A TO Z Literary Principles from History of English Literature: Note 82

A Set of 26 Objective Questions & Answers

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A. Prose poetry should be considered as neither primarily poetry nor prose but is essentially a hybrid or fusion of the two, and accounted a separate genre altogether. Prose poetry originated in early 19th century France and Germany as a reaction against dependence upon traditional uses of line in verse.
  Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)    Prose poetry dates back to the ancient writings of Hebrew scholars. It was used in the King James version of the Bible in the Book of Psalms.

Examples
Psalm 93
“The Lord reigneth, he is clothed with majesty;the Lord is clothed with strength, wherewith he hath girded himself: the world also is stablished, that it cannot be moved.
Thy throne is established of old: thou art from everlasting.
The floods have lifted up, Oh Lord, the floods have lifted up their voice; the floods lift up their waves.
The Lord on high is mightier than the noise of many waters, yea, than the mighty waves of the sea.
Thy testimonies are very sure: holiness becometh thine house, O Lord, forever.”

B. Narrative poetry gives a verbal representation, in verse, of a sequence of connected events; it propels characters through a plot. Read More UGC NET It is always told by a narrator. Narrative poems might tell of a love story (like Tennyson’s Maud), the story of a father and son (like Wordsworth’s Michael) or the deeds of a hero or heroine (like Walter Scott’s Lay of the Last Minstrel). Epic poems are very vital to narrative poems, although it is thought that narrative poems were created to explain oral traditions. The focus of narrative poetry is often the pros and cons of life.
Examples
• The Book of the Duchess by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer
• The Charge of the Light Brigade by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
• The Divine Comedy by Dante
• Don Juan by Lord Byron
• The Eve of St. Agnes by John Keats

C. Dramatic poetry, also known as dramatic verse or verse drama, is a written work that both tells a story and connects the reader to an audience through emotions or behavior. Read More UGC NET A form of narrative closely related to acting, it usually is performed physically and can be either spoken or sung. Normally, it uses a set rhyming or meter pattern, setting it apart from prose. It has evolved since its start in ancient Greece, but it still survives today, especially in opera librettos. A lack of strict guidelines makes it somewhat debatable what exactly counts as a dramatic poem, but in general, the four main accepted forms include soliloquy, dramatic monologue, character sketch and dialogue.
Dramatic poetry can take one of several forms: soliloquy, dramatic monologue, character sketch and dialogue.

Examples.
The Raven, by Edgar Allan Poe

“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

‘Out-Out’, by Robert Frost

Doing a man’s work, though a child at heart
He saw all spoiled. “Don’t let him cut my hand off
The doctor, when he comes. Don’t let him, sister!”
So. But the hand was gone already.
A Dream, by William Blake

Pitying, I dropped a tear:
But I saw a glow-worm near,
Who replied, “What wailing wight
Calls the watchman of the night?

D. The poem Journey of the Magi has been penned down by Nobel prize winner TS Eliot an is a contrast of experiences based on the nativity of Christ. The monologue describes the journey of the Magi to Bethlahem in search of spiritual pacification and is an account of Eliot’s own conversion to Anglican faith, making the journey and objective correlation for Eliot.

E. An Essay on Man is a poem published by Alexander Pope in 1734. Read More UGC NET Pope’s Essay on Man and Moral Epistles were designed to be the parts of a system of ethics which he wanted to express in poetry. Moral Epistles have been known under various other names including Ethic Epistles and Moral Essays. On its publication, An Essay on Man met with great admiration throughout Europe. Voltaire called it “the most beautiful, the most useful, the most sublime didactic poem ever written in any language”.

F. In Guerrillas (1975) and A Bend in the River (1979) Naipaul dealt in fictional form with events in the West Indies and Zaire, respectively. Guerrillas concerns a would-be West Indian revolutionary; A Bend in the River probes the search for identity in a newly independent African nation. Though cast as novels, The Enigma of Arrival (1987) and A Way in the World (1994) are to a great extent autobiographical, dealing with Naipaul’s recurrent themes of exile and the idea of home. Read More UGC NET In these works Naipaul is haunted by a landscape that reflects the past yet is marked more and more by profound social change.

