second group of six lines is called the sestet. Its rhyme scheme is abba, abba,
cd ,cd, cd, or cde, cde. Keat’s sonnet ‘On the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ and
Wordsworth’s ‘The World is Too Much with us’ are the best examples.
(2) The Shakespeare Sonnet or English Sonnet—This sonnet was
intorduced into English by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. This kind
of sonnet has three stanzas of four lines and in the end a couplet. Its rhyme
scheme is ab, ab, cd, cd, ef, ef, gg.
Shakespeare, Robert Brooke and John Masefield have used this kind of
sonnet pattern.
(5) The Ode
The word ‘Ode’ is simply the Greek word for ‘song’. “It is a rhymed lyric
often in the form of an address, generally dignified, or exalted in subject, feeling
and style.”
According to second definition, “An Ode is a lyric poem of elaborate
metrical strucutre, solemn in tone and usually taking the form of address very
often to some abstraction or quality.”
Ode is of two Kinds :
1. Pindaric Ode—The Greek poet Pinder was the great writer of ode of
this kind. This kind of Ode has three stanzas usually called triad. First stanza is
called ‘Strophe’, second stanza is called ‘Anti-strophe’ and the third stanza is
called an ‘epode’. Dryden’s Ode to Cecilia, Gray’s The Board the Progress
of Poesy, Shelley Ode to Liberty are the finest examples of this kind of Ode.
2. Horatian Ode—Among the Romans, Horace is the greatest writer of
Ode. The Horation Ode has a number of stanzas.
Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’, William Collion
‘Ode to Evening’. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in the
Recollection of Early childhood’, Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Keat’s
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Um’ are some of the well known
English odes.
(6) The Pastoral
‘Pastoral’ comes from Latin Pastor which means shepherd and gives its
name to poetry which treats of shepherd life or of scenes and incidents. Edmund
Spenser (1552-1599) was one of the earliest to adopt this form in the Shepherd’s
Calendar.
(7) Lyric
It is personal and subjective form. Lyric means a kind of song which can
be rung with the ‘lyre’, a musical instrument.
Cavalier poets, Romantic poets and modern poets used this form
successfully.
Drama
1. Tragedy—In the Greek language, the word tragedy means ‘a goat song’
and the word came to be used for plays because of the practice of awarding
goats to winners in a dramatic contest. According to Aristole, “A tragedy is the
dramatic representation of some serious action arousing pity and fear.” Tragedy
is of two kinds—
(i) Classical Tragedy,
(ii) Romantic Tragedy.
In Classical Tragedy the three Unities (of action time and place) are
followed, ‘thre is also the device of chorus. The Tomantic Tragedy is short and
its does not follow the three Unites, Shakespeare wrote Romantic tragedies.
2. The Comedy—Among the ancients, Aristophanes, Plautus and Terance
were great writers of comedy. Comedy provides laughter and laughter, serves
as a sort of change from the serious pre-occupation of life.
(i) Classical Comedy—In which the three Unities are followed.
(ii) Romantic Comedy—In which the three Unities are not followed.
(iii) Comedy of Character—In this comedy the stress is on individual
idiosyncrasies. This is also called comedy of humour. All Shakespeare comedies
are more or less ‘comedies of character’ Ben Jonson’s Volpone and ‘Every
Man in His Humour’ are also comedies of character.
(iv) Comedy of Manners—In this type of comedy the current social habits
are reflected. This is also called artificial comedy. Congreve, Goldsmith and
Sheridan’s comedies belong to this type. Shakespeare’s comedy ‘Love Labour’s
Lost’ belongs to this category.
(v) Comedy of Interigue—In this type of comedy, the plot or action is
related to the principal object and not to mere character drawing.
3. Tragi Comedy—Tragi-comedy was a hybrid form of drama which
flourished for a brief period in the 17th century. A critic defined tragi-comedy
as a fusion of seeming desparates, taking from tragedy its great characters, but
not its great action, a likely story, but not a ture one, delight not sadness, danger
not death and taking from comedy laughter that was not dissolute, modest
attractions, a well-tied knot, a happy reversal and above all the comic order of
things. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, A Winter’s Tale and The Merchant
of Venice are tragi-comedies.
4. Sentimental Comedy—The audience in the 18th century wished to be
moved not to laughter but to tears. They expected some kind of moral upliftment
by witnessing a comedy on the stage.
5. The Problem Play—The problem play is one of important forms of
drama which is developed properly in the 20th century. This is a useful term to
apply to the kind of play which treats of a particular social or moral problem
so as to make people think intelligently about it. The first decade of the 20th
Literary Forms 115. 116. A HAND BOOK OF VIVA-VOCE
century was a period of great promise and of considerable achievement in
drama. With the play of Bernard Shaw, Granville Barker, Saint John Hankin,
John Galsworthy, Stanley Houghton and others were famous problem
playwrights.
6. Farce—Farce is a form of comedy in which no attempt is made at
fidelity to real life. Its aim is to produce laughter by exaggerated effects of
various kinds and without psychological depth. The comic situations are
generally rather crude, Farce has been called ‘custard pie comedy’ because it
often uses such purely material absuradities as people. Throwing custard pies
or other merry things at each other’s heads heavy falls. Terence Rettigan’s
‘French Without Tears’ and Seam O’ Casey’s ‘The End of Beginning’ are the
best examples of farce.
7. Melodrama—Melodrama is a debased form of tragedy and it orignially
meant, as the word implies being a compound of Greek ‘melos’, and the French
drain, action a mixture of music and action’. This type of drama has a romantic
story ‘which depends for its interests on sensational situations and incidence,
and an exaggerated appeal to sentiment. The melodrama flooded the stage
during the first half of the 19th century.
Lord Lytton’s ‘The Lady of Lyons’, W.W. Jacob’s, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’
James Bridie’s ‘Dr. Angelus’ and ‘The Antomist’ are the best examples.
8. The Absurd Drama—The plays of Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamon
and Eugene Ionesco have been performed with astonishing success in France,
Germany, Scandinavia and in the English speaking countries. These plays are
divorced from any framework of conceptual rationality. These plays have
substantial content and meaning. In an absurd drama there is no suspense as
such, for the suspense continues even after the curtain has finally come down.
The theatre of the absured drama is complex, unfathomable and paradoxical.
Novels
1. Realistic Novel—The realistic novel is the authentic representation of
life and character in the context of society. It faithfully recreates the sociocultural
enviornment prevailing in society, that is the forces which organise
and regulate life and action of human beings in contemporary society.
Types of Realistic Novel
(i) Picaresque novel.
(ii) Regional novel.
(iii) Autobiographical novel.
(iv) Social problems novel.
(v) Novel of manners.
2. Psychological Novel—A psychological novelist analyses the motives,
impules and metnal processes which moved his characters to act in a particular
way. Psychological novel is primarily concerned with ‘what a man thinks and
what he feels’ observed Henry James.
George Eliot and Henry James were the first to create psychological novel
in English.
(3) The Stream of Conscious Novel—This kind of novel carries probing
the soul, analysis of motives and mental processes, a step further. It depicts the
flux of emotions and sensations passing through the consciousness of a
character, without any organisation or ordering on the part of the novelist.
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William James used this form of novel.
(4) Historical Novel—The word ‘novel’ designates a work of fiction while
facts are the underlying basis of history. The historical novelist takes certain
events and characters from history and weaves around them a fictitious story.
Walten Scott’s ‘Waverly’ (1814), Tolstoy’s ‘War And Peace’, charles
Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ are historical novels. Bulwee, Lyttons Rienzi’s,
‘The Last Days of Pompii’, Thackeray’s ‘Henry Esmond’, Charles Kingsley’s
‘Westward Hoe’ are few more examples.
