LITERATURE: 2021

Sunday, 7 November 2021

Edmound Spenser sonnets

A great name in Elizabethan poetry.

His sonnets series Amoretti, a collection of 89 sonnets, Amoretti was first published in 1595 in London by William Ponsonby, it's actually an Italian title inspired by Petrach .

The sonnets are addressed to his lady love Elizabeth Boyle who become his wife. His sonnets contain some autobiographical matters. Rhyme scheme - abab bcbc cdcd ee.

Saturday, 6 November 2021

Smart fact on Anglo Norman period | Intersting fact on English Literature

1. Period 1066-1340

2. French was the official language (the language of courts and king)

3. Norman were pagan barbarian pirates from Denmark Norway and Island

4. The Battle of Hasting in 1066 establish Norman domination

5. Earliest History in French - Geoffrey Gaimar's (1140) Estoril Des Engles(History of English) is considered to be the earliest extant history in the French language.

6. More than 10000 French words found their way into English words associated with the government, law, art, literature, food and many other aspects of life

7. Englishman become desirous of learning the language of the ruling class.

8. Jean Bodel auther of the Chanson des Saisnes (song of the sexons) classified medeaval romance into three main categories a. The Matter of France

b. The matter of Britain

c. The Matter of Rome

9. Modern scholer Added The matter of England

Friday, 1 October 2021

Multiple- choice Questions on Chaucer

1. Between which sets of dates did Chaucer live?

(A) 1340-1400

(b) 1345-1400

(D) 1349-1400 Ans: (A) 1340-1400

2. Chaucer lived during the reigns of—

(A) Edward III and Richard II

(B) Edward III and Henry IV

(D) Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV. Ans: Edward III, Richard II, and Henry IV

3. Which of the following was the closest contemporary of Chaucer?

(A) John Gower

(B) William Langland

(D) John Barbour. Ans: (B) William Langland

4. Who called Chaucer “the Father of English Poetry”?

(A) Sidney

(B) Spenser

(D) Arnold Ans:

5. Who described Chaucer as “The Well of English Undefiled”?

(A) Dryden

(B) Spenser

(D) Sidney Ans: B

6. “With Chaucer is born our real poetry.” Who holds this view?

(A) Matthew Arnold

(B) Spenser

(D) Addison Ans: A

7. Chaucer found his native tongue a dialect and left it Languages? Who makes this

Observation?

(A . (A.) Richards

(B) F.R.

(D) Walter Pater. Ans: C

8. "Chaucer is the earliest of the great moderns." Who holds this View?

(A)Dryden

(B)Ben Jonson

(D) Matthew Arnold. Ans: D

9. "if Chaucer is the Father of English Poet, he is the Grandfather of the English Novel." Who makes this remark?

(A) Walter Pater

(B) Ruskin

(D) Coleridge Ans: C

10. Who says about Chaucer’s ‘Character Here is Gad’s Plenty.”

(A) Dryden

(B) Dr. Johnson

(D) Coleridge Ans: A

11. In which month did Chaucer’s pilgrims go on their Pilgrimage?

(A) January

(B) February

(D) April Ans: D

12. HOW many pilgrims in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales are going on the pilgrimage?

/ (A) 27

(B) 29

(D) 31 Ans: B

13. How many pilgrims in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales represent the knighthood

Class?

(A)One

(B) Two

(D) Four. Ans: C

14. How many ecclesiastical characters are portrayed in the Prologue?

(A) Five

(B) Six

(D) Eight Ans: D

15. How many women characters figure in the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales?

(A) One

(B) Two

(D) Four Ans: C

16. It is believed that the Host at the Inn was a real man. What is the name of the Host?

(A) Henry Baily

(B) Harry Bailly

(D) Hoary Bailly Ans: B

17. What is the name of the Inn where the pilgrims assemble for the night?

(A) Southwark Inn

(B) Temple Inn

(D) St. Becket Inn Ans: C

18. To which shrine are the pilgrims going?

(A) Shrine of St.Agnes at Canterbury

(B) Shrine of St. Lucas at Jerusalem

(D) Shrine of St. Mark in Southwark. Ans: C

19, One of the Tales in Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales is in prose. Which of the following?

