Shakespeare The Sonnets

It is likely that Shakespeare composed his sonnets between 1592 and 1598 and were published in
1609 during the Renaissance Period or Elizabethan Age. There are some conventions and specific modes
of expression illustrative of the Elizabethan Age, such as: - Shakespeare was still the poet in service to
his lord and he left himself bound to write piece after piece to his beloved friend. Shakespeares career
(1564-1616) bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625) and he
was a favourite of both monarchs, which developed a habit of going to see plays and due to the increase
in life standards, people have more time and more money to go to the theatres. The first 126 sonnets are
dedicated to the fair friend, sonnets 127-152 dedicated to the Dark Lady while the last two sonnets 153-
154 representing modern variants were left for the end of the collection. Sonnet 18 is a glorification of
handsomeness, physical beauty, against the changing nature and the passing of time with all the marks
left by. This sonnets is the most famous, is simply a statement of praise about the beauty. An important
theme of the sonnet is the power of the speakers poem to defy time and last forever, carrying the beauty
of the beloved down to future generations. The beloveds eternal summer shall not fade precisely
because it is embodied in the sonnet: So long as men can breathe or eyes can see, the speaker writes in
the couplet: So long lives this, and this gives life to thee. Sonnet 130 shows the poets wooing of the
Dark Lady: My mistress eyes are not like the sun.. The mistress eyes are compared with the sun,
her lips with coral, and her cheeks with roses. The idea of satire is further enforced by final couplet of
130 in which the speaker delivers his most expositional line: And yet, by heaven, Y think my love as
rare, as any she belied with false compare. The specific themes of the Sonnets are: love (of genuine art),
beauty, mortality vs immortality, rivality, marriage, emotional triangle, gender roles. A Shakespearean
sonnet is generally grouped into 3 quatrains and a couplet. The idea focalises on the relationship between
friendship, love, art and time. All these qualities of the Shakespearean sonnets entittle modern
scholarship, in particular, and readership, in general, to consider them the finnest love sonnets ever
written in the English Language.

Shakespeare- Romeo and Juliet

Shakespeares career (1564-1616) bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I
(ruled 1603-1625) and he was a favourite of both monarchs, which developed a habit of going to see
plays and due to the increase in life standards, people have more time and more money to go to the
theatres. Shakespeare wrote 2 poems, 154 sonnets and 37 plays: Chronicle and Roman plays, comedies,
tragedies. In comedies and tragedies errors are produced by accident, other human being, oneself. The
play focuses on romantic love, specifically the intense passion that springs up at first sight between
Romeo and Juliet. The action takes place in Verona during 4 days. The motifs of the play are poison and
weapon. The themes of the death and violence permeate Romeo and Juliet, and they are always
connected to passion, whether the passion is love or hate, passion can be disruptive, dangerous.
Shakespeares version of Romeo and Juliet distinguishes itself from its predecessors in several important
aspects: the subtility and originality of its characterization, the intense pace of its action, a powerful
enrichment of the storys thematic aspects, and, above all an extraordinary use of language. Both the
story of Romeo and Juliet and Shakespeares life takes place during the Renaissance, a period that begins
in the 14th century and extends into the 17th century. In conclusion, Romeo and Juliet is a tragedy of
youth, love and fate.

Shakespeare Hamlet
Revenge tragedies were all the rage in Elizabethan England. Shakespeare is generally believed to
have written Hamlet around 1601, for it seems to allude to his own Julius Caesar (1599) and we have a
record of its entry for publication in mid-1602. A moment of transition from medieval to modern world.
Shakespeare wrote 2 poems, 154 sonnets and 37 plays: Chronicle and Roman plays, comedies, tragedies.
In comedies and tragedies errors are produced by accident, other human being, oneself. Tragedies have a
main character: he is of noble origins with admirable personal qualities. The tragic spectacle depends on
the audience being aware of the capacity of the even the most powerful individuals to destroy themselves
through their imperfect understanding of our human condition. The issue of the sources Shakespeare
might have inspired from in writing his Hamlet has also provided Shakesperean scholarship with material
for speculations. The text Shakespeare most probably based his play upon in the revenge tragedy of
Hamlet. The story is an ancient on, originating in Scandinavia as the tale of Amleth, the legendary prince
of Denmark. The main themes of the play are: madness, revenge, suspense, appearance vs reality. Hamlet
is a play which invites the reader/spectator to embark on a stimulating exercise of interpretation in order
to eventually grasp its meanings.

