WILLIAM FAULKNER- ABSALOM, ABSALOM!

I.a CONTEXT

William Faulkner ( 1897- 1962) achieved a reputation as one of the greatest American
novelists of the 20th century largely based on his series of novels about a fictional region of
Mississippi called Yoknapatawpha County, centered on the fictional town of Jefferson. The
greatest of these novels—among them The Sound and the Fury, Light in August, and
Absalom, Absalom!—rank among the finest novels of world literature.

Faulkner was especially interested in moral themes relating to the ruins of the Deep South in
the post-Civil War era. His prose style—which combines long, uninterrupted sentences with
long strings of adjectives, frequent changes in narration, many recursive asides, and a frequent
reliance on a sort of objective stream-of- consciousness technique, whereby the inner
experience of a character in a scene is contrasted with the scene's outward appearance—ranks
among his greatest achievements. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1949.

His novel may not have elements of the supernatural like a classic gothic novel, but there are
definitely ghosts (in the form of people haunting other people); super spooky moments
(Quentin and Miss Rosa at the "big house"); and a serious sense of dread. Everyone is a little
off-kilter, suffering from various forms of obsession, arrested development, and bitterness.

The big gothic element is the house, which acts almost like a character in the novel. Each
person projects his or her own feelings onto that big house: it's a dream, a nightmare, a prison,
and a safe haven. Because Sutpen built it, the house suffers from something like an evil spirit:
it's got some really bad mojo. In fact, Faulkner believed that, because of the legacy of slavery,
the entire South had evil spirits and everyone there was haunted by that violent past. And the
fact that Sutpen has slaves build the house and funds the whole deal through dubious means
implies that Sutpen's Hundred is a place of particularly bad blood. And of course, in typical
Southern gothicfashion, Absalom, Absalom! features a lot of ruins – not just crumbling houses
and graveyards, but also demolished lives.

I.b Tragedy

Sutpen is a character with grand plans: what he calls his "design." However, like every tragic
figure, Sutpen has a so-called "tragic flaw." But what exactly is Sutpen's tragic flaw? Some
critics believe that it's innocence or naiveté: you know, making a big deal out of not being let
in the front door, marrying a woman who he doesn't realize is part black… the list goes on.
On the whole, Sutpen tends to catch on to things kind of late in the game. Other critics claim
that Sutpen's tragic flaw is his arrogance. The fact that he believes he can ride to the top, treat
humans like objects, and behave like an animal in a civilized world indicates a certain self-
centeredness on his part. He can only see the world through his own desires. Whether it's
innocence or arrogance (or something else altogether), Sutpen definitely has a tragic flaw,
which leads to his big, ugly downfall.

Ic.Folklore, Legend, and Mythology

In Mr. Compson's narrative more than anywhere else, Sutpen's story is told as a Greek
tragedy, drawing on oral tradition to make sense of a grand episode or a tragic hero. His story
is driven by the actions of a larger-than-life, ambitious man concerned with fate and eternity.
He must fulfill his design, he will be thwarted by a fatal flaw (an "ancient curse"), and he is
partly motivated by the desire to create a genealogy that will last for generations to come.
This is definitely the stuff of legends.

I d.Modernism

Modernist Literature refers to literature written between 1899 and 1945, and involving
experimentation with the traditional novel format. Modernist literature plays with time and
order, perspective, and point of view. There is lot of play with form, it was more common to
see a fragmented plot than, say, a clear beginning, middle, and end. Many critics see these
radical experiments as a response to the violence of the World Wars. Here are just a few of
the ways that Absalom, Absalom! fits snugly into this category of modernist experimentation:
multiple narrators, stream of consciousness narrative, complex play with time, long sentences,
and persistent examination of notions of truth and reality.

S.FITZGERAL- THE GREAT GATSBY

I.CONTEXT

Fitzgerald was the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed “the
Jazz Age.” Written in 1925, The Great Gatsby is one of the greatest literary documents of this
period, in which the American economy soared, bringing unprecedented levels of prosperity
to the nation. Prohibition, the ban on the sale and consumption of alcohol mandated by the
Eighteenth Amendment to the Constitution , made millionaires out of bootleggers, and an
underground culture of revelry sprang up. Sprawling private parties managed to elude police
notice, and “speakeasies”—secret clubs that sold liquor—thrived. The chaos and violence of
World War I left America in a state of shock, and the generation that fought the war turned
to wild and extravagant living to compensate. The staid conservatism and timeworn values
of the previous decade were turned on their, and money, opulence, and exuberance became
the expression of a new modus vivendi.

Set in the prosperous Long Island of 1922, The Great Gatsby provides a critical social history
of America during the Roaring Twenties within its narrative. That era, known for
unprecedented economic prosperity, the evolution of jazz music, flapper culture, and
bootlegging and other criminal activity, is plausibly depicted in Fitzgerald's novel. Fitzgerald
uses these societal developments of the 1920s to build Gatsby's stories from simple details
like automobiles to broader themes like Fitzgerald's discreet allusions to the organized crime
culture which was the source of Gatsby's fortuneFitzgerald educates his readers about the
garish society of the Roaring Twenties by placing a timeless, relatable plotline within the
historical context of the era.[

The Great Gatsby may be seen as a "cautionary tale of the decadent downside of the
American dream." The story deals with human aspiration to start over again, social politics
and its brutality and also betrayal, of one's own ideals and of people. Using elements of irony
and tragic ending, it also delves into themes of excesses of the rich, and recklessness of
youth.
Like Nick in The Great Gatsby, Fitzgerald found this new lifestyle seductive and exciting, and,
like Gatsby, he had always idolized the very rich. Now he found himself in an era in which
unrestrained materialism set the tone of society, particularly in the large cities of the East.
Even so, like Nick, Fitzgerald saw through the glitter of the Jazz Age to the moral emptiness
and hypocrisy beneath, and part of him longed for this absent moral center. In many ways,
The Great Gatsby represents Fitzgerald’s attempt to confront his conflicting feelings about
the Jazz Age. Like Gatsby, Fitzgerald was driven by his love for a woman who symbolized
everything he wanted, even as she led him toward everything he despised.

E.M.FORSTER

I.CONTEXT

Edward Morgan Forster was born into a comfortable London family in 1879. He attended
Cambridge University and. spent much of the next decade traveling and living abroad,
dividing his time between working as a journalist and writing short stories and novels.

Many of Forster’s observations and experiences from this time figure in his fiction, most
notably A Room with a View (1908), which chronicles the experiences of a group of English
people vacationing in Italy. Two years after A Room with a View, the novel Howards End
(1910), in which Forster criticized the class divisions and prejudices of Edwardian England,
solidified his reputation as a social critic and a master of incisively observational fiction.

By the time of Forster’s visit, Britain’s control over India was complete: English governors
headed each province and were responsible to Parliament. Though England had promised the
Indian people a role in government in exchange for their aid during World War I, India did
not win independence until three decades later, in 1949. Forster spent time with both
Englishmen and Indians during his visit, and he quickly found he preferred the company of
the latter. He was troubled by the racial oppression and deep cultural misunderstandings that
divided the Indian people and the British colonists, or, as they are called in A Passage to
India, Anglo-Indians. The prevailing attitude among the British in India was that the colonists
were assuming the “white man’s burden”—novelist Rudyard Kipling’s phrase—of governing
the country, because the Indians could not handle the responsibility themselves. Forster, a
homosexual living in a society and era largely unsympathetic to his lifestyle, had long
experienced prejudice and misunderstanding firsthand. It is no surprise, then, that Forster felt
sympathetic toward the Indian side of the colonial argument. Indeed, Forster became a
lifelong advocate for tolerance and understanding among people of different social classes,
races, and backgrounds.

