MAJOR WORKS

POETRY, DRAMA, FICTION

Dr. K. ANURADHA
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR OF ENGLISH
GOVERNMENT ARTS COLLEGE,
COIMBATORE- 641 018
SHELLEY, KEATS, BROWNING
Percy Bysshe Shelley
 Percy Bysshe Shelly's Life
• Born on 4th of August 1792 in England
• One of the most popular English Romantic poets
• Great lyrical poet in English language.
• Poetry of Shelley gained better recognition following his
death
• Shelley also became a source of inspiration for the poets of
other languages
 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Style

• His poetry reflects passion, beauty, imagination, love,

creativity, political liberty and nature.

• He possess distinctive qualities of hope, love, joy and

imagination.

• He strongly believed in realization of human happiness.

 Percy Bysshe Shelley’s Works
The best known classic poems of Shelley include,

• “Ode to the West Wind"

• “Ozymandias”
• “Music, To a Skylark”
• “The Cloud”
• “The Mask of Anarchy”
• “When Soft Voices Die”
 More about Him

• Shelley was the supporter of social justice for the masses.

• He had strong feelings for the lower classes.

• He also saw how animals were maltreated and slaughtered.

• Therefore, he became a fighter and an advocate for all those living

creatures mistreated or treated unjustly.

• He died on 8th July 1822.

John Keats
 John Keats’s Life

• Born in Moorefield, London in 1795.

• Great English poet

• One of the youngest poets of the Romantic movement

• When he was 8, his father died and when he was 14, his mother died

• These tragic circumstances had a profound impact on his mind

• This brought him closer to his other siblings

 John Keats’s Style

• Keats’s diction is highly connotative.

• His writing style is characterized by sensual imagery
• It contains many poetic devices and it together create rhythm
and music
• His themes were love, beauty, joy, nature, music, and the
mortality of human life.
• He developed a famous doctrine known as “Negative
Capability.”
 John Keats’s Works
His most popular poems include,
• “Ode on Melancholy”
• “Ode on a Grecian Urn”
• “Ode to Autumn”
• “Ode to a Nightingale”
• “La Belle Dame Sans Mercy”
• “Imitation of Spenser”
• “Hyperion” and “Isabella.”
 More About Him

• Keats did not harness dramatic and narrative power

• He was gifted with lyrical power to present characters with expressive

moods

• These moods were of pensiveness, romantic sadness, indolence,

ecstatic delight.
Robert Browning
 Browning's Life

• He was born on 7th May 1812

• The son of a clerk in the Bank of England

• Major English poet and playwright of the Victorian age

• Noted for his mastery of dramatic monologue and psychological portraiture.

 Browning's writing style

• Makes striking revelations of human passions and aspirations

• Makes valuable passages of ethical teaching

• He portrays characters well

• One finds no conventionality in his poems

• One has to dive into the depth of his writings to know the actual
meaning.
 Browning's famous works

• "The Ring and the Book"

• "Fra Lippo Lippi"

• "My Last Duchess"

• "Sordello"

• "Pippa passes"

• "Christmas-eve and Easter-Day"

 More about him

• Browning produced comparatively little poetry during his married life

• In many poems, he achieves effects of obvious felicity

• Browning uses his poetry as a vehicle for his philosophy

• His hopes for the world are not simple and unreasoning

• He died on 12th Dec, 1889

 Born -March 31, 1934, Thrissur, Malabar Coast [now in Kerala]
 Malayalam pen name Madhavikutty
 Muslim name Kamala Surayya
 Indian author who wrote openly and frankly about female sexual
desire and the experience of being an Indian woman.
 Das was part of a generation of Indian writers whose work
centered on personal rather than colonial experiences, and her
short stories, poetry, memoirs, and essays brought her respect
and notoriety in equal measures.
 Das wrote both in English (mostly poetry) and, under the pen
name Madhavikutty, in the Malayalam language of southern
India.
 Died- May 31, 2009, Pune, India),
 Kamala Das was born into a high-status family. Her mother, Nalapat Balamani
Amma, was a well-known poet, and her father, V.M. Nair, was an automobile
company executive and a journalist.
 She grew up in what is now Kerala and in Calcutta (now Kolkata), where her father
worked.
 She began writing poetry when she was a child.
 When she was 15 years old, she married Madhava Das, a banking executive many
years her senior, and they moved to Bombay (now Mumbai).
 Das had three sons and did her writing at night.
 Kamala Das’s poetry collections included “Summer in Calcutta” (1965), “The
Descendants” (1967), and “The Old Playhouse”, and “Other Poems” (1973).
 Subsequent English-language works included the novel “Alphabet of Lust” (1976)
 And the short stories “A Doll for the Child Prostitute” (1977) and “Padmavati the
Harlot” (1992).
 Notable among her many Malayalam works were the short-story collection
Thanuppu (1967; “Cold”) and the memoir “Balyakalasmaranakal” (1987;
“Memories of Childhood”).
 Perhaps her best-known work was an autobiography, which first appeared as a
series of columns in the weekly Malayalanadu, then in Malayalam as “Ente Katha”
(1973), and finally in English as “My Story” (1976). A shockingly intimate work, it
came to be regarded as a classic. In later life Das said that parts of the book were
fictional.
She was born in a conservative
Hindu Nair (Nallappattu) family
having royal ancestry, After being
asked by her lover Sadiq Ali, an
Islamic scholar and a Muslim League
MP, she embraced Islam in 1999 at
the age of 65 and assumed the name
Kamala Surayya.
Though never politically active before, she
launched a national political party, Lok Seva
Party, aiming asylum to orphaned mothers and
promotion of secularism. In 1984 she
unsuccessfully contested in the Indian
Parliament elections.
On 31 May 2009, aged 75,
she died at a hospital in
Pune. Her body was flown to
her home state of Kerala.
She was buried at the
Palayam Juma Masjid at
Thiruvanathapuram with full
state honour.
Kamala Das has received many awards for her literary contribution, including:
 Nominated and shortlisted for Nobel Prize in 1984.
 Asian Poetry Prize-1998
 Kent Award for English Writing from Asian Countries-1999
 Asian World Prize-2000
 Ezhuthachan Award-2009
 Sahitya Academy Award-2003
 Vayalar Award2001
 Kerala Sahitya Academy Award-2005
 Muttathu Varkey Award
SHAKESPEARE
LIFE AND WORKS OF
WILLIAM SHAKESPEARE
(1564 – 1616)
 EARLY YEARS
 Born in Stratford – upon Avon, England.
 Son of Prominent town official.
 3rd child of 8 children.
 Received excellent education with heavy
focus on grammar and literature.
 MARRIAGE AND FAMILY
 Married at the age of 18 to Anne
Hathaway (she was 26) who was pregnant
with his child.
 1st child was daughter, Susanna born in
1583.
 Twins Hamnet and Judith born in 1585.
 Hamnet dies at the age 11.
 LOST & LATER YEARS
 The period between 1585 and 1592 is
known as the “Lost Years” because there
are no documentary records of
Shakespeare’s activities
 Moved to London around 1591 and
became an actor.
 Worked with Lord Chamberlin’s company
of players, later known as Kings Men.
 WORKS OF LITERATURE
 Along with acting, he also wrote some of
the most renowned and studied literature
written in the English language.
 Poems- famous for his sonnets
 Play- Comedies, Tragedies, Histories.
 COMEDIES
 All is Well that Ends Well.
 As You Like It.
 Comedy of Errors.
 Measure for measure.
 Mid Summer Night’s
Dream.
 Taming of the Shrew.
 Much Ado About Nothing
 Twelfth Night
 Merchant of Venice.
 TRAGEDIES
 Julius Caesar.
 Hamlet.
 Macbeth.
 Othello.
 Romeo and Juliet.
 King Lear.
 HISTORIES
 King Henry V
 King John
 Richard II
 Richard III
 He wrote 37 very successful plays
 His vocabulary was HUGE-somewhere
between 17,000 and 34,000 words!
 The estimated vocabulary of an educated
person today is around 15,000 words.
 He had an amazing influence on our
English language.
 HAVE YOU HEARD THESE
PHRASES?
 I couldn’t sleep a wink.
 He was dead as a doornail.
 She’s a tower of strength.
 They hoodwinked us.
 We’d better lie low for awhile.
 I am constant as the Northern Star.
 It’s all Greek to me.
 . Hamlet

 Since its first recorded production, Hamlet

has engrossed playgoers, thrilled readers, and
challenged even the most gifted actors. No
other single work of fiction has produced
more commonly used expressions. If you are
sure in your heart of hearts that every dog
will have his day, you are echoing the
philosopher-prince.
 Macbeth

 Each time I read this whirlwind tale of

murder, betrayal, and lusty ambition, I find
an even greater appreciation for
Shakespeare's unsurpassed ability to tell a
riveting story with transcendent poetic
imagery. In our modern history of tragic
theatre, Macbeth has no equal.
 Julius Caesar

 Although there were earlier Elizabethan

plays on the subject of Julius Caesar and
his turbulent rule, Shakespeare's
penetrating study of political life in
ancient Rome is the only version to
recount the demise of Brutus and the
other conspirators.
 The Tempest

 Hailed as a stunning climax to the career

of England's favorite dramatist, The
Tempest is a play praising the glories of
reconciliation and forgiveness. Some
believe that Prospero's final speeches
signify Shakespeare's personal adieu from
the stage.
 Henry IV

 Many believe 1 Henry IV to be

Shakespeare's greatest history play. The
unforgettable characters Hotspur, Prince
Hal, King Henry, and the jovial John
Falstaff affirm John Dryden's assertion
that Shakespeare was "the man who of all
modern, and perhaps ancient poets, had
the largest and most comprehensive
soul."
 King Lear

 Despite the relatively simple primary plot

-- an aging monarch who decides to
divide his kingdom amongst his three
daughters -- King Lear is the most
complex and analytical of all
Shakespeare's great tragedies. The play is
an efficacious exploration of the
boundlessness of evil, suffering, and love.
 Romeo and Juliet

 Celebrated for the radiance of its lyric

poetry, Romeo and Juliet was
tremendously popular from its first
performance. The sweet whispers shared
by young Tudor lovers throughout the
realm were often referred to as "naught
but pure Romeo and Juliet."
 King John

 In the shadow of Shakespeare's second

tetralogy of history plays lies this neglected
masterpiece. The play is cursed with the
egregious reputation of being Shakespeare's
great artistic failure. Never has a work so
remarkable been so consistently underrated.
With its vigorous plot, immortal verse, and
subtle combination of Tudor and
Machiavellian theories on kingship, King John
is worthy of rediscovery.
 Much Ado About Nothing

 The happy conclusion of Much Ado About

Nothing is the reason we classify the play
as a comedy. However, the true humor in
the drama is left to the remarkable
collection of supporting characters who
dazzle us with wit and confound us with
absurdity.
 The Winter's Tale

 The Winter's Tale is considered a

romantic comedy, but tragic elements are
interwoven throughout the play. First
produced at the Globe around 1610, it is
one of Shakespeare's final plays.
 SHAKESPEAR’S SONNETS
 The Sonnets are Shakespeare's most popular
works, and a few of them, such as Sonnet 18
(Shall I compare thee to a summer's day),
Sonnet 116 (Let me not to the marriage of
true minds), and Sonnet 73 (That time of
year thou mayst in me behold), have become
the most widely-read poems in all of English
literature. Here you will find the text of each
Shakespearean sonnet with commentary for
most.
 KEY DATES AD TIMELINES
 Shakespeare Timeline: Part 1 (1558-1599)

 A Shakespeare Timeline: Part 2 (1600-1604)

 A Shakespeare Timeline: Part 3 (1605-1616)

 Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays (when written)

 Chronology of Shakespeare's Plays (when set)

 Shakespeare's Kings and Queens: A Timeline

 Tudor Timeline

 Stuart Timeline
GEOFFREY CHAUCER
 Geoffrey Chaucer was born in London
sometime between 1340 and 1344.
 He was an English author, poet,
philosopher, bureaucrat (courtier), and
diplomat.
 He is also referred to as the father of
English Literature
 Geoffrey Chaucer is considered one of
the first great English poets. He is the
author of such works as The Parliament
of Fowls, Troilus and Criseyde, and The
Canterbury Tales. Humorous and
profound, his writings show him to be an
acute observer of his time with a deft
command of many literary genres.
 He is truly a modern poet because his
works have all the elements of modern
writings.
 He has realism, catholicity, humor,
Renaissance spirit, and style which are the
prominent features of modernism.
 The Canterbury Tales is considered
Chaucer's masterpiece and is among the
most important works of medieval
literature for many reasons besides its
poetic power and entertainment value,
notably its depiction of the different social
classes of the 14th century CE as well as
clothing worn, pastimes enjoyed, and
language.
 The name given to a group of 15th‐ and
16th‐century Scottish poets who wrote
under the influence of Geoffrey Chaucer
(or of his follower John Lydgate), often
using his seven‐line rhyme royal stanza.
The book of Dutches
 We begin this pick of Chaucer’s best works
with an early work from around 1370, when
Chaucer was still probably only in his late
twenties. Sometimes known by the
alternative title The Death of Blaunche, this
poem is an example of the dream-vision, a
popular genre in medieval poetry. It was
written for John of Gaunt, the Duke of
Lancaster, following the death of his wife
Blanche, probably from the Black Death, in
1368.
Parliament of Fowls
 The poem features a parliament, or
assembly, of birds, which have gathered
together in order to choose their mates.
The house of Fame
 Although it’s nowhere near as long as The
Canterbury Tales, The House of Fame is still
a substantial work, in which the poet falls
asleep and dreams he’s in a glass temple
adorned with images of glorious and famous
people from history (including the poets
Ovid and Virgil). This prompts Chaucer to
consider what fame actually is, and the
relationship between poets and fame.
Troilus and Criseyde.
 After The Canterbury Tales (of which more below), this is
Chaucer’s greatest achievement: a long narrative poem,
written in rhyme royal stanzas, detailing the doomed love
affair between the Trojan prince Troilus and the beautiful
woman Cressida during the Trojan War.

 A number of scholars believe that this, rather than the next

item on this list, is Chaucer’s best work, and it’s certainly a
more polished, even, and complete work (well, he never
completed the next one!). As with a number of the
Canterbury Tales, Chaucer’s source for this story was the
Italian writer Boccaccio, but Chaucer worked the tale of
tragic love into great English poetry
The Canterbury Tales.