Shakespeare- A Midsummer Nights Dream

Shakespeares career (1564-1616) bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I
(ruled 1603-1625) and he was a favourite of both monarchs, which developed a habit of going to see
plays and due to the increase in life standards, people have more time and more money to go to the
theatres. Shakespeare wrote 2 poems, 154 sonnets and 37 plays: Chronicle and Roman plays, comedies,
tragedies. In comedies and tragedies errors are produced by accident, other human being, oneself.
Comedies themes: time, ordinary humans, the analysis of life, love, war, man and nature. First written to
be performed as part of a wedding festivity before being adapted for the public theatre, A Midsummer
Nights Dream is one of Shakespeares strangest and most delightful creations, and it marks a departure
from his earlier works and from others of the English Renaissance. One of a Midsummer Nights
Dreams most important themes is that of the dificulty of love. Though most of the conflict in the play
stems from the troubles of romance. The theme of loves difficulty is often explored through the motif of
love out of balace-that is, romantic situations in which a disparity or inequality interferes with the
harmony of a relationship. The motifs in the play are the Moon, the animals and seeing. The repetition of
references to seeing, eyes and eyesight reminds the audience of the difference between things look and
what they are, and that love is blind and beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Lyrical in tone and masque-
like in movement, it lacks the graver undertoones ot the later comedies and it appears like a dream, a jest,
a presentation of the comic irresponsibility of young love whose variations are light-heartedly attributed
to the mischief-making-half deliberate, half accidental of Puck.

Shakespeare Julius Caesar

Julius Caesar takes place in ancient Rome in 44 BC, when Rome was the centre of an empire
stretching from Britain to North Africa and from Persia to Spain. The empire suffered from a sharp
division between citizens, who were represented in the Senate, and in the increasingly underrepresented
plebeian masses. A succession of men aspired to become the absolute ruler of Rome, but only Julius
Caesar seemed likely to achieve this status. Therefore, a group of conspirator came together and
assassinated Caesar. The assassination, however, failed to put an end to the power, struggles dividing the
empire. The plot of Shakespeares play includes the events leading up to assassination of Caesar.
Shakespeares contemporaries have detected parallels between Julius Caesars portrayal of the shift from
republican to imperial Rome and the Elizabethan eras trend toward consolidated monarchic power. The
main theme in the play is fate versus free will. Julius Caesar raises many questions about the force of fate
in life versus the capacity for free will. Ultimately, the play seems to support a philosophy in which fate
and freedom maintain a delicate coexistence. In other words, Caesar recognizes that certain events lie
beyond human control. The main motif in the play is omens and portents. Throughout the play, omens
and portents manifest themselves, each serving to crystallize the larger themes of fate and
misinterpretation of signs. In a larger sense, the omens in Julius Caesar thus imply the dangers of failing
to perceive and analyze the details of ones world.

Jonathan Swift Gullivers Travels

While Swift was writing Gulliver\s Travels in the 1720s, England was undergoing a lot of
political shuffling. The restoration era began in 1660, a few years before Swift was born. Defoe disagreed
the idea that this could just as easily be misured for foolish or selfish purposes as good as ones. Swifts
satire of the Jolly on Enlightenment scientific and theological musings and experiments in Part III of
Gullivers Travels is follwed by his portrayal of an utopian society, into which man can never fit. Lemuel
Gulliver narrates the story of Gullivers Travels, but this first-person narrator is not completely reliable.
Though Gulliver is very exact with the details of his travels, and we know him to be honest, sometimes
he doesnt see the forest for the trees. Swift deliberately makes Gulliver naive and sometimes even
arrogant for two reasons: first, it makes the reader more skeptical about the ideas presented in the book.
Second, it allows the reader to have a good laugh at Gullivers expense when he doesnt realize the
absurdity of his limited viewpoint. The main themes are: human condition- Swift subscribed to the pre-
Enlightenment, Protestant idea that man is by nature sinful, having fallen from perfection in the Garden
of Eden. Swift also parodies the scientists of his day in order to make his point that science for its own
sake are not a lofty ideal. Science, and the ability to reason, ought to be used for practical ends, he felt, to
address and solve the many real-life problems.

Defoe Robinson Crusoe

Robinson Crusoes journey takes place in the context of 17th century European imperialism and
colonialism, as different countries explored the Americas, establishing colonies and exploiting natives.
The Neoclassical period, Augustan age. Charles I dissolves Parliament which demands control on the
army. Charles refusal led to Civil War. Charles I is executed and Cromwell sets about founding a
Republic, the Commonwealth. Under Charles II people came back to monarchy-the Restoration.
Robinson Crusoe is a fictional autobiography written from a first-person point of view, apparently written
by an old man looking back on his life. Robinson Crusoe can be viewed as a spiritual or religious fable.
Defoe was very concerned with religious issues, and nearly became a Dissenter minister. Robinson
Crusoe may be read as a novel that is the product of the economic individualism of Puritanism. It is also a
narrative that clearly respects the prescriptive realism that the novel was supposed to entail. Loneliness, a
fundamental theme in the novel, can be regarded as a metaphor for a new type of human consciousness -
the individual robbed of the ties with his community. Colonization is yet another essential theme in the
novel. Even if the pattern of colonization had existed in English literature (Shakespeares The Tempest),
the novel endorsed the ideology of the time with regard to Englands colonial expansion. The novel
advances the paradigm of the colonizer/colonized.