(A) The Pardoner’s Tale

(B) The Parson’s Tale

(D) The Knight’s Tale Ans: B

20. One of the portraits in the Prologue that of the wife of Bath. What is Bath?

(A) The Christian name of the lady

(B) The surname of the lady

(D) The name of the town to which she belonged Ans: D

21. “He was as fresh as the month of May.” this line occurs in the Prologue. Whom does this line refer to

(A) Friar

(B) Franklin

(D) Squire Ans:D

22. One of the following works is not a work of Chaucer. Which one?

(A) The House of Fame (B) The Owl and the Nightingale

23. Which of the following is Chaucer’s prose work?

(A) Troylus and Cryseyde

(B) The Legend of Good Women

(D) the House of Fame Ans: C

24. Which of the following poets wrote a famous poem mourning the death of Chaucer?

(A) Occleve in The Governail of Princes

(B) Lydgate in Falles of Princes

(D) William Dunwar in The Thistle and the Rose Ans: A

25. Chaucer was not indebted for his sources to one of the following, identify him:

(A) Homer

(B) Virgil

(D) Ovid Ans: A

Wednesday, 24 March 2021

FOUNDERS AND FATHERS OF IMPORTANT ENGLISH GENRE

FOUNDERS AND FATHERS OF IMPORTANT ENGLISH GENRE

1.Geoffrey Chaucer = The Father of English Literature
2.Geoffrey Chaucer = The Father of English Poetry
3.Geoffrey Chaucer = The Father of English Language
4.Geoffrey Chaucer = The Morning Star of the Renaissance
5.Geoffrey Chaucer = The First National Poet
6.Venerable Bede = The Father of English Learning.
7.Venerable Bede = The Father of English History
8.King Alfred the Great = The Father of English Prose
9.Aeschylus = The Father of Tragedy
10.Nicholas Udall = The First English Comedy Writer
11.Edmund Spenser = The Poet’s poet (by Charles Lamb)
12.Edmund Spenser = The Child of Renaissance
13.Edmund Spenser = The Bridge between Renaissance and Reformation
14.Gutenberg = The Father of Printing
15.William Caxton = Father of English Press
16.Francis Bacon = The Father of English Essay
17.John Wycliffe = The Morning Star of the Reformation
18.Christopher Marlowe = The Father of English Tragedy
19.William Shakespeare = Bard of Avon
20.William Shakespeare = The Father of English Drama
21.William Shakespeare = Sweet Swan of Avon
22.William Shakespeare = The Bard
23.Robert Burns = The Bard of Ayrshire (Scotland)
24.Robert Burns = The National Poet of Scotland
25.Robert Burns = Rabbie
26.Robert Burns = The Ploughman Poet
27.William Dunber = The Chaucer of Scotland
28.John Dryden = Father of English criticism
29.William of Newbury = Father of Historical Criticism
30.John Donne = Poet of love
31.John Donne = Metaphysical poet
32.John Milton = Epic poet
33.John Milton = The great master of verse
34.John Milton = Lady of the Christ College
35.John Milton = Poet of the Devil’s Party
36.John Milton = Master of the Grand style
38.John Milton = The Blind Poet of England
39.Alexander Pope = Mock heroic poet
40.William Wordsworth = The Worshipper of Nature
41.William Wordsworth = The High Priest of Nature
42.William Wordsworth = The Poet of Nature
43.William Wordsworth = The Lake Poet
44.William Wordsworth = Poet of Childhood
45.William Wordsworth = Egotistical Sublime
46.Samuel Taylor Coleridge = The Poet of Supernaturalism
47.Samuel Taylor Coleridge = Opium Eater
48.Coleridge & Wordsworth = The Father of Romanticism
49.Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey = Lake Poets
50.Lord Byron = The Rebel Poet
51.Percy Bysshe Shelley = The Revolutionary Poet
52.Percy Bysshe Shelley = Poet of hope and
regeneration
53.John Keats = Poet of Beauty
54.William Blake = The Mystic Poet
55.John Keats = Chameleon Poet
56.Lord Alfred Tennyson = The Representative of the Victorian Era
57.George Bernard Shaw = The greatest modern dramatist
58.George Bernard Shaw = The Iconoclast
59.Jane Austen = Anti-romantic in Romantic age
60.Lindley Murray = Father of English Grammar
61.James Joyce = Father of English Stream of Conscious Novel
62.Edgar Allen Poe = Father of English Mystery play
63.Edgar Allen Poe = The Father of English Short Story
64.Henry Fielding = The Father of English Novel
65.Samuel Johnson = Father of English one Act Play
66.Sigmund Freud = A great Psycho-analyst
67.Robert Frost = The Poet of Terror
68.Francesco Petrarch = The Father of Sonnet (Italian)
69.Francesco Petrarch = The Father of Humanism
70.Sir Thomas Wyatt = The Father of English Sonnet
71.Henry Louis Vivian Derozio = The Father of Indian-Anglican Sonnet
72.William Hazlitt = Critic’s Critic
73.Charles Lamb = The Essay of Elia
74.Arthur Miller = Mulk Raj Anand of America
75.Addison = The voice of humanist Puritanism
76.Emerson = The Seneca of America
77.Mother Teresa = The Boon of Heaven
78.Thomas Nash = Young Juvenile
79.Thomas Decker = Fore-runner of Humorist
80.Homer = The Father of Epic Poetry
81.Homer = The Blind Poet
82.Henrick Ibsen = Father of Modern theatre
83.Rabindranath Tagore = Indian National Poet
84.Nissim Ezekiel = The Father of Indian English Poet