Not so much one poem as a whole series of poems,

The Canterbury Tales was begun in the mid-1380s
and remained unfinished upon Chaucer’s death in
1400. To begin exploring the sheer range and scope
of Chaucer’s eclectic compilation, begin at the
beginning with his General Prologue, in which he
sets the scene – a group of pilgrims travelling from
London to Canterbury to visit the shrine of St
Thomas Becket – and introduces his cast of
colourful characters, including a monk, knight, miller,
reeve, manciple, prioress, nun’s priest, and, of course,
the Wife of Bath
 But of course, The Canterbury Tales is
vast, so in the remainder of this pick of
Chaucer’s best works we’ll break down
that huge work into five shorter works
‘The General Prologue’.
 It also offers a rich and colorful picture of
fourteenth-century English life and the
various people found in the new society
that was being formed in the wake of the
Black Death in the 1340s. The
descriptions of the pilgrims taking part in
the tale-telling contest are brilliantly vivid,
illuminating, and entertaining.
The Knight’s Tale’.
 The inspiration for William Shakespeare and
John Fletcher’s play The Two Noble Kinsmen
(and, more recently, for the title of a 2001
film starring Heath Ledger, and featuring Paul
Bettany playing Chaucer), this tale kicks off
the storytelling competition among the
pilgrims. A story of rivalry (between two
Athenians, Palamon and Arcite) and love, its
pure, straight-faced nature prompts the
Miller to tell his tale of bawdy high-jinks that
follows.
‘The Miller’s Tale’.
 Perhaps the most famous – and best-loved – of all
of the tales in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, ‘The
Miller’s Tale’ is told as a comic corrective
following the sonorous seriousness of the
Knight’s tale. The tale is an example of the fabliau
or comic skit, and concerns a lecherous young
student at the University of Oxford, Nicholas, and
his adulterous relationship with Alison, the young
wife of an old carpenter. Flood warnings, farting,
and frantic ark-building all ensue, in one of the
great jewels in the comic crown of medieval
literature.
The Wife of Bath’s Tale
 The Wife of Bath is more famous as a
character in The Canterbury Tales than her
tale, which is a tale set in Arthurian England.
After he violates a maiden, a young knight is
sent away to undergo his penance, tasked
with finding out what it is that women want.
If he fails, he will be killed. He meets an ugly
hag who promises to tell him the answer –
but only if he agrees to grant her a favour in
exchange. He agrees to her terms.
‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’.
 The Canterbury Tales is huge fun (as long as
you skip the overlong and overly religious
Parson’s Tale). And some of the tales even
see Chaucer having fun writing about
animals. Another genre here: this time, the
medieval ‘beast fable’, featuring Chaunticleer
the rooster, who, having been kidnapped by a
fox (modeled on Reynard the Fox from
French literature), devises a plan to escape.
 In 1357, Geoffrey Chaucer became a
public servant to Countess Elizabeth of
Ulster and continued in that capacity with
the British court throughout his lifetime.
The Canterbury Tales became his best
known and most acclaimed work.
JOHN MILTON
 John Milton, (born December 9, 1608,
London, England—died November 8?,
1674, London?), English poet, pamphleteer,
and historian, considered the most
significant English author after William
Shakespeare. November 8, 1674? Milton is
best known for Paradise Lost, widely
regarded as the greatest epic poem in
English
 The inaugurating figure of Romanticism is
John Milton. ... As much as Paradise Lost,
Paradise Regained, and Samson Agonists
are defining poems of British
Romanticism, of the three, Paradise
Regained is the most strikingly so.
 By 1652, Milton had become totally blind;
the cause of his blindness is debated but
bilateral retinal detachment or glaucoma
are most likely. His blindness forced him
to dictate his verse and prose to
amanuenses who copied them out for
him; one of these was Andrew Marvell.
 Milton wrote poetry and prose between
1632 and 1674, and is most famous for his
epic poetry. Special Collections and
Archives holds a variety of Milton's major
works, including Paradise Lost, Paradise
Regained, IL’ Allegro, and Il Penseroso.
 As he was a writer of a great deal of
significance, Milton's influence and
reputation continued to flourish among
the poets and writers of later generations.
In fact, the most part of his fame is due to
his poetry. Poets frequently resorted to
Milton for their works, and in doing so
they imitated his poetry.
 Though Milton isn't labeled as a
Metaphysical poet, his stylistics share
commonality with metaphysicalists on at
least two points. Firstly, Milton adapted his
religious beliefs to suit his own
understandings and held a spiritual view
that reflected monism as he had adopted
an animist materialist point of view.
 Paradise Lost was written about the
ultimate spiritual battle between good and
evil, Milton's purpose in writing this great
epic was to justify God's ways to
humankind. ... He showed the spiritual
battle between God, Satan, and the other
fallen angels, but he also showed the
spiritual battle between man and Satan.
 The famous work by Milton is Paradise
Regained, first published in 1671. Special
Collections and Archives holds a 1790 edition
titled, Paradise Regained: A Poem in Four parts,
by John Milton from the Text of Dr. Newton. This
edition was published by William Young, a
bookseller, printer, and publisher who had a
printing business at his Philadelphia home.
Milton's Paradise Regained is a philosophical
dialogue between Satan and the Son of God. The
Son of God strives for noble consciousness, an
internal quality. Conversely, Satan believes that it
is acceptable to pursue external values, such as
power, wealth, and recognition.
 Milton's L'Allegro and Il Penseroso is another
important work by Milton held in Special
Collections and Archives. This edition was
published 1855 in London by David Bogue.
Myles Birket Foster, a famous illustrator,
watercolor artist, and engraver in the nineteenth
century, created the illustrations in this edition.
His work depicts the interaction between day and
night, one of Milton's primary themes in the work.
Both L’Allegro and Il Penseroso consider the
internal and external life of the poet through
allegory.
Robert Southey and his notable works.
Robert Southey, (born Aug. 12, 1774, Bristol,
Gloucestershire, Eng.—died March 21, 1843,
Keswick, Cumberland), English poet and
writer of miscellaneous prose who is chiefly
remembered for his association with Samuel
Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth,
both of whom were leaders of the early
Romantic movement.
As poet—and eventually poet laureate—he produced epics,
romances, and metrical tales, ballads, plays, monodramas,
odes, eclogues, sonnets, and miscellaneous lyrics. His prose
works include histories, biographies, essays, reviews,
translations, travelogues, semi-fictional journalism, polemical
dialogues, and a farraginous work of fiction, autobiography,
anecdote, and omnium-gatherum that defies classification. His
bent was inherently encyclopedic; and, while his writings lack
both moral profundity (as distinct from moral fervor) and
“natural magic,” they compensate by their vigor and
abundance for their dearth of genius. Coleridge rightly called
him the complete man of letters.
Southey’s prose is superior to his verse and has proved more
durable. His ambitious epic projects were largely dead ends of
a moribund tradition.
Although Southey began to write journalism early and
continued to compose verse in later years, his literary career,
like those of Coleridge and Scott, is roughly divisible into two
phases: an early poetic vein, followed by a midlife shift to
prose discourse.
Notable works :

Fall of Robespierre (1794)

Joan of Arc: An Epic Poem (1796)
Poems (1797–1799)
Letters from Spain (1797)
Devil's Thoughts (1799)
Thalaba the Destroyer (1801)
Amadis de Gaula (1803)
Madoc (1805)
Letters from England (1807)
Palmerin of England (1807; translation)
The Cid (1808; translation)
The Curse of Kehama (1810)
The Life of Nelson (1813)
Roderick, the Last of the Goths (1814)
Wordsworth and his works.
William Wordsworth was one of the founders of English
Romanticism and one its most central figures and important
intellects. He is remembered as a poet of spiritual and
epistemological speculation, a poet concerned with the human
relationship to nature and a fierce advocate of using the
vocabulary and speech patterns of common people in poetry.
William Wordworth was born on April 7, 1770 in
Cockermouth, Cumberland, located in the Lake District of
England: an area that would become closely associated with
Wordsworth for over two centuries after his death. He began
writing poetry as a young boy in grammar school, and before
graduating from college he went on a walking tour of Europe,
which deepened his love for nature and his sympathy for the
common man: both major themes in his poetry. Wordsworth is
best known for Lyrical Ballads, co-written with Samuel Taylor
Coleridge, and The Prelude, a Romantic epic poem
chronicling the “growth of a poet’s mind.”
Notable works

Resolution and Independence"

"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" Also known as "Daffodils"
"My Heart Leaps Up"
"Ode: Intimations of Immortality"
"Ode to Duty"
"The Solitary Reaper"
"Elegiac Stanzas"
Samuel Taylor Coleridge
Samuel Taylor Coleridge is the premier poet-critic of modern
English tradition, distinguished for the scope and influence of
his thinking about literature as much as for his innovative
verse. Active in the wake of the French Revolution as a
dissenting pamphleteer and lay preacher, he inspired a brilliant
generation of writers and attracted the patronage of
progressive men of the rising middle class.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (/ˈkoʊlərɪdʒ/;[1] 21 October 1772 –
25 July 1834) was an English poet, literary critic, philosopher
and theologian who, with his friend William Wordsworth, was
a founder of the Romantic Movement in England and a
member of the Lake PoetsHe wrote the poems The Rime of
the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan, as well as the major
prose work Biographia Literaria. His critical work, especially
on William Shakespeare, was highly influential, and he helped
introduce German idealist philosophy to English-speaking
culture. Coleridge coined many familiar words and phrases,
including "suspension of disbelief".[2] He had a major
influence on Ralph Waldo Emerson and American
transcendentalism..
As William Wordsworth’s collaborator and constant
companion in the formative period of their careers as
poets, Coleridge participated in the sea change in
English verse associated with Lyrical Ballads (1798).
His poems of this period, speculative, meditative, and
strangely oracular, put off early readers but survived
the doubts of Wordsworth and Robert Southey to
become recognized classics of the romantic idiom.
Notable works

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner”

“Christabel”
“Biographia Literaria”
“Kubla Khan”
“Frost at Midnight”
“Dejection: An Ode”
“Lyrical Ballads”
“On the Constitution of the Church and State”
THOMAS STEARNS
ELIOT
T.S.ELIOT
• He was born on 26 September 1888
• He was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor in
20th century
• He is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry.
• His period was 1905–1965
• His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919) ,his mother Charlotte Champe
Stearns (1843–1929)
• His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school
exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February
1905.
• He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of
a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King".
• By 1916, he had completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on
“Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley”, but
he failed to return for the viva voce exam.
 NOTABLE WORKS
1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock(1915)
2. The Waste Land(1922)
3. Four Quartets (1943)
4. Ash Wednesday (1930)
5. The Hallow men (1925)
6. Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
• He worked on commercial plays : The Family Reunion (1939), The
Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The Elder
Statesman (1958)
TRADITIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL TALENT
• Eliot made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism,
strongly influencing the school of New Criticism.
• His critical essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that art
must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces
of art.
• His essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by
introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the
context of the artist's previous works, a simultaneous order of works
 METAPHYSICAL POETS
• Eliot‘s essays metaphysical poets, says ability to show experience as both
psychological and sensual,wit and uniqueness.
• Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, along with giving new significance and
attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of
unified sensibility, which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term
metaphysical.
• The most important metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Henry
Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew
Marvell. Their work has considerably influenced the poetry of the 20th century.
Literary Awards :
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1948)
• Hanseatic Goethe Prize (of Hamburg) (1955)
• Dante Medal (of Florence) (1959)
• He died in 4 January 1965
GERARD MANLEY
HOPKINS
• He was born on 28 July 1844
• Gerard Manley Hopkins is considered to be one of the greatest poets of
the Victorian era.
• Parents: Catherine Hopkins , Manley Hopkins
• His work was not published until 30 years after his death when his friend
Robert Bridges edited the volume Poems.
• Well-known works by Hopkins include:
1. "Binsey Poplars“(1879)
2. "Pied Beauty“(1877)
3. “The Windhover: To Christ our Lord“(1877)published in (1918)
4. The Wreck of the Deutschland(1875-1876)published in (1918)
• Ricks called Hopkins "the most original poet of the Victorian age.
• The language of Hopkins's poems is often striking.
• Hopkins was a supporter of linguistic purism in English
• Hopkins's own concept of inscape, which was derived in part from the
medieval theologian Duns Scotus.
• The Windhover aims to depict not the bird in general, but instead one
instance and its relation to the breeze.
• Notable collections of Hopkins's manuscripts and publications are
in Campion Hall, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Foley
Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.
• Hopkins composed two poems about Dolben, Where art thou friend and
The Beginning of the End
• Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as
Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed," though
Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918).
• Hopkins's relationship with Dolben is explored in the novel The Hopkins
Conundrum.
• Hopkins's poems, such as The Bugler's First
Communion and Epithalamion, arguably embody homoerotic themes
• The poem To seem the stranger was written in Ireland between 1885 and
1886 and is a poem of isolation and loneliness
SPRUNG RHYTHM
• Sprung rhythm, an irregular system of prosody developed by the 19th-century by
English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
• It is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and permits an
indeterminate number of unstressed syllables.
• In sprung rhythm, a foot may be composed of from one to four syllables. Because
stressed syllables often occur sequentially in this patterning rather than in
alternation with unstressed syllables, the rhythm is said to be “sprung.”
• After several years' ill health and bouts of diarrhoea, Hopkins died
of typhoid fever
• He is thought to have suffered throughout his life from what today might
be labelled bipolar disorder or chronic unipolar depression,[19] and battled a
deep sense of melancholic anguish
• His last words on his death bed were, "I am so happy, I am so happy. I
loved my life.“
• He lived for 44 years .He died on 8 June 1889.
ALFRED LORD
TENNYSON:

• Born in England in 1809, Alfred, Lord Tennyson began writing poetry as a boy.

• He was first published in 1827, but it was not until the 1840s that his work
received regular public acclaim.

• His "In Memoriam" (1850), which contains the line "'This better to have loved
and lost than never to have loved at all," cemented his reputation.

• Tennyson was Queen Victoria's poet laureate from 1850 until his death in 1892.
EARLY LIFE AND FAMILY :
Alfred Tennyson was born in Somersby, Lincolnshire, England on August 6, 1809.
He would be one of his family's 11 surviving children (his parents' firstborn died
in infancy). Tennyson grew up with two older brothers, four younger brothers and
four younger sisters.

Tennyson's father was a church rector who earned a decent income, but the size of
the family meant expenses had to be closely watched. Therefore, Tennyson only
attended Louth Grammar School (where he was bullied) for a few years. The rest
of his pre-university education was overseen by his well-read father. Tennyson
and his siblings were raised with a love of books and writing; by the age of 8,
Tennyson was penning his first poems.

However, Tennyson's home wasn't a happy one. His father was an elder son who
had been disinherited in favor of a younger brother, which engendered resentment.
Even worse, his father was an alcoholic and drug user who at times physically
threatened members of the family. threatened members of the family.

In 1827, Tennyson had his first poetry published in Poems by Two

Brothers (though actually three Tennyson brothers contributed to the
volume). That same year, Tennyson began to study at Trinity College at
Cambridge, where his two older brothers were also students.

It was at university that Tennyson met Arthur Hallam, who became a close
friend, and joined a group of students who called themselves the Apostles.
Tennyson also continued to write poetry, and in 1829, he won the
Chancellor's Gold Medal for the poem "Timbuctoo." In 1830, Tennyson
published his first solo collection: Poems, Chiefly Lyrical.

Tennyson's father died in 1831. His death meant straitened circumstances for
the family, and Tennyson did not complete his degree. As a younger son,
Tennyson was encouraged to find a profession, such as entering the church
like his father. However, the young man was determined to focus on poetry
 1. In “Ulysses,” the hero based on Homer's Odysseus confronts his
LIST OF POEMS : impending death and ruminates on wanting to leave his home behind, since
people there are weak and complacent, to undertake a new heroic journey.
He considers his noble deeds thus far and is not content to sit idly without
making his last years meaningful.
2. In “Tithonus,” the title character became the lover of the goddess of
the dawn and was granted immortal life, but not eternal youth. As he ages he
laments the slow and unceasing decay of his body and his exemption from the
natural cycle of life and death. He wishes ardently for a natural death and
envies those mortals who die. He remembers happier times with her when he
was content to enjoy each morning, like she still does.

3. In “Mariana,” the titular character waits alone in a moated grange

for her lover to return. The house and grounds decay, as does her mental
state. Everaything is broken, torpid, sluggish, endless, timeless. She finally
acknowledges that he will not come.
 4. In “Break, break, break,” the speaker watches the sea breaking
LIST OF POEMS : on the rocks and wishes he could express his deep grief over the loss
of a friend. Others shout and play and choose action, but he is silent
and immobile.
5. In “Crossing the Bar,” the night has come: it is time to die and
cross the bar into, he hopes and expects, the afterlife where he will see his
Pilot face to face.
6. In “Memoriam,” deals with the poet's extreme grief regarding the death of
his friend, Arthur Henry Hallam. Many of the poems deal with Tennyson's lack of
faith, and others ponder the state of the individual soul after death. The poems trace a
movement from utter grief and hopelessness to acceptance and hope for the future.

7. In “Tears, Idle Tears,” a poem found within "The Princess," the

speaker is filled with tears of which she does not know the source. She
thinks of the days that have passed, friends who are gone, and lost kisses,
and she is filled with sweet and poignant grief.
 8. In “The Charge of the Light Brigade,” commemorates
the doomed charge of six hundred British soldiers in the
LIST OF POEMS :
Crimean War. Because someone made a mistake, they were
ordered to charge a much bigger army. They fight nobly on the
hellish battlefield and ride into "the mouth of Hell." Horses and
comrades fall, and only a few return.
9. In “Morte d’Arthur,” King Arthur is dying from a grievous
wound sustained on the battlefield. All of the Knights of the Round
Table are dead save Sir Bedivere. The King instructs Sir Bedivere to
take his sword Excalibur and throw it into the lake, but it takes the
equivocating knight a few struggles to accomplish this. Then Sir
Bedivere takes King Arthur to the barge on which he is to be borne
away to the afterlife, and he laments the passing of the king. Arthur
instructs him to have faith and live his life.
 10. In “The Lotos-Eaters,” the men from Ulysses's fantastic journeys
arrive on the island of the Lotos-Eaters. When they imbibe that delicious and
LIST OF POEMS :
intoxicating plant, they are immersed in a dreamy, peaceful state that makes
them desire to remain forever, never to return to the toil and strife of their former
lives. They are content with their "Choric Song.“

11. In “Godiva,” the heroine is the wife of an earl who has laid a heavy tax
on the townspeople. She implores him to get rid of it, but he scoffs at her and
jeers that he will only do it if she rides naked through the town. She instructs the
townspeople, who already love her, to close their doors and windows and not
look outside all morning. She undresses and mounts her horse and undertakes
her famous ride. One villager cannot resist the urge to peek at her, but his eyes
drop out of his head, and he is blinded. The earl removes the tax, and his wife is
beloved for her heroism.
 12. In “The Vision of Sin,” Tennyson depicts a youth journeying to a house
where pleasure, indolence, and sin reign. The poem is told as a dream, and the
LIST OF POEMS :
speaker says an old man appears and recites a monologue regarding various sins.
At the end of the poem, the speaker recounts that he hears a voice in the dream that
asks God in an anguished voice if there is any hope. The reply comes in a language
he cannot understand.

13. In “The Kraken,” the mythological massive sea beast sleeps at the bottom
of the sea. One day he will rise to the surface and die in a blazing, glorious fashion,
and this is the only time he will be seen by men and angels.