Forster began writing A Passage to India in 1913, just after his first visit to India. The novel
was not revised and completed, however, until well after his second stay in India, in 1921,
when he served as secretary to the Maharajah of Dewas State Senior. Published in 1924, A
Passage to India examines the racial misunderstandings and cultural hypocrisies that
characterized the complex interactions between Indians and the English toward the end of the
British occupation of India.
John Fowles

I.CONTEXT

The French Lieutenant's Woman is a 1969 postmodern historical fiction novel by John
Fowles. It was his third published novel, after The Collector (1963) and The Magus (1965).
The novel explores the fraught relationship of gentleman and amateur naturalist, Charles
Smithson, and the former governess and independent woman, Sarah Woodruff, with whom
he falls in love. The novel builds on Fowles' authority in Victorian literature, both following
and critiquing many of the conventions of period novels

This novel is based on the nineteenth-century romantic or gothic novel, a literary genre
which can trace its origins back to the eighteenth century. Although Fowles perfectly
reproduces typical characters, situations, and even dialogue, the reader should always be
aware of the irony inherent in Fowles' perception; for his perspective, however cleverly
disguised, is that of the twentieth century. We see this both in the authorial intrusions,
which comment on the mores of people in Victorian England, and in his choice of opening
quotations, which are drawn from the writings of people whose observations belie the
assumptions that most Victorians held about their world.

Fowles is concerned in this novel with the effects of society on the individual's awareness of
himself or herself and how that awareness dominates and distorts his or her entire life,
including relationships with other people. All the main characters in this novel are molded by
what they believe to be true about themselves and others. In this case, their lives are
governed by what the Victorian Age thought was true about the nature of men and women
and their relationships to each other. The French Lieutenant's Woman of the title, for
example, is the dark, mysterious woman of the typical Victorian romantic novel.The story
that develops around Charles Smithson and Sarah echoes other romantic novels of a similar
type, wherein a man falls in love with a strange and sometimes evil woman. Fowles uses the
popularity of the comedy of manners and combines it with the drama and sensationalism of
the gothic novel and, using several stylistic conventions, creates a masterful, many-layered
mystery that is one of the finest pieces of modern literature.

Part of the novel's reputation is based on its expression of postmodern literary concerns
through thematic focus on metafiction, historiography, metahistory, marxist criticism and
feminism. Stylistically and thematically, Linda Hutcheon describes the novel as an exemplar
of a particular postmodern genre: "historiographic metafiction."Because of the contrast
between the independent Sarah Woodruff and the more stereotypical male characters, the
novel often receives attention for its treatment of gender issues. However, despite claims by
Fowles that it is a feminist novel, critics have debated whether it offers a sufficiently
transformative perspective on women.

WILLIAM GOLDING, LORD OF THE FLIES

CONTEXT
a.Golding wrote Lord of the Flies in 1954, less than a decade after World War II, when the
world was in the midst of the Cold War. The atrocities of the Holocaust, the horrific effects of
the atomic bomb, and the ominous threat of the Communist demon behind the Iron Curtain
were all present in the minds of the western public and the author. This environment of fear
combined with technology's rapid advances act as a backdrop to the island experiences: the
shot-down plane, for example, and the boys' concern that the "Reds" might find them before
the British do.Historically, in times of widespread socio-economic distress, the general public
feels itself vulnerable and turns to the leader who exhibits the most strength or seems to offer
the most protection. In Lord of the Flies, Jack and the hunters, who offer the luxury of meat
and the comforts of a dictatorship, fill that role. In exchange for his protection, the other boys
sacrifice any moral reservations they may have about his policies and enthusiastically
persecute the boys who resist joining their tribe. These circumstances somewhat mirror
Germany's economic suffering, which paved the way for the radical politics of Adolph Hitler's
Nazism in the aftermath of World War I and in the worldwide depression of the 1930s.

As all authors use their life and times as reference points in their works, William Golding
drew heavily on the social-religious-cultural-military ethos of his times. Lord of the Flies is an
allegorical microcosm of the world Golding knew and participated in. The island and the boys
and many other objects and events in the work represent Golding's view of the world and
humankind in general and some characteristics or values found in British culture specifically.

Significant personal life experiences shaped the author and therefore his work. Golding spent
two years as a science student at Oxford University before he aborted his pursuit of science
for a degree in English literature, his first step toward a rejection of the scientific rationalism
espoused by his father. Having joined the British Royal Navy when World War II began,
Golding was involved in the invasion of Normandy on D-Day. After his military experience,
Golding was a schoolteacher and, for 15 years, immersed himself in reading the Greek
classics because, according to him, "this is where the meat is." He felt that Greek drama had a
great influence on his work; many scholars agree.

As a synthesis of Golding's life experiences, Lord of the Flies investigates three key aspects of
the human experience that form the basis of the the author wants to convey: (1) The desire
for social and political order through parliaments, governments, and legislatures (represented
by the platform and the conch). (2) The natural inclination toward evil and violence,
manifested in every country's need for a military (represented by the choir-boys-turned-
hunters-turned-murderers and in the war going on in the world beyond the island); and (3)
The belief in supernatural or divine intervention in human destiny (represented by the
ceremonial dances and sacrifices intended to appease the "beast").

By juxtaposing the evil, aggressive nature of the degenerating boys with the proper reserve
and civility of the British persona that their cultural background implies, Golding places the
boys in a series of life experiences that lead some (like Jack) deeper into their depraved
psyche, and some (like Ralph), who recognize the inclination toward evil in themselves, to an
epiphany of self-discovery. Such an epiphany is the only hope for humankind to escape from
itself.
TESS OF THE D’URBERVILLES, by Thomas Hardy

I.CONTEXT

Thomas Hardy (1840-1928) was born in Higher Bockhampton in Dorset, a rural region of
southwestern England that was to become the focus of his fiction. The child of a builder,
Hardy was apprenticed at the age of sixteen to John Hicks, an architect who lived in the city
of Dorchester. The location would later serve as the model for Hardy’s fictional Casterbridge.
Far from the Madding Crowd, published in 1874, was the author’s first critical and financial
success.

Although he built a reputation as a successful novelist, Hardy considered himself first and
foremost a poet. To him, novels were primarily a means of earning a living. Like many of his
contemporaries, he first published his novels in periodic installments in magazines or serial
journals, and his work reflects the conventions of serialization. To ensure that readers would
buy a serialized novel, writers often structured each installment to be something of a
cliffhanger, which explained the convoluted, often incredible plots of many such Victorian
novels. But Hardy cannot solely be labeled a Victorian novelist. Nor can he be categorized
simply as a Modernist, in the tradition of writers like Virginia Woolf or D. H. Lawrence, who
were determined to explode the conventions of nineteenth-century literature and build a new
kind of novel in its place. In many respects, Hardy was trapped in the middle ground between
the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, between Victorian sensibilities and more modern ones,
and between tradition and innovation.

Soon after Tess of the d’Urbervilles (1891) was published, its sales assured Hardy’s financial
future. But the novel also aroused a substantial amount of controversy. In Tess of the
d’Urbervilles and other novels, Hardy demonstrates his deep sense of moral sympathy for
England’s lower classes, particularly for rural women. He became famous for his
compassionate, often controversial portrayal of young women victimized by the self-righteous
rigidity of English social morality. Perhaps his most famous depiction of such a young
woman is in Tess of the d’Urbervilles.

Hardy lived and wrote in a time of difficult social change, when England was making its slow
and painful transition from an old-fashioned, agricultural nation to a modern, industrial one.
Businessmen and entrepreneurs, or “new money,” joined the ranks of the social elite, as some
families of the ancient aristocracy, or “old money,” faded into obscurity. Tess’s family in Tess
of the d’Urbervilles illustrates this change, as Tess’s parents, the Durbeyfields, lose
themselves in the fantasy of belonging to an ancient and aristocratic family, the d’Urbervilles.
Hardy’s novel strongly suggests that such a family history is not only meaningless but also
utterly undesirable. Hardy’s views on the subject were appalling to conservative and status-
conscious British readers, and Tess of the d’Urbervilles was met in England with widespread
controversy.