(5) The Gothic Novel—The novels in vogue at that time were romances
with deep interest in and emphasis on interest in the past especially the Middle
Age. The Gothic Novel besides its romantic character incorporates interest in
mystery, horror, terror, wild passions. According to Louis Cazamian, “The
Gothic term shows the strangencess and mystery of distant age, and wondefully
fitted to recreate the atmosphere of emotional belief served as a model and
encouragement to an instinct inouest of new and more poetent means of self
satisfaction.” Historically the term gothic is used for the fiction of Horace
Walpole, Mrs. Radciliffe, M.G. Lewis, Mary Shelley and Maturin.
Figures of Speech
(1) Simle—The word ‘simile’ comes from the Latin semiles ‘like’ and
means likeness. In a simile a comparison is made between two objects of
different kinds. Examples—
(i) The child shows the man as morning shows the day. (Milton)
(ii) O, my love is like a red, red rose. (Robert Burns)
(2) Metaphor—A metaphor is an implied simile. In this two unlike objects
are compared by identification or by the substitution of one for the other.
Example—
(i) The Camel is the ship of the desert.
(ii) Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
(3) Personification—In this inanimate objects or abstract ideas are spoken
as they are persons or human beings. Example—Death lays his icy hands on
kings.
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(4) Hyperbole—In this statements are stated in exaggerated manner or it
is a figure of speech in which emphasis is achieved by deliberate exaggeration.
Example—And saw ten thousand at a glance, (Words Worth)
(5) Apostrophe—It is a gigure of speech in which abstract ideas or
inanimate objects are addressed as if they were alive. Example—O Liberty,
What crimes have been committed in thy name. (Coleridge)
(6) Euphemism—This figure of speech consists in stating something
offensive in an aggreeable and pleasing manner. This figure is used in order
that a statement may not go beyond the limits of property and decency and the
hearer may not feel hurt. Example—They dropped down one by one.
(7) Synecdoche—In this figure of speech concrete is also put for the
abstract, the material for the thing which is made of it. this figure usually consists
in changing one noun for another of kindered meaning. Example—Kalidas is
the Shakespeare of India.
(8) Antithesis—In this figure of speech contrasted words or dieas are set
against each other in a balanced form for the sake of emphasis. Example—
United we stand and divided we fall.
(9) Pun—A pun consists in the use of a word in such a way that it is
capable of more than one application, the object being to produce a ludicrous
effect. Example—An ambassador is a gentleman who lies abroad for the good
of his country.
(10) Oxymoron—This is a figure of speech consisting generally of two
apparently contradictory words which express a startling effect of paradox.
Example—
(i) A noiseless noise among the leaves.
(ii) Her dialogue was bitter-sweet.
(11) Metonymy—The literal meaning of metonymy is the change of a
name. It is a figure of speech in which it has some relation, as a cause for its
effect, a writer for his work. Example—The pen is mightier than the sword.
(12) Epigram—An epigram is a brief pointed saying frequently
introducing antithetical ideas which excite surprise and arrest attention.
Example—In the midist of life we are in death.
(13) Irony—It is a mode of speech in which the real meaning is just the
opposite of that which is literally conveyed by the language used. Example—
And Brutus is an honourable man.
(14) Alliteration—In this figure of speech there is repitition of the same
letter or syllable at the beginning of two or more words. Example—Above,
alone, all, all alone Alone on a wide, wide sea.
(15) Pathetic Fallacy—In this figure of speech, nature or inanimate objects
are represented as echoing of the feelings of man, or showing interest in human
action either by sympathy on by antipathy. Example—The pale yellow woods
were waning. The broad stream in his banks complaining.
(16) Transferred Epithet—In this figure of speech an epithet or qualifying
adjective is sometimes transferred from a person to an object or from one
word to another. Example—He lay all night on his sleepless pillow.
(17) Onomatopoeia—This is an artifice of language by which the sound
of words is made to suggest or reflect the sense. Example—Break, break,
break on thy cold grey stones, O sea.
(18) Parado—A statement or opinion seeming to be self-contradictory
but in reality well-founded or true. Example—
(i) The child is father of the man.
(ii) Cowards die many times before their deaths.
QUESTIONS
Q. 1. What is an allegory?
Ans. An allegory is a literary composition with a double meaning.
Apparently the writer tells a story, but in reality he seeks to convey some moral
lesson. Thus an allgory is a story with a hidden moral significance.
Q. 2. What is a conceit?
Ans. A conceit is essentially a simile. As in a simile, in a conceit also,
there is a comparison between two dissimilar objects. All comparisons discover
likeness in things unlike, a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made
to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikness.
Q. 3. What is a heroic couplet?
Ans. The heroic coulpet consists of two iambic pentametre lines rhyming
together. In the Neo-classical age it became the dominant measure and was
used for dramas, satire, descriptive and narrative verse.
Q. 4. What is a machinery?
Ans. ‘Machinery’ is a term invented by the critics to signify the part which
deities, angels or demons play in a poem. According to Rosicrucian doctrine
of spirits, there are four elements inhabited by sylphs, nymphs, gnomes and
salamanders.
Q. 5. What is a Dramatic Monologue?
Ans. The dramatic monologue is essentially a narrative spoken by a single
character. It gains added effects and dimensions through the characters’
comments on his own story and the circumstances in which he speaks. The
dramatic monologue unilke the soliloquy implies the presence of some other
character or characters listening and reacting.
Q. 6. What is a soliloquy?
Ans. Soliloquy is a theatrical device whereby an actor expresses his
Literary Forms 119. 120. A HAND BOOK OF VIVA-VOCE
thoughts to the audience alone. It is spoken by one person who is alone or acts
though he is alone on the stage.
Q. 7. What is a dramatic irony?
Ans. Irony or dramatic irony arises from a contrat, the contrast between
appearance and reality. There may be a contrast between what a character says
and what he actually means to convey. Irony in a play may produce a comic or
a tragic effect, depending the circumstance of the case.
Q. 8. What is Homeric simile?
Ans. The use of Homeric or epic similes is an important feature of the
epic. They are called Homeric because the Greek epic poet Homer was the
first to use them. They differ from an ordinary simile in as much as the epic
poet goes much beyond the point of comparison between the similar objects
compared and digresses into the building up of an elaborate word picture.
Q. 9. What is Malapropism?
Ans. The term Melapropism derives its name from a very interesting and
entertaining character Mrs. Malaprop in R.B. Sheridan’s comedy ‘The Rivals’.
Mrs. Melaprop’s use of big bombastic words is of special interest. She uses
the words in much a way that the listener is left confused and confounded and
when he realises her middle headedness he cannot help laughter.
Q. 10. What is Pantheism?
Ans. The greatest contribution of William Wordswroth to the poetry of
Nature is his unqualified Pantheism. He believes that God shines through all
the objects of nature, investing them with a celestial light ‘a light that was on a
sea on land.’
Q. 11. Tell us the definition of Essay.
Ans. According to Dr. Johnson, “An essay is a loose sally of mind, an
irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance.”
Q. 12. What is Mysticism?
Ans. Mysticism is a mood and temper rather than a systematic philosophy
of life. A mystic has apprehensions of the presence of the divine, and he conveys
his truth and perception through the use of symbols.
Q. 13. What is a Heroic Play?
Ans. The heroic play made its appearance during the Restoration. Nathaniel
Lee and Earl of Surrey also made a substanstial contribution to the writing of
this kind or play. The heroic play combined some of the features of an epic
poem with some features of drama. This kind of play was generally written in
heroic couplets.
Q. 14. What are the essentials of a novles?
Ans. The essentials of novel are—(i) Character, (ii) Plot, (iii) Story, (iv)
Dialogue.
Q. 15. What is a masque?
Ans. Masuqe was another form of drama. They were dumb shows in the
beginning but graudually music and dances were added to them which made
them immensely popular down to the 17th cnetury.
Q. 16. What do you understand by Naturalism?
Ans. Naturalism is a literary technique of composition. It is based on the
real and the actual, a detached scientific objectivity, a wide inclusiveness of
detail, a freedom of subject-matter and a treatment of the natural man in any
way. A naturalistic writer creates a natural character, a natural action, not a
romantic character.