14. In “The Two Voices,” the speaker wrestles with an internal voice that
encourages him to end his suffering over a friend's death by taking his own life.
The voices offer arguments for either continuing to live or committing suicide. It
appears that the speaker vanquishes the insidious voice and chooses life.
 15. In “The Princess”: A Medley, friends at an outdoor party weave a
LIST OF POEMS : tale of a prince and a princess. The long poem is told by the prince, who
hears that the princess he is betrothed to wants to break the engagement
because she is committed to female education and to remaining apart from
men. The prince remembers his childhood love for her and is determined to
win her. He and two friends disguise themselves as women and enter the
university. They remain there for a short time but are discovered. At one
point the prince saves the princess's life, but she feels only cold fury toward
him. He is forced to fight her brother, her champion, for her. He loses and
lingers in a coma. The princess feels an obligation to nurse him, and as she
does, she feels her heart thaw. Her grand experiment has failed, however,
and she becomes saddened. At the end the prince tells her they will have an
equal marriage and bring out the best in each other.
 16. In “The Lady of Shalott,” the Lady is isolated in a tower
LIST OF POEMS :
alongside the river that leads to Camelot. A curse placed upon her
dictates that she cannot look out the window or leave her tower. Thus,
she weaves her magic web from the images she sees reflected in her
mirror. She is happy at first, but one day she sees the handsome and
bold Sir Lancelot in the mirror and hears him singing. She crosses the
room and looks down at him, and then the mirror cracks and the web
flies out the window. She leaves the tower and finds a little boat where
she inscribes her name on the prow. She lays down in it and sings her
mournful song as the boat is carried down the river. She dies, and the
townspeople are disconcerted by her. Sir Lancelot sees her in the boat
and murmurs that she had a pretty face.
Fame and Fortune :
Tennyson's poetry became more and more widely read, which gave him
both an impressive income and an ever-increasing level of fame. The
poet sported a long beard and often dressed in a cloak and broad-
brimmed hat, which made it easy for fans to spot him. A move to the
Isle of Wight in 1853 offered Tennyson an escape from his growing
crowds of admirers, but Tennyson wasn't cut off from society there he
would welcome visitors such as Prince Albert, fellow poet Henry
Wadsworth Longfellow and Hawaii's Queen Emma.
"Theirs not to make reply / Theirs not to reason why / Theirs but to do
and die." -from "The Charge of the Light Brigade" 1854
An episode in the Crimean War led to Tennyson penning "The Charge of
the Light Brigade" in 1854; the work was also included in Maud, and Other
Poems (1855). The first four books of Tennyson's Idylls of the King, an epic
take on the Arthurian legend, appeared in 1859. In 1864, Enoch Arden and
Other Poems sold 17,000 copies on its first day of publication. Tennyson
became friendly with Queen Victoria, who found comfort in reading "In
Memoriam" following the death of her husband Prince Albert in 1861. He
also continued to experience the downside of fame: As the Isle of Wight
became a more popular destination, people would sometimes peer through
the windows of his home. In 1867, he bought land in Surrey, where he
would build another home, Aldworth, that offered more privacy.
Later Years :
In 1874, Tennyson branched out to poetic dramas, starting
with Queen Mary (1875). Some of his dramas would be
successfully performed, but they never matched the impact of
his poems.
Though he had turned down earlier offers of a baronetcy, in
1883 Tennyson accepted the offer of a peerage (a higher rank
than baronet). He thus became Baron Tennyson of Aldworth
and Freshwater, better known as Alfred, Lord Tennyson.
Tennyson and his wife had had two sons, Hallam (b. 1852) and
Lionel (b. 1854). Lionel predeceased his parents; he became ill
on a visit to India, and died in 1886 onboard a ship heading
back to England. Tennyson's Demeter and Other Poems (1889)
contained work that addressed this devastating loss.
Death and Legacy :
The poet suffered from gout, and experienced a recurrence that
grew worse in the late summer of 1892. Later that year, on
October 6, at the age of 83, Tennyson passed away at his
Aldworth home in Surrey. He was buried in Westminster Abbey's
Poets' Corner.
Tennyson was the leading poet of the Victorian age; as that era
ended, his reputation began to fade. Though he will likely never
again be as acclaimed as he was during his lifetime, today
Tennyson is once more recognized as a gifted poet who delved
into eternal human questions, and who offered both solace and
inspiration to his audience.
• Born in Higher Bockhampton, Dorset, England on June 2, 1840, Thomas Hardy was a
pessimistic critic and a novelist. His inclination towards the countryside and life of
Vessex was reflected in his works.

• The man-nature relationship remains very indifferent to the man of his writings.

• In fact, Hardy's tragic vision is a part of his pessimism.

• The role of fate is too prominent in his works.

• Characters are hapless victims in his creations. His man thinks that he owns the land,
but land actually is omnipotent.

• Hardy's famous works are The Return of the Native, The Mayor of Casterbridge etc. In
the former work, Heath is a character itself described along with the Puritanism of
Eustacia.
Hardy was the eldest of the four children of Thomas Hardy, a stonemason and jobbing
builder, and his wife, Jemima (née Hand). He grew up in an isolated cottage on the edge
of open heathland. Though he was often ill as a child, his early experience of rural life,
with its seasonal rhythms and oral culture, was fundamental to much of his later writing.
He spent a year at the village school at age eight and then moved on to schools in
Dorchester, the nearby county town, where he received a good grounding in
mathematics and Latin. In 1856 he was apprenticed to John Hicks, a local architect, and
in 1862, shortly before his 22nd birthday, he moved to London and became a draftsman
in the busy office of Arthur Blomfield, a leading ecclesiastical architect. Driven back to
Dorset by ill health in 1867, he worked for Hicks again and then for the Weymouth
architect G.R. Crickmay.
Though architecture brought Hardy both social and economic
advancement, it was only in the mid-1860s that lack of funds and
declining religious faith forced him to abandon his early ambitions of
a university education and eventual ordination as an Anglican priest.
His habits of intensive private study were then redirected toward the
reading of poetry and the systematic development of his own poetic
skills. The verses he wrote in the 1860s would emerge in revised form
in later volumes (e.g., “Neutral Tones,” “Retty’s Phases”), but when
none of them achieved immediate publication, Hardy reluctantly
turned to prose.
In 1867–68 he wrote the class-conscious novel The Poor Man and the Lady, which
was sympathetically considered by three London publishers but never
published. George Meredith, as a publisher’s reader, advised Hardy to write a
more shapely and less opinionated novel. The result was the densely
plotted Desperate Remedies (1871), which was influenced by the contemporary
“sensation” fiction of Wilkie Collins. In his next novel, however, the brief and
affectionately humorous idyll Under the Greenwood Tree (1872), Hardy found a
voice much more distinctively his own. In this book he evoked, within the
simplest of marriage plots, an episode of social change (the displacement of a
group of church musicians) that was a direct reflection of events involving his own
father shortly before Hardy’s own birth.
In March 1870 Hardy had been sent to make an architectural assessment of the
lonely and dilapidated Church of St. Juliot in Cornwall. There is in romantic
circumstances later poignantly recalled in prose and verse, and he first met the
rector’s vivacious sister-in-law, Emma Lavinia Gifford, who became his wife
four years later. She actively encouraged and assisted him in his literary
endeavours, and his next novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), drew heavily upon
the circumstances of their courtship for its wild Cornish setting and its
melodramatic story of a young woman (somewhat resembling Emma Gifford)
and the two men, friends become rivals, who successively pursue,
misunderstand, and fail her.
Hardy’s break with architecture occurred in the summer of 1872, when he
undertook to supply Tinsley’s Magazine with the 11 monthly installments of A
Pair of Blue Eyes, an initially risky commitment to a literary career that was soon
validated by an invitation to contribute a serial to the far more
prestigious Cornhill Magazine. The resulting novel, Far from the Madding
Crowd (1874), introduced Wessex for the first time and made Hardy famous by
its agricultural settings and its distinctive blend of humorous, melodramatic,
pastoral, and tragic elements. The book is a vigorous portrayal of the beautiful
and impulsive Bathsheba Everdene and her marital choices among Sergeant Troy,
the dashing but irresponsible soldier; William Boldwood, the deeply obsessive
farmer; and Gabriel Oak, her loyal and resourceful shepherd.
The closing phase of Hardy’s career in fiction was marked by the
publication of Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) and Jude the
Obscure (1895), which are generally considered his finest novels.
Though Tess is the most richly “poetic” of Hardy’s novels,
and Jude the most bleakly written, both books offer deeply
sympathetic representations of working-class figures: Tess
Durbeyfield, the erring milkmaid, and Jude Fawley, the studious
stonemason. In powerful, implicitly moralized narratives, Hardy
traces these characters’ initially hopeful, momentarily ecstatic, but
persistently troubled journeys toward eventual deprivation and
death.
Though technically belonging to the 19th century, these novels anticipate
the 20th century in regard to the nature and treatment of their subject
matter. Tess profoundly questions society’s sexual mores by its
compassionate portrayal and even advocacy of a heroine who is seduced,
and perhaps raped, by the son of her employer. She has an illegitimate
child, suffers rejection by the man she loves and marries, and is finally
hanged for murdering her original seducer. In Jude the Obscure the class-
ridden educational system of the day is challenged by the defeat of Jude’s
earnest aspirations to knowledge, while conventional morality is
affronted by the way in which the sympathetically presented Jude and
Sue change partners, live together, and have children with little regard for
the institution of marriage. Both books encountered some brutally hostile
reviews, and Hardy’s sensitivity to such attacks partly precipitated his
long-contemplated transition from fiction to poetry.A
Hardy seems always to have rated poetry above fiction, and Wessex
Poems (1898), his first significant public appearance as a poet, included verse
written during his years as a novelist as well as revised versions of poems dating
from the 1860s. As a collection it was often perceived as miscellaneous and
uneven—an impression reinforced by the author’s own idiosyncratic
illustrations—and acceptance of Hardy’s verse was slowed, then and later, by the
persistence of his reputation as a novelist. Poems of the Past and the
Present (1901) contained nearly twice as many poems as its predecessor, most of
them newly written. Some of the poems are explicitly or implicitly grouped by
subject or theme. There are, for example, 11 “War Poems” prompted by the
South African War (e.g., “Drummer
Hodge,” “The Souls of the Slain”) and a sequence of disenchantedly
“philosophical” poems (e.g., “The Mother Mourns,” “The Subalterns,”
“To an Unborn Pauper Child”). In Time’s Laughingstocks (1909), the
poems are again arranged under headings, but on principles that often
remain elusive. Indeed, there is no clear line of development in Hardy’s
poetry from immaturity to maturity; his style undergoes no significant
change over time. His best poems can be found mixed together with
inferior verse in any particular volume, and new poems are often
juxtaposed to reworkings of poems written or drafted years before. The
range of poems within any particular volume is also extremely broad—
from lyric to meditation to ballad to satirical vignette to dramatic
monologue or dialogue—and Hardy persistently experiments with
different, often invented, stanza forms and metres.
In 1903, 1905, and 1908 Hardy successively published the three
volumes of The Dynasts, a huge poetic drama that is written mostly in
blank verse and subtitled “an epic-drama of the War with Napoleon”—
though it was not intended for actual performance. The sequence of
major historical events—Trafalgar, Austerlitz, Waterloo, and so on—is
diversified by prose episodes involving ordinary soldiers and civilians
and by an ongoing cosmic commentary from such personified
“Intelligences” as the “Spirit of the Years” and the “Spirit of the Pities.”
Hardy, who once described his poems as a “series of seemings” rather
than expressions of a single consistent viewpoint, found in the
contrasted moral and philosophical positions of the various Intelligences
a means of articulating his own intellectual ambiguities.
The Dynasts as a whole served to project his central vision of a
universe governed by the purposeless movements of a blind,
unconscious force that he called the Immanent Will. Though
subsequent criticism has tended to find its structures
cumbersome and its verse inert, The Dynasts remains an
impressive—and highly readable—achievement, and its
publication certainly reinforced both Hardy’s “national” image
(he was appointed to the Order of Merit in 1910) and his
enormous fame worldwide.

The sudden death of Emma Hardy in 1912 brought to an end some 20

years of domestic estrangement. It also stirred Hardy to profundities of
regret and remorse and to the composition of “After a Journey,” “The
Voice,” and the other “Poems of 1912–13,”
which are by general consent regarded as the peak of his poetic
achievement. In 1914 Hardy married Florence Emily Dugdale,
who was 38 years his junior. While his second wife sometimes
found her situation difficult—as when the inclusion of “Poems of
1912–13” in the collection Satires of Circumstance (1914)
publicly proclaimed her husband’s continuing devotion to her
predecessor—her attention to Hardy’s health, comfort, and privacy
made a crucial contribution to his remarkable productivity in old
age. Late in his eighth decade he published a fifth volume of
verse, Moments of Vision (1917), and wrote in secret an official
“life” of himself for posthumous publication under the name of his
widow. In his ninth decade Hardy published two more poetry
collections, Late Lyrics and Earlier (1922) and Human
Shows (1925), and put together the posthumously
published Winter Words (1928).
Following his death, on January 11, 1928, his cremated remains were
interred with national pomp in Westminster Abbey, while his separated heart
was buried in the churchyard of his native parish.
The continuing popularity of Hardy’s novels owes much to their richly varied yet
always accessible style and their combination of romantic plots with
convincingly presented characters. Equally important—particularly in terms of
their suitability to film and television adaptation—is their nostalgic evocation of
a vanished rural world through the creation of highly particularized regional
settings. Hardy’s verse has been slower to win full acceptance, but his unique
status as a major 20th-century poet as well as a major 19th-century novelist is
now universally recognized.
Born Virginia Stephen, she was the child of ideal Victorian parents. Her
father, Leslie Stephen, was an eminent literary figure and the first editor (1882–
91) of the Dictionary of National Biography. Her mother, Julia Jackson,
possessed great beauty and a reputation for saintly self-sacrifice; she also had
prominent social and artistic connections, which included Julia Margaret
Cameron, her aunt and one of the greatest portrait photographers of the 19th
century. Both Julia Jackson’s first husband, Herbert Duckworth, and Leslie’s first
wife, a daughter of the novelist William Makepeace Thackeray, had died
unexpectedly, leaving her three children and him one. Julia Jackson Duckworth
and Leslie Stephen married in 1878, and four children
followed: Vanessa (born 1879), Thoby (born 1880), Virginia (born 1882), and Adrian
(born 1883). While these four children banded together against their older half siblings,
loyalties shifted among them. Virginia was jealous of Adrian for being their mother’s
favourite. At age nine, she was the genius behind a family newspaper, the Hyde Park
Gate News, that often teased Vanessa and Adrian. Vanessa mothered the others,
especially Virginia, but the dynamic between need (Virginia’s) and aloofness
(Vanessa’s) sometimes expressed itself as rivalry between Virginia’s art of writing and
Vanessa’s of painting.
The Stephen family made summer migrations from their London town house
near Kensington Gardens to the rather disheveled Talland House on the
rugged Cornwall coast. That annual relocation structured Virginia’s childhood world in
terms of opposites: city and country, winter and summer, repression
and freedom, fragmentation and wholeness. Her neatly divided,
predictable world ended, however, when her mother died in 1895 at age
49. Virginia, at 13, ceased writing amusing accounts of family news.
Almost a year passed before she wrote a cheerful letter to her brother
Thoby. She was just emerging from depression when, in 1897, her half
sister Stella Duckworth died at age 28, an event Virginia noted in her
diary as “impossible to write of.” Then in 1904, after her father died,
Virginia had a nervous breakdown.
Two of Virginia Woolf's novels in particular, Mrs.
Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), successfully
follow the latter approach. The first novel covers a day in the life
of Mrs. Dalloway in postwar London; it achieves its vision of
reality through the reception by Mrs. Dalloway's mind of what
Virginia Woolf called those "myriad impressions-trivial, fantastic,
evanescent [vanishing], or engraved with the sharpness of steel."
To the Lighthouse is, in a sense, a family portrait and history rendered in
subjective (characterized by personal views) depth through selected
points in time. Part I deals with the time between six o'clock in the
evening and dinner. Primarily through the consciousness of Mrs.
Ramsay, it presents the clash of the male and female sensibilities in the
family; Mrs. Ramsay functions as a means of balance and settling
disputes. Part II is a moving section of loss during the interval between
Mrs. Ramsay's death and the family's revisit to the house. Part III moves
toward completion of this complex portrait through the adding of a last
detail to a painting by an artist guest, Lily Briscoe, and through the final
completion of a plan, rejected by the father in Part I, for him and the
children to sail out to the lighthouse.
Virginia Woolf was the author of about fifteen books, the last, A Writer's
Diary, posthumously (after death) published in 1953. Her death by drowning in
Lewes, Sussex, England, on March 28, 1941, has often been regarded as a
suicide brought on by the unbearable strains of life during World War II (1939–
45; a war fought between the Axis powers: Japan, Italy, and Germany—and the
Allies: France, England, the Soviet Union, and the United States). The true
explanation seems to be that she had regularly felt symptoms of a mental
breakdown and feared it would be permanent.
Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Jacob's Room (1922) represent Virginia
Woolf's major achievements. The Voyage Out (1915) first brought her critical
attention. Night and Day (1919) is traditional in method. The short stories
of Monday or Tuesday (1921) brought critical praise. In The Waves (1931) she
masterfully employed the stream-of-consciousness technique which stresses "free
writing." Other experimental novels include Orlando (1928), The Years (1937),
and Between the Acts (1941). Virginia Woolf's championship of women's rights is
reflected in the essays in A Room of One's Own (1929) and in Three
Guineas (1938).
JACQUES DERRIDA,
TED HUGHES, EMILY
DICKINSON
JACQUES DERRIDA