A Darwin and Social Darwinism

The last fifty years of the nineteenth century saw innovations in science and technology that
changed society to a greater degree than ever before. The theory of evolution popularized by
naturalist Charles Darwin in his On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection,
published in 1859, had enormous cultural implications. The idea that humans were descended
from apes changed accepted views of religion and society. It shook belief in the Biblical
creation story and, therefore, all religious beliefs. It shocked the Victorians (those who lived
during the reign of the British Queen Victoria from 1837 to 1901) to think that their ancestors
were animals. They glorified order and high-mindedness, and thought themselves, as British
subjects, the pinnacle of culture.

To make Darwin’s theory more palatable, a complementary theory called Social Darwinism
was formulated. Proponents of this social philosophy argued that Darwin’s ideas of “survival
of the fittest” also applied to society. The existence of lower classes could be explained by
their inferior intelligence and initiative in comparison to that of the upper classes. Angel refers
to this theory when he expresses his surprise that there is no “Hodge” amongst the workers at
Talbothays. “The conventional farm-folk of his imagination-personified in the newspaper-
press by the pitiable dummy known as Hodge-were obliterated after a few days’ residences.”
He is surprised to discover in Tess “the ache of modernism.” For Tess, Angel, and others of
their era, the God of their childhood was no longer able to answer their Questions. Darwin’s
book ended forever the security of a society that could offer unalterable answers to every
question; like Angel, many began to put their faith in “intellectual liberty” rather than
religion.

B Industrialization and Rural England

When the railroad came to the area of southwest England where Tess was born, the area still
led an isolated, almost medieval existence. The railroad made it easier for country folk
looking for work to leave the towns where their families had lived for centuries. The railroad
also fostered new types of agricultural use of the land. Large dairies such as Talbothays,
where Tess worked as a milkmaid, could flourish only because the rapid trains allowed
transport of fresh milk to heavily populated areas. When Tess and Angel take milk cans from
the dairy to the nearest train station, Tess reflects that the next morning in London “strange
people we have never seen” will drink the milk. The trains converted a closely-knit society
into one where consumers never met the producers and where strangers lived together in
larger and larger groups.

England entered an agricultural depression in the 1870s, brought on in part by the completion
of the first transcontinental railroad across the United States in 1869. (This made it easier and
cheaper for American goods to complete with British goods.) Rural workers unable to get
jobs, flocked to British cities, causing urban population to double between 1851 and 1881.
Less profitable farming, meant farms had to become larger in order to turn a profit , so
smaller farms were bought out by larger farm owners. Machines, like the steam threshing
machine at Flintcomb-Ash, made agricultural workers less in demand. The large landowners
felt no connection with the families living on their land, so to not renew their leases-as was
done to Tess’s family on Old Ladies Day-was a question of economic good sense, nothing
more. Hardy criticized this practice in “The Dorsetshire Labourer,” an essay published in
Longman’s magazine in July 1883 quoted in Martin Seymour-Smith’s biography of Hardy.
“But the question of the Dorset cottager,” Hardy notes, “here merges in that of all the
houseless and landless poor and the vast topic of the Rights of Man.”
C Women in Victorian Society

In Tess Hardy considers both the “Rights of Man” and, with equal sympathy, the rights of
women. Women of the Victorian era were idealized as the helpmate of man, the keeper of the
home, and the “weaker sex.” Heroines in popular fiction were expected to be frail and
virtuous. The thought that Hardy subtitled his novel “A Pure Woman” infuriated some
Victorian critics, because it flew in the face of all they held sacred. For while the Victorian era
was a time of national pride and belief in British superiority, it was also an age best-
remembered for its emphasis on a strict code of morality, unequally applied to men and
women. The term Victorian has come to refer to any person or group with a narrow,
uncompromising sense of right and wrong. Women were not only discriminated against by
the moral code, but they were also discriminated against by the legal code of the day. Until
the 1880s married women were unable to hold property in their own name; and the wages of
rural workers would go directly to the husband, even if he failed to provide anything for his
family. The Matrimonial Causes Act of 1857 granted the right to a divorce to both men and
women on the basis of adultery but, in order to divorce her husband, a women would have to
further prove gross cruelty or desertion. Women who sought divorce for whatever reason
were ostracized from polite society. Women, like children, were best “seen, but not heard,” or
as Seymour-Smith observes, “The Victorian middle-class wife … was admired upon her
pedestal of moral superiority only so long as she remained there silently.”

N.HAWTHORNE

I.CONTEXT

Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864)was born in Salem, Massachusetts. After college

Hawthorne tried his hand at writing.. His growing relationship with the intellectual circle that
included Ralph Waldo Emerson and Margaret Fuller led him to abandon his customs post for
the utopian experiment at Brook Farm, a commune designed to promote economic self-
sufficiency and transcendentalist principles. Transcendentalism was a religious and
philosophical movement of the early nineteenth century that was dedicated to the belief that
divinity manifests itself everywhere, particularly in the natural world. It also advocated a
personalized, direct relationship with the divine in place of formalized, structured religion.
This second transcendental idea is privileged in The Scarlet Letter.

In 1850, after having lost the job, he published The Scarlet Letter to enthusiastic, if not
widespread, acclaim. His other major novels include The House of the Seven Gables (1851),
The Blithedale Romance (1852), and The Marble Faun (1860)..

The majority of Hawthorne’s work takes America’s Puritan past as its subject, but The Scarlet
Letter uses the material to greatest effect. The Puritans were a group of religious reformers
who arrived in Massachusetts in the 1630s under the leadership of John Winthrop (whose
death is recounted in the novel). The religious sect was known for its intolerance of dissenting
ideas and lifestyles. In The Scarlet Letter, Hawthorne uses the repressive, authoritarian
Puritan society as an analogue for humankind in general. The Puritan setting also enables him
to portray the human soul under extreme pressures. Hester, Dimmesdale, and Chillingworth,
while unquestionably part of the Puritan society in which they live, also reflect universal
experiences. Hawthorne speaks specifically to American issues, but he circumvents the
aesthetic and thematic limitations that might accompany such a focus. His universality and his
dramatic flair have ensured his place in the literary canon.

E.HEMINGWAY-THE OLD MAN AND THE SEA

I.CONTEXT

The Old Man and the Sea takes place in September of 1950 and reflects a universal pattern of
socioeconomic change familiar even today among developing nations. In rural Cuba of the
1930s and 1940s, the traditional fishing culture began shifting to the material progress of a
fishing industr. In The Old Man and the Sea, Hemingway depicts Santiago as a dedicated
fisherman whose craft is integral to his own identity, his code of behavior, and nature's order.
On the other hand, Hemingway portrays the pragmatic younger fishermen as those who
supply shark livers for the cod liver oil industry in the United States, use their profits to
purchase motorized boats, and approach their fishing strictly as a means to improve their
material circumstances.

Similarly, Santiago's personal history represents something of universal journey, as critics

have pointed out. Santiago is culturally a Spaniard and therefore a European. As an émigré to
Cuba, a journey made by many Spaniards from Europe, he is both a Cuban and an American.
Santiago has brought with him to the New World some Old World European and African
values of dedication to craft and acceptance of one's role in the natural order and joined those
to a decidedly American preoccupation with living one's life according to an independent and
individual code of behavior that redeems the individual's existence.