Jane Austen Pride and Prejudice

Jane Austens major novels, including Pride and Prejudice, were all composed within a short
period of about twenty years. Those twenty years also mark a period in history when England was the
height of its power. England stood as the bulwark against French revolutionary extremism and against
Napoleonic imperialism. The dates Austen was writing almost exactly coincide with the great English
military victories over Napoleon and the French: the Battle of the Nile and the Battle of Waterloo.
However, so secure in their righteousness were the English middle and upper classes-the landed gentry
(people who have earned their property, not by inheriting it from their aristocratic ancestors, but by
purchasing it with their new wealth) featured in Jane Austens works-that these historical events impact
very little the novel. There is a3rd person narrator, omniscient Elizabeths point of view. Pride and
Prejudice is uncharacteristic of the Romanticism, although it was written in the middle of the Romantic
period. The two major themes of Jane Austens Pride and Prejudice are summed up in the title. The first
aspect can be traced in the actions and statements of all the works major and many of its minor
characters. Pride is the character flow that causes Elizabeth Bennet to dislike Darcy upon their first
meeting. She perceives in him a cold aloofness that she attributes to his inflated opinion of himself. The
subject of prejudice is linked to pride in the title. It is also more directly linked to Elizabeth Bennets
character. She sets herself up as an ironic spectator, able and prepared to judge and classify, already
making the first large division of the world into two sorts of people: the simple ones and the intricate
ones, an extreme example of prejudice.

Coleridge The Rime of the Ancient Mariner

 Samuel Taylor Coleridge was born in Devon in 1772. During the politically charged atmosphere
of the late eighteenth century the French Revolution had sent shockwaves through Europe, and
England and France were at warColeridge made a name for himself both as a political radical and as an
important young poet; along with his friends Robert Southey and William Wordsworth, he became one of
the most important writers in England. Collaborating with Wordsworth on the revolutionary Lyrical
Ballads of 1798, Coleridge helped to inaugurate the Romantic era in England; Coleridge became the poet
of imagination, exploring the relationships between nature and the mind as it exists as a separate entity.
Poems such as The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan demonstrate Coleridges talent for
concocting bizarre, unsettling stories full of fantastic imagery and magic; Coleridge became an opium
addict and, in 1816, moved in with the surgeon James Gillman in order to preserve his health. The
intentional archaisms of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the hypnotic drone of Kubla Khan do
not imitate common speech, creating instead a more strikingly stylized effect. The main themes are: the
transformative power of the imagination , the interplay of philosophy, religious piety and poetry and
nature and the development of the individual. The main motifs of this poem are: conversation poems,
delight in the natural world, prayer. The symbols in the poem are: The Sun , The Moon, Dreams and
dreaming, Childhood, Innocence and Happiness. Coleridge emphasis on the imagination, on its
independence from the outside world and its creation of fantastic picture such as those found in the
Rime, exerted a profound influence on later writers such as Shelley, a constant philosophical pressure on
his ideas.

John Keats To Autumn, Ode on A Grecian Urn

In his short life, John Keats wrote some of the most beautiful and enduring poems in the English
language. Among his greatest achievements is his sequence of six lyric odes, written between March and
September 1819. He died barely a year after finishing the ode To Autumn, in February 1821. The
beauty of nature, the relation between imagination and creativity, the response of the passions to beauty
and suffering, and the transience of human life in time. The sumptuous sensory language in which the
odes are written, their idealistic concern for beauty and truth, and their expressive agony in the face of
death are all Romantic preoccupationsthough at the same time, they are all uniquely Keatss. Taken
together, the odes do not exactly tell a storythere is no unifying plot and no recurring characters.
Nevertheless, the extraordinary number of suggestive interrelations between them is impossible to ignore.
. In that sense, there is no harm in treating the odes a sequence of utterances told in the same voice. The
main themes of the odes are: The Inevitability of Death = even before his diagnosis of terminal
tuberculosis, Keats focused on death and its inevitability in his work. For Keats, small, slow acts of death
occurred every day, and he chronicled these small mortal occurrences. The end of a lovers embrace, the
images on an ancient urn, the reaping of grain in autumnall of these are not only symbols of death, but
instances of it. The Contemplation of Beauty = in his poetry, Keats proposed the contemplation of beauty
as a way of delaying the inevitability of death. Although we must die eventually, we can choose to spend
our time alive in aesthetic revelry, looking at beautiful objects and landscapes. Unlike mortal beings,
beautiful things will never die but will keep demonstrating their beauty for all time. Keates speakers
contemplate urns, books, birds and stars.

