Anthony Trollope

One of the most solidly competent of the professional Victorian novelists who aimed to entertain by constructing stories grounded in the kind of life recognizable by his readers was Anthony Trollope. His most popular are the Barsetshire series-Barchester Towers. Doctor Thorne. The other novels are Phineas Finn, The Prime Minister, The Claverings, and The Orley Farm. These novels dealing with life and love in a small cathedral city provided the readers a world to retire to.

Sybil

Sybil is political novel in which the flamboyancy of a grandiose political imagination, high idealism and exhibitionist dandyism are oddly combined. The novel reflects Tory romanticism. Benjamin Disraeli wrote this novel to tackle the 'condition of England question'. The novel embodies his vision of a Young England restored to an organic national wholeness and freed from the disintegrating effects of Whig economic individualism and lack of tradition.

Achievement of Alfred, the great as a king

King Alfred of Wessex wasnknown in political history for his achievement in stemming the Danish conquest of England. He was one of the best military readers of tge Western world in the Anglo-Saxon age. He organized a strong and unified defense against the Danish marauders who were threatening the complete overthrow of Anglo-Christian civilization. The Danes were forced to sign the Treaty of Wedmore in 878 and leave Wessex to live peacefully in Danelaw. Alfred established Wessex as a new centre of English culture by encouraging literary production ane himself playing active role as a writer and translator in the development of English language and literature. He patronized the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle.

HAROLD PINTER

Harold Pinter was born on 10 October 1930 in the London borough of Hackney, son of a Jewish dressmaker. Growing up, Pinter was met with the expressions of anti-Semitism, and has indicated its importance for his becoming a dramatist. At the outbreak of the Second World War, he was evacuated from London at the age of nine, returning when twelve. He has said that the experience of wartime bombing has never lost its hold on him. Back in London, he attended Hackney Grammar School where he played Macbeth and Romeo among other characters in productions directed by Joseph Brearley. This prompted him to choose a career in acting. In 1948 he was accepted at the Royal Academy of Dramatic Art. In 1950, he published his first poems. In 1951 he was accepted at the Central School of Speech and Drama. That same year, he won a place in Anew McMaster’s famous Irish repertory company, renowned for its performances of Shakespeare. Pinter toured again between 1954 and 1957, using the stage name of David Baron. Between 1956 and 1980 he was married to actor Vivien Merchant. In 1980 he married the author and historian Lady Antonia Fraser. Pinter made his playwriting debut in 1957 with The Room, presented in Bristol. Other early plays were The Birthday Party (1957), at first a fiasco of legendary dimensions but later one of his most performed plays, and The Dumb Waiter (1957). His conclusive breakthrough came with The Caretaker (1959), followed by The Homecoming (1964) and other plays.
Harold Pinter is generally seen as the foremost representative of British drama in the second half of the 20th century. That he occupies a position as a modern classic is illustrated by his name entering the language as an adjective used to describe a particular atmosphere and environment in drama: “Pinteresque”. Pinter restored theatre to its basic elements: an enclosed space and unpredictable dialogue, where people are at the mercy of each other and pretence crumbles. With a minimum of plot, drama emerges from the power struggle and hide-and-seek of interlocution. Pinter’s drama was first perceived as a variation of absurd theatre, but has later more aptly been characterised as “comedy of menace”, a genre where the writer allows us to eavesdrop on the play of domination and submission hidden in the most mundane of conversations. In a typical Pinter play, we meet people defending themselves against intrusion or their own impulses by entrenching themselves in a reduced and controlled existence. Another principal theme is the volatility and elusiveness of the past. It is said of Harold Pinter that following an initial period of psychological realism he proceeded to a second, more lyrical phase with plays such as Landscape (1967) and Silence (1968) and finally to a third, political phase with One for the Road (1984), Mountain Language (1988), The New World Order (1991) and other plays. But this division into periods seems oversimplified and ignores some of his strongest writing, such as No Man’s Land (1974) and Ashes to Ashes (1996). In fact, the continuity in his work is remarkable, and his political themes can be seen as a development of the early Pinter’s analysing of threat and injustice. Since 1973, Pinter has won recognition as a fighter for human rights, alongside his writing. He has often taken stands seen as controversial. Pinter has also written radio plays and screenplays
for film and television. Among his best-known screenplays are those for The Servant (1963), The Accident (1967), The Go- Between (1971) and The French Lieutenant’s Woman (1981, based on the John Fowles novel). Pinter has also made a pioneering contribution as a director.