The novella is truly universal in its consideration of the plight of an old man struggling
against age, poverty, loneliness, and mortality to maintain his identity and dignity, reestablish
his reputation in the community, and ensure for all time his relationship with those he loves
and to whom he hopes to pass on everything he values most. Ultimately, Santiago's heroic
struggle not only redeems himself but inspires and spiritually enriches those around him.

Hemingway first published The Old Man and the Sea in its entirety in 1952. The novella
subsequently became a best seller. It gained immediate critical acclaim and earned
Hemingway the Pulitzer Prize in 1953 .It also contributed to his receiving the Nobel Prize for
Literature in 1954.

HENRY JAMES-THE AMBASSADORS

I CONTEXT

Henry James has been called the first of the great psychological realists in our time. Honored
as one of the greatest artists of the novel, he is also regarded as one of America's most
influential critics and literary theorists. During the fifty years of his literary career, which
spanned the period from the end of the American Civil War to the beginning of World War I,
James produced a body of tales and novels that fills thirty-six .He became a British subject in
1915, a year before his death.

The influence of James' European experience and, ultimately, the "idea" of Europe as it
relates to his work are central to an understanding of James' fiction.. In Europe, James could
best deal with his dominant theme: the illumination of the present by "the sense of the past,"
the American present illuminated by the sense of the European past. James saw, in his own
words, the manifest "possibility of contrast in the human lot . . . encountered as we turn back
and forth between the distinctively American and the distinctively European outlook." This
contrast forms the basis of the Jamesian "international theme."

James' literary career has been divided into three stages or "periods": the early period, the
middle years, and the "later manner" or, more popularly, the major phase.The period of James'
apprenticeship and first success — the early period of his career — is characterized by his
discovery and development of the "international" theme: the study of the American abroad,
the juxtaposition of New World innocence and Old World experience, American freedom and
European convention, and an examination of the conflicting values of the two societies.
Works of this period include Roderick Hudson (1875); The American (1877), James' first
really successful novel; Daisy Miller (1879); The Europeans (1878); and the triumphant novel
which ends this period, The Portrait of a Lady (1881).

James' second period, the middle phase of his career, has also been labeled the period of his
"social" novels, involving a turning from the international theme to complex social and
political issues set against both New England and European backdrops. These novels include
The Princess Casamassima (1886) and The Bostonians (1886). The final period of James'
career — the major phase — produced the novels that are today regarded as the peak of his
achievement: The Wings of the Dove (1902), The Ambassadors (1903), and The Golden Bowl
(1904). In these three novels, James returned to his "international" theme, but with a more
subtle, mature, and deeper exploration of its implications. The Ambassadors is perhaps the
most widely admired of James' novels and is an excellent introduction to his work, for it
embodies his most significant themes and the best of his style and technique. The
Ambassadors presents Henry James at the peak of his literary career.

JAMES JOYCE-DUBLINERS

I.CONTEXT

James Joyce( 1882-1941) based many of the characters in Dubliners( 1914) on real people,
and such suggestive details, coupled with the book’s historical and geographical precision and
piercing examination of relationships, flustered anxious publishers. Joyce’s autobiographical
novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man followed Dubliners in 1916, and a play, Exiles,
followed in 1918. Joyce is most famous for his later experimental novels, Ulysses (1922),
which maps the Dublin wanderings of its protagonist in a single day, and Finnegans Wake
(1939). These two works emblematize his signature stream-of-consciousness prose style,
which mirrors characters’ thoughts without the limitations of traditional narrative, a style he
didn’t use in Dubliners.

Ireland permeates all of Joyce’s writing, especially Ireland during the tumultuous early
twentieth century. The political scene at that time was uncertain but hopeful, as Ireland sought
independence from Great Britain. The nationalist Charles Stewart Parnell, who became active
in the 1870s, had reinvigorated Irish politics with his proposed Home Rule Bill, which aimed
to give Ireland a greater voice in British government. Parnell, dubbed the “Uncrowned King
of Ireland,” was hugely popular in Ireland, both for his anti-English views and his support of
land ownership for farmers. In 1889, however, his political career collapsed when his
adulterous affair with the married Kitty O’Shea was made public. Kitty’s husband had known
for years about the affair, but instead of making it public, he attempted to use it to his political
and financial advantage. He waited until he filed for divorce to expose the affair. Both Ireland
and England were scandalized, Parnell refused to resign, and his career never recovered.
Parnell died in 1891, when Joyce was nine years old.

In the last part of the nineteenth century, after Parnell’s death, Ireland underwent a dramatic
cultural revival. Irish citizens struggled to define what it meant to be Irish, and a movement
began to reinvigorate Irish language and culture. The movement celebrated Irish literature and
encouraged people to learn the Irish language, which many people were forgoing in favor of
the more modern English language. Ultimately, the cultural revival of the late nineteenth
century gave the Irish a greater sense of pride in their identity.

Despite the cultural revival, the bitter publicity surrounding Parnell’s affair, and later his
death, dashed all hopes of Irish independence and unity. Ireland splintered into factions of
Protestants and Catholics, Conservatives and Nationalists. Such social forces form a complex
context for Joyce’s writing, which repeatedly taps into political and religious matters. Since
Joyce spent little of his later life in Ireland, he did not witness such debates firsthand.
However, despite living on the continent, Joyce retained his artistic interest in the city and
country of his birth and ably articulated the Irish experience in his writings.

Dubliners contains fifteen portraits of life in the Irish capital. Joyce focuses on children and
adults who skirt the middle class, such as housemaids, office clerks, music teachers, students,
shop girls, swindlers, and out-of-luck businessmen. Joyce envisioned his collection as a
looking glass with which the Irish could observe and study themselves. In most of the stories,
Joyce uses a detached but highly perceptive narrative voice that displays these lives to the
reader in precise detail. Rather than present intricate dramas with complex plots, these stories
sketch daily situations in which not much seems to happen—a boy visits a bazaar, a woman
buys sweets for holiday festivities, a man reunites with an old friend over a few drinks.
Though these events may not appear profound, the characters’ intensely personal and often
tragic revelations certainly are. The stories in Dubliners peer into the homes, hearts, and
minds of people whose lives connect and intermingle through the shared space and spirit of
Dublin. A character from one story will mention the name of a character in another story, and
stories often have settings that appear in other stories. Such subtle connections create a sense
of shared experience and evoke a map of Dublin life that Joyce would return to again and
again in his later works.

H. MELVILLE, MOBY DICK

I.CONTEXT

Today it is considered one of the Great American Novels and a leading work of American
Romanticism.The opening line, "Call me Ishmael", is one of the most recognizable opening
lines in Western literature. Ishmael then narrates the voyage of the whaleship Pequod,
commanded by Captain Ahab. Ahab has one purpose: revenge on Moby Dick, a ferocious,
enigmatic white whale which on a previous voyage destroyed Ahab's ship and severed his leg
at the knee. The detailed and realistic descriptions of whale hunting and the process of
extracting whale oil, as well as life aboard ship among a culturally diverse crew, are mixed
with exploration of class and social status, good and evil, and the existence of God.Melville
uses a wide range of styles and literary devices ranging from lists and catalogs to
Shakespearean stage directions, soliloquies, and asides.
Melville began writing Moby-Dick in 1850 and it appeared that he would have the book
completed by the fall of that year. Two major events happened in Melville’s life that delayed
the publication: he read Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Mosses from an Old Manse and then met
him and they became friendsAt the time Melville was writing Moby-Dick the United States
was acquiring land and making laws to oppress the Native Americans and continue the
enslavement of African Americans. The Fugitive Slave Act was passed in 1850, the
Compromise of 1850 was passed which admitted California as a free state. The Sioux Indian
tribe signed the Treaty of Traverse des Sioux giving up land in Iowa and Minnesota.