 Name: Jackie Élie Derrida (July 15, 1930 – October 9, 2004)

 Born in Algeria
 A French philosopher best known for developing a form of semiotic
analysis known as deconstruction, which he analyzed in numerous
texts, and developed in the context of phenomenology.
 He is one of the major figures associated with post-structuralism and
postmodern philosophy.
 During his career Derrida published more than 40 books, together
with hundreds of essays and public presentations.
 He had a significant influence on the humanities and social
sciences, including philosophy, literature, law, anthropology,
historiography, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, psychoanalysis
and political theory.
Of Grammatology

 Derrida argues that throughout the Western philosophical tradition,

writing has been considered as merely a derivative form of speech,
and thus as a "fall" from the "full presence" of speech. In the course
of the work he deconstructs this position as it appears in the work of
several writers, showing the myriad aporias and ellipses to which this
leads them. Derrida does not claim to be giving a critique of the
work of these thinkers, because he does not believe it possible to
escape from operating with such oppositions. Nevertheless, he calls
for a new science of "grammatology" that would relate to such
questions in a new way.
 Of Grammatology introduced many of the concepts in relation to
linguistics and writing.
Speech and Phenomena

 Speech and Phenomena: And Other Essays on Husserl's Theory of

Signs, or Voice and Phenomenon: Introduction to the Problem of the
Sign in Husserl's Phenomenology, is a book about the
phenomenology of Edmund Husserl.
 Derrida articulates his mature relationship to Husserl, putting forward
an argument concerning Husserl's phenomenological project as a
whole in relation to a key distinction in Husserl's theory of language
in the Logical Investigations (1900–1901) and how this distinction
relates to his description of internal time consciousness. He discusses
the terms deconstruction and différance. He commented that
Speech and Phenomena is the "essay I value the most".
Writing and Difference

 In "Violence and Metaphysics," Derrida comments on the writings of

Emmanuel Levinas. He honors Levinas for his ethical philosophy of
openness to the Other. He says that to live for the Other is the
highest good. But he claims that only face-to-face interaction can
be ethical. Whereas Levinas sees written communication as dead
and unresponsive, Derrida argues that writing can be just as
valuable a space for ethical encounter.
 The Structuralist Controversy is Included in his 1966 lecture at Johns
Hopkins University, which changed the course of the conference
leading it to be renamed The Structuralist Controversy, and caused
Derrida to receive his first major attention outside France. The
lecture is titled Structure, Sign, and Play in the Discourse of the
Human Sciences.
TED HUGHES

 Alternative Title: Edward James Hughes

 born August 17, 1930, Mytholmroyd, Yorkshire, England—died
October 28, 1998, London, English poet whose most characteristic
verse is without sentimentality, emphasizing the cunning and
savagery of animal life in harsh, sometimes disjunctive lines
The Hawk in the Rain

 The Hawk in the Rain is a collection of poems by the British poet Ted
Hughes. Published in 1957, it was Hughes's first book of poetry. The
book received immediate acclaim in both England and America,
where it won the Galbraith Prize. Many of the book's poems imagine
the real and symbolic lives of animals, including a fox, a jaguar, and
the eponymous hawk. Other poems focus on erotic relationships,
and on stories of the First World War, Hughes's father being a survivor
of Gallipoli.
Crow: From the Life and Songs of
the Crow
 Neil Roberts said:
“Crow holds a uniquely important place in Hughes [sic] oeuvre. It heralds
the ambitious second phase of his work, lasting roughly from the late sixties
to the late seventies, when he turned from direct engagement with the
natural world to unified mythical narratives and sequences. It was his most
controversial work: a stylistic experiment which abandoned many of the
attractive features of his earlier work, and an ideological challenge to
both Christianity and humanism. Hughes wrote Crow, mostly between 1966
and 1969, after a barren period following the death of Sylvia Plath.”
 About the character Crow, which borrows extensively from many world
mythologies, notably both trickster and Christian mythology. A central
core group of poems in the work can be seen as an attack on
Christianity. The first Crow poems were written in response to a request
by American artist, Leonard Baskin, who had at the time produced
several pen and ink drawings of crows.
Remains of Elmet

 Remains of Elmet is a collection of poems by Ted Hughes published

in 1979. In this book Hughes has poetically covered the region of
Elmet.
 The book contains black and white photographs by Fay Godwin,
taken in the barren hill country of West Yorkshire, Hughes's
birthplace.
 The book was re-published by Faber and Faber in 1994, re-titled as
Elmet, with a third of the book comprising additional new poems
and photographs.
Tales from Ovid

 Professor James Shapiro, writing for the New York Times, said of the
book: "In transforming Ovid, Hughes follows a well-traveled path.
Even as Ovid himself pillaged Greek and Roman mythologies in
composing his Metamorphoses Chaucer, Milton, Dryden and
especially Shakespeare ransacked Ovid's stories to furnish their own
artistic worlds. Hughes makes clear his admiration for the gift that
Shakespeare shares with Ovid: insight into what a passion feels like
to one possessed by it. Not just ordinary passion either, but human
passion in extremis -- passion where it combusts, or levitates, or
mutates into an experience of the supernatural… Hughes, too, is
blessed with this gift, and this book brilliantly succeeds at bringing
Ovid's passionate and disturbing stories to life. One of the many
pleasures offered by this splendid book is discovering that the sweet
witty soul of Ovid now lives in Ted Hughes."
The Dreamfighter and Other
Creation Tales (Short Story)
 The tales, both imaginative and humorous, are reminiscent of Kipling’s
Just So Stories and Aesop’s Fables, in so far that they use animals to
show human vices, such as selfishness, meanness, or vanity amongst
others. The Creation Tales feature a very human kind of God, one who
next to his successes also makes a few mistakes along the way. The
eleven stories tell the different ways in which his creatures come to be:
Owl, Whale, Fox, Polar Bear, Hyena, Tortoise, Bee, Cat, Donkey, Hare
and Elephant. Amongst these tales, perhaps the most memorable are
“How the Whale Became”, which tells of how the Whale grew up in
God’s vegetable patch but was banished to the sea when he became
too large and the haunting tale of “How the Bee Became”, where we
learn that Bee is made through the precious gems and tears of the
demon and as a result must fly from flower to flower, seeking sweetness
to overcome the bitter demon that runs through his veins.
EMILY DICKINSON(December 10,
1830 – May 15, 1886)
 American poet
 Emily Dickinson wrote about what she knew and about what
intrigued her. A keen observer, she used images from nature,
religion, law, music, commerce, medicine, fashion, and domestic
activities to probe universal themes: the wonders of nature, the
identity of the self, death and immortality, and love. In this poem she
probes nature’s mysteries through the lens of the rising and setting
sun.
 Sometimes with humor, sometimes with pathos, Dickinson writes
about her subjects. Remembering that she had a strong wit often
helps to discern the tone behind her words.
Success is counted sweetest (1859)

 Omni-disciplinary writer Joyce Carol Oates called Dickinson, one of

her literary idols, the “poet of paradox.” This poem makes it clear
how she earned that title. Victory, it argues, can only be grasped by
the losers.
 Using militaristic imagery, the poem observes, in Dickinson’s usual
unsentimental manner, that life is often a zero-sum game: success
for one person tends to come at the expense of someone else. A
relatively early work, it was one of her only poems to be published in
her lifetime — anonymously, of course.
I'm nobody! Who are you? (1861)

 This crowd-pleasing verse shows off the poet’s playful side. It’s proof
that Dickinson’s insights on human psychology aren’t limited to
heavy topics like grief, doubt, and the fear of death. Here, her
speaker winkingly draws the reader into a friendly conspiracy of
anonymity.
 There’s a delightful hint of satire here — Dickinson strips public figures
of their dignity by comparing them to croaking frogs
“Hope” is the thing with feathers
(1861)
 With its sweet message and singable rhythm, this tribute to hope is
arguably Dickinson’s best-known work. Prettier and somewhat more
palatable than many of her later meditations on pain and death, it
appears on plenty of greeting cards and posters you can buy
online.
 The poem spins out a straightforward extended metaphor: hope as
a bird — selfless, persistent, and warm. Rendered with a feather-light
touch, this imagery sticks in the brain because it rings true and gives
the reader, well, hope.
I felt a Funeral, in my Brain (1861)

 Opaque and viscerally disturbing, this poem combines funerary

imagery and a forensic examination of psychological turmoil. The
speaker, though suffering, remains keenly self-aware, observing their
own pain with blade-sharp insight.
 This funeral in the brain eludes easy decoding. It could signify the
death of reason — a plunging into madness — but indicates
repression, a killing off of some part deep within the self. The poem
makes jarring use of sound — beating, creaking, tolling — to convey
the speaker’s declining mental state.
There’s a certain Slant of light
(1861)
 The beautifully crafted poem speaks to anyone who feels a little out
of sorts when the days start getting shorter. It offers a somber
meditation on the emotional weight of time’s passing, suffused with
typical Dickinsonian images of light and faith. Here they take on a
melancholy cast, as the poem reflects on three kinds of ending:
winter, the closing of the year; later afternoon, the fading of the
daylight, and finally, Death.
 The poem implicitly juxtaposes the permanence of religious truth
against the tendency of the natural — and human — world toward
fading and flux. It’s the distance between these that hurts, as the
chill winter light slants across a landscape of anticipated decay.
I dwell in Possibility (1862)

 One of literature’s most celebrated homebodies, Dickinson pulls

from an architectural lexicon the language of chambers and
gambrels, windows and doors to express the boundlessness of
imagination. Set against Prose, Possibility stands in a metonymic
relation to poetry: it’s poetry that gives the speaker her feeling of
sky-span limitlessness.
 Like much of Dickinson’s work, this poem relies on paradox. Its
imagery turns on the notion of a cozy infinity, a delimited
endlessness. A house can be a universe, a roof is the open air, and
“narrow” hands spread “wide” to bring in all of “Paradise”.
I heard a Fly buzz– when I died
(1862)
 This death poem treads some of Dickinson’s favorite thematic
ground, but with a considerably more caustic wit than many of her
other pieces.
 Compared to some of her other works, this piece presents death in
a way that feels irreverent, almost slapstick. Dying is a succession of
distinctly undignified details: dimming vision, buzzing fly, and cried-
out mourners waiting for the will to be ironed out.
 This is a calm and canny corpse, reflecting on its own condition with
characteristic Dickinsonian detachment. But it’s not headed to
eternity or transcendence, it’s bound for the dirt of the grave.
After great pain, a formal feeling
comes (1862)
 This poem demonstrates her affinity for psychological realism and
her unparalleled skill at rendering the nuances of difficult emotions.
With crystalline diction and finely faceted detail, the poem
describes not grief, but the numb disorientation that follows it.
 It pays unflinching attention to the physicality of feeling what pain of
the psyche does to the benumbed body, rendered in the coldly
tactile language of lead, quartz, and snow. The poem also
succinctly captures the weird temporality of grief how it plays tricks
on memory, how it knocks time askew.
Because I could not stop for Death
(1863)
 This balladic piece shows off the poet’s chops as a storyteller, set to
music by both classical and folk artists. The poem narrates a soul’s
passage into death and the eternal thereafter.
 Despite shivering in her thin clothes, Dickinson’s dying woman faces
her own demise with a clear-eyed fearlessness that shades into
passivity: though full of keen observations, she asks no questions and
makes no demands.
 Death, personified as a country gentleman, is notable for his slow
carriage and courteous manners. According to the Dickinson
biographer Thomas H. Johnson, this polite and trustworthy Death
deserves to be seen as “one of the great characters of literature
Charles Dickens
 His life
• Charles Dickens, in full Charles John Huffam Dickens
• Born on February 7, 1812
• English novelist
• Generally considered the greatest of the Victorian era
• He enjoyed a wider popularity during his lifetime than had any
previous author
• The most abundantly comic of English authors
 His writing style
• Charles Dickens has a very distinct writing style
• He writes in a poetic way
• He uses a lot of satire and consequently humor
• He uses idealized characters in his books
• He loves to employ incredible circumstances in his books
 His works
• "Bleak House"
• "David Copperfield"
• "Great expectations"
• "Oliver twist"
• "Dombey and son"
• "A Tale of Two Cities"
• "Little Dorrit"
• "A christmas Carol"
• "The Mystery of Edwin Drood"
• "Hard Times"
 His Quotes
• A loving heart is the truest wisdom.
• No one is useless in this world who lightens the burdens of another.
• Life is made of ever so many partings welded together.
Thomas Hardy
 His life
• Born on June 2, 1840
• English novelist and poet
• Set much of his work in Wessex
• She actively encouraged and assisted him in his literary endeavours
• He was influenced both in his novels and in his poetry by
Romanticism
• He was highly critical of much in Victorian society
 His writing style
• He was an unorthodox short-story teller
• He wrote totally 53 short stories
• He wrote 9 Novels
• His was essentially a pastoral voice
• One of the best representatives of his age as a novelist
• His representation of the essential human conditions is outstanding.
 His Works
• Tess of the D'Urbervilles
• Jude the Obscure
• The Return of the Native
• The woodlanders
• Far From the Madding Crowd
• The Dynasts
• The Mayor of Casterbridge
• Wessex poems
 Hardy and Wessex
• Uses the name ‘Wessex’ for the first time in chapter 50 of Far from the
Madding Crowd
• It was the name for the Anglo-Saxon kingdom
• Wessex functions as an imagined place
• Based on a real region with actual places which Hardy knew well and
observed closely
• Books that could be marketed under the Hardy brand of "Wessex
novels" were particularly lucrative
Jane Austen
 His life
• Born on December 16, 1775
• He was an English novelist
• Her works critique the novels of sensibility
• Austen has inspired many critical essays and literary anthologies
• The remainder of her education came from reading
 Her writing style
• She uses parody and burlesque for comic effect
• She often creates an ironic tone through free indirect speech
• Her plots are fundamentally about education
• Austen's novels have variously been described as politically
conservative and progressive
• Irony is one of Austen's most characteristic and most discussed literary
techniques
 Her Works
• "Emma"
• "Pride and Prejudice"
• "Sense and Sensibility"
• "Northanger Abbey"
• "Persuasion"
• "Mansfield Park"
• "Lady Susan"
 More about Her
• Sense and Sensibility tells the story of the impoverished Dashwood
sisters
• Pride and Prejudice describes the clash between Elizabeth Bennet
and a rich and aristocratic landowner
• Northanger Abbey combines a satire on conventional novels of polite
society with one on Gothic tales of terror
• Of all Austen’s novels, Emma is the most consistently comic in tone.
It centres on Emma Woodhouse
Sylvia Plath
 Her Life
• Sylvia Plath, pseudonym Victoria Lucas
• Born on October 27, 1932
• American poet, novelist, and short-story writer
• Plath published her first poem at age eight
• She entered and won many literary contests
• She is credited with advancing the genre of confessional poetry
 Her Writing Style
• Plath used a powerful, intensely emotional autobiographical approach
in her work
• One of her most famous poems was "Daddy,"
• Her several other poems explore her conflicted relationship with her
father
• She wrote with great speed, producing poems of stark self-revelation
and confession
 Her Works
• "The Bell Jar"
• "Ariel"
• "Daddy"
• "Winter Trees"
• "Crossing the Water"
• "The Collected Poems"
• "Lady Lazarus"
• "Mary Ventura and the Ninth Kingdom"
• "Johnny Panic and the Bible of Dreams"
 Her Awards and Quotes
• She won Pulitzer Prize in 1982
• Dying
• Is an art, like everything else.
• I do it exceptionally well
• I am terrified by this dark thing that sleeps in me
• I wanted to be where nobody I knew could ever come
EMERSON AND SHAW
Ralph Waldo Emerson
 Emerson's Life
• Born on May 25, 1803 in U.S
• American lecturer, poet, and essayist
• Great philosopher and abolitionist
• The leading exponent of New England Transcendentalism
• He was seen as a champion of individualism
• A prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society
 Emerson's writing style

• Wrote a poetic prose, ordering his essays by recurring themes and images.

• His poetry is often called harsh and didactic

• He was a steady optimist

• A believer in the "divine sufficiency of the individual,"

• His concepts owe much to the works of Plotinus, Swedenborg, and Bohme.
 Emerson's Works
• "Self-Reliance"
• "Representative Men"
• "Essays"
• "Poems"
• "Address at Divinity College"
• "The Conduct of Life"
• "Nature"
• "English Traits"
• "The American Scholar"
 Emerson's Awards and Quotes

• He won Hall of Fame for Great Americans(1900)

• Live in the sunshine, swim the sea, drink the wild air.

• What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared

to what lies within us.