Physiologus

Physiologus is an example of allegorical use of natural history to illuminate Christian teaching. The Old English poem Bestiary bears some relationship with Continental Physiologus. It consists of three brief sketches of Panther, the Whale and the Partridge- the last poem surviving in a form too fragmentary for profitable interpretations. The Panther is full of kindness and is symbolical of Christ. The Whale is full of deceit recalling to our mind the deceitful character of Satan whom Milton compares to Leviathan. The practice of this kind of allegorizing animals lasted well into the Renaissance.

Effect of English Conquest on Britons.

Many of Britons were killed in the fighting. Many of them took refuge in the West in Cornwall, Wales and Cumberland. Some went over the sea to the north west of France and settled in the land called Brittany. To the English Britons were known as Welsh. Cornishmen were West Welsh, the people of Wales were North Welsh and those of Cumberland were Cumbrian Welsh. Until the West Saxons won the Battle of Deorham in 577, the West Welsh were not cut off from the North Welsh. Similarly, North Welsh was cut off from the Cumbrian Welsh when the Angels won the Battle of Chester in 613 and reached the Irish Sea.

POETIC DRAMA

Side by side with the realistic plays of Shaw, Galsworthy and Grandville Barker, there arouse the type of drama that is called poetic drama by 1920. Tennyson and Browning attempted poetic drama but they were more poetic than dramatic. So, truely speaking was no tradition poetic drama before the beginning of 20th century and poetic drama may be regarded as a new literary creation. Verse was a natural medium of poetic drama but many dramatist wrote poetic drama in prose. J.M. Synge's Riders to the Sea is a good example of poetic drama which is rich in imaginative qualities and metaphysical conception of life. W.B. Yeats, the ever lyric poet wrote poetic drama and mention may be made of The Shadowy Waters, Deride and The Golden Helmet. John Drinkwater's Abraham Lincoln is a good example of poetic drama. Masefield used prose with a poets vision in the Tragedy of Nan and The Tragedy of Pompey the Great. Stephen Phillips wrote a number of blank verse notably Nero and Ulysses. But these dramas had little dramatic quality.

MORALITY PLAY

After the success of Mystery Play, the next stage in the history of English drama is the morality play. This was didactic in purpose; but its characters, instead of being taken from the holy Bible of from the legends of the saints, were personified abstractions. All kind of mental and moral qualities appeared as characters in the play- perseverance, Free Will, the five senses, the Seven Deadly sins, good and bad angels, etc. Among such personifications, there was generally a place for the Devil who had held a prominent position in the mircle plays. A later introduction of much importance was the so-called Vice, who was a humorous personification of evil taken on the comic side. This was the recognized fun-maker of the piece. This character often scored a tremendous popular success by jumping on the devil's back, sticking thorns into him, beating him with a stick, and making him roar with pain.

KEW GARDENS

Kew Gardens is written by Virginia Woolf.. You can read the entire story by downloading the pdf file.
https://drive.google.com/file/d/0BzAMnd--KDJBUjlMZUdJekxWSnc/view?usp=sharing

Irony

Irony is derived from Latin 'ironia' which comes from Greek 'eironeia' meaning feigned ignorance. The greek comic character Eiron, a clever underdog who by his wit repeatedly triumphs over the boastful character Alazon. The Socratic irony of the Platonic dialogues derives from this comic origin. Feigning ignorance and humility, Socrates goes about asking silly and obvious questions of all sorts of people on all sorts of subjects only to expose their ignorance. There are two example of irony- verbal and dramatic. Verbal irony is the intentional irony in speech, the speaker saying one thing to mean its reverse using innocent language with an offensive motive. The classic example of this kind of irony is Antony's repeated assertion in Julius Caesar that 'Brutus is an honourable man'. Verbal irony arises from a sophisticated or resigned awareness of contrast between what is and what ought to be and expresses a controlled pathos without sentimentality.