Charles Dickens Great Expectations

Great Expectations was published serially in Dickens weekly periodical All the Year Round,
from December 1860 until June 1861. There have been countless adaptations of the novel for the stage
and screen and it is often credited as Dickens greatest work. Some critics and historians suggest that
Dickens wrote Great Expectations from an autobiographical perspective, drawing on his own experience
as a discontent child. The Victorian period represents a time of great change: Britain became a major
imperial power. Is an age full of contrast. The most important paradigm is the surface where we found
domesticity, respectability and stability. Dickens has shaped Great Expectations on the lines of the
Bildungsroman genre, which closely follows the inner growth of a protagonist from his childhood to
middle age. In many respects, it contains themes and emotions directly related to the authors experience.
His literary style is a mixture of fantasy and realism. The major themes in the novel are related to
ambition, i.e. great expectations. Some issues explored under this umbrella theme are greed, envy,
pride, arrogance, ingratitude and unkindness. Other theme in the novel are: fear and fun, loneliness and
luck, humiliation and honor. Great Expections is regarded as Dickens grotesque tragico-comic
conception, probably because of the mix of comedy and tragedy that adorns most of his novels. There are
moments of touching tragedy and sadness, such as young Pip in a cemetery surrounded by his dead
family and at the same time, there is lighthearted comedy, such as when Mr. Pumblecook and Mr. Wopste
weave their.

Thomas Hardy Tess of the Ubervilles

The critical realism of the 19th century drew to its end in the works of Thomas Hardy. We call
Hardys works the Swan Song of critical realism, for he is undoubtedly the greatest representative of that
literary movement. The last 50 years of the 19 th century saw innovations in science and technology that
changed society to a greater degree than even before. The Victorian period is a time of great change:
Britain became a major important imperial power. The tone for the late Victorian age was set by Queen
Victoria herself. She had always been a very serious and self-important person for that time she took the
throne at the age of 18, it is reported that when she became queen, her first resolution was I will be
good. Many middle-clan Englishmen and women followed her example. Tess of the Ubervilles is a
tragic novel with a realistic and pesimistic tone. This is one of Hardys best-known and best-constructed
novels. It holds first place among Hardys realistic writings as a vivid protest against the urban social
order and civilization. It is the story of an innocentcountry girl whose happiness is ruined by a tragic fate,
which has its origin in the social, economic, political and moral conditions. Considered a Victorian
realist, Hardy examines the social constraints on the lives of those living in Victorian England, and
criticises those beliefs, especially those relating to marriage, education and religion, that limited peoples
lives and caused unhappiness. Fate or chance is another important theme. Hardys main characters often
seem to be held in fates overwhelming grip. Tess was powerless to change her fate, because she had been
the plaything of a malevolent universe.

Lewis Carroll Alices Adventures in Wonderland

According to his own account, Lewis Carroll composed the story that became Alices Adventures
in Wonderland in a sunny July day in 1862. He created it for the Liddell sisters while on a boating trip up
the Thames River. Although the book have since became timeless classics, nonetheless clearly reflect the
Victorian origin in its language, its class-consciousness and the atitude toward children. The Victorian
age, named for the long rule of Britain;s Queen Victoria, spanned the years 1837 to 1901. The early
Victorian era marked the emergence of a large middle-class society for the first time in the history of the
Western world. With this middle-class population came a spread of so called familly values:polite
society avoided mentioning sex, sexual passions, bodily functions and in extreme cases, body parts. The
tone for the late Victorian age was set by Queen Victoria herself. Many middle-class Englishmen and
women followed her example, seeking to find morally uplifting and mentally stimulating thoughts in
their reading and other entertainments. Lewis Carrolls Alices Adventures in Wonderland has been one of
the most analyzed books of all time. One of the clearly identifiable subjects of the story is the identity
question. One of the first things that the narrator says about Alice after her arrival in Wonderland is that:
this curious child was very fond of pretending to be two people. The question of why Alice is so
confused about her identity has to do with her developing sense of the diffenrence of childhood and
adulthood. Carroll communicates Alices confusion about her own identity and her position between
childhood and adulthood by contrasting her logical, reasoned behaviour with that of the inhabitants of
Wonderland. Everything about Wonderland is absurd by Alices standards. Most of the songs and poems
that appear in the book are parodies of well-known Victorian poems.

George Bernard Shaw Caesar and Cleopatra

Born in Dublin in 1856 to a middle-class Protestant family bearing pretentions to nobility, George
B. Shaw grew to become what other consider the second greatest English playwright, behind only
Shakespeare. Caesar and Cleopatra, a play written in 1898, was first staged in 1901 and first published in
1901 during the Edwardian Age. The Edwardian Age was also seen as a mediocre period of pleasure
between the great achievements of the preceding Victorian Age and the catastrophe of the following war.
Below the upper-class, the era was marked by significant shifts in politics among sections of society that
had been largely excluded from weilding power in the past, such as common labourers. Women became
increasingly politicised. The most powerful influences in this era: art critic, music critic, theatre critic,
fashion society (socialist). The play is an anti romantic comedy where the style of writing has as device
and techniques: comedy, parody and colloquial language. Shaw wants to prove that it was not love but
politics that drew Cleopatra to Julius Caesar. He sees the Roman occupation of ancient Egypt as similar
to the British occupation that was occuring during his time. A second theme, apparent both from the text
of the play itself and from Shaws lenghty notes after the play, is Shaws belief that people have not been
morally improved by civilization and technology. Another theme is the value of clemency. Caesar
remarks that he will not stop to vengeance when confronted with Septimius, the murderer of Pompey.
The plays outstanding success rests upon its treatment of Caesar as a credible study in magnanimity and
original morality rather than as a superhuman hero on a stage pedestal.