George Bernard Shaw
 Bernard Shaw's Life

• Born on 26th July, 1856 in Ireland

• Irish comic dramatist, literary critic, and socialist propagandist

• Grew up in an atmosphere of genteel poverty

• Remained relatively impoverished throughout his 20s

• Famous for his role in revolutionizing comedic drama

• Developed a wide knowledge of music, art, and literature

 Bernard Shaw's Writing Style

• His work is often comedic and clever

• Continuously engages his audience intellectually

• Provides stimulating dialogue and plot lines

• They are also heavy with monologues

• Characters often engage with each other in intellectual debates

• He seeks, not just to entertain, but also to educate

 Bernard Shaw's Works
• Pygmalion
• Mrs. Warren’s Profession
• Arms and the Man
• Saint John
• Heartbreak House
• Major Barbara
• Caesar and Cleopatra
• Man and Superman
• The Doctor’s Dilemma
• Androcles and the Lion
 Bernard Shaw's "PYGMALION"
• Written in 1912 and first staged in English in 1914
• Named after a Greek mythological figure
• The play was well received by critics in major cities
• There are two main versions of the play in circulation.(earlier and later
version)
• It is not a tragedy but rather a comedy of manners.
• Themes include
• Language and Speech
• Appearance and Identity
• Social Class and Manners
• Education and Intelligence
• Feminity and Gender Roles
 Bernard Shaw's Awards and Quotes

• He Won Academy Award (1939),Nobel Prize (1925)

• Life isn't about finding yourself. Life is about creating yourself.

• You use a glass mirror to see your face, you use works of art to see

your soul
African Literature
What is African Literature

African Literature is the body of traditional oral

and written literature in Afro-Asiatic and African
languages together with works written by Africans
in European languages.
Father of African Literature

Chinua Achebe, the Nigerian novelist seen by

millions as the father of African Literature. His first
novel Things Fall Apart is considered as a
masterpiece and most widely read book in
modern African Literature. He is also a poet,
professor and a critic, has died at the age of 82.
Types of African Literature

There are 4 types of African Literature

 Oral literature
 Precolonial African Literature
 Colonial African Literature
 Postcolonial literature
 Oral Literature- examples may be in the form of a prose, often mythological
or historical and can include tales of the trickster character or a verse.
 Precolonial Literature- There are many examples such as the Kebea Negast,
or “Book of Kings.” They include animal tricksters like Anansi, a spider in the
folklore of the Ashanti people of Ghana; a tortoise in Yoruba folklore of
Nigeria; and Sungura, a hard found in central and East African folklore.
 Colonial African Literature- This was the time between the end of world war
1 and independence. African Literature increasingly showed themes of
liberation, independence, and (among Africans in French-controlled
territories)negritude.
 Postcolonial African Literature- African writers in this period wrote both in
Western languages (mainly English, French, and Portuguese) and in
traditional African languages such as Hausa.
Themes of African Literature

 The clash between Africa’s past and present

 Between tradition and modernity
 Between indegineous and foreign
 Between individualism and community
 Between Socialism and captilalism
 Between development and self-reliance and
 Between Africanity and humanity
Famous writers in African Literature

 Chinua Achebe
 Nadine Gordimer
 Buchi Emecheta
 Nelson Mandela
 Alan Paton
 Ayi Kwei Armah
 Nuruddin Farah
Why African Literature is important

 It increases our social Consciousness, and raises

awareness of social, political, and economic crises that
the African continent is facing. It is an opportunity to
hear the voices of African people rather than just about
the stories about Africa as written by visitors
 It is an essential component understanding a
geographical local and history of that area.
Famous works in African Literature

 Things Fall Apart, A man of the people– Chinua Achebe

 Half of a Yellow Sun, Purple Hibiscus, Americanah– Chimamanda Ngozi
Adichie
 Kizungumkuti, Huba, Fungate – Fadhy Mtanga
 The Mythical Father, Lost- Christopher Zacharia Lameck
 Everything Good Will come- Sefi Atta
 Open City – Teji Cole
AUSTRALIAN
LITERATURE
INTRODUCION AND IT’S ORIGIN:

• Australian literature is a literary work produced by the people of the Commonwealth of

Australia. During its early Western history, Australia was a collection of British colonies,
therefore, the literary tradition begins with and is linked to the tradition of English
literature.
• Australian literature exploring such themes as Aboriginality, mateship, egalitarianism,
democracy, national identity, migration, Australia’s unique location and geography, the
complexities of urban living.
NOVELIST OF CLASSIC AUSTRALIAN WORKS:

• Marcus Clarke - For the Term of His In terms of children’s literature,

Natural Life
• Norman Lindsay - The Magic Pudding
• Miles Franklin - My Brilliant Career
• Mem Fox - Possum Magic
• Henry Handel Richardson - The
• May Gibbs - Snugglepot and Cuddlepie
Fortunes of Richard Mahony
• Joseph Furphy - Such Is Life
• Rolf Boldrewood - Robbery Under Arms
• Ruth Park - The Harp in the South
ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER
WRITERS AND THEMES
• James Unaipon (1835-1907), contributed to accounts of Aboriginal mythology written
by the missionary George Taplin.
• David Unaipon (1872–1967) provided the first accounts of Aboriginal mythology
written by an Aboriginal: Legendary Tales of the Aborigines.
• Oodgeroo Noonuccal (1920–1993) was a famous aboriginal poet, publishing the first
Aboriginal book of verse: We Are Going (1964).
• Sally Morgan’s novel My Place was considered a breakthrough memoir in terms of
bringing indigenous stories to wider notice.
INDIGENOUS AUTHORS

• The voices of Indigenous Australians are being increasingly noticed and include the
playwright Jack Davis and Kevin Gilbert.
• Indigenous authors who have won Australia’s high prestige Miles Franklin Award
include Kim Scott who was joint winner in 2000 for Benang and again in 2011 for That
Deadman Dance.
• Alexis Wright won the award in 2007 for her novel Carpentaria.
• Melissa Lucashenko won the award in 2019 for her novel Too Much Lip, which was also
short-listed for the Stella Prize for Australian women’s writing.
 EARLY AND CLASSIC WORKS:

• Before the British settlement of Australia, European writers wrote fictional accounts of
an imaginings of a Great Southern Land.
• Later, the British satirist, Jonathan Swift, set the land of the Houyhnhnms of Gulliver’s
Travels to the west of Tasmania.
• The first novel to be published in Australia was a crime novel, Quintus Servinton: A Tale
founded upon Incidents of Real Occurrence by Henry Savery published in Hobart in 1830.
EARLY WORKS:

• Rolf Boldrewood - Robbery Under Arms

• Marcus Clarke - For the Term of His Natural Life
• Henry Handel Richardson - The Fortunes of Richard Mahony
• Joseph Furphy - Such Is Life
• In 1838 The Guardian: a tale by Anna Maria Bunn was the first Australian novel printed
and published in mainland Australia and the first Australian novel written by a woman. It is
a Gothic romance.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE

• Ethel Turner’s Seven Little Australians, which relates the adventures of seven mischievous
children in Sydney.
• The Getting of Wisdom (1910) by Henry Handel Richardson, about an unconventional
schoolgirl in Melbourne.
• Dorothy Wall’s Blinky Bill, Ethel Pedley’s Dot and the Kangaroo, May Gibbs’ Snugglepot
and Cuddlepie, Norman Lindsay’s The Magic Pudding, Ruth Park’s The Muddleheaded
Wombat and Mem Fox’s Possum Magic. These classic works employ anthropomorphism
to bring alive the creatures of the Australian.
CHILDREN’S LITERATURE:

• The world’s richest prize in children’s literature has been received by two Ausans, Sonya
Hartnett, who won the 2008 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award and Shaun Tan,
who won in 2011.
• Paul Jennings is a prolific writer of contemporary Australian fiction for young people
whose career began with collections of short stories such as Unreal! (1985) and
Unbelievable! (1987).
EXPATRIATE AUTHORS:

• Clive James, Robert Hughes, Barry Humphries, Geoffrey Robertson and

Germaine Greer these writers had links to the Sydney Push intellectual sub-culture in
Sydney from the late 1940s to the early 1970s.
• Robert Hughes The Art of Australia (1966) and The Fatal Shore (1987).
• Leading feminist Germaine Greer, author of The Female Eunuch, has spent much of her
career in England but continues to study, critique, condemn and adore her homeland.
HISTORY:

• History has been an important discipline in the development of Australian writing.

• Robert Hughes and Thomas Keneally to be essential reading for the early history of
Australia.
• A significant milestone was the historian Manning Clark’s six volume History of Australia,
which is regarded by some as the definitive account of the nation.
• Geoffrey Blainey stands as another to have deeply influenced Australian historiography.
His important works include The Tyranny of Distance (1966) and Triumph of the Nomads: A
History of Ancient Australia (1975).
POETRY:

• The first poet to be published in Australia was Michael Massey Robinson whose odes
appeared in The Sydney Gazette. Charles Harpur and Henry Kendall were the first
poeballads. ny consequence.
• Australia was blessed with a competing, vibrant tradition of folk songs and ballads. Henry
Lawson and Banjo Paterson were two of the chief exponents of these popular ballads.
• Prominent Australian poets of the 20th century include Dame Mary Gilmore, A. D. Hope,
Judith Wright, Gwen Harwood, Kenneth Slessor, Les Murray, Bruce Dawe and more
recently Robert Gray, John Forbes, John Tranter, John Kinsella and Judith Beveridge.
PLAYS:

• The Recruiting Officer by George Farquhar.

• Our Country’s Good by Timberlake Wertenbaker.
• Summer of the Seventeenth Doll by Ray Lawler.
• David Williamson is Australia’s best known playwright, with major works including: The
Club, Emerald City, and Brilliant Lies.
• The One Day of the Year by Alan Seymour.
These are some of the notable works of Australian literature.
SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY:

Australia, does not have a long history in the genre of science fiction.
• Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, was perhaps the first notable international success.
• Various compilation magazines began appearing in the 1960s and the field has continued
to expand into some significance.
• Today Australia has a thriving Science Fiction and lFantasy genre with names recognised
around the world.
• In 2013 a trilogy by Sydney-born Ben Peek was sold at auction to a UK publisher for a
six-figure deal .
LITERARY JOURNALS:

• The first periodical that could be called a literary journal in Australia was The Australian Magazine (June
1821 – May 1822).
• Most recent Australian literary journals have originated from universities, and specifically English or
Communications departments. They include:
• Meanjin
• Overaland
• HEAT
• Southerly
• Westerly
CRIME:

• The most crime fiction books written by Kerry Greenwood, Shane Maloney, Peter
Temple, Barry Maitland, Arthur Upfield and Peter Corris.
• Helen Garner’s The First Stone, Joe Cinque’s Consolation and This House of Grief each of
Garner’s works incorporates the style reminiscent of a fictional narrative novel, a stylistic
device known as the non-fiction novel.
• Chloe Hooper published The Tall Man: Death and Life on Palm Island in 2008.
• Australian literature is not necessarily set in Australia or explicitly about Australia or
Australians, but it reflects upon, explores, celebrates or grieves over human experience
through stories which are informed and influenced by deep and long-lasting experience
of Australian culture, geography, landscape and climate.
R.K. Narayan
Born the 10th of October 1906 in Madras, he spent his early childhood there with his maternal grandmother,
as his father was a headmaster who was in need to transfer from one place to another, the love and care of
his grandma filled him with all joy and happiness, studying for eight years at Lutheran Mission School and
the CRC High School he would go on to obtain his bachelor’s degree from the University of Mysore and
began his career in his father’s footsteps as a school teacher, later quitting when the headmaster asked him to
work as a physical training master instead. He was drawn to writing and would contribute to a few English
magazines and newspapers before starting his own publishing company. The year 1935 saw him begin his
writing career with Swami and friends set in the fictional town of Malgudi which would later be turned into
one of more than India’s most cherished teddy serials.
Further Contributions and Achievements:

His other works are The Bachelor of Arts (1973), The Dark Room (1938), The English Teacher
(1945), Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), and the Man-eater of Malgudi (1961). He has
presented the Sahitya Akademi award for The Guide in 1958 which was later turned into the
Bollywood classic by the same name. He was conferred the Padma Bhushan in 1964 and
nominated to the Rajya Sabha in 1989.
Famous Books of RK Narayan

1. The English Teacher

2.Malgudi Days
3.The Guide
4.Waiting for the Mahatma
5.Swami and Friends’s The Bachelor of Arts and The Dark Room

Follow through “Malgudi days”:

•This is the synopsis of his most popular work Malgudi days which is a collection of short stories published in 1943 by
Indian Though Publications. The book was republished outside India in 1982 by Penguin Classics. The book includes 32
stories all set in the fictional town of Malgudi that is located in South India.
•It has a series of chronicles which talks about the life of people living in that beautiful town. The stories share the life of
everyone from entrepreneurs to beggars all takes place in and near Indian fictional village.
•Thus, the heart and the soul of that village are on display and we find it a place where most people are haunted by illiteracy
and unemployment. Despite the ubiquity of the poor many of the stories come across humorous and good-natured episodes
of their lives.
•Our Indian villages which are viewed as scarcity-ridden infested with extensive occupied by “good for nothing fellows”
have another side to them – they have a delight which no one can explain. This charm is depicted and presented in each of
the stories in this book.
•His story is so full of humanity and will invoke that part of ‘you’ which you have forgotten in this deplorable part called
Life.
The Guide:

It is a 1958 novel written in English by the Indian author R K Narayan. It is a philosophical novel that describes the transformation of
the protagonist, Raju, from a tour guide to a spiritual guide and then one of the greatest holy men of India. The title of the novel has
dual meaning, and Raju is in a sense a dual character. The novel also tells two stories, that of Raju’s relationship with the female
protagonist as a tourist guide and that of his connection with the villagers as a holy man. Raju played a sympathetic character
throughout the novel which brought more readers to involve and concentrate more on his role. As mentioned already, this is the one
novel that brought him the Sahitya Akademi award and also pride in his life and profession.

The English Teacher:

This book by R K Narayan was first published in 1945. This is an autobiographical book that the author dedicated to his wife Rajam.
The book is poignant, filled with the intensity of feeling with his magical words. The story revolves around Krishna, an English
teacher. It tells about his experiences and his quest for achieving inner peace and self-development. Looking into his works, The
English teacher is one of the most enormous creations with his attractive and enlightening thoughts that enhance the common man to
coincidence with his own life and attain the goal in their life.
The above mentioned three books of R K Narayan are most delighted contributions to the literary field which made him come out of
the surrounded circumstances and made his name popular all around the world. To be mentioned, his other works are not less
compared as all his books are more incorporated with the individual emotions and feelings making the people get into the fantasies of
his stories.
His admiring words:

Sometimes, life feels so heavy when no treatment works on us. It can be the time we feel alone even when surrounded by number of people;
it can be the time we feel depressed and cannot find the reason; it can be the time when we feel so upset that nothing more in right direction;
it can be the time when we feel to end our life for no ‘good reason’ and it will be time when famous saying and quotes of many people pop-
up in front of our eyes that give at least temporary relief to our bad mind-set. R K Narayan’s quotes also seem to be a medicine for many
people who are feeling down in their life. The deep meaning of his “Life is about making the right things and going on” quote improves the
quality of life to which it looks devastating with their mental status. By including “going on” he beautifully explained that life never stops at
any situation and we the one who needs to catch up with its forceful game.
.
His other sayings:

•The most admiring thinking is when he contributes his thought to give more importance to his profession and at that juncture, he said, “You
become a writer by writing. It is yoga”. This will give enthusiasm to people who took him as their role-model in becoming a writer. He
mentioned it as ‘yoga’ which tells that the field of writing involves rules and regulations and also to grab the success it needs to be practiced
continuously without having a break.
•He is the man who also gave significance to nature and considers it to be his child by quoting, “This is my child. I planted it. I saw it grow. I
loved it. Don’t cut it down”. When people come across this quote, we feel each plant is our child and it brings that sense of responsibility in
nurturing it as we take care of our child.
•People following in all his aspects know how he is more involved with the happenings of life and for this, he said, “Death and its
associates, after the initial shock, produce callousness”. He also said about friendship for life which is mentioned as “another illusion like
love”. He also expressed his views on society which became a forcing aspect in our life.
These are some of his quotes that gave importance to the overall development of human nature and by these sayings, he goes into the life of
each individual giving them the confidence to lead their path. He gives strength to people to struggle with the obstacles that evil brings into
their way and gives them the power to work on the solutions to overcome their penetrating failures.
Anita Desai
 Nationality: Indian.

Born: Anita Mazumbar, Mussoorie, 1937.

Education: Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School, New Delhi; Miranda House, University of Delhi, B.A. (honours) in English
literature 1957.

Career: Since 1963 writer; Purington Professor of English, Mount Holyoke College, 1988-93; professor of writing, Massachusetts
Institute of Technology, 1993—. Helen Cam Visiting Fellow, Girton College, Cambridge, 1986-87; Elizabeth Drew Professor, Smith
College, 1987-88; Ashby Fellow, Clare Hall, Cambridge, 1989. Since 1972 member of the Sahitya Academy English Board.