G. A Clockwork Orange  1962 novel by Anthony Burgess is about a near future in which gangs of boys roam the streets of England in search of people to rob or rape. Alex , the teenage leader of one of those gangs, gets arrested for raping and killing a woman during a night of violent debauchery. In jail he is brainwashed so that ideas of sex and violence nauseate him, and he emerges a changed and vulnerable man. After a series of misadventures and another trip to jail, Alex returns to his amoral ways.   Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)   

H. Anthony Powell, a friend and Oxford classmate of Evelyn Waugh, also wrote wittily about the higher echelons of English society, but with more affection and on a broader canvas. His 12-volume series of novels, grouped under the title A Dance to the Music of Time (1951-1975), is a highly readable account of the intertwined lives and careers of people in the arts and politics from before World War II to many years afterward. His four-volume autobiography, To Keep the Ball Rolling (1977-1983), complements the fictionalized details that form the basis of his novels.

I. A Farewell to Arms,  1929 novel by American author Ernest Hemingway, earned Academy Awards for cinematography and sound recording. Read More UGC NET Released in 1932, the film examines how World War I (1914-1918) impacted the lives of American ambulance driver Lieutenant Frederic Henry , British nurse Catherine Barkley , and a variety of other characters. Barkley nurses Henry back to health after he is injured in the war, and the two fall in love. Once Henry recovers, he must return to the war, but he soon escapes to be with Barkley. She gets pregnant and nearly dies in childbirth.

J. Evelyn Waugh (1903-66), English author of satirical novels. Evelyn Arthur St. John Waugh was born in London and educated at the University of Oxford. Between 1928 and 1938 he published five novels notable for their wit and pure satire on such aspects of upper-class British life as colonialism, public schools, and the manners and morals of high society. These novels are Decline and Fall (1928), Vile Bodies (1930), Black Mischief (1932), A Handful of Dust (1934), and Scoop (1938). Put Out More Flags (1942) is a novel about the British effort during World War II.  Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)   

K. Born in Trinidad of East Indian ancestry, Naipaul received recognition for novels that focus on Indians living in the Caribbean, including A House for Mr. Biswas (1961) and Guerrillas (1975). His later fiction and nonfiction focused more often on countries in Asia and Africa. Lovelace, also from Trinidad, discusses education, poverty, and village life in his novels, which include The Schoolmaster (1968), The Dragon Can’t Dance (1979), and Salt (1996), which won the Commonwealth Writers Prize.

L. A PASSAGE TO INDIA by E.M. Forster: The English novelist E.M. Forster explores in his work the barriers in communication that separate one person from another. In A Passage to India, the barrier is culture. Among his other notable novels are Where Angels Fear to Tread (1905), Howard's End (1910), and A Room With a View (1908).

M. Irving's fourth novel, The World According to Garp , which follows the tumultuous life of a writer, was such a commercial success that Irving was able to leave teaching and devote full time to writing. The book was nominated for both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award. Irving's other works include The Hotel New Hampshire (1981; motion picture, 1984), The Cider House Rules (1985; motion picture, 1999), A Prayer for Owen Meany (1989), A Son of the Circus (1994), Trying to Save Piggy Sneed (1996), and A Widow for One Year (1998). He received an Academy Award for best adapted screenplay for The Cider House Rules. His insights into the process of adapting a novel for the screen are recorded in the memoir My Movie Business (1999).