Joseph Conrad Heart of Darkness

In 1890, Joseph Conrad secured employment in the Congo as the captain of a river steamboat; this
was also the approximate year in which the main action of Heart of Darkness takes place. Today, the river
at the center of Heart of Darkness is called the Zaire and the country is the Democratic Republic of the
Congo, but at the time Conrad wrote of them the country was the Belgian Congo and the river the Congo.
The Ivory Trade = during the 1890s, at the time Heart of Darkness takes place, ivory was in enormous
demand in Europe, where it was used to make jewelry, piano keys and billiard balls, among other items.
Conrad tells us that Kurtz was the best agent of his time, collecting as much ivory as all the other agents
combined. The Belgian traders commited many acts of atrocity against the African natives, including the
severing of hands and heads. These acts, reflected in Heart of Darkness, continued, despite on order by
Leopold II that they cease. The story is told in the words of Charlie Marlow, a seaman, and filtered
through the thoughts of an unidentified listening narrator, is framed as a story within a story. Throughout
Heart of Darkness, which tells the story of a journey into the heart of the Belgian Congo, the themes of
alienation, loneliness, silence and solitude predominate. The book begins and ends in silence. Deception,
or hypocrisy, is a central theme of the novel and is explored on many levels. Conrad sounds the themes of
order and disorder in showing, primarly through the example of the Companys chief clerk. Closely
linked to the themes of order and disorder are those os sanity and insanity. Madness, given prolonged
exposure to the isolation of the wilderness, seems an inevitable extension of chaos. As is true of all other
themes in the book, those of duty and responsibility are glimpsed on many levels. On a national level, we
are told of the British devotion to duty and on individual level, Conrad weaves these themes through
Marlows job as captain.

Edward Morgan Forster A passage to India

Edward Morgan Forster born in London, in 1879, was one of the founders and leading figures of
the Bloomsburry Group, together with Virginia Wolf and others. His literary work primarly belongs to
the realist mode of writing: his ideas, however, are sooner to be associated with the liberal tradition. The
Bloomsburry Group members dedicated a lot of time and effort to the raising of consciousness towards
the necessity of change, innovation, the break with the past, modernism in a word. Forsters later works,
A passage to India, in particular, are highly modernist, basicallysymbolist writings whose main purpose
seems to be that of offering glimpses into the intricacies of the human heart as it is stirred by that which
goes on outside. The novel waves its story around opposing principles, be they social, historical, political,
cultural, moral, or simply human. Forsters mature work, A Passage to India, is neatly structured into
three parts: The Mosque, The Caves and The Temple. The indian ingredient is what makes A Passage to
India a refreshing writing and reading experience, what distances Forster from the rather dull modes and
manners of his earlier work. The central character, a woman, has the symbolical function of fertilising the
novel discourse and, as her very name suggests, begins a journey meant to help her rediscover herself.
The themes of the novel are cultural clash- east versus vest (English vs Indians), Moslem vs Hindus
(Indians vs Indians), friendship, ambiguity, God and religion. Forsters dominant theme is that of habitual
conformity of people to unexamined social conventions. It forms the basis for elaborate discussions on
the condition of the individual which prevents him/her from making choices, includin choices about their
own lifes.

Henry James The Portrait of a Lady

Although the period known as the Enlightenment took place a century before The Portrait of a
Lady was written, the Enlightenment is the historical period that most influences the novels characters
and its story. Isabel, especially, is a product of Enlightenment ideas, whose life show how completely
these ideas were adapted in the US and how strong their influence still was a century later. In the late
1800s, when The Portrait of a Lady was written and takes place, England was still very much a society
based on wealth, class, tradition, and the supremacy of society over the individual; and it was still
consolidating its rule over a vast empire of subject peoples. Ralph and Lord Warburton find Isabels
independence and individualism captivating because Isabel is a captivating young woman who clearly is
not a threat. These men, although they reflect European ideas in their own lifes, find Isabels ways
refreshing -as long as they are expressed by a lovely young woman and not by an angry mob. The
contrast between the American character and the European character is a theme that appears throughout
Jamess work. This theme is especially interesting in The Portrait of a Lady because most of its characters
are Americans who have been living in Europe for varying periods of time. Isabels social and emotional
development is thrown into high relief by Jamess contrast of American and European nature. In The
Portrait of a Lady, James uses one theme, the contrasts between Americans and Europeans, to intensify
another, more universal theme of a womans development from naive youth to mature wisdom as she
suffers the consequences of a poor romantic choice. James is considered the foremost author of
psychological realism, a subcategory of American realism.

