.  Pride and Prejudice, by far the most popular of all Jane Austen’s novels.The novel was first entitled ‘First Impression.”

Ardhendu De

Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert
2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature

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