Q. 17. What is a ballad?
Ans. The word Ballad is derived from the word ‘ballare’ which means to
dance. Originally a ballad was a song with a strong narrative substance sung to
the accompaniment of dancing. The minstrel or the bard would sing the main
parts and dancers would sing the refrain on certain lines which were frequently
repreated. Often it was in the form of a dialogue. Love, battles or heroic exploits
are the chief themes of ballads.
Q. 18. What do you understand by Dark-Comedy?
Ans. Comedy in the sphere of drama is a play which not only has a happy
ending but which contains plenty of wit and homour, plenty of fun. A dark
comedy, on the other hand, is pervaded by a general gloom. It is still a play
with a happy ending and it contains several amusing scenes and episodes with
some display of wit and homour but the comic elements in such a play are
pushed into the background by the tone and atmosphere of seriousness and
gravity.
Q. 19. What is a Anti-sentimental comedy?
Ans. Goldsmith and Sheridan reacted against the prevalent type of comedy
and treid to revive once again the spirit of true comedy. Goldsmith through his
‘She Stoops To Conquer and Sheridan through ‘The Rivals’, ‘The School for
Scandal’ and ‘The Critic’ gave a dead blow to this kind of comedy and once
again brought fun and homour to the English taste. There are laughing comedies
full of pure fun and ridicule the Epurious brand of comedy dominant in the
age. In the Second Prologue to the Rivals’, Sheridan ridicules the sentimental
Muse and calls her, “The goddess of the woeful conuntenances.” The prologue
is a powerful plea for the revival of the true spirit of comedy which consists of
fun and laughter.
Q. 20. What do you understand by anachronism?
Ans. Anachornism is false assignment of an event, a person, a scene,
language in fact anything to a time what that event or thing or person was not
in existence.
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Q. 21. What do you understand by ambiguity?
Ans. After the publication in 1930 of ‘Seven types of Ambiguity’ by
William Empson, the word became a critical and academic cliche for the double
or multiple meanings that may be intended by words and phrases in poetry.
Though a reader’s alertness to the overtones and undertones of language may
increase both pleasure and mental profit, it may also with less advantage induce
a cryptogrammatic attitude to literature.
Q. 22. What do you know about a ‘Angry Youngman’?
Ans. This phrase ‘angry youngman’ did not gain wide spread currency
until ‘Look Back In Anger’ by John Osborne was regarded as a pioneering
new type of drama. The title was popularly attached to social misfits reacting
to the self recognition of their own personal inadequacy. Kingsley, Amis Johns
Wian and John Braine are usually called angry youngman.
Q. 23. What do you know about Baroque?
Ans. Baroque is a style in architecture and its chief characteristic is over
elaboration which almost obscures the underlying order or pattern.
The term is extended to apply to an extravagant and luxurious literary
style.
Q. 24. What do you know about Blank Verse?
Ans. A Blank verse is a five foot unrhymed iambic verse. This blank
verse is used by Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton.
Q. 25. Tell us the names of the Bloomsbury group?
Ans. This group included Virginia Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey. J.M.
Keynes, E.M. Forester, Bertrand Russell and Desmond MacCarthy.
Q. 26. What is a burlesque?
Ans. Burlesque is a work designiated to ridicule attitude, style or subject
matter by either handling an elevated subject in trivial manner or a trivial one
treated with mock dignity.
Q. 27. What is Closet Drama?
Ans. A closet drama is designed for reading rather than performance.
Q. 28. What is a dirge?
Ans. A dirge is song of grief, lamentation and mourning.
Q. 29. What is known as denuouement?
Ans. A denuouement is the final unravelling of the plote in drama or fiction.
Q. 30. What is an Eclogue?
Ans. An eclogue is a short pastoral poem in which Shepherds converse
with one another.
Q. 31. What is Apistolary novel?
Ans. An epistolary novel is written in the form of letters like Richardson’s
‘Pamela’.
Q. 32. What do you know about Euphuism?
Ans. Euphuism is an affected literary style, originating in the 15th century
characterized by a wide, vocabulary alliteration, consonance, verbal antithesis
and odd combination of words.
Q. 33. What do you know about Existentialism?
Ans. Kierkegaard is the pioneer of Existentialism. He has stressed the
idea that in God man may find freedom from tension, in Him, the finite and the
infinite are one. There are also atheistic existentiablists who follow Jean Paul
Satre and Martin Heidegger who believe that man is alone in a godless world.
Both the groups of existentialists however hold certain elements in common,
the concern with man’s being, the feeling that reason is insufficient to understand
the mysteries of the universe.
Q. 34. What do you know about Expressionism?
Ans. Expressionism is a literary movement dominant especially in Germany
during the decade following the First World War. It borrowed its name from a
more precisely definable movement in painting in which external realism was
abandoned in favour of a more subjective approach.
Q. 35. What do you know about Idyll?
Ans. Idyll is a short lyrical poem deseriptive of everday life amid natural,
often pastoral even romantic surroundings.
Q. 36. What do you know about Imagism?
Ans. Imagism is a school of poetry which flourished under the leadership
of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the second decade (1913-1918) of the
twentieth century. The Imagists employed the language of common speech,
mostly wrote in free verse, and effected the utmost economy in the use of
words.
Q. 37. What do you know about Mondoy?
Ans. Monody is a poem of mouring spoken by one person only. Like John
Milton’s Lycidas, Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis are monody.
Q. 38. What do you know about Peripeteia?
Ans. Peripeteia is a sudden change of fortune in a play or story.
Q. 39. Give some definitions of poetry?
Ans. (i) Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, it takes
its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. (William Wordsworth)
(ii) Poetry in a general sense, may be defined to be the expression of the
imagination. (P.B. Shelley)
(iii) By poetry we mean the art of simplifying words in such a manner as
to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words
the painter does by means of colours. (Macaulay)
Q. 40. Name some of the important playwrights of ‘problem plays’?
Ans. The important playwrights of ‘problem plays’ are T.W. Robertson,
Literary Forms 123. 124. A HAND BOOK OF VIVA-VOCE
Henry Arthur Jones, Sir Arthur Wing Penerio, George Bernard Shaw, John
Galsworthy, Harley Granville—Barker.
Q. 41. What do you know about Satanic School?
Ans. This term Satanic School was first used by Robert Southey to refer
to Byron, Moore, P.B. Shelley, Hunt and others. This romantic group was said
to scorn for all moral rules and the accepted tentes of Christianity.
Q. 42. What is Surrealism in literature?
Ans. Surrealism is the name given to a twentieth century movement among
certain writers and painters. Sir Herbert Read is the chief exponent of this
movement. The modern Surrealist poets like Dylan Thomas show us a series
of moods from challenge to heroic despair.
Q. 43. What is Aestheticism?
Ans. The term aesthetics is derived from a Greek Word which means
perceptible by the senses. Beautiful, sublime and ludicrous are known as
aesthetic feelings or emotions.
Q. 44. What is an Opera?
Ans. Opera is derived from an Italian word, meaning work but now it is
used for a drama set to music, as distinguished from plays in which the music
is merely incidental. The first English work that may be called an opera was D’
Avenant’s ‘Seige of Rhodes’. In the 18th century Thomas Gray wrote the
‘Beggar’s Opera’ (1728).
Q. 45. Differentiate between a dramatic Monologue and a Soliloquy?
Ans. Though dramatic monologue is generally poetic in form, it is
addressed to a silent and passive audience. Whose presence is presumed. A
soliloquy is not addressed to any one, it is the actor’s private thoughts uttered
aloud on the stage.
Q. 46. What is Transcendentalism?
Ans. Transcendentalism is based upon the recognition of a priori element
in human knowledge or independent of experience which is vague and illusive
in philosophy. In America, it was a reaction against Puritan prejudices and old
fashioned metaphysics. This movement is associated with Kant, Schegel R.W.