Bede

Bede (673-735)

The Venerable Bede, as he is called, spent his life as a monk at Jarrow and is one of the really great scholars of England and of Europe. Bede is famous for his Historia Ecclesiastica Gentis Anglorum ( Ecclesiastical History of the English People ). His writings also include grammatical and critical bandbooks like De Metrica Arte, scientific treatises like De Ratione Temporum, commentaries on various books of the Bible ( canonical and apocryphal), homilies, saint's lives and verse. Bede wrote Latin with the competence to be expected of a gifted man. He is not only the first among English historians in point of time, he is also first in importance.

John Mandeville

John Mandeville is best known by the work The Travels of John Mandeville. It is written in the Midland dialect which was then becoming the literary language of England. It is now established that Sir John Mandeville is a fictitious hero very much like Defoe's Robinson Crusoe. Mandeville is the imaginary English knight who narrates his journey to Palestine and China. The author confesses that he traveled through strange countries where men were fed on serpents and hissed like them. He also described dog-headed men and many such fantastic things. Fantasy is the soul of the narrative of Mandeville because truth and fiction are strongly mingled by its simple effortless and almost nursery style. The book had a happy effect on the development of English prose which in the Middle English period was very nascent. Mandeville's name is uttered with another name, that is of John Wycliffe. Although Wycliffe's prose was grave in tone, Mandeville's prose was imaginative and marked by a child like simplicity.

Caxton

The beginning of the revival of learning was one important feature of Renaissance of Europe and England. After the fall of Constantinople, the monks who possessed the manuscripts of Greek literature and philosophy, took shelter in Mylam, Venice and Florence. Quite naturally there was a need for printing new books on new literature. It was Caxton who bore the entire responsibility for publishing books for spreading the message of humanism. In 1476 Caxton established his printing press in England and promoted 'New Learning' by printing Lydgate's Temple of Glass. It is the first printed book in Europe. In 1485 Caxton published Malory's Morte d' Arthur which was a manifestation of the Renaissance spirit. Caxton himself translated some of the books from latin and printed them with the zeal of reformer. Caxton was more than a mere printer of books. He embodied Renaissance ideals through his publications.

Renaissance

Renaissance in the words of Michelet, the French historian means, 'the discovery of the world and the discovery of man by man'. In the 16th century, Renaissance in Europe means the liberation of the human mind from the authority of the church and the new spirit of enquiry and challanges. Renaissance means the freedom from all blind faith in conventions and dogmas. The Middle age which was dominated by religion, suppressed freedom of thought and freedom of action. But after the fall of Constantinople in 1453, the revival of learning occurred when the  greek and the roman writings were studied with great zeal and eagerness. In England, 'New Learning' got a new impetus from the publication of two books- Thomas More's Utopia and The Praise of Fooly by Erasmus. The scholars like Elyot, Wilson and Aschan played their parts in the revival of humanism. Humanistic spirit of the Renaissance was supported by the Reformation which made Protestantism of Martin Luther Triumphant. Also in England, Shakespeare, Marlowe , Kyd and Spenser promoted humanism in their writings and the legacy of the classical literature is upheld.

