AD's English Literature

"When enthusiasm and commitment take root within a project, that project comes to life." Robin Sieger   British business executive. Natural Born Winners   P roject Works are a wonderful way to get excited about literature learning, but they require a lot of hard work. If you want the benefits of participating in a literature project, but don’t know where to start, this guide is for you. It will provide a brief overview of the most important aspects of a literature project and get you well on your way to having a display at your school and college work out. Read More Teaching English Though the information is most applicable for middle school students, it can be adapted for use with elementary students and can be a great resource for first-time college participants. This article attempts to provide essential guidelines to students for preparation of their Project Proposal for consideration of the ‘Project Board’ of the institute. As per the provisions of the academic re...

"The Life of Johnson is assuredly a great, a very great work. Homer is not more decidedly the first of heroic poets, Shakespeare is not more decidedly the first of dramatists, Demosthenes is not more decidedly the first of orators, than Boswell is the first of biographers." Thomas Babington Macaulay  (1800 - 1859) British politician, historian, and writer. Essays Contributed to the Edinburgh Review ,  "On Samuel Johnson" J ames Boswell (1740-1795) is a Scottish writer who became a close friend and biographer of the writer Samuel Johnson. Boswell, whose father was a well-known advocate, was born in Edinburgh, and educated at Edinburgh High School, the universities of Glasgow, Edinburgh, and Utrecht. Read More Criticism Boswell was admitted to both the Scottish and English bars and practiced law but devoted himself primarily to the pursuit of a literary career. His most important early works were An Account of Corsica, The Journal of a Tour to t...

E ugene O' Neill ’s Mourning Becomes Electra which is about a brother and sister trying to avenge their father’s murder is constructed as a trilogy- Homecoming, The Hunted and The Haunted -on a very large scale. Eugene O' Neill ’s play is adapted from Aeschylus’s tragic trilogy called the Oresteia . The model is Aeschylus, and the pattern of Homecoming and The Hunted follows very closely the pattern of Oresteia . Though each play has a beginning, a logical development and convincing and, the three plays cannot be taken separately. The sequence of parts, exposition, complication, climax and resolution, is reflected in the trilogy as a whole. The complication and climax naturally begin with the murder of Ezra Mammon and end with Orin’s suicide.  The principal merit of Eugene O' Neill ’s trilogy lies in the arrangement or patterning or a series of events. The story itself follows the Oresteia up to the middle of the third division of the play. In   Homecoming Ezra M...

T he works of modern poets throughout the world have been inspired by Dante. And it is imbued with Dantean imagery, especially that of Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot, Gabriele D’Annunzio, Paul Claudel, and Anna Akhmatova. Read More Teaching English Again, among the many notable translations into English are verse renditions by the American poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and, in the 20th century, by the English writer Dorothy L. Sayers and the American poet and critic John Ciardi. In the other part of the world, the Persian poet Omar Khayyam is also made a place in our heart by the translation (published anonymously in 1859) of the Rubáiyát by Edward FitzGerald. But ware these possible if they have not been translated into other languages!!

R abindranath Tagore’s Gitanjali one of the poet’s three collections of exclusively devotional poems, the other two being Gitimalya and Gitali . These religious poems naturally raise the question of the interrelationship between faith and poetry. It is often said that poetry which is based on a particular religious faith is necessarily limited in its appeal and Dr. Johnson declared categorically that “contemplative piety or the intercourse between god and the human soul can never be poetical”. Read More Poetry  Tagore’s religious poetry may at first sight appear to be severely limited in its appeal to western readers, because its faith is too Indian to have any universal significance.  The English critic George Sampson finds nothing beyond a common type of eastern mysticism in Tagore’s poetry. But much of the greatest poetry of the world springs from religious convictions which are not universal, for example The Divine Comedy of Dante and Milton’s Paradise Lost . Read Mo...

  'A man can be destroyed but not defeated.' _ Earnest Hemingway’s The  Old Man and the Sea I t has been rightly suggested that Hemingway’s The  Old Man and the Sea portrays a man’s fulfillment in striving rather than in success. The book's simple plot contains some element of suspense, but above all, the book lives in its beautiful imagery, the poetic evocation of the sea, and the admirable character of an old man. Read More American literature The story of the novella is that of an old fisherman’s single-handed fight with a giant marlin and then with sharks is the Gulf Stream, north of Havana and it is unmistakably a parable on the theme of fighting the good fight. Hemingway focuses on Santiago's consciousness in this quest story. Read More American literature Very much in the way that a traditional soliloquy or an interior monologue serves to reveal character, this novella functions as one ...

A n essay, a literary composition, is usually a number of related sentences dealing with one main idea or topic. Often brief in scope and informal in style, the essay differs from such formal expository forms as the thesis, dissertation, or treatise. Read More Essay The essay is more compact with ideas than data or vociferation. It is more a stream of ideas and logical assertions. And that idea may be stated in a topic sentence, which is often the first sentence in the essay. The sentences that follow may be related in two ways: (a) Each sentence should help develop the topic. (b) Each sentence should lead smoothly into the thought of the next. The essay may end with a clincher sentence, a sentence that sums up the thought of the essay or emphasizes some ideas. Read More Essay Sometimes the topic sentence comes in the end of an essay, and at times somewhere in the middle, and once in a while an essay may not have a topic sentence. Below are given examples of each typ...