Emerson, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley and Robert Browning.
Q. 47. What do you know about Cubism?
Ans. The Spanish painter Picasso gave rise to the creed which purports to
paint Nature as solid block of spheres and cones. It introduces a third dimension
in art and literature. In this way this is called cublism.
Q. 48. What is Threnody?
Ans. Threnody is a song of lamentation.
Q. 49. What do you know about Bombast?
Ans. Bombast meant ‘Cotton stuffing’. The word was adopted to signify
verbose and inflated diction that is disproportionate to the matter it expresses.
Bombast is a frequent component in the heroic drama of the late 17th century.
Q. 50. What do you know about Caroline Age?
Ans. The reign of Charles I 1625-1649, is called Caroline age. This name
is derived from ‘Carolus’ the latin version of ‘Charles’. This was the time of
the English Civil War fought between the supporters of the king and the
supporters of the Parliament. This group includes Richard Lovelace, Sir John
Suckling, Thomas Carew and Robert Herrick.
Q. 51. What do you know about Comedy of Humours?
Ans. It is a type of comedy which Ben Jonson the Elizabethan playwright
based on the ancient but still current physiological theory of the four humours.
The humours were held to be the four primary fluids-blood, phlegm, choler
and melancholy. In Jonson’s comedy of humours each of the major characters
instead of being a well-balanced individual, has a preponderant humour that
gives him a characteristic distortion or eccentricity of disposition.
Q. 52. What do you know about ‘Deus Ex Machina’?
Ans. It is a Latin world for ‘a god from a machine’. It describes the practice
of some Greek playwrights to end the drama with a god who was lowered to
the stage by a mechanical apparatus and by his judgement and commands,
solved the problems of the human characters. This phrase in now used for any
forced and imporbable device by which a hard-pressed author makes shift to
resolve his plot.
Q. 53. What do you know about Doggerel?
Ans. Doggerel is a term applied to rough, heavy footed and jerky
versification. It may be the result of ineptitude on the part of the versifier, but
is sometimes deliberately employed by very able poets for satiric, comic or
rollicking effect.
Q. 54. What do you understand by literature of the absurd?
Ans. This name is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction
which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially and
ineradicably absurd. Samuel Beckett, the most influential writers of this
movement is an Irishman living in Paris who wrote in French and then translated
many of this works into English.
!
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Chapter 17
LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM
Types of Literary Criticism
1. Legislative Criticism—It seeks to teach writers how to write and laid
down canons, rules, formulae of liteary composition.
2. Judicial Criticism—It seeks to pronounce Judgement on works of
literature on the basis of certain rules. Dr. Johnson may be regarded as the
most powerful exponent of this kind of criticism.
3. Theoretical Criticism—This kind of criticism deals with literary
aesthetics. Attention is focussed on particular works, but on literature in general,
a study is made of the process of creation and the basic principles of artistic
beauty.
4. Evaluative Criticism—Evalautive criticism is criticism which is
concerned with the assessment or evaluation of the worth and significance of a
work of art.
5. Impressionistic Criticism—IMpressionistic criticism is criticism which
seeks merely to record what Anatole France calls, “the adventures of the soul
among the master pieces.”
6. Textual or Ontological Criticism—For the ontological critic, the Text
under consideration is the thing in itself, and it is examined and analysed without
any consideration of such extrinsic factors as biography, history, sociology,
psychology etc.
7. Descriptive Criticism—The descriptive criticism beings in self
justification with poets discussing their own works and defending them against
hostile attacks as Dryden has done in his innumerable Prefaces.
8. Psychological Criticism—Psychology has provided the critic with a
more precise language with which to discuss the creative process it enables the
critic to study the interior life of the writer and then to study his works with
reference to it.
9. Comparative Criticism—Comparative Criticism is criticism which
seeks to evaluate a work by comparing it with other works of a similar nature,
either in one’s own language or in other languages.
10. Archetypal Criticism—The archetypal criticism is based on the
Freud’s theory of collective consciousness that civilized man preserves though
unconsciously by, those pre historical areas of knowledge, which he articulated
obliquely in primitive myths.
Greek Criticism
1. Plato (427-387 B.C.) Main Works—The Dialogues, Ion, Lysis,
Gorgias, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic.
2. Aristotle (384-322 B.B.) Main Works—Dialogues, On Monarchy,
Natural History, Organon or The Instrument of Correct Thinking, Rhetoric,
Logic, Educational Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, Politics,
Poetics.
(i) Aristotele’s Definition of Tragedy—“Tragedy is the imitation of an
action, serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, in a language beautified
in different parts with different kinds of embellishment through actions and
narration and through scenes of ‘pity’ and fear bringing about the ‘Catharsis’
of these emotions.”
(ii) Aristotle gave the Comparative Study of Plot and Character.
(iii) Aristotle gave the Theory of lmitation.
(iv) Aristotle gave the Theory of Ideal Tragic Hero.
(v) Aristotle gave the Theory of Catharsis.
Graeco-Roman Criticism
1. Horace—’Ars Poetica’.
2. Longinus—’Or the Sublime’.
Sources of Sublimity—
(a) Grandeur of thought.
(b) Passion.
(c) The Use of Figures.
(d) Diction.
(e) Dignified Composition.
Renaissance Criticism
I. Sir Philip Sidney—An Apology for Poetry.
Gosson’s attack on poetry was the occassion for this book.
1. Definition of Poetry—“Poetry is an art of imitation for so Aristotle
termeth it, that is to say, a representive counter feiting or figuring forth. To
speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end to teach and delight.”
2. Poetry its superiority over philosophy and history.
3. Puritan objections to Poetry : Sidney’s defence of it.
(II) Ben Jonson—He thought the ancients as guides not commanders.
“Let Aristotle, and others have their dues, but if we can make further discoveries
of truth and fitness than they. Whey are we emried.”
His famous remark on Spenser : “Spenser writ no language”.
His famous ramark on Shakespeare : “Shakespeare wanted art”.
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Neo-Classical Criticism
(I) John Dryden (1631-1700)—Father of English Criticism.
His Works—Essay on Heroic Tragedy, Essay on Fables, Essay on
Dramatic Poetry.
Essay on Dramatic Poetry—It shows Dryden as the father of comparative
and historical criticism. In the preface he says that his aim was to vindicate the
honour of our English writers from the censure of those who unjustly prefer
the French.
There are four speakers on intelocutors and the setting is dramatic. Crites
speaks for ancients. Eugenius Speaks for moderns. Lisideius speaks for French
drama, superiority of the French over English. Neander speaks for superiority
of the English over French (In defence of rhyme).
Dryden’s Comments
1. “I admire him (Ben Jonson) but I love Shakespeare. Ben may be more
correct but Shakespeare has greater wit.”
2. Of Shakespare he enthusiastically says that “of all modern and ancient
poets he had the largest and the most comprehensive soul.” Dryden’s liberal
classicism, the three unities.
(II) Joseph Addison (1672-1719)—
His Works—’An account of the greatest english poets. Discourse on
Models, The Remarks on Italy.
(III) Alexander Poep (1688-1744)—
His Works—Essay on criticism, Imitations of the Epistles of Horace to
Augutus.
(IV) Dr Samuel Johnson—It was Dr. Johnson who first called Dryden
‘the father of English criticism as the writer who first taught us to determine
upon principles the merit of composition.
His Works—Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the Poets, His ‘Life of
Milton’ is a piece of Biographical criticism.
1. Tragi-comedy—Johnson’s defence of it.
2. Shakespeare’s Comic Genius—Faults of his tragedies.
3. The Unities—Johnson defended Tragi-Comedy and the Three Unities.
Romantic Criticism
(I) William Wordsworth (1770-1850)—Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(1798).
Wordsworth Conception of Poetry—“Poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful passion recollected in tranquility.” He calls poetry, “the
most philosophical of all writings, ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”
Wordsworth’s theory of Poetic Diction—In the Preface Wordsworth
told his purpose “to choose incidents and situations from common life. He
also intended to use a selection of language really used by men.”
