Studying English Literature

It is now an established fact that all the cultural productions—be it popular or serious and be it a production on the celluloid or on the stage—are actually produced on the invisible matrices of a particular culture at a particular time, and what makes the acceptance or refusal of a particular art form possible is the operation of ideology or ideologies in the society. This is more prominently understandable in the rise and development of Restoration Comedy, which coincided with the restoration of monarchy, of king Charles II­ (1660) after England had gone through a political. England had previously seen a king being murdered and a Protector clamping strictest moral restorations of Puritan faith. It was not only a restoration of monarchy but also of drama, because during Cromwell’s regime the theatres were branded as immoral. Between 1642 and 1660 English theatre virtually did not exist. The natural reaction of moral starvation was extreme profligacy. The king himself was an indolen...

With Edward II Marlowe seems to have left away the non-English legends and myths with tragic potentialities and melodrama in favour of the native historical themes that have some sort of socio-political relevance for the time without the melodrama. Marlowe drew upon the accounts of Stowe and Holinshed and presented the much debated personality of Edward II in perfect balance with the dynamics of tragedy and the psychology of the audience whose maturity he must have invested his faith in. It may be pointed out here that Marlowe might have been influenced by the Renaissance notion of history as a teacher, a notion reinforced in England by the vogue of the “courtesy books” like the Mirror of the Magistrates . In other words, the tragedy of Edward II was expected to illustrate the ways of life a king should avoid and the kind of the ways the subjects should not take resort to in order to advance personal gains or whims. Again, it must be emphasised here that Marlowe must have been f...

At the beginning of the 17 th century the love poetry of John Donne expressed a strong and independent spirit. He combined in his lyrics passionate emotional intensity with keen and active intelligence displayed in logical analysis and verbal wit, especially the extensive use of puns, equivocations, and the conceit or extended metaphor. All these features in some sense work in a principle of contraries. Dr. Johnson, noted Donne’s fondness for conceits, which he called “discordia concors”, the “discovery of occult resemblances in things apparently unlike”. This kind of peculiar poetic vision and practice, however, had much to do with the kind of culture he inherited, a culture, which, based on medieval world view and ethos, suddenly seemed to change in the face of the Copernican science and new geographical discoveries. Donne faced a moral vacuum and experienced the unstable nature of the universe. So he tried to find out a resolution, first in the Neo-Platonic theory and then fina...

Generally speaking, Indian writings in English are a product of the historical encounter between the two cultures—Indian and the western—for about one hundred and ninety years. It is not that Indian people did not experience the impact of a foreign culture. It did during the reigns of various foreign rulers. But the difference with the British rule lies in the nature of the economic system that had come into being in Europe after the Renaissance, described by Marx as capitalist system. Before the introduction of the British rule India had the feudal economic system, in accordance with which the vast population of the country, having various religious faiths and conforming to the caste system, tried to live their life, sometimes fatalistically and sometimes stoically. Above all, it was a closed society with a peculiar cultural xenophobia. In fact, India had been awaiting a political and cultural change, which became necessary after the weakening and disintegration of the Moghul Empire...

“It [English] is the language”, Jesperson concludes, “of a grown up man having very little childish or feminine about it”. While analysing and comparing English with many languages, as a philologist he marked out certain characteristics of English, which he found decidedly masculine. The evolution of the language as a masculine one, in fact, coincides with the rise of the Anglo-Saxon people and the subsequent world domination. Perhaps the national spirit for domination contributed much to making English a masculine language. The masculine traits of the language are as follows: I. Sound System in English : The sound system of the English language is characterised by certain masculine traits. The consonants are well defined. They belong to their own types, and they are precisely pronounced; for instance, ‘t’ is always pronounced as ‘t’ as in ‘bat’, ‘d’ is always a ‘d’ as in ‘desk’ and so on. These consonantal sounds are much less modified by the following vowels compar...

In King Lear we discover the presence of two parallel plots: Gloucester story intensifies our experience of the central action by supplying sequence of parallel, impressed upon us by frequent commentary by the characters themselves. The sub-plot simplifies the central action of Lear and his daughters, translating its verbal and visual patterns. it also pictorializes the main action, supplying interpreted visual emblems for some of the play’s important themes. The clarity of the subplot and its didacticism are related, furthermore, to the old fashioned literary form like the morality play, but the verbal and visual simplifications of sub-plot do not simply provide a contrast with what goes on elsewhere in the play; they help to reveal the nature of Lear’s experience by being so obviously inadequate to it. Lear’s sufferings are heroic because they cannot be accommodated by traditional formulas, moral or literary and thee sub-plot exists partly to establish that fact. ...