THE DIDACTIC NOVEL

The Didactic Novel

The didactic novel is best represented by Dr. Johnson's The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abyssinia (1759). In it Johnson uses the framework of exotic tale. Rasselas grows weary of the happy valley of Abyssinia. He tells the philosopher Imlac about his discontent. But the prince is adamant; he desires to escape and see the world outside to know the secret of content. At last the prince leaves the happy valley, accompanied by his sister and Imlac and goes to Egypt. They study the various aspects of social life in Cario. Rasselas mixes with the youth but finds that the laughter of the youths is without motives. So he recoils from their society, weary and disgusted. Then the prince turns to the teachers of morality. He is again disillusioned for he finds that "they discourse like angels, but they live like men". While the prince studies the public life, the princes mixes with the members of private families who are enchanted by her charm and beauty. She finds that imperious husbands, perverse wives, disobedient children alike contribute to domestic unhappiness. The party come to conclusion that man is nowhere happy and virtue is nowhere to be found, and return to Abyssinia.
The historical importance of Rasselas lies in the fact that it is the first example of a novel consisting of a series of philosophical essays strung on a thin thread of story. The novel is set in an oriental setting. No attempt is made to reproduce the life atmosphere, manners, customs of the Far East. The novel seems to be a warning to those who listen with credulity to the whispers of fancy and pursue with eagerness the phantoms of hope.

Impressionism and Expressionism in modern drama

Impressionism and Expressionism

Impressionism and expressionism are two trends thatbare equally well-markd in modern drama. Impressionism was a movement in painting, music and literature whose aim was to force the beholder, listener or the reader to participate in recreating the experience of the artist and whose method was to suggest "impression" or effect on the artist than to make precise and explicitvthe objective characteristics of things or events. In impressionism the emphasis is on the subjective reception of impressions, and the impressionist seeks to escape from the tyrannical aspects of objective reality. The impressionist does not accept objective life as it comes, but seeks to escape from the world of reality to his own imaginary land. Traces of can be found in the plays of Irish writer like W.B. Yeats and J.M. Synge.

    Expressionistic movement originated in Germany as a reaction against naturalism. It attempted to express the basic reality of its subjects rather than to produce the mere appearance or surface of life. Expressionist drama was not concerned with society but man. It aimed to offer subjective psychological analysis, not so much of individual as of a type and it made use of the subconscious. For such a study established dramatic forms and methods of expression were inadequate. Hence the expressionists threw overboard conventional structure in favour of an unrestricted freedom. The dialogue of the expressionist drama were after cryptic and patterned on prose and was in every way far remote from naturalistic prose of the realist school. Sean O'Casey, C.K. Munro, Elmer Rice are those who popularised expressionism in drama.

RICHARD BAXTER

                               RICHARD BAXTER (1615-1691). 

This "busiest man of his age" strongly suggests Bunyan in his life and writings. Like Bunyan, he was poor and uneducated, a nonconformist minister, exposed continually to insult and persecution; and, like Bunyan, he threw himself heart and soul into the conflicts of his age, and became by his public speech a mighty power among the common people. Unlike Jeremy Taylor, who wrote for the learned, and whose involved sentences and classical allusions are sometimes hard to follow, Baxter went straight to his mark, appealing directly to the judgment and feeling of his readers.

The number of his works is almost incredible when one thinks of his busy life as a preacher and the slowness of manual writing. In all, he left nearly one hundred and seventy different works, which if collected would make fifty or sixty volumes. As he wrote chiefly to influence men on the immediate questions of the day, most of this work has fallen into oblivion. His two most famous books are The Saints' Everlasting Rest and A Call to the Unconverted, both of which were exceedingly popular, running through scores of successive editions, and have been widely read in our own generation.

IZAAK WALTON

                                        IZAAK WALTON (1593-1683). 

Walton was a small tradesman of London, who preferred trout brooks and good reading to the profits of business and the doubtful joys of a city life; so at fifty years, when he had saved a little money, he left the city and followed his heart out into the country. He began his literary work, or rather his recreation, by writing his famous Lives,—kindly and readable appreciations of Donne, Wotton, Hooker, Herbert, and Sanderson, which stand at the beginning of modern biographical writing.