Virginia Wolf Mrs. Dalloway

A member of the Bloomsbury Group, Virginia Wolf has played an active part on the intellectual
scene of the early 20th century. Like the other members of the group that made the London district center
literary history, she was committed to the rejection of the structures and taboos of Victorianism on
religious, artistic, social and sexual matters. In flight from the object world objectively portrayed, Mrs.
Dalloway brings the modernist alternative of presenting the materiality of the flow of human thought
triggered by external stimuli and its protagonist, caught in between, narrates from both ends with the aid
of free indirect style: in the third person, from a distance, about the reflected I. The symbolic window
for the separation between worlds is recurrent in the novel and it serves to deliberate between tradition
and innovation. From the very first sentence, Mrs. Dalloway shows the secure meshing of a third person
narrators point of view with a first person characters point of view, such that it is not possible to
separate or distinguish the two. The novel multiplies time by presenting the thoughts of myriad
characters, each of whom remember and experience time, the past and the present, in different ways. The
main themes of the novel are: society and class, suffering repression, memory and the past, madness,
isolation, stream of consciousness, interior monologue.

James Joyce A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

Joyce grew up in an Ireland that constitutionally was a part of a nation formally known as the
United Kingdom of Great Britain and Ireland. Located just to the west of the island of Great Britain,
Ireland had its own distinctive customs and culture. Most significantly, while Protestantism was the
predominant religion in Great Britain, most native Irish people were Roman Catholics. However, both
politically and economically, Ireland had long been dominated by Britain. Of all the English modernists
works, Joyces is the indubitable evidence that if there is any difference at all between realism and
modernism in literary terms, it does not reside so much in the sense realism and modernism make of the
real, but in the new status assigned to literature. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is generally
considered to be a Bildungsroman, following the development of Stephan Dedalus, its hero, from
childhood into adulthood, through a tormented quest for identity. Since the novel simultaneously focuses
on Stephans becoming as an artist, the novel may be also understood as a Kunstler-roman (an artist
novel), although, due to the coincidence of trajectory between Stephans evolution as an individual and
his evolution as an artist, the two species tend to overlap. The main themes of the novel are: religion,
family, nationality, language, the artists growing interest in the aesthetics of art. In the novel the centre is
formed by the heros consciousness, the realistic detail being given up, indirect projections of the world
around replacing them and composing the symphony of voices heard, remembered or anticipated.

Elliot Waste Land

Not only is The Waste Land Elliots greatest work, but it may be along with Joyces Ulysses
the greatest work of all modernist literature. Most of the poem was written in 1921, and it first appeared
in print in 1922. Elliot was director of publishing house in 1888 1965, he won a Nobel prize for
literature in 1948. At the age of 25, in 1914 he emigrated to England. A long work divided into five
sections, The Waste Land takes on the degraded mess that Elliot considered modern culture to constitute,
particularly after the first World War had ravaged Europe. A sign of pessimism with which Elliot
approaches his subject is the poems epigraph, taken from the Satyricon, in which the Sibyl looks at the
future and proclaims that she only wants to die. Elliots poem, like the anthropological texts that inspired
it, draws on a vast range of sources. Many of the references are from the Bible: at the time of the poems
writing Elliot was just beginning to develop an interest in Christianity that would reach its apex in the
Four Quartets. The main theme of the poem is disillusionment. While Elliot employs a deliberately
difficult style and seems often to find the most obscure reference possible, he means to do more than just
frustrate his reader and display his own intelligence: He intends to provide a mimetic account of life in
the confusing world of the 20th century.

Emily Dickinson Poems

For Emily Dickinson, the immeasurable, unrecorded life was far more real than the verifiable one;
the intersections of visible and invisible worlds far more electric than facts recognizes by biographers. A
sketch of her known dates and places cannot capture or account for Dickinsons extraordinary sensibility
or originality, which brought fresh currents into American thought and literature and expanded the
possibilities of poetry. For women of Dickinsons class, the appropriate social institutions were the family
and the church; with those came societal obligations. Women of her day were not expected to be
intellectuals, leaders, thinkers, philosophers or creators. But Dickinson rebelled. She was a woman who
created her own avenues of thought. In reading Dickinsons poetry, it is best not to look for creeds or
statements of belief. Though she reflects her communitys Protestant and Calvinistic frames of reference,
religious terminology in her poetry does not indicate that she held orthodox religious beliefs. She is by
turn satirical, skeptical, owed, reverent, speculative, and outraged. She wrote a remarkable number of
poems on pain, a taboo subject in her time and place. She refused to accept the Calvinistic teaching that
she had earned pain, through original sin, or the Transcendentalist habit or transcending it, through denial
or euphemism. Certainly Dickinsons explorations of consciousness, and the strategies she used to free
language from traditional structures and expectations continue to challenge, reward, and astonish readers
year after year. Dickinson was a poet who had the courage to resist many authorities, even at the price of
being misunderstood. The main themes of Dickinsons poems are: death, truth and its tumultuous nature,
fame and success, grief, faith, freedom through poetry, intensity of emotions.