There are many possible contexts for Herman Melville’s great novel about a tormented sea
captain, the white sperm whale that symbolizes for him “all that most maddens and torments,”
and the unemployed school teacher whose whimsical decision to go to sea installs him as
witness to the whole drama. Moby Dick pushes American romanticism to its limits,
challenging the idea of an immanent god in nature. Published in 1851, it reflects the conflicts
of continental expansion and rapid industrialization. It is one of a small group of
masterpieces published mid-century that present themselves as American literary declarations
of independence, attempts to achieve an aesthetics of democracy. It is the culmination of
amazing personal and artistic growth on the part of its author, and the beginning of a troubled
but very rich period of his creativity.

America was in a tumultuous period, establishing its national and international identity at the
time Moby-Dick was being written. It is noteworthy that the classic American novel of the
period is not ostensibly about westward expansion. Instead it is about pursuit and capture,
about following a dream. The American Dream, as it was envisaged by the Founding Fathers,
is now considered by some as a dangerous preoccupation, a consuming national obsession. In
a real sense, Melville's book is not about its time, but about ours. A possible reading would
have the Pequod as modern corporate America, intent on control and subjection, and Ahab as
a power-crazed executive, quick to seek vengeance for any received aggression

E.A POE

Edgar Allan Poe mastered a variety of literary forms over the course of his brief and turbulent
career. As a storyteller, Poe defied convention by creating Gothic tales of mystery, horror, and
suspense that remain widely popular today. This collection demonstrates how Poe's
experience of early nineteenth-century American life fueled his iconoclasm and shaped his
literary legacy.

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849. In his stormy
forty years, which included a marriage to his cousin, fights with other writers, and legendary
drinking binges, Poe lived in all the important literary centers of the northeastern United
States: Baltimore, Philadelphia, New York City, and Boston. He was a magazine editor, a
poet, a short story writer, a critic, and a lecturer. He introduced the British horror story, or the
Gothic genre, to American literature, along with the detective story, science fiction, and
literary criticism. Poe became a key figure in the nineteenth-century flourishing of American
letters and literature. Famed twentieth--century literary critic F.O. Matthiessen named this
period the American Renaissance. He argued that nineteenth-century American writers Ralph
Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, and Walt
Whitman crafted a distinctly American literature that attempts to escape from the long shadow
of the British literary tradition. Matthiessen paid little attention to Edgar Allan Poe. Although
he long had a reputation in Europe as one of America’s most original writers, only in the latter
half of the -twentieth century has Poe been viewed as a crucial contributor to the American
Renaissance.

The often tragic circumstances of Poe’s life haunt his writings. His father disappeared not
long after the child’s birth, and, at the age of three, Poe watched his mother die of
tuberculosis. Poe then went to live with John and Frances Allan, wealthy theatergoers who
knew his parents, both actors, from the Richmond, Virginia, stage. Like Poe’s mother,
Frances Allan was chronically ill, and Poe experienced her sickness much as he did his
mother’s. His relationship with John Allan, who was loving but moody, generous but
demanding, was emotionally turbulent. With Allan’s financial help, Poe attended school in
England and then enrolled at the University of Virginia in 1826, but he was forced to leave
after two semesters. Although Poe blamed Allan’s stinginess, his own gambling debts played
a large role in his fiscal woes. A tendency to cast blame on others, without admitting his own
faults, characterized Poe’s relationship with many people, most significantly Allan. Poe
struggled with a view of Allan as a false father, generous enough to take him in at age three,
but never dedicated enough to adopt him as a true son. There are echoes of Poe’s upbringing
in his works, as sick mothers and guilty fathers appear in many of his tales.

After leaving the University of Virginia, Poe spent some time in the military before he used
his contacts in Richmond and Baltimore to enter the magazine industry. With little
experience, Poe relied on his characteristic bravado to convince Thomas Willis White, then
head of the fledgling Southern Literary Messenger, to take him on as an editor in 1835. This
position gave him a forum for his early tales, including “Berenice” and “Morella.” The
Messenger also established Poe as a leading and controversial literary critic, who often
attacked his New England counterparts—especially poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—in
the genteel pages of the magazine. Poe ultimately fell out of favor with White, but his literary
criticism made him a popular speaker on the lecture circuit. Poe never realized his most
ambitious dream—the launch of his own magazine, the Stylus. Until his death, he believed
that the New England literary establishment had stolen his glory and had prevented the Stylus
from being published.

His name has since become synonymous with macabre tales like “The Tell-Tale Heart,” but
Poe assumed a variety of literary personas during his career. The Messenger—as well as
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s—established Poe as one of America’s first
popular literary critics. He advanced his theories in popular essays, including “The
Philosophy of Composition” (1846), “The Rationale of Verse” (1848), and “The Poetic
Principle.” In “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe explained how he had crafted “The
Raven,” the 1845 poem that made him nationally famous. In the pages of these magazines,
Poe also introduced of a new form of short fiction—the detective story—in tales featuring the
Parisian crime solver C. Auguste Dupin. The detective story follows naturally from Poe’s
interest in puzzles, word games, and secret codes, which he loved to present and decode in the
pages of the Messenger to dazzle his readers. The word “detective” did not exist in English at
the time that Poe was writing, but the genre has become a fundamental mode of twentieth-
century literature and film. Dupin and his techniques of psychological inquiry have informed
countless sleuths, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes and Raymond
Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.

Gothic literature, a genre that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late eighteenth century,
explores the dark side of human experience—death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and
haunted landscapes. Poe brought the Gothic to America. American Gothic literature
dramatizes a culture plagued by poverty and slavery through characters afflicted with various
forms of insanity and melancholy. Poe, America’s foremost southern writer before William
Faulkner, generated a Gothic ethos from his own experiences in Virginia and other
slaveholding territories, and the black and white imagery in his stories reflects a growing
national anxiety over the issue of slavery.

In the spectrum of American literature, the Gothic remains in the shadow of the dominant
genre of the American Renaissance—the Romance. Popularized by Nathaniel Hawthorne,
Romantic literature, like Gothic literature, relies on haunting and mysterious narratives that
blur the boundary between the real and the fantastic. Poe’s embrace of the Gothic with its
graphic violence and disturbing scenarios places him outside the ultimately conservative and
traditional resolutions of Romantic novels such as Hawthorne’s The House of the Seven
Gables (1851).

In Romances like the novels of Hawthorne, conflicts occur among characters within the
context of society and are resolved in accordance with society’s rules. Poe’s Gothic tales are
brief flashes of chaos that flare up within lonely narrators living at the fringes of society.
Poe’s longest work, the 1838 novel Arthur Gordon Pym, described in diary form a series of
episodes on a journey to Antarctica. A series of bizarre incidents and exotic discoveries at sea,
Pym lacks the cohesive elements of plot or quest that tie together most novels and epics and is
widely considered an artistic failure. Poe’s style and concerns never found their best
expression in longer forms, but his short stories are considered masterpieces worldwide. The
Poe’s Gothic is a potent brew, best served in small doses.

THOMAS PYNCHON

I. Historical and cultural context

Thomas Pynchon wrote The Crying of Lot 49 in the 1960s, one of the most politically and
socially turbulent decades in U.S. history. The decade saw the rise of the drug culture, the
Vietnam War, the rock revolution, as well as the birth of numerous social welfare programs..
This was also the decade of John F. Kennedy's assassination, Martin Luther King's
assassination, Civil Rights, and, to some extent, women's rights.

The novel taps into this explosion of cultural occurrences, depicting a dramatically
fragmented society. The Crying of Lot 49 contains a pervasive sense of cultural chaos; indeed,
the book draws on all areas of culture and society, including many of those mentioned above.
The world around Oedipa Maas-the novel’s protagonist- seems to be a world perpetually on
drugs, manic and full of conspiracies and illusions. And though that world is exciting and
new, it is also dangerous. More than anything else, The Crying of Lot 49 appears to be about
cultural chaos and communication as seen through the eyes of a young woman who finds
herself in a hallucinogenic world disintegrating around her.