In 1653 appeared The Compleat Angler, which has grown steadily in appreciation, and which is probably more widely read than any other book on the subject of fishing. It begins with a conversation between a falconer, a hunter, and an angler; but the angler soon does most of the talking, as fishermen sometimes do; the hunter becomes a disciple, and learns by the easy method of hearing the fisherman discourse about his art. The conversations, it must be confessed, are often diffuse and pedantic; but they only make us feel most comfortably sleepy, as one invariably feels after a good day's fishing. So kindly is the spirit of the angler, so exquisite his appreciation of the beauty of the earth and sky, that one returns to the book, as to a favorite trout stream, with the undying expectation of catching something. Among a thousand books on angling it stands almost alone in possessing a charming style, and so it will probably be read as long as men go fishing. Best of all, it leads to a better appreciation of nature, and it drops little moral lessons into the reader's mind as gently as one casts a fly to a wary trout; so that one never suspects his better nature is being angled for. Though we have sometimes seen anglers catch more than they need, or sneak ahead of brother fishermen to the best pools, we are glad, for Walton's sake, to overlook such unaccountable exceptions, and agree with the milkmaid that "we love all anglers, they be such honest, civil, quiet men."

SIR THOMAS BROWNE

                                     SIR THOMAS BROWNE (1605-1682).


 Browne was a physician who, after much study and travel, settled down to his profession in Norwich; but even then he gave far more time to the investigation of natural phenomena than to the barbarous practices which largely constituted the "art" of medicine in his day. He was known far and wide as a learned doctor and an honest man, whose scientific studies had placed him in advance of his age, and whose religious views were liberal to the point of heresy. With this in mind, it is interesting to note, as a sign of the times, that this most scientific doctor was once called to give "expert" testimony in the case of two old women who were being tried for the capital crime of witchcraft. He testified under oath that "the fits were natural, but heightened by the devil's coöperating with the witches, at whose instance he [the alleged devil] did the villainies."

Browne's great work is the Religio Medici, i.e. The Religion of a Physician (1642), which met with most unusual success. "Hardly ever was a book published in Britain," says Oldys, a chronicler who wrote nearly a century later, "that made more noise than the Religio Medici." Its success may be due largely to the fact that, among thousands of religious works, it was one of the few which saw in nature a profound revelation, and which treated purely religious subjects in a reverent, kindly, tolerant way, without ecclesiastical bias. It is still, therefore, excellent reading; but it is not so much the matter as the manner—the charm, the gentleness, the remarkable prose style—which has established the book as one of the classics of our literature.

Two other works of Browne are Vulgar Errors (1646), a curious combination of scientific and credulous research in the matter of popular superstition, and Urn Burial, a treatise suggested by the discovery of Roman burial urns at Walsingham. It began as an inquiry into the various methods of burial, but ended in a dissertation on the vanity of earthly hope and ambitions. From a literary point of view it is Browne's best work, but is less read than the Religio Medici.

JEREMY TAYLOR

                                 JEREMY TAYLOR (1613-1667)

 Taylor was the greatest of the clergymen who made this period famous, a man who, like Milton, upheld a noble ideal in storm and calm, and himself lived it nobly. He has been called "the Shakespeare of divines," and "a kind of Spenser in a cassock," and both descriptions apply to him very well. His writings, with their exuberant fancy and their noble diction, belong rather to the Elizabethan than to the Puritan age.

From the large number of his works two stand out as representative of the man himself: The Liberty of Prophesying (1646), which Hallam calls the first plea for tolerance in religion, on a comprehensive basis and on deep-seated foundations; and The Rules and Exercises of Holy Living (1650). To the latter might be added its companion volume, Holy Dying, published in the following year. The Holy Living and Dying, as a single volume, was for many years read in almost every English cottage. With Baxter's Saints' Rest, Pilgrim's Progress, and the King James Bible, it often constituted the entire library of multitudes of Puritan homes; and as we read its noble words and breathe its gentle spirit, we cannot help wishing that our modern libraries were gathered together on the same thoughtful foundations.