Saturday, 30 January 2021

The Art of Fiction by Henry James summary note

The Art of Fiction by Henry James

The Art of Fiction was a response to remarks by English critic Walter Besant, who wrote an article that literally attempted to lay down the "laws of fiction." For instance, Besant insisted that novelists should confine themselves to their own experience: "A young lady brought up in a quiet country village should avoid descriptions of garrison life." James argued that a sufficiently alert novelist could catch knowledge from everywhere and use it to good purpose: "The young lady living in a village has only to be a damsel upon whom nothing is lost to make it quite unfair (as it seems to me) to declare to her that she shall have nothing to say about the military. Greater miracles have been seen than that, imagination assisting, she should speak the truth about some of these gentlemen."

James continually argues for the fullest freedom in the novelist's choice of subject and method of treatment: "The only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel, without incurring the accusation of being arbitrary, is that it be interesting." In particular, James is suspicious of restraining fiction with specific moral guidelines: "No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind; that seems to me an axiom which, for the artist in fiction, will cover all needful moral ground."

James followed his own advice in criticizing the various writers included in Partial Portraits. In his long, engrossing essay on Maupassant, for instance, he couldn't help noticing the Frenchman's propensity for what James called the "monkeys' cage" view of human existence. But that didn't stop James from approving wholeheartedly of Maupassant's vigour, precision and conciseness in describing life as he saw it.

Similarly, James found much to appreciate in the intellectual force of George Eliot, the stolid but comprehensive detail-work of Anthony Trollope, the unbounded imagination of Robert Louis Stevenson, and the genial common sense of Alphonse Daudet. All very different writers, but all speak with validity from their personal view on life. This wide range presages the "house of fiction" image James would include in the New York Edition preface to The Portrait of a Lady, where each novelist looks at life from a particular window of the house and thus composes a unique and personally characteristic account.***

Henry James and The Art of Fiction

The novel has struggled to be taken seriously as an art form. The very title of James’s essay begins his campaign on its behalf: ‘art’ and ‘fiction’, often seen at odds with each other, are placed side by side here. Prose fiction includes short stories, novellas (longer short stories), and the novel. James regarded the novel as supreme in its importance, not least because of the possibilities it provided for larger-scale plot development and characterization. In this essay, as Mark Spilka has argued, James began ‘an adventure of immense importance to the novel’s history’ (1977: 208).

James begins by referring to ‘the mystery of story-telling’ (1884: 44), and it is worth reminding ourselves that the word ‘mystery’ originally referred to the secrets of a particular trade, or craft, and that ‘art’ was generally applied in mediaeval times and beyond to practical skills. James’s perspective in this essay is very much that of the producer, of the novelist, and he wants to retrieve this older, practical sense of ‘art’, together with the meaning that developed in the Romantic period (in literature, from around the 1780s through to the 1830s). In that period, artists were regarded as creative geniuses involved in the production of beautiful artefacts. What defined art, increasingly in the nineteenth century, was its detachment from the world, or its apparent lack of a specifiable purpose. The best fiction, for James, is an art because it involves both the kind of proficiency in a craft that comes with a long apprenticeship and the individual creative genius celebrated by Romantic writers such as the English poets William Wordsworth (1770–1850) and John Keats (1795– 1821). By combining these meanings of ‘art’, James attempts to fend off those who attack the novel for having ‘no great character’ and for being a ‘commodity so quickly and easily produced’ (1884: 49).

At the core of James’s definition of the novel is what he sees as its responsibility to represent life. He states that this is ‘the only reason for the existence of a novel’ (1884: 46). But it soon emerges that James is committed to a complex and shifting sense of what this responsibility amounts to. Part of the reason for these complications is James’s belief that ‘a novel ought to be artistic’ (1884: 47) as well as a representation of life. In an era of burgeoning popular photography, James wants to put as much distance as possible between the novel and crude realism. He argues that ‘[a] novel is in its broadest definition a personal, a direct impression of life’ (1884: 50). Crucially important here is the imaginative power of the writer; and this is what distinguishes the good novel from the bad, or popular, novel. To write artistic novels, rather than novels merely, the author must have ‘[t]he power to guess the unseen from the seen, to trace the implication of things, to judge the whole piece by the pattern’ (1884: 53).