The Crying of Lot 49 is thought by many to be Pynchon's best work, a representative novel for the
postmodernist literature. Postmodernism, a trend which emerged in the post–World War II era,
is characterized by heavy reliance on techniques like fragmentation, paradox, and
questionable narrators. Postmodern authors tend to celebrate chance over craft, and employ
meta-fiction to undermine the writer's authority. Another characteristic of postmodern
literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and low culture through the use of
pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously deemed fit for literature.
Irony, along with black humor and the general concept of "playfulness" are among the most
recognizable aspects of postmodernism

Themes

a. Entropy.

The process of entropy leads to the inevitable progression of a closed system to patterned,
chaotic sameness. In thematic terms, entropy represents Pynchon's concern with our
culture's movement toward intellectual inertia. In Maxwell's Demon, Nefastis created a
machine which works directly with Pynchon's theme of entropy. The closed system will
move toward entropy in the same manner that the entire universal system will, both
existentially and rationally. In tune with the allusions to Narcissus, the world is contained
within itself and has become a egotistical system moving toward a chaotic sense of
orderlessness/disorder..

b. Post-modernist examination of textual versus metaphorical literary significance

The majority of recent critics,seem to believe that Pynchon's many allusions are partially red
herrings. They are an attempt by Pynchon to lead the reader into drawing the easy
references and falling into the traps readers so often do when they reach for allusions in
order to find significance. Pynchon is possibly leading the reader into assumptions which
they are all too likely to make so that they realize the error as they proceed within the
postmodern novel which espouses a theme of non-categorization and structuralism. We are
taken on her journey because the search for self and meaning and connection is insatiable,
even when it is being parodied as is often the case with Pynchon. The search of meaning and
analysis may be a fruitless attempt to grant significance to a increasingly gray ash type of
modern society or the only escape in a system which is decreasingly transmitting
communication to forge new, alternate means of informing and differentiating human
beings.

c. Excluded middles: the gray ash / what has been thrown away as valuable

The entire idea of waste is concurrent with Pynchon's theme of excluded middles, in this
sense, where the gray ash of life is often tossed away in order to hold onto the overly
extreme binaries. A consumer society disposes and dispossesses more of life than it keeps.
Often more questions are raised then answered and for every binary presented, an inversion
of the duality is also usually suggested. One of the most common terms thrown around in
literary criticism concerning Crying is the "excluded middle." The progression toward
dichotomy is also a progression toward the questioning of what lies between the two
extremes. The gray area is very significant, while also asking the reader if it is significant only
because the human being cannot be satisfied without an attempt at pointing significance.
Largely, though, it points to the waste, the disinherited of society, as symbolized by the
amount of underground networks who have felt unrepresented by the official postal system.
These are the people, the lives, the core of humanity disregarded and dispossessed. Mucho
Maas is haunted by nightmares of these grey ash leftovers of humanity and so, in its way, is
the entire novel.

d. Man versus modernity/consumerism/consumption

At the start of the novel, Oedipa is not working. She attends a Tupperware gathering, a clear
symbol of mid-twentieth century American housewifery. As some critics have noted, the fact
that the host of the party had likely put too much kirsch in the fondue shows that the party
signifies superficial consumership in material America more than any type of sincere
communal bonding as the hostess felt the need to get her attendees drunk in order to
entertain them. Oedipa's search for information and cohesion within the world at large is
symbolized by her entrapment by commercial society. Parallels have been constructed
between the green bubble glasses that Oedipa wears when crying as she views the painting
in Mexico City and the lone green eye that is a metaphor for the television screen.
Furthermore, expanding the theme of disillusioning modern commercialism, Oedipa notes
that in her vision, Pierce only reaches the top of her tower when he uses a credit card to
shimmy his way up. In the mass consumer society in which Oedipa lives, the individual is in
dire need of revelation, another term which is used often by Pynchon.
e.Cmmunication
Many of the problems with chaos found in the novel are tied in to the idea of
communication. The major symbol of order in the novel, Maxwell's Demon, cannot be
operated because it requires a certain unattainable level of communication. Letters in the
novel, which should be clear and direct forms of stable communication, are ultimately
meaningless. The novel also contains a mail-delivery group that requires its members to mail
a letter once a week even if they have nothing to say. Indeed, the letter Oedipa receives in
chapter one may itself be meaningless, since it is the first step in what may be nothing more
than a big joke played on Oedipa. The religious moment Oedipa experiences in chapter two
seems for a moment to promise the possibility of some kind of communication being
communicated, but the process breaks down. Religion, language, science, all of the
purveyors of communication, and through that communication a sense of wholeness, do not
correctly function in the novel.
f. Interpretation of meaning
Related to the theme of the problem of communication is the novel's representation of the
way in which people impose interpretation on the meaningless. It is very telling that Oedipa
wants to turn the mystery of the Tristero into a "constellation," which is not really an
example of true order. Solar systems are simply mankind's way of imposing an artificial but
pleasing order on the randomness of outer space. It is, furthermore, an imposition of a two-
dimensional structure onto a three-dimensional reality. Oedipa's quest to construct a
constellation seems to indicate that she is only looking for a superficial system. Indeed, she
never succeeds in figuring out the meaning behind the Tristero, and, further, the novel ends
with the very strong likelihood that the mystery may hold no mystery at all. And just as she is
unable to piece together the puzzle of the Tristero, she is similarly unable to refashion her
life after it begins to fall apart. Even the United States government, which tries to impose an
order on the world of mail delivery, cannot prevent side groups from springing up to
undermine its work.
Language
There are two concepts underlying all this: puns and science. The novel is full of puns and
language games of all sorts. For instance, the odd names of the novel's characters are a type
of play on different words and their symbolic baggage. Another example is the concept of
the word "lot" in the title, which actually occurs several times in the book but does not
relate to anything in the story until the last few pages. Also, we see that Mucho's radio
station spells "fuck" when read in reverse, forming another little language game that does
not have necessarily any inherent meaning but does indicate an interest in manipulating
language for intellectual enjoyment. Language is the means through which the story is
communicated, and Pynchon has chosen to use a language full of jokes, puns, and satires.
Science seems to stand in opposition to the chaos of language that all of Pynchon's
manipulation suggests. Science is ordered and coherent and offers a body of definite
knowledge that all can study. And yet, even the coherence of science is undermined in the
existence of Maxwell's Demon and the figure of Dr. Hilarius. Though pure science may offer
coherence, the uses to which that science is put, the interpretations imposed on that
science, can scatter that coherence to the wind.

William Shakespeare (1564-1616),

It’s very easy to think of Shakespeare as a one-off genius with a unique perspective on the
world around him. However, Shakespeare was very much a product of the huge cultural shifts
that were occurring in Elizabethan England during his lifetime. He was working in the theater
at the height of the renaissance movement, something that is reflected in Shakespeare’s plays.
Broadly speaking, the renaissance movement is used to describe how Europeans moved away
from the restrictive ideas of the Middle Ages. The ideology that dominated the Middle Ages
was heavily focused on the absolute power of God and was enforced by the formidable
Catholic Church. From the Fourteenth Century onwards, people started to break away from
this idea. The renaissance movement did not necessarily reject the idea of God, but rather
questioned humankind’s relationship to God – an idea that caused an unprecedented upheaval
in the accepted social hierarchy. In fact, Shakespeare himself may have been Catholic. This
focus on humanity created a new-found freedom for artists, writers and philosophers to be
inquisitive about the world around them. Shakespeare was born towards the end of the
renaissance period and was one of the first to bring the renaissance’s core values to the
theater.