In one of his letters he writes, “Every great poet is a teacher, I wish either
to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing.”
There neither is nor can be an essential difference between prose and
metrical composition.
(II) S.T. Coleridge—
His Works—Biographia Literaria, Lectures on Shakespeare and other
Poets etc.
His views on Imagination and Fancy—“The Imagination then I consider
either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living
power and prime agent to all human perception and as a repetition in the finite
mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. The secondary, I consider
as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical
with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in
the moe of its operation. It dissovles, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create,
or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles
to idealize and to unify.”
“Fancy on the contrary has no other counters to play with but fixities and
definities. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode f memory exanicipated
from the order of time and space, and blended with, and modified by that
empirical phenomenon of the will which he expresses by the word choice. But
equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready-made
from the laws of association.” It is esemplastic ‘a shaping and modifying power’,
which by its ‘plastic stress’ re-shapes objects of the external world and steeps
them with a glory and dream that never was on sea and land.
Coleridge’s Criticism of Wordsworth—To Wordswroth’s contention that
there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and that of
prose, Coleridge replies that there is and there ought to be, an essential difference
between the language of prose and that of poetry. The language of poetry differs
from that of prose in the same way in which the language of prose differs and
ought to differ from the language of conversation and as reading differs from
talking. Colerdige’s phrase ‘Willing of disbelief.”
(III) P.B. Shelley—
His Work—The Defence of Poetry.
Victorian Criticism
(I) Matthew Arnold—
His Works—The Preface to the Poems, 1853, On Translating Homer
1816, Essays in Literature, Culture and Anarchy, Literature and Dogma, God
and the Bible.
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Poetry as Criticism of Life—Arnold has defined poetry himself as
criticism of life as the noble and laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty as truth
and seriousness of substance and matter and felicity and perfection of diction
and manner.
The Touchstone Method
Arnold’s Comments—Shelley is a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating
in the void his luminous wings, in vain.
(II) Walter Pater—His Works—Studies in the History of the
Renaissance, Marius, the Epicurean, Appreciations.
Pater’s Aestheticism—Art for Art’s Sake.
20th Century Criticism
1. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)—His Works—The Use of Poerty and the Use
of Criticism, The Idea of a Christian Society, Notes Towards a Definition a
Culture, Selected Essays, On Poetry and Poets, To Criticse the Critic.
(a) Objective Co-relative—T.S. Eliot defines objective Co-relative as “a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula.”
(b) Dissociation of Sensibility—This phrase was first used by Eliot in
his essay on Metaphysical Poets. Dissociation of Sensibility means “a fusion
of thought and feeling ‘a recreation of thought into feeling’, a direct sensuous
apprehension of thought.”
(c) Tradition and Individual Talent—A writer with the sense of tradition
is fully conscious of his own generation, of his place in the present, but he is
also acutely conscious of his relationship with the writers of the past.
(d) Impersonality of Poetry
(e) Poetry as Escape from Personality—According to Elito ‘Poetry is
not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not the
expression of personality but on escape from personality.
The New Criticism
1. I.A. Richards—His Works—The Meaning of Meaning, The Principles
of Literary Criticism, The Practical Criticism—(i) The Value of Metaphors,
(ii) His Psychological Approach.
2. William Empson—His Works—Seven Types of Ambiguity.
3. Cleanth Brooks—His Works—The Well Wronght Urn Modern Poetry
and Tradition, Understanding Poetry with R.P. Warren.
4. T.E. Hulme—His Works—Speculations.
5. R.P. Blackmur—Hiw Works—The Double Agent, The Expanse of
Greatness, The Enabling Act of Criticism, New Criticism, Language as Gesture,
Lion and The Honeycomb.
6. J.C. Ranson—His Works—God without Thunder, The World’s Body.
7. Allen Tate—His Works—Tension in Poetry, Reason in Madness,
Reactionary Essays on the limits of Poetry, The Hovering Fly, The Forlorn
Demon.
8. Yvor Winters—His Works—The Anatomy of Non-sense.
Literary Theory
Literary criticism has become a part and parcel of literary tradition in our
country. Hence literary criticism now offers such a building variety of theory
and practice that it is almost difficult to find a way out. There are many literary
theories like Structuralism, Post-stucturalism, Deconstruction, Post-modernism,
Feminism and Reader’s Response Theories.
Post-Structuralism
Post-Structuralism as its name implies is actually a growth of structuralism.
Structuralism, which had its heyday during the 60s gets the first blow in the
middle of the 70s when a basic paper entitled “Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of Human Sciences” by the French philosopher jacques Derrida
was presented in John Hopkins University in 1966.
Besides Derdida, the other three who helped to develop the Post-
Structuralism in the 70s are Lacan (a French Psychologist), Michael Foucault
and Gulia Kristeva.
Foucault’s aim is to show the operation of power. The Post-Structuralism
challenges Strucutralism. Strucutralism owes its origin to Saussurian linguistics.
Saussure’s idea of linguistic meaning depends on the concept of ‘sing’. Sign is
composed of ‘signifier’ and ‘singified’ is actually a concept, an idea or a thought
to say. The Post-Structuralists challenge Saussure’s anthroplological concept
of sign, which Saussure unconsciously holds to show how the signifier and the
signified are far from being united and opposite to each other.
Decentering is the major aspect which differentiates Post-Structuralism
from Structuralism. According to Post-Structuralists, ‘centre’ is an illusion,
everywhere there is a play of difference. Roland Barthes’ essay ‘Death of
Author’ and Michael Foucault’s essay ‘What is an Author’ suggest that an
author is not responsible for the verbal meaning of the text.
The work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s is generally considered of crucial
importance in the rise of Post-Structuralism. In three seminal works—of
Gramamtology, Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference—Derrida
called into question the notion of centres, unity, identity, signification.
Key Thinkers
1. Roland Barthes—His work is ‘The Death of the Author’.
American Deconstruction
(1) Paul de Man—One of the most important members of the Yale School
of Deconstruction.
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(2) Geoffrey Hartman
(3) J. Hillis Miller—His works are Poets of Reality, Fiction and Repetition.
(4) Harold Bloom—His famous works is Shakespeare. The Invention of
the Human.
(5) Michel Foucalt
Derrida’s Theory of Deconstruction—Deconstruction is not destruction
or decomposition, nor is dismantling of the structure, of the text, it is
‘reconstruction’. Deconstruction is a procedure where oppositions, not
opposites, are shown. Deconstruction was elaborated in his three major works
(a) ‘Of Grammatology (b) Writing and Difference, (c) ‘Speech and Phonemena’
which were published towads the end of the 60s of this century. Derrida’s aim
was to deconstruct a text, to show there is no centre to control the play of
signifiers.
Psycho-analytic Criticism
Sigmund Freud’s extraordinary work on dream, hysteria, sexuality and
civilisation form the basis of psycho-analytic criticism. Freud’s main discovery
was the role of the unconscious in human lives. Freud identified three ‘levels’
of personality.
(a) the Ego—which is conscious.
(b) the Super Ego—which is the conscience.
(c) the Id—which is unconscious.
Key Thinkers
1. Ernest Jones—Ernest Jones is better known for his masive work—
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.
2. Jacques Lacan—He is certainly the most influential psychoanalytic
thinker since Freud. Lacan’s works available in Ecrits are : The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis and the Seminars of Jacques Lacan.
Feminism
Writers like Mary Wollstonecraft in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman’ (1792), male authors like J.S. Mill in the ‘Subjection of Women’
(1869) and Fredrich Engels in the Origin of the Family (1884) wrote of the
need to rethink the role of women and social opperession, against them. With
the 1960s, the Women’s Movement became a major political force. While the
movement took various issues for the gender debate (including science, politics,
economics, culture, epistemology) literary critics influenced by the Movement
undertook a whole new project.
