AD's English Literature

History of English Literature: A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers :  Epic and Mock Epic       Epic: The epic poetry is a long narrated poem recounting heroic action usually of one principal hero.  Among the early epics 'The Mahabharata' and ‘The Ramayana’ in India and Homer’s, a Greek epic poet  , ‘The Iliad’ and ‘The Odyssey’ in ancient Greek are the only well known classical epic.  The epic has certain characteristic. It begins with ‘The Proposition’ i.e. the statement of the themes and the ‘Invocation’ or ‘Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ which is an imitation of Homer’s Iliad and Milton’s ‘Paradises Lost’ which follows Virgil’s Aeneid, both begin with a clearly define, propulsive and invocation.  In the epic contains a no  of thrilling episodes and digressive such as the mustering of troops battles, duels wanderings, ordeals and the like. The incredible advent so, narrated excite, wonder and admiration. Read More about A to ...

A Critique of Arthur Benson's  “The Art of the Essayist” Arthur Benson explains the design and characteristics of an essay, the fundamental of which according to him, is the personal and subjective nature of the Essay . ‘an Essay is a thing which someone does himself’ ( “The Art of the Essayist”) - this implies that an essay is a piece which has been the recording  of the entire personal ideas and emotions of the written which he has experienced as a reaction to certain sensation. Moreover, doing himself also explains the nature of the essay. An essay is something spontaneous reaction. The recording of such a reaction forms the subject matter of an essay. If something is done by the way of professional work or in a mechanical uninspired manner then that cannot be of the nature of an essay. In fact, Arthur Benson's "The Art of the Essayist" which is a critical essay that explores the qualities that make for a successful essayist, discusses the importance of a p...

 History of English Literature : A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers  Mystery, Morality and Miracle Plays After the Normal Conquest (1066) in England the liturgical plays reappeared in developed from and were known as Mysteries and Miracles, ‘The Mystery Plays’, were performed by guilds, who called their crafts, ‘Plasterers’.   Miracle, Mystery, and Morality Plays , generic terms given to the English dramas of medieval times (from the 5th century to about the 15th century). These plays developed from the liturgy of the Roman Catholic church after 1210 when a papal edict forbade members of the clergy from appearing on a stage in public.These plays had considerable influence on the work of the great English dramatists of the 1500s and 1600s.   When the simple scenes from the Bible that had become part of the liturgy could no longer be performed by the priests early in the 13th century, the miracle plays came into existence. These plays had as subject mat...

 History of English Literature : A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers Influences of Modern  Inventions on Literature. Consequences brought about the First World War. Impact of Psychology on  Modern  Literature. Reasons for the Dominance of the Novel. Rebirth of the Drama in the Twentieth Century.  Modern inventions and discoveries by universities, government agencies, private industries, or privately endowed foundations have changed the lifestyle of the modern men.  Particularly, Methods in industry and agriculture, methods in business and finance have been revolutionized, and all these innovations and modifications have their influence on the physical environment in which the modern author moves and has his being.  More directly, the modern press, made possible through improvements in machine production, the rapid collection of news, and the speedy distribution of newspapers and magazines has shown its power i...

"A man's ethical behavior should be based effectually on sympathy, education, and social ties and needs; no religious basis is necessary. Man would indeed be in a poor way if he had to be restrained by fear of punishment and hope of reward after death." - Albert Einstein  (1879 - 1955) Any level of discourse to a moral Essay on humanism must represent the truth of the human condition. There is hardly any doubt that humanists’ social and political thought must gone through the crosscurrents of major European intellectual thought, especially socialism, religiosity and humanism. Here we will try to peep through their intelligentsia. Humanism broadly defined as an attitude that emphasizes the dignity and worth of the individual was, in fact, the ‘Renaissance’ of classical literature and thought . The word “Humanism” is here used in a very wide sense, and this gives rise to considerable difficulty in drawing the line of exclusion. As a literary and cultural movement t...

 History of English Literature: A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers:  Up to Pope   Queen Elizabeth : Queen Elizabeth died in 1603, thirteen years before Shakespeare, twenty-three years before Bacon.   Elizabethan : The term Elizabethan is applied not only to those who wrote while the Queen was on the throne but to Jacobean writers as well; that is, to writers of the reign of James I. The literature of the two reigns are thus grouped together because they have many characteristics in common.    Elizabethan Renaissance: It is intellectual awakening which came first to Italy upon the rediscovery of Greek and Latin literature, followed by discoveries in the realm of science which swept away many of the crude ideas which had prevailed during the Middle Ages, and a vast widening of the world through the voyages of Columbus and the later explorers.  

History of English Literature : A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers : Metaphysical Poetry                                The metaphysical school of poetry is the kind of poetry written by a group of poets under the leadership of John Donne in 17 th century. Other poets of the group are George Herbert, Richard Cashew, Henry Vaughan and Endrew Marvell.  It was Dr. Johnson who named Donne and his followers Metaphysical Poet’s. The name is now applied to those poets who employed a similar poetic manner and imagery, both in secular poetry and in religious poetry .   In a number of other lyrical and narrative works Sidney and Spenser displayed the ornate, somewhat florid, highly figured style characteristic of a great deal of Elizabethan poetic expression; but two other poetic tendencies becam...

 History of English Literature A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers  Jeremy Collier’s A Short View of the Immorality and Profaneness of the English Stage attacked   William Congreve. In fact,   the work of Congreve and his colleagues was attacked by the clergyman Jeremy Collier as licentious. Congreve replied him with Amendments of Mr. Collier's False and Imperfect Citations (1698 ) .   John Ruskin’s Sesame and Lilies influenced Mahatma Gandhi. Graham Greene’s novels are marked by Catholicism . This English novelist was concerned with spiritual struggle in a deteriorating world. His writings are seriously concerned with the moral, social, and religious problems of the time. Greene himself had been converted to Roman Catholicism in 1926. One important feature of Jane Austen’s style is humour and pathos .

Simply , Robert Lynd  (1879 - 1949), the Irish essayist and journalist, became interested in Epictetus in his essay On Not Being a Philosopher . He wanted to read his works. He wonders if in the words of Epictetus, was the book of wisdom that he had been looking for at intervals ever sine he was at school. He never lost his early faith that wisdom could be found somewhere in a book. He desired wisdom. He wanted to get it at the cost of a few shilling. So he read the books of Emerson and Marcus Aurelius . He thought to become wise by reading. But when he finished reading, he was the same man that he had been before.Still he never lost faith in books. Lynd read Epictetus. He agreed with nearly everything he said. He found close resemblance between the opinions. Epictetus held the same opinions. He felt death, pain and poverty as real evils except when he was in arm-chair reading a book by a philosopher. Even in the small things of life he failed to comfort himsel...

" Shaw's judgements are often scatterbrained, but at least he has brains to scatter." -                    Max Beerbohm   Pre-eminently a first-rate dramatist whose work had a major influence on British drama , Shaw is a philosopher par excellence, with a definite philosophy of life. As a philosopher he is the chief exponent of the philosophic doctrine known as Creative Evolution. The earliest statement of his philosophic doctrine appears in his Man and Superman as the doctrine of Life Force. This doctrine runs through most of his later plays and takes final shape as the doctrine of Creative Evolution in his Back to Methuselah published in 1921.  George Bernard Shaw A. C. Ward has traced the growth and development of Shaw’s philosophic doctrine in the following wards: “This play was Bernard Shaw’s earliest full statement of his conception of the way of Salvation for the hum...