Awards: Royal Society of Literature Winifred Holtby prize, 1978; Sahitya Academy award, 1979; Guardian award, for children's book,
1982; Hadassah Magazine award, 1989; Tarak Nath Das award, 1989; Padma Sri award, 1989; Literary Lion Award, New York Public
Library, 1993. Fellow, Royal Society of Literature, 1978; Girton College, Cambridge, 1988; Clare Hall, Cambridge, 1991.
Early Life

Anita Desai was born on June 24, 1937, in the hill station of Mussoorie, Uttar Pradesh, India. She was
one of four children: she had a brother and two sisters, all raised in what was a British colony in their
youth. Desai's father D.N. Mazumdar was a Bengali engineer. Her mother, Toni Nimé, was German and
met Mazumdar in Germany, then emigrated to India in the 1920s. Desai has said that it was exposure to
her mother's European core that allowed her to experience India as both an insider, and an outsider.
Although Desai was formally educated in English, she was raised speaking both Hindi and German in
her home in Old Delhi. She attributes some of the diversity of her fictional characters to having lived
among a mix of Hindu, Muslim, and Christian neighbors while growing up.
In the 1996 Contemporary Novelists, Desai revealed to critic Bruce King that she began writing early,
saying, "I have been writing since the age of seven, as instinctively as I breathe." At the age of nine, she
began her publishing career when a submission she made to an American children's magazine was
accepted and published. At the age of ten, Desai had a life–changing experience as she watched her
society ripped apart by the violence born of the Hindu–Muslim conflict during the division of British
India into the nations of India and Pakistan. Her Muslim classmates and friends disappeared without
explaination, all of them fleeing from Hindu violence. British Writers' Matin described how the
"stupefying bloodshed and violence . . . erupt[ing] from the dream of independence" informed the tone of
her early fiction.
Education

Desai's formal education was in the English language and her writing was always in English as a
result. She attended British grammar schools, then Queen Mary's Higher Secondary School
in New Delhi. She was accepted at Miranda House, an elite women's college in Delhi, and in
1957 at the age of 20 she received a B.A. with Honors in English Literature from Delhi
University. Already hard on the heels of her dream of being a writer, she published her first short
story the same year she graduated, in 1957. Desai continued to compose and publish short
fiction, working for a year in Calcutta and marrying business executive Ashvin Desai on
December 13, 1958. They had four children, sons Rahul and Arjun, and daughters Tani and
Kiran.
Life As A Writer

While raising her children, Desai maintained her efforts as an author, and completed her early novels while her family grew.
The Desais lived in Calcutta from 1958 to 1962, then moved to Bombay, Chandigarh, Delhi, and Poona. Each new location
provided an additional rich back–drop for the young author's fiction. Desai became a freelance writer in 1963, and has retained
this as her occupation ever since. She addressed her craft in the King interview, "[Writing] is a necessity to me: I find it is in the
process of writing that I am able to think, to feel, and to realize at the highest pitch. Writing is to me a process of discovering
the truth."
Desai contributed to various prestigious literary publications, including the New York Times Book Review, London Magazine,
Harper's Bazaar and Quest. Her first novel, Cry, the Peacock (1963), was published when she was 26 years old. In 1965 she
published her second novel, Voices in the City, which revealed Calcutta as seen by a group of aristocratic siblings, and she left
India for the first time to visit England. While in Europe, Desai gathered material for her third novel, Bye–Bye,
Blackbird (1971). She directed her focus inward, experimenting with both content and form. 1974 saw the release of her first
attempt at juvenile literature, The Peacock Garden, and the next two years yielded another adult novel, Where Shall We Go
This Summer? (1975), followed by another juvenile venture titled Cat on a Houseboat (1976).
Although her first three adult novels were not favorably reviewed, her later work garnered growing attention for what the
1999 Encyclopedia of
World Literature in the 20th Century critic Janet Powers refered to as "a sensitivity to subtle emotions and family
reverberations . . . [an] intuitive awareness [that] emanates from a distinctly feminine sensibility." Her next three
adult novels gained her international recognition. Her 1977 novel, Fire on the Mountain, featured three female
protagonists each subdued or damaged in some way coming to terms with how place effects their realities. In 1978
she published Games at Twilight, a collection of short stories and the 1980 novel Clear Light of Day, a study of
Delhi that combines fiction with history to explore the lives of a middle–class Hindu family. In 1982, she released
another children's piece titled The Village by the Sea, followed two years later by another adult novel, In
Custody (1984).

Desai entered the scholarly world in a position as the Helen Cam Visiting Fellow at Girton College in Cambridge
University, England from 1986 to 1987. She came to the United States in 1987 and served as an Elizabeth Drew
Professor at Smith College from 1987 to 1988 and a Purington Professor of English at Mount Holyoke College from
1988 to 1993. In 1988 she wrote another novel, Baumgartner's Bombay, and by 1989 her status as a significant
postcolonial novelist had been cemented in literary circles. Fame, however, appeared far off due to the post–1947
prejudice against Anglophone literature, particularly that written by female authors. In 1993 Desai took as post as
Professor of Writing at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and has remained there ever since.
In 1992, Desai's children's book The Village by the Sea was adapted and filmed as a six–part miniseries by the BBC,
and in 1993 she co–authored an adaptation of her novel In Custody that was filmed by Merchant–Ivory and released in
1994. Desai wrote two more novels—Journey to Ithaca (1995) and Fasting, Feasting (1999)—and one more short story
collection, Diamond Dust (2000).
True Measure Of Success

Desai, who lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts and teaches writing at MIT has been appointed to
various literary offices. She was a member of the Advisory Board for English at Sahitya
Akademi in New Delhi from 1975 to 1980, and a member of the National Academy of Letters,
as well as becoming a Fellow for the Royal Society of Literature in England in 1978. She was
appointed Honorary Fellow for the American Academy of Arts and Letters and has produced
three well–liked children's books, an unusual feat for an Indian author of her caliber.
As Desai explained to Contemporary Novelists' King, it is writing's ability to "[enable] her to
think and feel and discover truth" that has driven her to such creative height and depth. She
explained that all her writing is "an effort to discover, to underline and convey the true
significance of things. That is why, in my novels, small objects, passing moods and attitudes
acquire a large importance . . . One hopes, at the end of one's career, to have made some
significant statement on life—not necessarily a water–tight, hard–and–fast set of rules, but
preferably an ambiguous, elastic, shifting, and kinetic one that remains always capable of further
change and growth." British Writers' Matin maintains that if one wishes to measure Desai's true
achievement, they "must look beyond those books that bear her own name on the title page" and
take note of the score of current Indian Anglophile authors who have enjoyed success as a direct
result of Desai's struggle to be heard.
GEORGE ORWELL
• George Orwell was born on 25 June 1903 and died on 21
January 1950.
• Eric Arthur Blair was known by his pen name 'George
Orwell’.
• He was an English novelist, essayist, journalist, and critic.
• Orwell is best known for the allegorical novella 'Animal
Farm’ (1945) snd the dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty Four
(1949).
• As a writer Orwell have produced literary criticism and
poetry, and fiction and polemical journalism.
• Orwellian theory - It denotes an attitude and a brutal
policy of draconian control by propaganda, surveillance, etc..
• Orwell’s works are characterized by lucid prose, biting social
criticism, opposition to totalitarianism and the outspoken support
of democratic socialism.
• The adjective – 'ORWELLIAN’ describes the totalitarian and
authoritarian social practices.
• In his literary carrier Orwell had wrote a critique of George
Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man.
• Orwell argues that vague writing can be used as a tool of
political manipulation.
• His writing was often explicitly critical of religion and
Christianity in particular.
HENRY DAVID THOREAU
• Henry David Thoreau was born on 12 July 1817 and died on 6
May 1862.
• Thoreau was an American naturalist, essayist, poet and
philosopher.
• He was a leading transcendentalist.
• Best known for his book 'Walden’ – a reflection upon simple
living in natural surroundings.
• His literary style interweaves the close observation of nature,
personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings and
historical lore.
• Thoreau was a lifelong abolitionist - Fugitive Slave Law while
praising the writings of Wendell Phillips and defending the
abolitionist John Brown.
• Philosophy of civil disobedience later influenced - Leo Tolstoy,
Mahatma Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr.
• Three things of greatest importance – philosophy, nature and
freedom.
• Conservation movement - fight hard for something you love
and believe in.
• Transcendalist movement - individualism, idealism, and the
divinity of nature.
WALLACE STEVENS – THE EMPEROR
OF ICE CREAM
• Wallace Stevens was an American modernist poet.
• He was born on 2 October 1879 and died on 2 August 1955.
• His work explores the interaction of reality and what man
can make of reality in his mind.
• Stevens’s first period of writing begins with his 1923
publication of the Harmonium – a collection of poems.
• The emperor of Ice cream is one of the popular poems from
that collection.
• The poem “wears a deliberately commonplace costume”.
• The simple poetic structure is of two stanzas related by an
identical closing verse in each stanza.
• A dead body is being prepared for a funeral.
• Transience of life and acceptance of death are the major themes
of this poem.
• The poem illustrates two things – attitude of the people gathered
around and the state of the old woman.
• Instead of being mournful, people are celebrating her death by
distributing ice cream.
“Bid him whip in kitchen cups concupiscent curds”
• Emphasizes the reality of death while comparing it with ice
cream.
• Conveys a message that one should be the ruler of his own
life before it melts away.
• It comprises the death ceremony of a lady and illustrates
how people celebrate the arrival of death.
• Assonance, symbolism, Consonance, alliteration, imagery, and
enjabment are some of the literary devices used by the poet
to convey his ideas of death.
• Reality vs Appearances and Life, death and sensuality are
some of the major and active themes appear in this poem.
“The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream”
 Robert Frost
(1874 – 1963)
Author’s Profile
• Robert Lee Frost was an American poet

• He is known for realistic depictions of rural life and his command of American
colloquial speech.

• He was only poet to be given four Pulitzer Prizes for poetry.

• He was named as the poet Laureate of Vermont.

• He had produced wonderful Dramatic monologues or Dramatic Scenes

Major works
The road not taken :

• It is a narrative poem by Robert Frost. Published as the first poem in the collection
‘Mountain Interval’.

• This poem speaks about two path ways. The poet keeps standing at the diverging point
and looked the paths carefully. One was grassy. Both the paths equally had untrodden
leaves.

• He must choose between the two. Yet he doesn’t have another chance to take the other
path.

• He takes the grassy path. The poet compares such a situation in life where everyone of us
would face such difficult situations to takes better decisions. Our decisions must be wise.
Mending wall : It opens Frost’s second collection of poetry, published in 1914

• This poem speaks about two people, the speaker and the neighbour.

• Their houses are separated by a wall in between.

• In the spring time the repair the wall which gets damaged due to an unknown fact.

• But the speaker wonders at the necessity of that wall. Their houses contain just apples and
pines.

• But the neighbour proclaims “Good fences make good neighbours”. The poet refers this to
a dark age mentality of the past.
 John Bunyan
(1628 – 1688)
Author’s Profile
• John Bunyan was an English writer and Puritan preacher.

• His famous work is Pilgrim’s Progress.

• In addition to Pilgrims Progress, Bunyan wrote nearly sixty titles, many of them became

expanded sermons.

• He had produced other doctrinal and controversial writings.

Major work
Pilgrim’s Progress :
• The Pilgrim’s Progress from This World, to That Which Is to Come is a 1678 Christian allegory
written by John Bunyan.
• It is regarded as one of the most significant works of religious, theological fiction in English
Literature.
• It has been translated into more than two hundred languages and has never been out of
print.
• This novel has been segregated into two parts.
• This novel portrays the typical life of a Christian life with the character named ‘Christian’.
• This gives the readers the notions of Christian life.
• Christian life is not just easy, but one has to pass through a lot of hurdles and temptations to
reach the celestial land (i.e.) the Heaven.
Grace Abounding to the Chief Of Sinners:

• It is a Puritan spiritual autobiography written by John Bunyan.

• It was published in 1666.

• It was written when Bunyan was serving a twelve year prison sentence.

• This autobiography speaks about the mercy and grace of God abounds more than the sin which

abounds a man.

• Here Bunyan expresses, the Exceeding Mercy of God in Christ to his poor servant John Bunyan.
 Born: 22 January 1572, London,
United Kingdom
Died: 31 March 1631, London,
United Kingdom
Spouse: Anne More (m. 1601–
1617)
Books: holy Sonnets, A
Valediction: Forbidding Mourning
Donne's style is characterised by abrupt openings and
various paradoxes, ironies and dislocations. These
features, along with his frequent dramatic or
everyday speech rhythms, his tense syntax and his
tough eloquence, were both a reaction against the
smoothness of conventional Elizabethan poetry and
an adaptation into English of European baroque and
mannerist techniques. His early career was marked
by poetry that bore immense knowledge of English
society and he met that knowledge with sharp
criticism.Another important theme in Donne's poetry
is the idea of true religion, something that he spent
much time considering and about which he often
theorised. He wrote secular poems as well as erotic
and love poems. He is particularly famous for his
mastery of metaphysical conceits.
Brunette Coleman was a pseudonym used by the poet
and writer Philip Larkin. In 1943, towards the end of
his time as an undergraduate at St John's College,
Oxford, he wrote several works of fiction, verse and
critical commentary under that name,
including homoerotic stories that parody the style of
popular writers of contemporary girls' school
fiction.
Born: 9 August 1922, Radford, Coventry,
United Kingdom
Died: 2 December 1985, Kingston upon Hull,
United Kingdom
Books: The Whitsun Weddings, Collected
Poems etc
Parents: Sydney Larkin, Eva emily day
The Coleman oeuvre consists of a completed
novella, Trouble at Willow Gables, set in a girls'
boarding school; an incomplete sequel, Michaelmas
Term at St Brides, set in a women's college at
Oxford; seven short poems with a girls' school
ambience; a fragment of pseudo-autobiography; and
a critical essay purporting to be Coleman's literary
apologia. The manuscripts were stored in
the Brynmor Jones Library at the University of Hull,
where Larkin was chief librarian between 1955 and
1985. Their existence was revealed to the public
when Larkin's Selected Letters and Andrew Motion's
biography were published in 1992 and 1993
Thomson William "Thom" Gunn (29 August 1929 – 25 April
2004), was an English poet who was praised for his early verses in
England, where he was associated with The Movement, and his
later poetry in America, even after moving towards a looser, free-
verse style. After relocating from England to San Francisco, Gunn
wrote about gay-related topics—particularly in his most famous
work, The Man With Night Sweats in 1992—as well as drug use,
sex and his bohemian lifestyle. He won major literary awards; his
best poems were said to have a compact philosophical elegance.
Born: 29 August 1929, Gravesend,
United Kingdom
Died: 25 April 2004, Haight-Ashbury, San
Francisco, California, United States
Awards: Lambda Literary Award for Gay
Men's Poetry etc
Nationality: American, British
During the 1960s and 1970s, Gunn's verse became
increasingly bold in its exploration of drug taking,
homosexuality, and poetic form. He enjoyed the
bohemian lifestyle in San Francisco so much
that Edmund White described him as "the last of the
commune dwellers [...] serious and intellectual by
day and druggy and sexual by night". While he
continued to sharpen his use of the metrical forms
that characterised his early career, he became more
and more interested in syllabics and free verse.
"He's possibly the only poet to have written a
halfway decent quintain while on LSD, and he's
certainly one of the few to profess genuine
admiration for both Winters (the archformalist) and
Allen Ginsberg (the arch ... well, Allen Ginsberg)",
GOVERNMENT ARTS COLLEGE
COIMBATORE