Basic Themes of Feminist Criticism
(a) Theme of female aesthetics.
(b) Gynocriticism.
(c) Concept of Canon formation.
(d) Feminine writing on the female subject on the literary identity of woman.
Key Thinkers
(1) Virgiaia Woolf—Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) and ‘Three
Guineas’ (1938) has analysed the gender biases and oppressive structure in
pedagogic practices to mediate upon the woman’s question.
(2) Simone de Beauvior—Her ‘The Second Sex’ (1949) seeks to
understand the relegation of the woman into a ‘second sex’.
(3) Kate Millett—His famous work is ‘Sexual Politics’ (1969).
(4) Juliet Mitchell—Her famous works are ‘Psychoanalysis and
Feminism’ (1974) and her collaborative work with Jacqueline Rose is ‘Feminine
Sexuality’ (1982).
(5) Elaine Showlater—Her famous works—‘The New Feminist Criticism’
(1985) and ‘Speaking of Gender’ (1989).
The New Historicism
The New historicists practise an extremely close reading of texts. The
New Historicism may be defined as a simultaneous reading of literary and
non-literary texts, and demonstrating how a work of art may be read and
interpreted on terms of its context of other texts, such as those from economics,
legal tracts and medical records.
Key Thinkers
Stephen Greenblatt
Post-Colonial Studies
‘Post-Colonial’ genrerally refers to writing of nations, peoples, cultures,
who were once coloured by European powers. Post-Colonial theory is an attempt
to uncover the Colonial ideologies implicit in European texts about the other.
The term ‘Post-Colonial literature’ now replaces the traditional category of
‘Commonwealth Literature’ or ‘Third World Literature’.
Key Thinkers
1. Frantz Fanon—Fanon’s works—The Wretched of the Earth (1963),
A Dying Colonialism (1965), and Black Skins, White Masks (1967) were
pioneer studies in the psychological aspects of colonialism.
2. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o—Decolonising the Mind (1986).
3. Edward Said—Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism.
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason.
5. Homi K. Bhabha—The Location of Culture (1994).
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Post-Modernism
The term ‘Post-Modernism’ was popularised in literary criticism during
the 1960s and 70s by critics like Shab Hassan, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler and
others. The term ‘Post-Modernism’ surfaced in the Anglo-American critical
discourse during the 1950s and in a very significant way in the 1960s. Even
though critics like Jean Francis Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon, David Loge have
tried to define ‘Post-Modernism’, the term eludes definition so much so that
‘one critic’s Post-Modernism is another critic’s modernism.
According to Jean Francois Lyotard, “Post-Modernism is incredulity
towards metanarratives.”
David Lodge, however, lists five techniques which may well be said as
typical of Post-Modern fiction. They are—
1. Contradiction—Cancels itself out as it goes along.
2. Permutation—Alternative narrative lines in the same text.
3. Discontinuity—Disrupting the continuity of his discourse by
unpredictable swerves of tone, metafictional asides to the reader, blank spaces
in the text, contradiction and permutation.
4. Randomness—According to a logic of the absurd.
5. Excess—Metaphoric or metomynic devices to excess and testing them
to destruction.
Postmodernism can be understood as a conceptual strategy or a set of
strategies to cope with present day realities and human condition.
Key Thinkers
1. Jean-Francois Lyotard—With his ‘The Post-Modern Condition’, The
Differened (1988), Just Gaming (1985). Lyotard has emerged as the most
important philosopher of Post-Modernism.
2. Jean Baudrillard—His Works—Simulations (1983), America (1988),
Seducation (1990), Cool Memories (1990), The Illusion of the End (1994).
QUESTIONS
Q. 1. What is Hamartia?
Ans. Hamartia is a Greek word but Aristotle has used this word in a typical
sense for his concept of Ideal Tragic Hero. Hamartia is error of judgement.
The tragic hero falls due to Hamartia on the part of the hero as tragic flaw.
In the words of Humphrey House, “Hamartia may be accompanied by
moral imperfection, but it is not itself a moral inperfection, and in the purest
tragic situation the suffering hero is not morally to blame.”
Q. 2. Why is John Dryden called the father of English Criticism?
Ans. Before John Dryden almost all the critics of England followed the
continental critics like Aristotle, Horace, Boileau and so forth, but it was
Dryden’s distinction that he did not follow the classical criticism blindly. Dryden
opens up a new field of comparative criticism.
Q. 3. What do you know about Renaissance Criticism?
Ans. Stephen Gosson attacked poetry in his ‘School of Abuse’ (1579). Sir
Philip Sidney defends poetry in his ‘Defence of Poesie’ (1598). Ben Johnson
is the disciple of the ancients, his criticism is after Horace.
Q. 4. What is Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy?
Ans. Aristotle defines tragedy as “the imitation of an action, serious
complete and of certain magnitude in a language beautified in different parts
with different kinds of embellishment, through actions and not narration and
through scenes of pity and fear bringing about the catharsis of these emotions.”
Q. 5. What do you know about Shakespearean Tragedy?
Ans. William Shakespeare has written four great tragedies namely ‘Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. The hero of Shakespearean tragedy is of
high status. He has one fault that is called fatal flaw. Shakespeare tragedies are
concerned mainly with only one character.
Q. 6. What do you know about Catharsis?
Ans. Aristotle writes that the function of tragedy is to arouse the emotions
of pity and fear and in this way to affect the catharsis of these emotions.
Q. 7. Who has written the book ‘A Short View of the Profaneness and
Immortality of the English Stage’?
Ans. This book is written by Jeremy Collier (1650-1726).
Q. 8. What are Puritan objections of Poetry and Sidney’s defence of
it?
Ans. Sidney proceeds to answer the various objections made against poetry
by Gosson. In the first place it is objected that a man might spend his time
more profitably than by reading the figments of poets. The study of poerty is
the most profitable because it imparts delightful instructions and so moves
man to virtuous action. In the second place, poetry has been called the mother
of lies, but Sidney shows that it is less likely to tell a lie in poetry than in other
sciences.
Q. 9. Tell us about T.S. Eliot’s ‘Impersonality of Poetry’?
Ans. The artist must continually surrender himself to something which is
more valuable than himself. He must allow his poetic sensibility to be shaped
and modified by the past. In the beginning, his self, his individuality, may
assert itself, but as his powers mature there must be greater and greater extinction
of personality. He must acquire greater and greater objectivity.
Q. 10. What is Dryden’s justification of Tragi-comedy?
Ans. Dryden justified tragi-comedy on the following grounds—(a) the
contraries, when placed near, set off each other (b) continued gravity depresses
the spirit, a scene of mrith thrown in between refreshes, (c) mirth does not
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cd ,cd, cd, or cde, cde. Keat’s sonnet ‘On the Grasshopper and the Cricket’ and
Wordsworth’s ‘The World is Too Much with us’ are the best examples.
(2) The Shakespeare Sonnet or English Sonnet—This sonnet was
intorduced into English by Sir Thomas Wyatt and the Earl of Surrey. This kind
of sonnet has three stanzas of four lines and in the end a couplet. Its rhyme
scheme is ab, ab, cd, cd, ef, ef, gg.
Shakespeare, Robert Brooke and John Masefield have used this kind of
sonnet pattern.
(5) The Ode
The word ‘Ode’ is simply the Greek word for ‘song’. “It is a rhymed lyric
often in the form of an address, generally dignified, or exalted in subject, feeling
and style.”
According to second definition, “An Ode is a lyric poem of elaborate
metrical strucutre, solemn in tone and usually taking the form of address very
often to some abstraction or quality.”
Ode is of two Kinds :
1. Pindaric Ode—The Greek poet Pinder was the great writer of ode of
this kind. This kind of Ode has three stanzas usually called triad. First stanza is
called ‘Strophe’, second stanza is called ‘Anti-strophe’ and the third stanza is
called an ‘epode’. Dryden’s Ode to Cecilia, Gray’s The Board the Progress
of Poesy, Shelley Ode to Liberty are the finest examples of this kind of Ode.