William Faulkner Absalom, Absalom

Almost one-third of the southern men who went to fight in the Civil War (1861-1865) died, and
almost as many suffered many injuries. The lose of the Civil War in the 19th century had a profound
impact on the south. The region not only lost the war but also their hall way of life. Young southern men
demonstrated their manhood to their families by working hard to show that they would be good providers
for their future families. Women were expected to avoid competition and to prepare for romantic,
submissive love, relationships with their future husbands. Young people were taught to respect their
elders. After World War I came the emergence of the Lost Generation, a group of writers disillusioned by
American idealism. These writers longed for something new and innovative. Sutpens story is told by
several narrators (4): 1. Rosa is the only narrator who lived during the events of the story. 2. Mr.
Compsons father was one of the first men in Jefferson to accept Sutpen, so this version is sympathetic
toward Sutpen. 3. Quentin is preoccupied with the Sutpen story as he attempts to make sense of his own
past and better understand his role in the present. 4. Shreve is introduced in chapter six and asks to hear
about the South. As the chapter progresses, it becomes clear that Quentin has told Shreve the Sutpen story
before. Shreve knows many of the events of the story but serves as sort of a spokesperson for the reader,
asking questions the reader would like to ask. The main themes of the story are: The American South,
truth and The Past. Faulkner shows his reader that there are limits to how fully people can know the truth
about the past. Truth seems to be in the eye of the beholder, as is evident with each telling of Sutpens
story. The challenge is for the reader to make decisions about which narrators are reliable in which
instances. Faulkner expresses his beliefs that people should be aware of the past and learn what they can
from it. Each narrator has a different relationship with the past.

John Fitzgerald The Great Gatsby

The Jazz Age and the roaring twenties. The Jazz Age began soon after World War I and ended
with the 1929 stock market crash. Victorious, America experienced an economic boom and expansion.
After the war, they pursued financial independence and a freer lifestyle. This was the time of the
flappers, young women who dressed up in jewelry and feather boots and danced the Charleston. In The
Great Gatsby, Jordan Baker is an athletic independent woman, who mantains a hardened, amoral view of
life. Her character represents the new breed of woman in America with a sense of power during this time.
New York City and the Urban Corruption. Prohibition fostered a large underworld industry in many big
cities, including Chicago and New York. For years, New York was under the control of the Irish
politicians of Tammany Hall, which assured that corruption persisted. A key player in the era of
Tammany Hall was Arnold Rothstein (Meyer Wolfsheim in the novel). Through his campaign, he was
entitled to a monopoly of prostitution and gambling in New York until he was murdered in 1928. The
main themes of the novel are: Cultural clash, American dream, Appearance and reality, Moral corruption.
Culture clash: by juxtaposing characters from the West and East in America in the novel, Fitzgerald was
making some moral observations about the people who live there. Those in the Midwest were fair,
relatively innocent, while those who lived in the East, Tom and Daisy Buchanan, were unfair, corrupt and
matherialistic. American Dream: Gatsby represents the American Dream of self-made wealth and
hapiness and the ability to make something of ones self despite ones origins. He achieved more than his
parents had and felt he was pursuing a perfect dream, Daisy, who for him embodied the elements of
success. When Gatsby found he couldnt win Daisys love, he pursued the American Dream in the guise
of Cody. Appearances and Reality: since there is no real love between Gatsby and Daisy, in The Great
Gatsby, there is no real truth to Gatsbys vision. Hand in hand with this idea is the appearances and reality
theme.

Hawthorne The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter, which takes as its principal subject colonial 17 th century New England, was
written and published in the middle of the 19th century. Hawthorne began writing the novel in 1849 and it
was published in 1950. The discrepancy between the time represented in the novel and the time of its
production has often been a point of confusion to students. Because Hawthorne took an earlier time as his
subject, the novel is considered a historical romance written in the midst of American literary movement
called Transcendentalism (c1836-1860). Even though Hawthorne was close to many transcendentalists,
including Emerson, he was rather peripheral to the movement. He even pokes fun at Brook Farm and his
transcendentalist contemporaries in The Custom-House, referring to them as his dreamy
brethren.indulging in fantastic speculation. Where they saw the possibilities of achieving knowledge
through mystical experience, he was far more skeptical. The Scarlet Letter is a novel that describes the
psychological anguish of two principle characters, Hester and Dimmesdale. They are both suffering under
their mutual sin of adultery in a strict Puritan society. As critics immediately recognized upon publication
of the novel in 1850, one of its principal themes involved conflict between the individual and society.
Hawthorne represents the stern and threatening force of Puritan society in the first sentence of the first
chapter, where he describes a throng of bearded men, in sad-colored garments and gray. The action of
the novel mantains the conflict of the individual with society, even to the end, where Hawthorne offers a
perplexing conclusion. Closely related to the conflict of the individual and society is the theme of
stability, change and transformation. One of the most important places where this theme is introduced is
actually outside the proper narrative, in Hawthornes introduction, The Custom-House, where he
informs us about his actual job as the commisioner of the house. Critical consensus has come to regard
the issue of ambiguity and knowledge rather than ones of deception and truth, as a central, theme of the
novel. Ambiguity, which implies the incapacity to know anything for certain, is much closer to what the
novel describes. The Scarlet Letter is without question a novel about sin and quilt.