Shakespeare updated the simplistic, two-dimensional writing style of pre-renaissance drama.

He focused on creating “human” characters with psychologically complexity. Hamlet is
perhaps the most famous example of this. The upheaval in the accepted social hierarchy
allowed Shakespeare to explore the humanity of every character regardless of their social
position. Even monarchs are given human emotions and are capable of making mistakes.
Shakespeare utilized his knowledge of Greek and Roman classics when writing his plays.
Before the renaissance, these texts had been suppressed by the Catholic Church.

While Shakespeare caused much controversy, he also earned lavish praise and has profoundly
impacted the world over in areas of literature, culture, art, theatre, and film and is considered
one of the best English language writers ever..

Likely the most influential writer in all of English literature and certainly the most important
playwright of the English Renaissance, William Shakespeare was born in 1564 in the town of
Stratford-upon-Avon in Warwickshire, England. The son of a successful middle-class glove-
maker, Shakespeare attended grammar school, but his formal education proceeded no further.
In 1582, he married an older woman, Anne Hathaway, and had three children with her.
Around 1590 he left his family behind and traveled to London to work as an actor and
playwright. Public and critical success quickly followed, and Shakespeare eventually became
the most popular playwright in England and part owner of the Globe Theater. His career
bridged the reigns of Elizabeth I (ruled 1558-1603) and James I (ruled 1603-1625); he was a
favorite of both monarchs. Indeed, James granted Shakespeare’s company the greatest
possible compliment by endowing them with the status of king’s players. Wealthy and
renowned, Shakespeare retired to Stratford, and died in 1616 at the age of fifty-two. At the
time of Shakespeare’s death, such luminaries as Ben Jonson hailed him as the apogee of
Renaissance theatre.

Shakespeare’s works were collected and printed in various editions in the century following
his death, and by the early eighteenth century his reputation as the greatest poet ever to write
in English was well established. The unprecedented admiration garnered by his works led to a
fierce curiosity about Shakespeare’s life; but the paucity of surviving biographical
information has left many details of Shakespeare’s personal history shrouded in mystery.
Some people have concluded from this fact that Shakespeare’s plays in reality were written by
someone else—Francis Bacon and the Earl of Oxford are the two most popular candidates—
but the evidence for this claim is overwhelmingly circumstantial, and the theory is not taken
seriously by many scholars.

In the absence of definitive proof to the contrary, Shakespeare must be viewed as the author
of the 37 plays and 154 sonnets that bear his name. The legacy of this body of work is
immense. A number of Shakespeare’s plays seem to have transcended even the category of
brilliance, becoming so influential as to affect profoundly the course of Western literature and
culture ever after.

JONATHAN SWIFT, GULLIVER’S SWIFT

The Enlightenment, sometimes referred to as the Age of Reason, was a confluence of ideas
and activities that took place throughout the eighteenth century in Western Europe, England,
and the American colonies. Scientific rationalism, exemplified by the scientific method, was
the hallmark of everything related to the Enlightenment. Following close on the heels of the
Renaissance, Enlightenment thinkers believed that the advances of science and industry
heralded a new age of egalitarianism and progress for humankind. More goods were being
produced for less money, people were traveling more, and the chances for the upwardly
mobile to actually change their station in life were significantly improving. At the same time,
many voices were expressing sharp criticism of some time-honored cultural institutions. The
Church, in particular, was singled out as stymieing the forward march of human reason. Many
intellectuals of the Enlightenment practiced a variety of Deism, which is a rejection of
organized, doctrinal religion in favor of a more personal and spiritual kind of faith. For the
first time in recorded Western history, the hegemony of political and religious leaders was
weakened to the point that citizens had little to fear in making their opinions known. Criticism
was the order of the day, and argumentation was the new mode of conversation.

In the genre of the novel, Jonathan Swift is probably most well-remembered. In all honesty,
the Enlightenment was a bit of a dry spell for English literature. Working in the shadow of the
Elizabethans presented creative difficulties for English writers, as no one could quite
determine how to follow up after Shakespeare and Marlowe. Swift answered the call with a
sizzling wit that resonates to this day. Gulliver’s Travels has established itself as a classic of
world, not just English, literature. The fantastic story, which in one sense could be seen as
mere children’s literature, works on multiple levels at once. Each of the societies that Gulliver
encounters has a metaphorical relation to the eighteenth century in England. Whereas some
authors confronted social injustice head-on, Swift preferred the inviting trickery of the
allegory. His sense of humor charmed his admirers, disarmed his critics, and cemented his
reputation in literary history.

Gulliver's Travels has been the recipient of several designations: from satire to a children's
story, from proto-Science Fiction to a forerunner of the modern novel.Published seven years
after Daniel Defoe's wildly successful Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver's Travels may be read as a
systematic rebuttal of Defoe's optimistic account of human capability.Swift was concerned to
refute the notion that the individual precedes society, as Defoe's novel seems to suggest. For
this reason Gulliver repeatedly encounters established societies rather than desolate islands..
Swift's critique of science (the experiments of Laputa) is the first such questioning by a
modern liberal democrat of the effects and cost on a society which embraces and celebrates
policies pursuing scientific progress. A possible reason for the book's classic status is that it
can be seen as many things to many different people. Broadly, the book has three themes:

 A satirical view of the state of European government, and of petty differences between
religions
 An inquiry into whether men are inherently corrupt or whether they become corrupted
 A restatement of the older "ancients versus moderns" controversy previously
addressed by Swift in The Battle of the Books

In terms of storytelling and construction the parts follow a pattern:

 The causes of Gulliver's misadventures become more malignant as time goes on—he
is first shipwrecked, then abandoned, then attacked by strangers, then attacked by his
own crew.
 Gulliver's attitude hardens as the book progresses—he is genuinely surprised by the
viciousness and politicking of the Lilliputians but finds the behaviour of the Yahoos in
the fourth part reflective of the behaviour of people.
 Each part is the reverse of the preceding part—Gulliver is big/small/wise/ignorant, the
countries are complex/simple/scientific/natural, and the forms of government are
worse/better/worse/better than England's.
  Gulliver's viewpoint between parts is mirrored by that of his antagonists in the
contrasting part—Gulliver sees the tiny Lilliputians as being vicious and
unscrupulous, and then the king of Brobdingnag sees Europe in exactly the same light;
Gulliver sees the Laputians as unreasonable, and his Houyhnhnm master sees
humanity as equally so.
 No form of government is ideal—the simplistic Brobdingnagians enjoy public
executions and have streets infested with beggars, the honest and upright Houyhnhnms
who have no word for lying are happy to suppress the true nature of Gulliver as a
Yahoo and are equally unconcerned about his reaction to being expelled.
 Specific individuals may be good even where the race is bad—Gulliver finds a friend
in each of his travels and, despite Gulliver's rejection and horror toward all Yahoos, is
treated very well by the Portuguese captain, Don Pedro, who returns him to England at
the novel's end.

MARK TWAIN-The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

I.CONTEXT

Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens in the town of Florida, Missouri, in 1835.
When he was four years old, his family moved to Hannibal, a town on the Mississippi River
much like the towns depicted in his two most famous novels, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
(1876) and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884).

Clemens spent his young life in a fairly affluent family that owned a number of household
slaves. The death of Clemens’s father in 1847, however, left the family in hardship. Clemens
left school, worked for a printer, and, in 1851, having finished his apprenticeship, began to set
type for his brother Orion’s newspaper, the Hannibal Journal. Clemens eventually became a
riverboat pilot, and his life on the river influenced him a great deal. Perhaps most important,
the riverboat life provided him with the pen name Mark Twain, derived from the riverboat
leadsmen’s signal—“By the mark, twain”—that the water was deep enough for safe passage.
Life on the river also gave Twain material for several of his books, including the raft scenes
of Huckleberry Finn and the material for his autobiographical Life on the Mississippi (1883).