A novel should seek not only to represent life, then, but to refract that representation through faculties of the imagination sharpened by sensitive and responsive observations in the world of experience. To say that novels represent experience realistically and leave it at that is to fail to acknowledge ‘that experience is never limited’, and that ‘it is never complete’ (1884: 52). It is also to overlook that ‘the measure of reality is very difficult to fix’ (1884: 51). James is less interested in ‘reality’, much more in the ‘air of reality’ (1884: 53). The central appeal of the novel is in its ability to represent life so interestingly that it actually ‘competes’ with it (1884: 53). Indeed, James was to go much further than this in a letter to the English novelist H. G. Wells (1866–1946), arguing there that ‘it is art that makes life’ (1915: 770). At the very least – because of its scope, flexibility of form, and openness towards experimentation – the novel can have the ‘large, free character of an immense and exquisite correspondence with life’ (1884: 61).

If the novel is a representation of life, its own vitality comes in part from the fusion of that representation with the writer’s own impressions. James’s insistence on the need for novels to be vital, on the analogy between the novel as a form and life, has a significant bearing on his theories of fiction and definition of the novel:

I cannot imagine composition existing in a series of blocks . . . A novel is a living thing, all one and continuous, like any other organism, and in proportion as it lives will it be found, I think, that in each of the parts there is something of each of the other parts. (1884: 54)

What matters here is the emphasis on the artificial nature of any boundaries between character and story, or plot, dialogue, description, and narration. James saw novels, in keeping with his description of them as ‘the most human form of art’ (1880: 868), as ‘organic’ in form. This fear of writing in ‘blocks’ is partly what propels James into condemning novels where the author’s voice, or that of his narrator, is obtrusive. James was unhappy with facile connections between text and author, and anxious about destructive interferences from the reader at large.

Further at issue are what James regarded as fruitless distinctions, then common, between ‘the novel of character and the novel of incident’ (1884: 54). James was often criticized for focusing too much on psychological analysis at the expense of telling a good story, for elaborating on character rather than concentrating on the plot; and his defence is that the boundaries between these are useless. Such separations result in a dead rather than a living work of art. He regarded characters as analogous to the seeds of a plant: the novel should develop outwardly from the nature of those characters, the plot resulting from their characteristics and not the other way round.

James extends his application of the biological metaphor of an organism when identifying the ‘search for form’ (1884: 48) as a central feature of the art of fiction. The search, among other things, is for the most effective way of structuring and narrating the story as a whole; and it can only be found from within the subject itself, not by imposing existing patterns or applying sterile rules. In his preface to The Spoils of Poynton, James calls this ‘the logic of the particular case’ (1907–9: 1139). This view leads not just to a rejection of any externally imposed purpose on the novel, in keeping with the idea of organic form, but to the repudiation of any kind of ‘conscious moral purpose’ (1884: 62). The alternative is to confine the subject to ‘conventional, traditional moulds’, thereby reducing it to ‘an eternal repetition of a few familiar clichés’ (1884: 58). It is a ‘mistake’ to ‘say so definitely beforehand what sort of an affair the good novel will be’; the ‘only obligation to which in advance we may hold a novel . . . is that it be interesting’ (1884: 49).

The Art of Fiction is in large measure a rebuttal of the English novelist and critic Walter Besant’s The Art of Fiction (1884), from where James initially took his title, and its insistence on the novel as an ‘Art’ which is ‘governed and directed by general laws’ (Besant 1884: 3). The most important of these laws was that there should be a ‘conscious moral purpose’ (Besant 1884: 24). Against this, James asserts that ‘[t]here are bad novels and good novels’, but ‘that is the only distinction in which I see any meaning’ (James 1884: 55). The implications of what he goes on to say for the relation between the novel and morality are discussed below:

There is one point at which the moral sense and the artistic sense lie very near together; that is in the light of the very obvious truth that the deepest quality of a work of art will always be the quality of the mind of the producer . . . No good novel will ever proceed from a superficial mind. (1884: viii)

The author should be granted his ‘subject’ (1884: 56), the form of which ‘is to be appreciated after the fact’ (1884: 50). If the reader dislikes the subject, then the novel can be abandoned. The measure of a novel’s success is that of how the subject is treated; whether it develops organically, that is, like a seed into a plant, from the centre of its chosen subject. ‘[W]e can estimate quality’, James believed, only by applying the ‘test of execution’ (1884: 50), by judging what an author has done with his or her subject. James criticized George Eliot’s Middlemarch (1871–2), for example, for being a ‘treasure-house of details’, but an ‘indifferent whole’ (Rawlings 2002: 2: 301). He saw the character of Dorothea as central to the novel and felt that excursions into other characters and stories were a distraction. For James, George Eliot’s novel not only dealt with its subject in too scattered and distracting a way, it was ultimately irresponsive and irresponsible to what should have been its subject, Dorothea, thereby failing the ‘test of execution’.