Eugene ONeill Mourning Becomes Electra

Eugene O'Neill (18881953) was the son of an actor whose work meant that the family led a
difficult life on the road. O'Neill would later deeply resent his insecure childhood, pinning the family's
many problems, including his mother's drug addiction, on his father. O'Neill wrote morality plays and
experimented with the tragic form. O'Neill's interest in tragedy began as early as 1924 with his Desire
Under the Elms, a tale of incest, infanticide, and fateful retribution, but would come to maturity with his
monumental revision of Aeschylus's Oresteia, Mourning Becomes Electra (1931). O'Neill chose Electra
because he felt that her tale had been left incomplete. More generally, as his diary notes indicate, O'Neill
understood his exercises in tragedy as an attempt to find a modern analogue to an ancient mode of
experience. Thus Mourning aims to provide a "modern psychological approximation of the Greek sense
of fate" in a time in which the notion of an inescapable and fundamentally non-redemptive determinism
is incomprehensible. The main themes are: revenge, truth, death, Oedipus complex. Although O'Neill
supposedly derived Mourning Becomes Electra from the Oresteia, the myth that actually structures the
play's action is overwhelming that of Oedipus. At the center of this complex in what Freud defined as its
positive form is the child's incestuous desire for the parent of the opposite sex, a desire possibly
surmounted in the course of the child's development or else subject to repression. As Travis Bogard notes,
ONeill wrote Mourning Becomes Electra to convince modern audiences of the persistence of fate. What
ONeill terms fate is the repetition of a mythic structure of desire across the generations, the Oedipal
drama. In the Oedipal myth, what tears the son away from his incestuous embrace with the mother is the
imposition of the fathers law. Mournings principal fater, Ezra, serves as figure for this paternal law,
though more in his symbolic form than in his own person.

Edgar Allan Poe The Tell-Tale Heart

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849. In his stormy forty
years, Poe lived in all the important literary centers of the northeastern United States: Baltimore,
Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. He introduced the British horror story, or the Gothic genre, to
American literature, along with the detective story, science fiction, and literary criticism. Poes Gothic
tales are brief flashes of chaos that flare up within lonely narrators living at the fringes of society. Poes
style and concerns never found their best expression in longer forms, but his short stories are considered
masterpieces worldwide. The Poes Gothic is a potent brew, best served in small doses. Literary critic
F.O. Mathiessen named this period the American Renaissance. A distinctly American literature that
attempts to escape from the long shadow of the British literary traditions was crafted. Poe explores the
similarity of love and hate in many stories, especially The Tell-Tale Heart and William Wilson. Poe
portrays the psychological complexity of these two supposedly opposite emotions, emphasizing the ways
they enigmatically blend into each other. Poe, like Freud, interpreted love and hate as universal emotions,
thereby severed from the specific conditions of time and space. The Gothic terror is the result of the
narrators simultaneous love for himself and hatred of his rival. The double shows that love and hate are
inseparable and suggests that they may simply be two forms of the most intense form of human emotion.
In The TellTale Heart, the narrator confesses a love for an old man whom he then violently murders
and dismembers. The narrator reveals his madness by attempting to separate the person of the old man,
whom he loves, from the old mans supposedly evil eye, which triggers the narrators hatred. This
delusional separation enables the narrator to remain unaware of the paradox of claiming to have loved his
victim.

Mark Twain The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is a picaresque novel (episodic, colourful story often in the
form of a quest or journey); satire of popular adventure and romance novels; bildungsroman (novel of
education or moral development). The tone of the novel is frequently ironic or mocking, particularly
concerning adventure novels and romances; also contemplative, as Huck seeks to decipher the world
around him; sometimes boyish and exuberant . Setting (time): Before the Civil War; roughly 18351845;
Twain said the novel was set forty to fifty years before the time of its publication. Setting (place): The
Mississippi River town of St. Petersburg, Missouri; various locations along the river through Arkansas.
The main themes of the novel are: 1. Racism and Slavery - an allegorical representation of the condition
of blacks in the United States even after the abolition of slavery. 2. Freedom: in The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn both Huck and the runaway slave Jim are in flight from a society which labels them as
outcasts. Although Huck has been adopted by the Widow Douglas and been accepted into the community
of St. Petersburg, he feels hemmed in by the clothes he is made to wear. At the end of the book, after Jim
has been freed, Huch decides to continue his own quest for freedom: Ireckon I got to light out gor the
Territory ahead of the rest... The irony of freeing a free man has concerned many critics, who believe
Twain might have been commenting on the failure of reconstruction after the Civil War. Hucks main
struggle in the book is with his conscience, the set of morals with which he has been raised. Probably the
most discussed aspect of Huck Finn is how it addresses the issue of race. Many critics agree that the
books presentation of the issue is complex or uneven. No clear-cut stance on race and racism emerges.