Clemens continued to work on the river until 1861, when the Civil War exploded across
America and shut down the Mississippi for travel and shipping. Although Clemens joined a
Confederate cavalry division, he was no ardent Confederate, and when his division deserted
en masse, he did too.Throughout the late 1860s and 1870s, Twain’s articles, stories, memoirs,
and novels, characterized by an irrepressible wit and a deft ear for language and dialect,
garnered him immense celebrity. His novel The Innocents Abroad (1869) was an instant
bestseller, and The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876) received even greater national acclaim
and cemented Twain’s position as a giant in American literary circles. As the nation prospered
economically in the post–Civil War period—an era that came to be known as the Gilded Age,
an epithet that Twain coined—so too did Twain.Twain began work on Huckleberry Finn, a
sequel to Tom Sawyer, in an effort to capitalize on the popularity of the earlier novel. This
new novel took on a more serious character, however, as Twain focused increasingly on the
institution of slavery and the South. Twain soon set Huckleberry Finn aside, perhaps because
its darker tone did not fit the optimistic sentiments of the Gilded Age. In the early 1880s,
however, the hopefulness of the post–Civil War years began to fade. Reconstruction, the
political program designed to reintegrate the defeated South into the Union as a slavery-free
region, began to fail. The harsh measures the victorious North imposed only embittered the
South.

Huckleberry Finn has become famous not merely as the crown jewel in the work of one of
America’s preeminent writers, but also as a subject of intense controversy. The novel
occasionally has been banned in Southern states because of its steadfastly critical take on the
South and the hypocrisies of slavery. Others have dismissed Huckleberry Finn as vulgar or
racist because it uses the word nigger, a term whose connotations obscure the novel’s deeper
themes—which are unequivocally antislavery—and even prevent some from reading and
enjoying it altogether. The fact that the historical context in which Twain wrote made his use
of the word insignificant—and, indeed, part of the realism he wanted to create—offers little
solace to some modern readers. Ultimately, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has proved
significant not only as a novel that explores the racial and moral world of its time but also,
through the controversies that continue to surround it, as an artifact of those same moral and
racial tensions as they have evolved to the present day.

KURT VONNEGUT JR, Slaughterhouse-Five

I. Context

The novel treats one of the most horrific massacres in European history—the World War
II firebombing of Dresden, on February 13, 1945—with mock-serious humor and clear
antiwar sentiment. More than 130,000 civilians died in Dresden.Inhabitants of Dresden
were incinerated or suffocated in a matter of hours as a firestorm sucked up and
consumed available oxygen. The scene on the ground was one of unimaginable
destruction. The novel is based on Kurt Vonnegut’s own experience in World War II. In
the novel, a prisoner of war witnesses and survives the Allied forces’ firebombing of
Dresden. Vonnegut, like his pro-tagonist Billy Pilgrim, emerged from a meat locker
beneath a slaughter-house into the moonscape of burned-out Dresden. His surviving
captors put him to work finding, burying, and burning bodies. Although he attempted to
describe in simple terms what happened and to create a linear narrative, this strategy
never worked for him. Billy Pilgrim’s unhinged time—shifting, a mechanism for dealing
with the unfathomable aggression and mass destruction he witnesses, is Vonnegut’s
solution to the problem of telling an untellable tale.

Vonnegut wrote Slaughterhouse-Five as a response to war. But the timing of the novel’s
publication also deserves notice: in 1969, the United States was in the midst of the
dismal Vietnam War. Appearing when it did, Slaughterhouse-Five made a forceful
statement about the campaign in Vietnam, a war in which technology was once more
being employed against nonmilitary targets in the name of a dubious cause.

Vonnegut is said to belong to postmodernism, a trend which emerged in the post–World

War II era, is characterized by heavy reliance on techniques like fragmentation, paradox,
and questionable narrators. Postmodern authors tend to celebrate chance over craft,
and employ meta-fiction to undermine the writer's authority. Another characteristic of
postmodern literature is the questioning of distinctions between high and low culture
through the use of pastiche, the combination of subjects and genres not previously
deemed fit for literature.
VIRGINIA WOOLF

I CONTEXT

Virginia Woolf,(1882-1941) the English novelist, critic, and essayist. Woolf viewed the
realistic Victorian novel, with its neat and linear plots, as an inadequate form of expression.
In the 1920s she began searching for the form that would reflect the violent contrasts and
disjointed impressions of the world around her. In Mrs. Dalloway, published in 1925, Woolf
discovered a new literary form capable of expressing the new realities of postwar England.
The novel depicts the subjective experiences and memories of its central characters over a
single day in post–World War I London. Divided into parts, rather than chapters, the novel's
structure highlights the finely interwoven texture of the characters' thoughts. Critics tend to
agree that Woolf found her writer’s voice with this novel.This book, which focuses on
commonplace tasks, such as shopping, throwing a party, and eating dinner, showed that no
act was too small or too ordinary for a writer’s attention. Ultimately, Mrs. Dalloway
transformed the novel as an art form.

Woolf develops the book’s protagonist, Clarissa Dalloway, and myriad other characters by
chronicling their interior thoughts with little pause or explanation, a style referred to as
stream of consciousness. Several central characters and more than one hundred minor
characters appear in the text, and their thoughts spin out like spider webs. Sometimes the
threads of thought cross—and people succeed in communicating. More often, however, the
threads do not cross, leaving the characters isolated and alone. Woolf believed that behind
the “cotton wool” of life, as she terms it in her autobiographical collection of essays
Moments of Being (1941), and under the downpour of impressions saturating a mind during
each moment, a pattern exists.

Characters in Mrs. Dalloway occasionally perceive life’s pattern through a sudden shock, or
what Woolf called a “moment of being.” Suddenly the cotton wool parts, and a person sees
reality, and his or her place in it, clearly. “In the vast catastrophe of the European war,”
wrote Woolf, “our emotions had to be broken up for us, and put at an angle from us, before
we could allow ourselves to feel them in poetry or fiction.” Her novel attempts to uncover
fragmented emotions, such as desperation or love, in order to find, through “moments of
being,” a way to endure.

While writing Mrs. Dalloway, Woolf reread the Greek classics along with two new modernist
writers, Marcel Proust and James Joyce. Woolf shared these writers' interest in time and
psychology, and she incorporated these issues into her novel. She wanted to show
characters in flux, rather than static, characters who think and emote as they move through
space, who react to their surroundings in ways that mirrored actual human experience.
Rapid political and social change marked the period between the two world wars: the British
Empire, for which so many people had sacrificed their lives to protect and preserve, was in
decline. Countries like India were beginning to question Britain’s colonial rule. At home, the
Labour Party, with its plans for economic reform, was beginning to challenge the
Conservative Party, with its emphasis on imperial business interests. Women, who had
flooded the workforce to replace the men who had gone to war, were demanding equal
rights. Men, who had seen unspeakable atrocities in the first modern war, were questioning
the usefulness of class-based sociopolitical institutions. Woolf lent her support to the
feminist movement in her nonfiction book A Room of One’s Own (1929), as well as in
numerous essays, and she was briefly involved in the women’s suffrage movement.
Although Mrs. Dalloway portrays the shifting political atmosphere through the characters
Peter Walsh, Richard Dalloway, and Hugh Whitbread, it focuses more deeply on the charged
social mood through the characters Septimus Warren Smith and Clarissa Dalloway. Woolf
delves into the consciousness of Clarissa, a woman who exists largely in the domestic
sphere, to ensure that readers take her character seriously, rather than simply dismiss her as
a vain and uneducated upper-class wife. In spite of her heroic and imperfect effort in life,
Clarissa, like every human being and even the old social order itself, must face death.