The Moral Sense and the Artistic Sense in The Art Of Fiction

James writes in The Art of Fiction that:

A similar idea is expressed in the preface to The Portrait of a Lady. The ‘ “moral” sense of a work of art’ depends ‘on the amount of felt life concerned in producing it’: ‘The question comes back thus, obviously, to the kind and degree of the artist’s prime sensibility, which is the soil out of which his subject springs’. ‘Sense’, especially the peculiarly intense sense of the highly intelligent novelist, connects the moral and the aesthetic for James. This is part of a long tradition of thinking that goes all the way back to the Greek philosopher Plato and beyond. One of its most well-known manifestations is in Keats’s ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’: ‘Beauty is Truth, – Truth Beauty, – that is all / Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know’ (1820: 321). Experience is at the core of the moral and the aesthetic. The moral and the artistic senses converge if we become ‘one on whom nothing is lost’ (James 1884: 53) as we encounter complex, ambiguous experiences.

We start to become moral, as James defines the word, only as we begin to realize that our perspective is partial and needs to take account of the perspectives of others. Art and morality are social affairs. Novelists and readers, like James’s characters, need to develop their moral intelligence as they steep themselves in the complexity of experiencing the world. But for James ‘experience is never limited and is never complete’. What matters is the extent to which ‘The Art of Fiction’ unites the experiencing subject with experience by suggesting that an ‘immense sensibility’ is the ‘very atmosphere’ of the ‘mind’ (James 1884: 52). Sensibility is always transitive; to be sensible, ultimately, is to be sensible of the world of experience. At this point, as a way of grasping just how inseparable art and morality are for James, you might find it helpful to review the discussion of perspective and consciousness in Chapter 4 (pp. 82–6).

Quite simply, James believes that to become an intelligent novelist is to reach a moral stature beyond narrow, conventional, thinking. He further believes that this should be a general aspiration, while still holding to the view that intelligence is often the preserve of the few. In such a world, he observes wistfully, ‘are we not moreover – and let it pass this time as a happy hope! – pretty well all novelists now?’ (1902a: 346). The novel, for both the writer and the reader, is the road not to moral principles, but to the moral sense; and developing the reader’s own intelligence. The novel is ‘the great extension, great beyond all others, of experience and of consciousness’ (1907–9: 1061); and ‘experience’ is, for James, ‘our appreciation and our measure of what happens to us as social creatures’ (1907–9: 1091). If the novel is intelligently controlled, all the necessary moral ground will be covered, and ‘all prate of its representative character, its meaning and its bearing, its morality and humanity, [is] an impudent thing’ (1907–9: 1068). Novels should not transmit moral principles and rules as such, but renovate and develop the mind by attempting to engage the reader in the pursuit of intricate combinations of form, content, and germinating subjects.

James connects morality and realism in The Art of Fiction by arguing that novelists should not limit what they represent to the morally exemplary by excluding aspects of human experience: ‘the essence of moral energy is to survey the whole field’ (1884: 63). Two things will guarantee the broader moral reach of the novel: the acuity of the novelist, and the degree to which his or her novels can stimulate critical investigation and reflection. James strikingly defined ‘moral consciousness’ as ‘stirred intelligence’ (1907–9: 1095) in his New York prefaces; and he believed that a sharp, responsive intellect and a sense of morality were much the same thing. The clarifying expression of some of these ideas came eight years before The Art of Fiction in an essay entitled The Minor French Novelists (1876):

Every out-and-out realist who provokes curious meditation may claim that he is a moralist, for that, after all, is the most that the moralists can do for us. They sow the seeds of virtue; they can hardly pretend to raise the crop. (1876: 169–70,)

LITERATURE

Sunday, 7 November 2021

Edmound Spenser sonnets

Saturday, 6 November 2021

Smart fact on Anglo Norman period | Intersting fact on English Literature

Sunday, 24 October 2021

MCQ on Indus Valley Civilization

Friday, 1 October 2021

Multiple- choice Questions on Chaucer

Wednesday, 24 March 2021

FOUNDERS AND FATHERS OF IMPORTANT ENGLISH GENRE

Saturday, 30 January 2021

The Art of Fiction by Henry James summary note

The Moral Sense and the Artistic Sense in The Art Of Fiction

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