2. Horatian Ode—Among the Romans, Horace is the greatest writer of
Ode. The Horation Ode has a number of stanzas.
Spenser’s ‘Epithalamion’ Dryden’s ‘Alexander’s Feast’, William Collion
‘Ode to Evening’. Wordsworth’s ‘Ode on the Intimations of Immortality in the
Recollection of Early childhood’, Shelley’s ‘Ode to the West Wind’, Keat’s
‘Ode to a Nightingale’ and ‘Ode on a Grecian Um’ are some of the well known
English odes.
(6) The Pastoral
‘Pastoral’ comes from Latin Pastor which means shepherd and gives its
name to poetry which treats of shepherd life or of scenes and incidents. Edmund
Spenser (1552-1599) was one of the earliest to adopt this form in the Shepherd’s
Calendar.
(7) Lyric
It is personal and subjective form. Lyric means a kind of song which can
be rung with the ‘lyre’, a musical instrument.
Cavalier poets, Romantic poets and modern poets used this form
successfully.
Drama
1. Tragedy—In the Greek language, the word tragedy means ‘a goat song’
and the word came to be used for plays because of the practice of awarding
goats to winners in a dramatic contest. According to Aristole, “A tragedy is the
dramatic representation of some serious action arousing pity and fear.” Tragedy
is of two kinds—
(i) Classical Tragedy,
(ii) Romantic Tragedy.
In Classical Tragedy the three Unities (of action time and place) are
followed, ‘thre is also the device of chorus. The Tomantic Tragedy is short and
its does not follow the three Unites, Shakespeare wrote Romantic tragedies.
2. The Comedy—Among the ancients, Aristophanes, Plautus and Terance
were great writers of comedy. Comedy provides laughter and laughter, serves
as a sort of change from the serious pre-occupation of life.
(i) Classical Comedy—In which the three Unities are followed.
(ii) Romantic Comedy—In which the three Unities are not followed.
(iii) Comedy of Character—In this comedy the stress is on individual
idiosyncrasies. This is also called comedy of humour. All Shakespeare comedies
are more or less ‘comedies of character’ Ben Jonson’s Volpone and ‘Every
Man in His Humour’ are also comedies of character.
(iv) Comedy of Manners—In this type of comedy the current social habits
are reflected. This is also called artificial comedy. Congreve, Goldsmith and
Sheridan’s comedies belong to this type. Shakespeare’s comedy ‘Love Labour’s
Lost’ belongs to this category.
(v) Comedy of Interigue—In this type of comedy, the plot or action is
related to the principal object and not to mere character drawing.
3. Tragi Comedy—Tragi-comedy was a hybrid form of drama which
flourished for a brief period in the 17th century. A critic defined tragi-comedy
as a fusion of seeming desparates, taking from tragedy its great characters, but
not its great action, a likely story, but not a ture one, delight not sadness, danger
not death and taking from comedy laughter that was not dissolute, modest
attractions, a well-tied knot, a happy reversal and above all the comic order of
things. Shakespeare’s Measure for Measure, A Winter’s Tale and The Merchant
of Venice are tragi-comedies.
4. Sentimental Comedy—The audience in the 18th century wished to be
moved not to laughter but to tears. They expected some kind of moral upliftment
by witnessing a comedy on the stage.
5. The Problem Play—The problem play is one of important forms of
drama which is developed properly in the 20th century. This is a useful term to
apply to the kind of play which treats of a particular social or moral problem
so as to make people think intelligently about it. The first decade of the 20th
Literary Forms 115. 116. A HAND BOOK OF VIVA-VOCE
century was a period of great promise and of considerable achievement in
drama. With the play of Bernard Shaw, Granville Barker, Saint John Hankin,
John Galsworthy, Stanley Houghton and others were famous problem
playwrights.
6. Farce—Farce is a form of comedy in which no attempt is made at
fidelity to real life. Its aim is to produce laughter by exaggerated effects of
various kinds and without psychological depth. The comic situations are
generally rather crude, Farce has been called ‘custard pie comedy’ because it
often uses such purely material absuradities as people. Throwing custard pies
or other merry things at each other’s heads heavy falls. Terence Rettigan’s
‘French Without Tears’ and Seam O’ Casey’s ‘The End of Beginning’ are the
best examples of farce.
7. Melodrama—Melodrama is a debased form of tragedy and it orignially
meant, as the word implies being a compound of Greek ‘melos’, and the French
drain, action a mixture of music and action’. This type of drama has a romantic
story ‘which depends for its interests on sensational situations and incidence,
and an exaggerated appeal to sentiment. The melodrama flooded the stage
during the first half of the 19th century.
Lord Lytton’s ‘The Lady of Lyons’, W.W. Jacob’s, ‘The Monkey’s Paw’
James Bridie’s ‘Dr. Angelus’ and ‘The Antomist’ are the best examples.
8. The Absurd Drama—The plays of Samuel Beckett, Arthur Adamon
and Eugene Ionesco have been performed with astonishing success in France,
Germany, Scandinavia and in the English speaking countries. These plays are
divorced from any framework of conceptual rationality. These plays have
substantial content and meaning. In an absurd drama there is no suspense as
such, for the suspense continues even after the curtain has finally come down.
The theatre of the absured drama is complex, unfathomable and paradoxical.
Novels
1. Realistic Novel—The realistic novel is the authentic representation of
life and character in the context of society. It faithfully recreates the sociocultural
enviornment prevailing in society, that is the forces which organise
and regulate life and action of human beings in contemporary society.
Types of Realistic Novel
(i) Picaresque novel.
(ii) Regional novel.
(iii) Autobiographical novel.
(iv) Social problems novel.
(v) Novel of manners.
2. Psychological Novel—A psychological novelist analyses the motives,
impules and metnal processes which moved his characters to act in a particular
way. Psychological novel is primarily concerned with ‘what a man thinks and
what he feels’ observed Henry James.
George Eliot and Henry James were the first to create psychological novel
in English.
(3) The Stream of Conscious Novel—This kind of novel carries probing
the soul, analysis of motives and mental processes, a step further. It depicts the
flux of emotions and sensations passing through the consciousness of a
character, without any organisation or ordering on the part of the novelist.
James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and William James used this form of novel.
(4) Historical Novel—The word ‘novel’ designates a work of fiction while
facts are the underlying basis of history. The historical novelist takes certain
events and characters from history and weaves around them a fictitious story.
Walten Scott’s ‘Waverly’ (1814), Tolstoy’s ‘War And Peace’, charles
Dickens’ ‘A Tale of Two Cities’ are historical novels. Bulwee, Lyttons Rienzi’s,
‘The Last Days of Pompii’, Thackeray’s ‘Henry Esmond’, Charles Kingsley’s
‘Westward Hoe’ are few more examples.
(5) The Gothic Novel—The novels in vogue at that time were romances
with deep interest in and emphasis on interest in the past especially the Middle
Age. The Gothic Novel besides its romantic character incorporates interest in
mystery, horror, terror, wild passions. According to Louis Cazamian, “The
Gothic term shows the strangencess and mystery of distant age, and wondefully
fitted to recreate the atmosphere of emotional belief served as a model and
encouragement to an instinct inouest of new and more poetent means of self
satisfaction.” Historically the term gothic is used for the fiction of Horace
Walpole, Mrs. Radciliffe, M.G. Lewis, Mary Shelley and Maturin.
Figures of Speech
(1) Simle—The word ‘simile’ comes from the Latin semiles ‘like’ and
means likeness. In a simile a comparison is made between two objects of
different kinds. Examples—
(i) The child shows the man as morning shows the day. (Milton)
(ii) O, my love is like a red, red rose. (Robert Burns)
(2) Metaphor—A metaphor is an implied simile. In this two unlike objects
are compared by identification or by the substitution of one for the other.