SEMINAR TOPIC: AMERICAN LITERATURE

Presented by
M.Kirithika
19MEN210
2nd MA English
literature
 AMERICAN LITERATURE
• Merican literature is the written or
literacy work Produced in the area
of the united states and it’s
preceding colonies.for more
specific discussions of poetry and
theater,see poetry of the united
states and theater in the united
states.
 WHAT ARE THE PERIODS OF
AMERICAN LITERATURE
• The colonial period (1607-1775)
• The revolutionary age (1765-1790)
• The early national period(1775-1828)
• The American Renaissance(1828-1865)
• The realistic period(1865-1900)
• The naturalist period(1900-1914)
• The modern period(1914-1939)
• The beat generation1944-1939)
• The contemporary period(1939-present)
 THE COLONIAL PERIOD (1607-
1775)
This period encompasses the founding of Jamestown up to a decade before the
Revolutionary War. The majority of writings were historical, practical, or religious in
nature. Some writers not to miss from this period include Phillis Wheatley, Cotton
Mather, William Bradford, Anne Bradstreet, and John Winthrop.
 THE REVOLUTIONARY AGE (1765-
1790)
• Beginning a decade before the Revolutionary War and ending about 25 years later,
this period includes the writings of Thomas Jefferson, Thomas Paine, James
Madison, and Alexander Hamilton. This is arguably the richest period of political
writing since classical antiquity. Important works include the “Declaration of
Independence,” "The Federalist Papers," and the poetry of Joel Barlow and Philip
Freneau.
 THE EARLY NATIONAL PERIOD
(1775-1828)
• This era in American literature is responsible for notable first works, such as the
first American comedy written for the stage—"The Contrast" by Royall Tyler, written
in 1787—and the first American Novel—"The Power of Sympathy" by William Hill,
written in 1789. Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, and Charles Brockden
Brown are credited with creating distinctly American fiction, while Edgar Allan Poe
and William Cullen Bryant began writing poetry that was markedly different from
that of the English tradition.
 THE AMERICAN
RENAISSANCE(1828-1865)
• Also known as the Romantic Period in America and the Age of Transcendentalism,
this period is commonly accepted to be the greatest of American literature. Major
writers include Walt Whitman, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau,
Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edgar Allan Poe, and Herman Melville. Emerson, Thoreau,
and Margaret Fuller are credited with shaping the literature and ideals of many later
writers. Other major contributions include the poetry of Henry Wadsworth
Longfellow and the short stories of Melville, Poe, Hawthorne, and Harriet Beecher
Stowe. Additionally, this era is the inauguration point of American literary criticism,
lead by Poe, James Russell Lowell, and William Gilmore Simms. The years 1853 and
1859 brought the first novels written by African American authors, both male and
female: "Clotel," by William Wells Brown and "Our Nig," by Harriet E. Wilson.
 THE REALISTIC PERIOD(1865-1900)
• As a result of the American Civil War, Reconstruction and the age of industrialism,
American ideals and self-awareness changed in profound ways, and American
literature responded. Certain romantic notions of the American Renaissance were
replaced by realistic descriptions of American life, such as those represented in the
works of William Dean Howells, Henry James, and Mark Twain. This period also
gave rise to regional writing, such as the works of Sarah Orne Jewett, Kate Chopin,
Bret Harte, Mary Wilkins Freeman, and George W. Cable. In addition to Walt
Whitman, another master poet, Emily Dickinson, appeared at this time.
 THE NATURALIST PERIOD (1900-
1914)
• This relatively short period is defined by its insistence on recreating life as life really
is, even more so than the realists had been doing in the decades before. American
Naturalist writers such as Frank Norris, Theodore Dreiser, and Jack London created
some of the most powerfully raw novels in American literary history. Their
characters are victims who fall prey to their own base instincts and to economic and
sociological factors. Edith Wharton wrote some of her most beloved classics, such as
"The Custom of the Country" (1913), "Ethan Frome" (1911), and "The House of
Mirth" (1905) during this time period
 THE MODERN PERIOD (1914-1939)

After the American Renaissance, the Modern Period is the second most influential and
artistically rich age of American writing. Its major writers include such powerhouse
poets as E.E. Cummings, Robert Frost, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams,
Marianne Moore, Langston Hughes, Carl Sandburg, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and
Edna St. Vincent Millay. Novelists and other prose writers of the time include Willa
Cather, John Dos Passos, Edith Wharton, F. Scott Fitzgerald, John Steinbeck, Ernest
Hemingway, William Faulkner, Gertrude Stein, Sinclair Lewis, Thomas Wolfe, and
Sherwood Anderson.
 THE MODERN PERIOD(1914-1939)

The Modern Period contains within it certain major movements including the Jazz
Age, the Harlem Renaissance, and the Lost Generation. Many of these writers were
influenced by World War I and the disillusionment that followed, especially the
expatriates of the Lost Generation. Furthermore, the Great Depression and the New
Deal resulted in some of America’s greatest social issue writing, such as the novels of
Faulkner and Steinbeck, and the drama of Eugene O’Neill.
 THE BEAT GENERATION(1944-1962)

• Beat writers, such as Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, were devoted to anti-
traditional literature, in poetry and prose, and anti-establishment politics. This time
period saw a rise in confessional poetry and sexuality in literature, which resulted in
legal challenges and debates over censorship in America. William S. Burroughs and
Henry Miller are two writers whose works faced censorship challenges. These two
greats, along with other writers of the time, also inspired the counterculture
movements of the next two decades.
 THE CONTEMPORARY
PERIOD(1939-PRESENT)
• After World War II, American literature has become broad and varied in terms of
theme, mode, and purpose. Currently, there is little consensus as to how to go about
classifying the last 80 years into periods or movements—more time must pass,
perhaps, before scholars can make these determinations. That being said, there are a
number of important writers since 1939 whose works may already be considered
“classic” and who are likely to become canonized. Some of these very established
names are: Kurt Vonnegut, Amy Tan, John Updike, Eudora Welty, James Baldwin,
Sylvia Plath, Arthur Miller, Toni Morrison, Ralph Ellison, Joan Didion, Thomas
Pynchon, Elizabeth Bishop, Tennessee Williams, Philip Roth, Sandra Cisneros,
Richard Wright, Tony Kushner, Adrienne Rich, Bernard Malamud, Saul Bellow, Joyce
Carol Oates, Thornton Wilder, Alice Walker, Edward Albee, Norman Mailer, John
Barth, Maya Angelou, and Robert Penn Warren.
 WHAT IS THE STUDY OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE
• Studying American literature encompasses understanding society.
• From this study,soceity can only improve by analyzing the writing in any
culture.
• American literature has produced some of the most significant prose and
poetry the world has been.
 MAJOR THEMES IN AMERICAN
LITERATURE
• The American dream
• Loss of innocence
• Coming of age
• Relationship with nature
• Relationship with society
• Relationship with science
• Alienation and isolation
• Survival of the fittest
 FATHER OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
• Father of American literature is
“Mark Twain”.
 WHAT ARE THE CHARACTERISTICS
OF AMERICAN LITERATURE
• The three characteristics of American literature include plot of
decline,indifferent of nature ,third person omniscient reaction to romanticism
and surrealism.
• Firstly American literature reflects beliefs and traditions that come from the
nation’s frontier days.
 WHY IS AMERICAN LITERATURE
UNIQUE
• American literature further developed in to its own form ,growing away from
its initial sphere of influence. English literature during the 17 the century
creating a unique american characteristics and promoting individualism.
• It developed writers of different genres.
• Experimenting human emotions , philosophy and psychology.
 THE PURPOSE OF AMERICAN
LITERATURE
• American literature is very important for education of people as it reveals the
culture and history of the united states.
• Morever,american literature studying in other countries gives foreigners the
opportunity to get to know American culture,history,and great works of the
great authors better.
 AMERICAN LITERARY AWARDS
• American academy of arts and science
• Pulitzer prize (fiction ,drama and poetry as well as various non fiction and
journalist categories)
• National book award (fiction ,non-fiction,poetry young ,adult fiction)
• American book awards
• Pen literary awards( multiple awards)
• United states poet laureate
• Bollingen prize
• Pushcart prize
• O henry award
THOMAS STEARNS
ELIOT
T.S.ELIOT
• He was born on 26 September 1888
• He was a poet, essayist, publisher, playwright, literary critic and editor in
20th century
• He is a central figure in English-language Modernist poetry.
• His period was 1905–1965
• His father, Henry Ware Eliot (1843–1919) ,his mother Charlotte Champe
Stearns (1843–1929)
• His first published poem, "A Fable For Feasters", was written as a school
exercise and was published in the Smith Academy Record in February
1905.
• He also published three short stories in 1905, "Birds of Prey", "A Tale of
a Whale" and "The Man Who Was King".
• By 1916, he had completed a doctoral dissertation for Harvard on
“Knowledge and Experience in the Philosophy of F. H. Bradley”, but
he failed to return for the viva voce exam.
 NOTABLE WORKS
1. The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock(1915)
2. The Waste Land(1922)
3. Four Quartets (1943)
4. Ash Wednesday (1930)
5. The Hallow men (1925)
6. Murder in the Cathedral (1935)
• He worked on commercial plays : The Family Reunion (1939), The
Cocktail Party (1949), The Confidential Clerk, (1953) and The Elder
Statesman (1958)
TRADITIONAL AND INDIVIDUAL TALENT
• Eliot made significant contributions to the field of literary criticism,
strongly influencing the school of New Criticism.
• His critical essay Tradition and the Individual Talent, Eliot argues that art
must be understood not in a vacuum, but in the context of previous pieces
of art.
• His essay was an important influence over the New Criticism by
introducing the idea that the value of a work of art must be viewed in the
context of the artist's previous works, a simultaneous order of works
 METAPHYSICAL POETS
• Eliot‘s essays metaphysical poets, says ability to show experience as both
psychological and sensual,wit and uniqueness.
• Eliot’s essay “The Metaphysical Poets”, along with giving new significance and
attention to metaphysical poetry, introduced his now well-known definition of
unified sensibility, which is considered by some to mean the same thing as the term
metaphysical.
• The most important metaphysical poets are John Donne, George Herbert, Henry
Vaughan, Thomas Traherne, Abraham Cowley, Richard Crashaw, and Andrew
Marvell. Their work has considerably influenced the poetry of the 20th century.
Literary Awards :
• Nobel Prize in Literature (1948)
• Hanseatic Goethe Prize (of Hamburg) (1955)
• Dante Medal (of Florence) (1959)
• He died in 4 January 1965
GERARD MANLEY
HOPKINS
• He was born on 28 July 1844
• Gerard Manley Hopkins is considered to be one of the greatest poets of
the Victorian era.
• Parents: Catherine Hopkins , Manley Hopkins
• His work was not published until 30 years after his death when his friend
Robert Bridges edited the volume Poems.
• Well-known works by Hopkins include:
1. "Binsey Poplars“(1879)
2. "Pied Beauty“(1877)
3. “The Windhover: To Christ our Lord“(1877)published in (1918)
4. The Wreck of the Deutschland(1875-1876)published in (1918)
• Ricks called Hopkins "the most original poet of the Victorian age.
• The language of Hopkins's poems is often striking.
• Hopkins was a supporter of linguistic purism in English
• Hopkins's own concept of inscape, which was derived in part from the
medieval theologian Duns Scotus.
• The Windhover aims to depict not the bird in general, but instead one
instance and its relation to the breeze.
• Notable collections of Hopkins's manuscripts and publications are
in Campion Hall, Oxford; the Bodleian Library, Oxford; and the Foley
Library at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Washington.
• Hopkins composed two poems about Dolben, Where art thou friend and
The Beginning of the End
• Robert Bridges, who edited the first edition of Dolben's poems as well as
Hopkins's, cautioned that the second poem "must never be printed," though
Bridges himself included it in the first edition (1918).
• Hopkins's relationship with Dolben is explored in the novel The Hopkins
Conundrum.
• Hopkins's poems, such as The Bugler's First
Communion and Epithalamion, arguably embody homoerotic themes
• The poem To seem the stranger was written in Ireland between 1885 and
1886 and is a poem of isolation and loneliness
SPRUNG RHYTHM
• Sprung rhythm, an irregular system of prosody developed by the 19th-century by
English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins.
• It is based on the number of stressed syllables in a line and permits an
indeterminate number of unstressed syllables.
• In sprung rhythm, a foot may be composed of from one to four syllables. Because
stressed syllables often occur sequentially in this patterning rather than in
alternation with unstressed syllables, the rhythm is said to be “sprung.”
• After several years' ill health and bouts of diarrhoea, Hopkins died
of typhoid fever
• He is thought to have suffered throughout his life from what today might
be labelled bipolar disorder or chronic unipolar depression,[19] and battled a
deep sense of melancholic anguish
• His last words on his death bed were, "I am so happy, I am so happy. I
loved my life.“
• He lived for 44 years .He died on 8 June 1889.
 A.D. Hope- Alec Derwent Hope
 born- July 21, 1907, Cooma, New South Wales,
Australia
 Australian poet
 best known for his elegies and satires.
 Died- July 13, 2000, Canberra, Australian Capital
Territory
 Hope, who began publishing poems when
he was 14 years old, was educated in
Australia and at the University of Oxford.
 He taught at various Australian
universities, including Sydney Teachers’
College and Melbourne University, until
his retirement in 1972.
 He was made a member of the Order of
the British Empire in 1972 and a
Companion of the Order of Australia in
1981.
 Though traditional in form, his poetry is thoroughly modern, two outstanding
examples being “Conquistador” (1947) and “The Return from the Freudian Isles”
(1944). Both poems are typical in their satirical approach and striking clarity of
diction.
 Hope also wrote religious and metaphysical poems, as well as erotic verse, which
often attracted controversy, as did his attacks on the cultural establishment, which
he considered pretentious and empty.
 His first book of poems, “The Wandering Islands”, appeared in 1955 and was
followed by several volumes of new poems and of collected poems.
 He also wrote essays and criticism, including A Midsummer Eve’s Dream (1970),
The Cave and the Spring (1965), and Native Companions (1974).
 At an advanced age when many poets cease writing, Hope was amazingly
productive. The year 1981 brought yet another poetry collection, “Antechinus”,
 While the following year witnessed Hope’s emendations to Christopher
Marlowe’s Tragical History of Doctor Faustus.
 When he was seventy-eight he published “The Age of Reason”, a collection of
narrative poems dealing with subjects from the eighteenth century.
 This same year, 1985, brought his appointment both as Ashby Visiting Fellow,
Clare Hall, Cambridge, and as Honorary Fellow of University College, Oxford.
 At the age of eighty, Hope published his first play, “Ladies from the Sea”, a
lively imagining of Circe and Calypso coming to call on a chagrined Odysseus
in Ithaca.
 He published another poetry collection, “Orpheus”, in 1991, which, though
uneven, contains a few of the best poems ever written by a poet in his ninth
decade.
 A loosely connected memoir, Chance Encounters appeared the following year.
 1956: Grace Leven Prize for Poetry
 1965: Britannica Australia Awards for Literature
 1966: Australian Literature Society Gold Medal
 1967: Myer Award for Australian Poetry
 1969: Ingram Merrill Foundation Award for Literature (New York)
 1969: Levinson Prize for Poetry (Chicago)
 1972: Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE)
 1976: The Age Book of the Year Award for A Late Picking
 1976: Robert Frost Award for Poetry
 1989: New South Wales Premier's Literary Awards Special Award
 1993: ACT Book of the Year for Chance Encounters
 Honorary doctorates from four Australian universities
Hope’s was a remarkable creative life, the relative
public silence of his first half releasing a torrent of
creation, publication, and honors in its second half.
He is still underappreciated, especially in the
United States, though many younger American
poets, seeking a return to the uses of traditional
form, see him as something of a father figure. The
body of his work is an impressive contribution to
twentieth century literature.
 F.R. Leavis-Frank Raymond Leavis
 Born on July 14, 1895, Cambridge,
Cambridgeshire, England.
 English literary critic who championed
seriousness and moral depth in literature and
criticized what he considered the amateur
belletrism of his time.
 Death- April 14, 1978,
 Leavis attended Cambridge University and then served throughout World War I as
an ambulance bearer on the Western Front.
 He lectured at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, from 1925 but moved in the early
1930s to Downing College, where he was elected into a fellowship in 1936.
 He retired in 1962 and thereafter served as visiting professor at a number of
English universities.
 In 1967 he delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College, Cambridge (published
in 1969 as English Literature in Our Time and the University).
 He was made a Companion of Honour in 1978.
 In 1932 with his wife, the former Queenie Dorothy
Roth, author of the important “Fiction and the
Reading Public” (1932), he founded “Scrutiny”, a
quarterly journal of criticism that was published
until 1953 and is regarded by many as his greatest
contribution to English letters.
 Always expressing his opinions with severity,
Leavis believed that literature should be closely
related to criticism of life and that it is therefore a
literary critic’s duty to assess works according to
the author’s and society’s moral position.
Leavis’ criticism falls into two phases.

