Studying English Literature

WRITING SUBSTANCE AND ADDING CRITICAL NOTE The substance: After you have got the question paper, · Read the given text as lightly as you read a newspaper item at first. Do not try to look for meaning. Then leave it and proceed to write other question. · After writing the question come back to it and read it for the second time. This time, be careful to understand what the passage is all about. · Again leave it and write the other questions. · After finishing all the questions come back to the passage. This time, try hard to understand the central idea of the passage. Underline the relevant portions. Just before writing, · Chalk out a rough first draft of the substance you are to write on the left page of the script. · Leave out the examples. If the examples represent certain ideas, take only the ideas. · Leave out the ornamental expressions. Try to transform those into simple and straightforward ones. · Leave out the explanatory sentences or parts of those. · Transform the circumlocuti...

As a result of the contacts with the Vikings, the Old English language underwent influence of Scandinavian towards the end of the Old English period. Originally, on the continent the Anglo-Saxons and the Scandinavians were intimately related in a common racial and linguistic bond. This explains why the first English epic Beowulf , had for its setting one of the Scandinavian countries; even the main characters in the poem are Scandinavian. But when the Vikings began to attack and plunder England, the relationship between the Germanic races worsened. Ultimately, many Scandinavians settled down in different parts of England, and as a result of this co-existence, the language of the Anglo-Saxons was considerably influenced by the language of the invaders. Since the two peoples lived very intimately, it is very difficult to identify the Scandinavian words in English. Some words, however, can be identified as of Scandinavian origin. The reason is that phonologically their form is...

The conquest of England in 1066 by William of Normandy was destined to have a profound impact on the life and language of the English people as well, and as such that it changed the whole course of the language. It is an interesting historical fact that the Normans were closely related both to the English and their Scandinavian conquerors. The Scandinavian invaders in England mingled with the Anglo-Saxons and the language that resulted from the fusion was Teutonic to a high degree. But the Franks and the Scandinavians who settled in Normandy adopted French, the language of the conquered people. But it should be noted that at that time there was no standard French language; there were only a number of dialects, descending from colloquial Latin. Among them that of Normandy was one which was introduced into England after Norman Conquest. Perhaps it is a psychological fact that the Normans wanted to be called in by the terms of the conquered people in the highest level...

As a pragmatic and as an empirical thinker Bacon subscribed to the fundamental Renaissance ideals—Sepantia (search for knowledge) and Eloquentia (the art of rhetoric). Here in the essay Of Truth he supplements his search for truth by going back to the theories of the classical thinkers and also by taking out analogies from everyday life. It is to be noted here that his explication of the theme is impassioned and he succeeds in providing almost neutral judgements on the matter. Again, it is seen that Bacon’s last essays, though written in the same aphoristic manner, stylistically are different in that he supplied more analogies and examples to support or explain his arguments. As this essay belongs to the latter group, we find ample analogies and examples. Bacon, while explaining the reasons as to why people evade truth, talks of the Greek philosophical school of sceptics, set up by Pyrro. Those philosophers would question the validity of truth and constantly change their opinions. Bac...

In the poem The Retreate Henry Vaughan deals with the loss of the heavenly glory experienced during the childhood and expresses a fanciful desire to get back that original stage. The theme, on the surface level, appears very simple; but going into the deeper the reader will find that the poem is founded on the diverse European idealistic, psychological, religious/mystical and philosophical doctrines in the western culture. On the socio-cultural level, the poem can be interpreted as a reflection of the urge for liberating the human psyche from the torments and tyrannies of civilization, an urge which, it must be said, has been expressed by Vaughan in the purest, distilled and highly cultivated form of thought. On the psychological level, the desire to go back to a happy childhood can be interpreted, Freud said, as an escape from the hard realities of life in the defence mechanism of regression, as a daydrea...

Prelude Wordsworth Generally speaking, The Prelude is a historical record of the growth of Wordsworth’s poetic imagination. It can be called an epic expansion of many poems like the Recluse, and The Excursion and, of course, the Tintern Abbey. The poem derived from many a thing: from the projected Recluse, from Coleridge’s suggestion about the French Revolution and, above all, from Wordsworth’s strenuous introspection. The end-product was a poem in which the poet furnished detailed record of the conditions in which he grew up and of the processes out of which he emerged as a poet of man and nature. In this the poem seems to have strong affinity with Wordsworth’s much read poem Tintern Abbey, which traces the development of his poetic career. But it must be stated here that The prelude is not an autobiography in the ordinary sense though he himself described the poem as “the story of my life; it is an autobiography in the sense that it offers in the poem the story of making of a poet. I...

One Day I Wrote Her Name… Spenser The Text of the Poem One day I wrote her name upon the strand, But came the waves and washed it away: Agayne I wrote it with a second hand, But came the tyde, and made my paynes his pray. Vayne men, sayd she, that doest in vaine assay, A mortall thing so to immortalize, For I my selve shall lyke to this decay, And eek my name bee wyped out lykewize. Not so, (quod I) let baser things devize To dy in dust, but you shall live by fame: My verse your vertues rare shall eternize, And in the hevens wryte your glorious name. Where whenas death shall al the world subdew, Our love shall live, and later life renew. With Amoretti Spenser descended on the permanent paradox, namely the principle of change inherent in nature that causes merciless mutations to everything in this world. This is a paradox which baffled the European intellectuals historically since...