N. Outside the works of H. G. Wells, the most important scientific romances produced before World War I were Shiel’s The Purple Cloud , Hodgson’s The House on the Borderland and The Lost World (1912) by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. The most important American writer who contributed to this genre in this period was Jack London in such work as The Iron Heel (1907).  Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)   

  O. The Canterbury Tales is written in Middle English, which bears a close visual resemblance to the English written and spoken today. Read More UGC NET

  In contrast, Old English (the language of Beowulf, for example) can be read only in modern translation or by students of Old English. Students often read The Canterbury Tales in its original language, not only because of the similarity between Chaucer’s Middle English and our own, but because the beauty and humor of the poetry—all of its internal and external rhymes, and the sounds it produces—would be lost in translation.Read More UGC NET

P.  E.V. Ramakrishnan is a bilingual writer who has published poetry and criticism in English and Malayalam. Read More UGC NET He is the author of three books of poetry, publishing each after symmetrical intervals of fourteen years: Being Elsewhere in Myself (1980), A Python in a Snake Park (1994) and Terms of Seeing: New and Selected Poems (2008). He is also the author of a landmark book of translations of modern Indian poetry. 

Q. A novel is a literary work where the author narrates a fictitious story in the prose form which can taken the place of the ancient epics if not in The magnitude of epic by the volume or narrative enlargement; rather by expansion of thought and perception. The term, 'novel' has been coined from the Italian word novella during the late 18th century. Though the novel form was introduced much later than the other forms of literature namely, the poetry and drama; novel, today has gained immense popularity among the masses. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)

R. The "Golden Age" of English biography emerged in the late eighteenth century, the century in which the terms "biography" and "autobiography" entered the English lexicon. The classic works of the period were Samuel Johnson's Critical Lives of the Poets (1779–81) and James Boswell's massive Life of Johnson (1791). Read More A to Z (Objective Questions) The Boswellian approach to biography emphasized uncovering material and letting the subject "speak for itself." While Boswell compiled, Samuel Johnson composed. Johnson did not follow a chronological narration of the subject's life but used anecdotes and incidents selectively.

S. A Brief History of Time (subtitled "From the Big Bang to Black Holes") is a popular science book written by Stephen Hawking and first published by the Bantam Dell Publishing Group in 1988. It became a best-seller and has sold more than 10 million copies. It was also on the London Sunday Times best-seller list for more than four years. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)

T. George Elliot (a pseudonym for Mary Ann Evans, 1819-80) was an intellectual who wrote about German philosophy, worried about deep theological issues, and published her first novel (Adam Bede) at the age of forty. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions) Her fiction combines intelligence, imagination, and human sympathy in a way that even the best English fiction rarely does; Virginia Woolf found Middle march (1872) “one of the few English novels written for grown-up people.” 

U. Frankenstein, quite a different sort of novel. Frankenstein was written by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley (1797-1851)—daughter of two famous reforming philosophers, and wife of the poet Percy Bysshe Shelley. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)

V. Arms and the Man  is both an amusing and thought-provoking drama that retains its relevance even today, more than a century after it was first conceived. Shaw mocks at the popular theories on war and love and combines a military satire with a taunt on love and family structure. 

W. In 1798, two young English poets—William Wordsworth (1770-1850) and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) published a book of poems called Lyrical Ballads. In 1800 an expanded edition was published, with a preface—a kind of poetic manifesto—by Wordsworth. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions) This is generally regarded as the official beginning of Romanticism in England.

X. Bede (c.672-735) is remembered as a great historian and theologian. His Old English works provide us with a glimpse into an otherwise mysterious period known as the "Dark Ages."

Y. Religion is an important and recurring theme in James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.   Through his experiences with religion, Stephen Dedalus both matures and progressively becomes more individualistic as he grows. Read More A to Z (Objective Questions)

Z.  In the Preface to his edition of Shakespeare (1765), Samuel Johnson begins by considering what makes writers of the past worth reading, and then moves to a more particular consideration of Shakespeare’s own strengths and weaknesses.

 Ardhendu De

Ref: 1. History of English Literature- Albert     

2. The Concise Cambridge History of English Literature

3. UGC NET OLD QUESTION PAPERS