AD's English Literature

“Money is like a sixth sense without which you cannot make a complete use of the other five.” - W. Somerset Maugham Apparently, Somerset Maugham’s Of Human Bondage is about a medical student who falls in love with a mean-spirited waitress. Diving deep into the story it, however, proves that it is more than that. Read More Novel According to Somerset Maugham, it is of multiple ‘human bondage’ which may be classified into several ways. First of all, there is the bondage related with the birth of a person. For example, Phillip, the central character of Of Human Bondage suffered from an inferiority complex on account of his poor birth and a club-foot. He suffered both in the class-room as well as in the society. There is also the body-bondage which keeps a person under painful conditions till death. Love and marriage are only illusion because they fail to afford real pleasure of life. Read More Modern Period In most of the eases, unhappiness arises out of failure, defeat, or dea...

 Somerset Maugham ’s Of Human Bondage is considered as a great introspective novel if not truly autobiographical novel. It’s an account of an epic tale  of life enacted through the portrayal of the characters of the novel through appealing and integrated ways. They are the floating yacht in the stream of life.  Notably, Philip Carey  is the Maugham figure or, in the words of  Phillip Carey, is Somerset Maugham’s Hamlet. But such Hamlets live in every essence of his other characters too.  Study in human relationship remain the chief concern of all the major novelists of English. So did Somerset Maugham . However, their approaches and methods of treatment were different. For example, Virginia Woolf discussed the human relationships in terms of husband and wife, mother and children, lover and beloved and between man and the universe. She differentiated between two kinds of truth in governing human relationship—intuitive truth and intellectual—logical t...

Gitanjali (NO. 50) Rabindranath Tagore I had gone a-begging from door to door in the village path, when thy golden chariot appeared in the distance like a gorgeous dream and I wondered who was this King of all kings! My hopes rose high and methought my evil days were at an end, and I stood waiting for alms to be given unasked and for wealth scattered on all sides in the dust. The chariot stopped where I stood. Thy glance fell on me and thou camest down with a smile. I felt that the luck of my life had come at last. Then of a sudden thou didst hold out thy right hand and say `What hast thou to give to me?' Ah, what a kingly jest was it to open thy palm to a beggar to beg! I was confused and stood undecided, and then from my wallet I slowly took out the least little grain of corn and gave it to thee. But how great my surprise when at the day's end I emptied my bag on the floor to find a least little gram of gold among the poor heap. I bitterly w...

Bright Star By John Keats Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art—          Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night And watching, with eternal lids apart,          Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, The moving waters at their priestlike task          Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask          Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable,          Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, To feel for ever its soft fall and swell,          Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, And so live ever—or else swoon to death. Bright Star is a beautiful sonnet in wh...

A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers Anglo-Saxon Period (450 — 1066) UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK 1: Which Roman General conquered England in A.D. 43? When did the Romans go back from England? Ans: Julius Caesar invaded Britain in 55 b.c. and returned the following year to defeat the native forces. The inhabitants, referred to collectively as Britons, maintained political freedom and paid tribute to Rome for almost a century before the Roman emperor Claudius I initiated the systematic conquest of Britain in ad 43. At the end of the 3rd century, the Roman army began to withdraw from Britain to defend other parts of the Roman Empire. The Romans went back from England in A. D. 410. Celtic culture again became predominant and Roman civilization in Britain rapidly disintegrated. Roman influence virtually disappeared during the Germanic invasions in the 5th and 6th centuries. Thereafter the culture of the Angles and Saxons spread throughout ...

Sylvia Plath wrote to her mother in a letter: “I am up about five, in my study with coffee, writing like mad—have managed a poem a day before breakfast… Terrific stuff, as if domesticity had choked me.” Sylvia Plath , noted for her intensely personal and brutally honest poems, was a phenomenon, a meteor that appeared suddenly on the literary horizon, dazzled and disappeared before the world could properly have a glimpse of her. Plath’s work has grown in influence and popularity since her suicide at age 30. She is widely regarded as one the first feminist poets and an icon of the women’s movement. Read More Poetry Germairie Greer claimed that Sylvia Plath was the most ‘arrogantly feminine” poetess whoever wrote. David Holbrook adds, “A phenomenological analyses suggests that while knowing well outwardly that she was a woman, Sylvia Plath could scarcely find within herself anything that was feminine at all. Read More Criticism She is, perhaps, the most masculine poetess who aver wrote...

A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers UGC NET ENGLISH QUESTION BANK   (a) Australian Aboriginal writer   Jack Davis (1917-2002) is known for his poetry, plays, and dedication to Aboriginal causes. A to Z (Objective Questions) (b)   A picaresque novel , full-length fictional work, often satirical in nature, in which the principal character is cynical and amoral, is about a rogue hero who leads a wandering life. The form originated in Spain, and the term picaresque derives from the Spanish word picaro (rogue). The earliest Spanish example is Lazarillo de Tormes (Lazaro of Tormes, 1554); of unknown authorship. The most noted of German picaresque novels is The Adventurous Simplicissimus . In France the type is best represented by The Adventures of Gil Blas of Santillane . The earliest English picaresque novel is believed to have been The Unfortunate Traveller, or, The Life of Jack Wilton (1594) by Thomas Nashe. The picaresque novel was particularl...