 Criticism of poetry

In the first, influenced by T.S. Eliot, he devoted his attention to

English verse. In “New Bearings in English Poetry” (1932) he
attacked English late Victorian poetry and proclaimed the
importance of the work of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, and Gerard Manley
Hopkins, emphasizing wit and the play of intellect rather than late-
Romantic sensuousness. In “Revaluation: Tradition and Development
in English Poetry” (1936), he extended his survey of English poetry
back to the 17th century.
 Criticism of novel

In the 1940s his interest moved toward the novel. In “The Great
Tradition” (1948) he reassessed English fiction, proclaiming Jane
Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad as the great
novelists of the past and D.H. Lawrence as their only successor (D.H.
Lawrence: Novelist, 1955). He stressed the importance these novelists
placed on “a reverent openness before life.” After 1955 other
novelists, notably Dickens and Tolstoy, engaged his attention in “Anna
Karenina and Other Essays” (1967) and “Dickens the Novelist” (1970),
written with his wife. His range is perhaps best shown in the collection
“The Common Pursuit” (1952).
Leavis published his first book in 1930 and continued to produce numerous books,
essays, and reviews, publishing his last book two years before his death. Among his
most important and influential literary studies are,
 “New Bearings in English Poetry”,
 “Revaluation”,
 “The Great Tradition”, and
 “The Common Pursuit”
Leavis believed strongly that English literature is an indispensable discipline in the
university and wrote many essays defending his position. In one of his last books,
The Living Principle, he argues that the study of English literature is a discipline of
rigorous thought, not merely an exercise of emotions.
He made lasting contributions to the study of
English literature and is perceived by many as
the most influential British critic of the twentieth
century. Leavis’s advocacy of close, analytical
reading of the text combined with a firm
awareness of the value and importance of what
it has to say about life established the dominant
pattern of British criticism and the dominant
approach to English literature in many
universities until the 1970’s.
TRANSLATION
STUDIES
INTRODUCTION:
Translation studies is an academic interdiscipline dealing with
the systematic study of the theory, description and application of
translation, interpreting, and localization. As an interdiscipline,
Translation Studies borrows much from the various fields of study
that support translation.
• Translation Studies is a field of study that deals with the theory, description,
and application of translation. Because it examines translation both as an
interlingual transfer, and as an intercultural communication, Translation
Studies can also be described as an inter-discipline which touches on other
diverse fields of knowledge, including comparative literature, cultural studies,
gender studies, computer science, history, linguistics, philosophy, rhetoric,
and semiotics.
Definitions of translation:
According to Newmark indicates that translation is rendering
meaning of the text into another language in the way that the author
intended the text.
Nida and Taber(1982:12)state that translating consists in
reproducing in the receptor language the closest natural equivalent
of the source Language to target language
The Spread of Information and Ideas
Translation is necessary for the spread of information, knowledge,
and ideas. It is absolutely necessary for effective and empathetic
communication between different cultures. Translation, therefore, is
critical for social harmony and peace.
• Translation is also the only medium through which people come to know
different works that expand their knowledge. For example:
• Arabic translators were able to keep the ideas of ancient Greek philosophers
alive throughout the Middle Ages
• The Bible has been translated into at least 531 languages
• Translation is helping sports teams and organisations overcome language
barriers and transcend international boundaries
• In a world with over 7000 spoken languages, translation is
important because it allows people to communicate and
understand each other’s ideas and cultures, without
having to learn a second language.
• Translation consist of studying the lexis, grammatical structure,
communication situation, and cultural context of the source
language text:all these are analysed in order to determine its
meaning.
• This same meaning is then reconstructed using the lexicon and
grammatical structure which are appropriate in the target language
and its cultural context.
• For example if we use Arabic as a source language and english as a target
language, “Ana Muslim” becomes the source Text whose lexicon,
grammatical structure, communication situation and cultural context are
analysed in order to determine it’s meaning.The meaning is reconstructed
using the lexicon and grammatical structure which are appropriate in the
target language.To the extent, “Ana muslim” is restructured as “I am
Muslim”
SKILLS NEEDED TO BE A GOOD TRANSLATOR:
• Excellent writing skills: Translators are expected to be a
professional writers.so they need to be knowledgeable about
grammar, vocabulary, and style of two languages at least.
• Research: Translators may get different texts to translate from one
day to next to research as much as possible
• Reasonable knowledge of a foreign language: Translator need to
be able to read widely and easily in foreign language and
understand what really means. Translator posses lots of practice
reading, watching TV and films, listening to radio in foreign
language
• Long and varied experience
• Good dictionaries
GOOD TRANSLATION:
•. Creating a good translation is a matter of grammar,
vocabulary and Cultural knowledge
• Translator must be familiar with all aspects of the source and
target language in order to render one
Properties of good translation:.
• It must make sense
• It must convey the spirit and manner of the original
• It must have a natural and easy form of expression
• It must produce a similar response.
High quality Translation:
• Easily understood
• Well written
• True to the spirit of the original as well as the meaning
• True to the context of the original in terms of history and culture
• Able to make explicit that which is implicit in the original without destroying
the meaning
Importance of Translation:
Translation enables effective communication between people
around the world. It is a courier for the transmission of knowledge,
a protector of cultural heritage, and essential to the development of
a global economy. Highly skilled translators are key. Translation
Studies helps practitioners develop those skills.
Conclusion:
Translation focuses on the translator’s role from taking a source
text and turning it into one in another language, but also
concentrates on the specific product created by the translator.
Translation Studies is the academic discipline which studies the
theory and practice of translation.
SRILANKAN WRITERS.
WHAT IS SRILANKAN LITERATURE?
• Sri Lankan literature is the literary tradition of Sri Lanka.
• The largest part of Sri Lankan literature was written in the Sinhala
language, but there is a considerable number of works in other
languages used in Sri Lanka over the millennia (including Pali, Tamil,
and English). However, the languages used in ancient times were
much different from the language used in Sri Lanka now.
• Up to the present, short stories are a very important part of Sri
Lankan literature; the output of Sinhalese short story writers is
greater than that of the Tamil and English writers combined and has
elicited a greater measure of critical analysis.
• English was brought into Sri Lanka, then ‘Ceylon’, by the British who
succeeded the Dutch in 1796 as colonial masters of the island.
• In 1802 a proper civil administration was set up when, as a result of
the Treaty of Amiens, Ceylon was officially declared a British Crown
Colony.
• English then replaced both Dutch and the vernaculars, Sinhala and
Tamil, as the state language.
• It later became the language of administration, of law, of secular
education and of commerce.
SOME PROMINENT SRILANKAN WRITERS
• Martin Wickramasinghe
• Jean Arasanayagam
• James Goonewardene
• Anne Ranasinghe
• Ru Freeman
MARTIN WICKRAMASINGHE
Martin Wickramasinghe
• Martin Wickramasinghe was born on the 29th of May in the year
1890 in the Southern village of Koggala, bounded on one side by the
reef – fringed sea, and on the other by the large lake into which the
numerous tributaries of the Koggala Oya drain.
• The landscapes of the sea, lake studded with little islands, the flora
and fauna, the forested hinterland, and the changing patterns of life
and culture of the people of the village were the background of his
early years, that Martin Wickramasinghe later immortalized in his
novels and short stories and autobiographical writings.
• The search for roots is the central theme in Martin Wickramasinghe’s
writings on the culture and life of the people of Sri Lanka.
• He imaginatively explored and applied modern knowledge in natural
and social sciences, literature, linguistics, the arts, philosophy,
education, and Buddhism and comparative religion to reach beyond
the superficial emotionalism of vulgar nationalism, and guide us to the
enduring roots of our common national identity that exists in the folk
life and folk culture of Sri Lanka
• Martin Wickramasinghe’s vision was primarily nurtured in the tolerant,
humane, realistic attitude to life traditional to Buddhist folk culture. He
valued the intellectual freedom and independence inspired by the
Buddha’s ‘Kalama Sutta’ which he saw as a tradition to question
tradition, not unlike the Western scientific attitude. Through his
writings he consistently opposed dogmatism, casuistry, elitism and
oppression in any form, be it cultural, religious, political or social.
• Martin Wickramasinghe died on the 23rd of July 1976. His works have
been translated and published in English, Hindi, Tamil, Russian,
Chinese, Romanian, Dutch, German, French and Japanese languages.
HIS WORKS IN ENGLISH
• Books in English
• Aspects of Sinhalese Culture (1952)
• The Buddhist Jataka Stories and the Russian Novel (1952)
• The Mysticism of D H Lawrence (1957)
• Buddhism and Culture (1964)
• Revolution and Evolution (1971)
• Buddhism and Art (1973)
• Sinhala Language and Culture (1975)
TRANSLATIONS

• Landmarks of Sinhala Literature (1948)

• Lay Bare the Roots (Ape Gama) (1958)
• Madol Doova (1968)
• The Way of the Lotus (Viragaya) (1985)
HONORS AND AWARDS
• Appointed Member of the Radio Broadcasting Commission – 1953
• Appointed Member of the Order of the British Empire, by Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II
in person – 1954
• Award for the best news paper article for the year "The fall of the Brahmin Class" – 1956
• The novel "Viragaya" wins the Don Pedric Award for the best novel of the year – 1957
• Awarded a Honorary PhD by the Vidyodaya University – 1960
• Awarded a DLitt by the University of Ceylon – 1963
• UNESCO Award for his book "The Rise of the Soviet Land" – 1964
• Awarded a DLitt by Vidyalankara University −1964
• Awarded a DLitt by the University of Ceylon, Colombo – 1970
• Receives the first Presidential Award for Literature – 1974
JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
JEAN ARASANAYAGAM
• Jean Solomons Arasanayagam, the much renowned poet, who wrote the
Sri Lankan Contemporary English Literary Scene is no more. Known for her
highly acclaimed literary work, she’s an author of nearly 50 books, both
fiction and non-fiction, some of which have been translated into many
foreign languages such as French, German, Danish, Swedish and Japanese.
• Born into a Dutch Burgher family on December, 2, 1931, she was brought
up and spent her life mostly in Kandy. She is a past student of Girls’ High
School Kandy, and graduated at the University of Peradeniya and later
obtained her MA in Linguistics at the University of Stratchclyde in Glasgow,
Scotland.
• Being a passionate, loveable teacher to thousands of students in many
institutions in Sri Lanka, she was also a visiting Fellow at the Faculty of Arts,
Exeter University, UK.
• Jean was married to a Jaffna Tamil and often dealt with multiple
cultures and traditions, which may have moulded her ethnic
consciousness and identity.
• The 1983 riots which led to the decades long civil war in the country
was often the main topic in most of her poetry. Subjects relating to
gender, post-colonialism and human relationships were also captured
in her creativity. Jean received numerous local and international
honours, among which are the Premchand Fellowship by the Sahitya
Akademi of India, the International Writer in Residence at the
University of Exeter, and International Writer at the Rockefeller
Centre, in USA.
• She was awarded the lifetime Achievement Award, Sahityarathana in
2017 and is a past winner of the State Literary Award for poetry. She
was widely recognized in most of the local literary awards and won
many state awards as well as the much coveted Gratiaen Prize 2017 for
her collection of poetry titled, The Life of the Poet.
• She received the honorary doctorate in letters from Bowdoin College in
2013. The citation included the following words - a poetic witness to
social and political history.
• Jean Arasanayagam, the celebrity of Sri Lankan English literature,
undoubtedly had been an inspirational, veteran Sri Lankan writer whose
literature has inspired many local and international writers and readers
across generations.
WORKS
POETRY:
• Kindura (1973)
• Poems of Season Beginning and a Season Over (1977)
• Apocalypse '83 (1984)
• The Cry of the Kite (1984)
• A Colonial Inheritance and Other Poems (1985)
• Out of Our Prisons We Emerge (1987)
• Trial by Terror (1987)
• Reddened Waters Flow Clear (1991)
• Shooting the Floricans (1993)
• Nallur
• Ruined gopuram
• Mother-in-law
WORKS
PROSE:
• The Cry of the Kite (A collection of short stories) (Kandy, 1984)
• The Outsider (Nagasaki University: Bulletin of the Faculty of Liberal
Arts, 1989)
• Fragments of a Journey (Colombo : WERC, 1992)
• All is Burning (New Delhi : Penguin Books India, 1995)
• Peacocks and Dreams (New Delhi : Navrang, 1996)
AWARDS
• A recipient of several awards and prizes nationally and internationally,
Ms. Arasanayagam was given the “Sahityaratna” award of the Sri
Lankan government in September 2017 for her lifetime contributions
and the Premchand Fellowship of the Sahitya Akademi, India, for
2014.
JAMES GOONEWARDENE
• James Alexander Shedden-Goonewardene (1921–1997) was a Sri
Lankan writer. He was born in Pannala, Sri-Lanka, and was raised in
Matara, Sri Lanka. He was the son of Mabel Alice Goonewardene and
James Robert Shedden, a police inspector serving in the remote town
of Pannala, Sri-Lanka.
• After his birth the family moved to Matara, Sri-Lanka, where they
spent several years before moving to Harmer's Avenue in Wellawatte,
Colombo. He studied at the University of London.
• During the 1950s, he began writing stories while working as a school
teacher. In 1963, he became a broadcaster for Radio Ceylon while
writing skits and dramas for the Sri Lanka Broadcasting Corporation.
• James' first novel ‘A Quiet Place’ was published in 1968, followed by
Call of the Kirala in 1971. In 1978, he left broadcasting to devote
himself full-time to writing. He published more English language
novels than any other Sri-Lankan author.
• His work suffered some heavy criticism because English was
becoming marginalized in the nationalistic passion in Sri-Lanka during
the 1960s and the 1971 JVP Insurrection. He was the first Sri-Lankan
author to have a novel published by Penguin India and has received
retroactive acclaim.
• James was married to an Australian national named Sonia. He had no
children and died in 1997.
WORKS
• The Tribal Hangover (1995)
• One Mad Bid for Freedon (1990)
• An Asian Gambit (1985)
• Dream Time River (1984)
• Acid Bomb Explosion (1978)
• The Awakening of Doctor Kirthi and Other Stories (1976)
• Call of the Kirala (1978)
• A Quiet Place: A man's quest in a village by the jungle (1968)
ANNE RANASINGHE
ANNE RANASINGHE
• Anne Ranasinghe (born Anneliese Katz; 2 October 1925 – 17 December 2016) was
a Jewish-German born Sri Lankan English-language poet. She is considered one of
Sri Lanka's leading English-language poets, having won several international
awards.
• Anneliese Katz was born on 2 October 1925 in Essen, Germany, to a Jewish family.
A victim of Nazi Germany's atrocities against Jews, she witnessed the Kristallnacht
(night of broken glass), the burning of the Essen synagogue. In 1939, her parents
sent her to England to an aunt she had never seen before. Within a week she was
sent to a school 140 miles away to live among strangers and to learn English, a
new language to her. Within six months World War II broke out and much later
she learned that her parents had been murdered by the Nazis.
• Anne completed her studies at Parkstone Grammar School and trained to become
a nursing sister at Charing Cross Hospital, King's College, Moorfields, Chelsea and
Burden Neurological Institute.
• Ranasinghe began her writing career in the late 1960s after obtaining
a Diploma in Journalism from Colombo Technical College. In 1971, she
published her first poem collection, And the Sun That Sucks The Earth
to Dry. Some of Ranasinghe's well known poems include July 1983,
Plead Mercy (1974), A Long Hot Day and At What Dark Point (1970).
She has published 12 books and has been translated into several
languages in seven countries.
• From 1975, Ranasinghe worked for the Amnesty International's South
Asian Publications Service in Sri Lanka.
• In 1949, Anne married D. A. Ranasinghe, a post-graduate student who
later became a lecturer and professor of obstetrics and gynecology at
the Colombo Medical School, and moved to Sri Lanka. She had seven
children, four of her own and three from her husband's previous
marriage. Her own four children are sons Ananda and Nihal, and
daughters Shanthi and Renuka, all of whom live abroad.
• Anne Ranasinghe died 17 December 2016 in her Colombo residence
in Rosmead Place, at age of 91. Sri Lankan school children study her
poems for their English literature coursework in GCE Ordinary Level.
WORKS
• Mascot and Symbol. 1997.
• Desire and other Stories. 1994, reprint 1995.
• You Ask Me Why I Write Poems. 1994.
• The Letter and Other Stories. 1994.
• At What Dark Point. 1991, reprinted and updated 1996.
• Not Even Shadows. 1991.
• Against Eternity and Darkness. 1985, reprinted 1985, 1988, 1996.
• Of Charred Wood Midnight Fear. 1983.
• Love, Sex and Parenthood. 1978.
• Plead Mercy. 1975.
• With Words We Write Our Lives Past, Present, Future. 1972.
POEMS:
• And a Sun That Sucks The Earth to Dry. 1971
AWARDS
• Ranasinghe was awarded Sri Lanka Arts Council Prize for Poetry in
1985 and again in 1992 and also for non-fiction in 1987.
• She won the Sri Lankan State Literary Award for best collection of
short stories in 1994.
• She was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of
Germany, the nation's only federal civilian award.
RU FREEMAN
RU FREEMAN
• Ru Freeman is a Sri Lankan born writer and activist whose creative
and political work has appeared internationally, including in the UK
Guardian, The Boston Globe, and the New York Times.
• She is the author of the short story collection, Sleeping Alone
(forthcoming from Graywolf Press, Spring 2022), and the novels A
Disobedient Girl (Atria/Simon & Schuster, 2009), and On Sal Mal Lane
(Graywolf Press), a NYT Editor’s Choice Book. Both novels have been
translated into multiple languages including Italian, French, Turkish,
Dutch, and Chinese.
• She is editor of the anthology, Extraordinary Rendition: (American)
Writers on Palestine, a collection of the voices of 65 American poets
and writers speaking about America’s dis/engagement with Palestine,
and co-editor of the anthology, Indivisible: Global Leaders on Shared
Security. She holds a graduate degree in labor studies, researching
female migrant labor in the countries of Kuwait, the U.A.E, and the
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and has worked at the Institute for Policy
Studies in Washington, DC, in the South Asia office of the American
Federation of Labor-Congress of Industrial Organizations (AFL/CIO),
and the American Friends Service Committee in their humanitarian
and disaster relief programs.
• She is a contributing editorial board member of the Asian American
Literary Review, and a fellow of the Bread Loaf Writer’s Conference,
Yaddo, Hedgebrook, the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts and the
Lannan Foundation. She is the 2014 winner of the Janet Heidinger
Kafka Prize for Fiction by an American Woman. She writes for the
Huffington Post on books and politics.
THANK YOU