Example—
(i) The Camel is the ship of the desert.
(ii) Revenge is a kind of wild justice.
(3) Personification—In this inanimate objects or abstract ideas are spoken
as they are persons or human beings. Example—Death lays his icy hands on
kings.
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(4) Hyperbole—In this statements are stated in exaggerated manner or it
is a figure of speech in which emphasis is achieved by deliberate exaggeration.
Example—And saw ten thousand at a glance, (Words Worth)
(5) Apostrophe—It is a gigure of speech in which abstract ideas or
inanimate objects are addressed as if they were alive. Example—O Liberty,
What crimes have been committed in thy name. (Coleridge)
(6) Euphemism—This figure of speech consists in stating something
offensive in an aggreeable and pleasing manner. This figure is used in order
that a statement may not go beyond the limits of property and decency and the
hearer may not feel hurt. Example—They dropped down one by one.
(7) Synecdoche—In this figure of speech concrete is also put for the
abstract, the material for the thing which is made of it. this figure usually consists
in changing one noun for another of kindered meaning. Example—Kalidas is
the Shakespeare of India.
(8) Antithesis—In this figure of speech contrasted words or dieas are set
against each other in a balanced form for the sake of emphasis. Example—
United we stand and divided we fall.
(9) Pun—A pun consists in the use of a word in such a way that it is
capable of more than one application, the object being to produce a ludicrous
effect. Example—An ambassador is a gentleman who lies abroad for the good
of his country.
(10) Oxymoron—This is a figure of speech consisting generally of two
apparently contradictory words which express a startling effect of paradox.
Example—
(i) A noiseless noise among the leaves.
(ii) Her dialogue was bitter-sweet.
(11) Metonymy—The literal meaning of metonymy is the change of a
name. It is a figure of speech in which it has some relation, as a cause for its
effect, a writer for his work. Example—The pen is mightier than the sword.
(12) Epigram—An epigram is a brief pointed saying frequently
introducing antithetical ideas which excite surprise and arrest attention.
Example—In the midist of life we are in death.
(13) Irony—It is a mode of speech in which the real meaning is just the
opposite of that which is literally conveyed by the language used. Example—
And Brutus is an honourable man.
(14) Alliteration—In this figure of speech there is repitition of the same
letter or syllable at the beginning of two or more words. Example—Above,
alone, all, all alone Alone on a wide, wide sea.
(15) Pathetic Fallacy—In this figure of speech, nature or inanimate objects
are represented as echoing of the feelings of man, or showing interest in human
action either by sympathy on by antipathy. Example—The pale yellow woods
were waning. The broad stream in his banks complaining.
(16) Transferred Epithet—In this figure of speech an epithet or qualifying
adjective is sometimes transferred from a person to an object or from one
word to another. Example—He lay all night on his sleepless pillow.
(17) Onomatopoeia—This is an artifice of language by which the sound
of words is made to suggest or reflect the sense. Example—Break, break,
break on thy cold grey stones, O sea.
(18) Parado—A statement or opinion seeming to be self-contradictory
but in reality well-founded or true. Example—
(i) The child is father of the man.
(ii) Cowards die many times before their deaths.
QUESTIONS
Q. 1. What is an allegory?
Ans. An allegory is a literary composition with a double meaning.
Apparently the writer tells a story, but in reality he seeks to convey some moral
lesson. Thus an allgory is a story with a hidden moral significance.
Q. 2. What is a conceit?
Ans. A conceit is essentially a simile. As in a simile, in a conceit also,
there is a comparison between two dissimilar objects. All comparisons discover
likeness in things unlike, a comparison becomes a conceit when we are made
to concede likeness while being strongly conscious of unlikness.
Q. 3. What is a heroic couplet?
Ans. The heroic coulpet consists of two iambic pentametre lines rhyming
together. In the Neo-classical age it became the dominant measure and was
used for dramas, satire, descriptive and narrative verse.
Q. 4. What is a machinery?
Ans. ‘Machinery’ is a term invented by the critics to signify the part which
deities, angels or demons play in a poem. According to Rosicrucian doctrine
of spirits, there are four elements inhabited by sylphs, nymphs, gnomes and
salamanders.
Q. 5. What is a Dramatic Monologue?
Ans. The dramatic monologue is essentially a narrative spoken by a single
character. It gains added effects and dimensions through the characters’
comments on his own story and the circumstances in which he speaks. The
dramatic monologue unilke the soliloquy implies the presence of some other
character or characters listening and reacting.
Q. 6. What is a soliloquy?
Ans. Soliloquy is a theatrical device whereby an actor expresses his
Literary Forms 119. 120. A HAND BOOK OF VIVA-VOCE
thoughts to the audience alone. It is spoken by one person who is alone or acts
though he is alone on the stage.
Q. 7. What is a dramatic irony?
Ans. Irony or dramatic irony arises from a contrat, the contrast between
appearance and reality. There may be a contrast between what a character says
and what he actually means to convey. Irony in a play may produce a comic or
a tragic effect, depending the circumstance of the case.
Q. 8. What is Homeric simile?
Ans. The use of Homeric or epic similes is an important feature of the
epic. They are called Homeric because the Greek epic poet Homer was the
first to use them. They differ from an ordinary simile in as much as the epic
poet goes much beyond the point of comparison between the similar objects
compared and digresses into the building up of an elaborate word picture.
Q. 9. What is Malapropism?
Ans. The term Melapropism derives its name from a very interesting and
entertaining character Mrs. Malaprop in R.B. Sheridan’s comedy ‘The Rivals’.
Mrs. Melaprop’s use of big bombastic words is of special interest. She uses
the words in much a way that the listener is left confused and confounded and
when he realises her middle headedness he cannot help laughter.
Q. 10. What is Pantheism?
Ans. The greatest contribution of William Wordswroth to the poetry of
Nature is his unqualified Pantheism. He believes that God shines through all
the objects of nature, investing them with a celestial light ‘a light that was on a
sea on land.’
Q. 11. Tell us the definition of Essay.
Ans. According to Dr. Johnson, “An essay is a loose sally of mind, an
irregular, indigested piece, not a regular and orderly performance.”
Q. 12. What is Mysticism?
Ans. Mysticism is a mood and temper rather than a systematic philosophy
of life. A mystic has apprehensions of the presence of the divine, and he conveys
his truth and perception through the use of symbols.
Q. 13. What is a Heroic Play?
Ans. The heroic play made its appearance during the Restoration. Nathaniel
Lee and Earl of Surrey also made a substanstial contribution to the writing of
this kind or play. The heroic play combined some of the features of an epic
poem with some features of drama. This kind of play was generally written in
heroic couplets.
Q. 14. What are the essentials of a novles?
Ans. The essentials of novel are—(i) Character, (ii) Plot, (iii) Story, (iv)
Dialogue.
Q. 15. What is a masque?
Ans. Masuqe was another form of drama. They were dumb shows in the
beginning but graudually music and dances were added to them which made
them immensely popular down to the 17th cnetury.
Q. 16. What do you understand by Naturalism?
Ans. Naturalism is a literary technique of composition. It is based on the
real and the actual, a detached scientific objectivity, a wide inclusiveness of
detail, a freedom of subject-matter and a treatment of the natural man in any
way. A naturalistic writer creates a natural character, a natural action, not a
romantic character.
Q. 17. What is a ballad?
Ans. The word Ballad is derived from the word ‘ballare’ which means to
dance. Originally a ballad was a song with a strong narrative substance sung to
the accompaniment of dancing. The minstrel or the bard would sing the main
parts and dancers would sing the refrain on certain lines which were frequently
repreated. Often it was in the form of a dialogue. Love, battles or heroic exploits
are the chief themes of ballads.
Q. 18. What do you understand by Dark-Comedy?
Ans. Comedy in the sphere of drama is a play which not only has a happy
ending but which contains plenty of wit and homour, plenty of fun. A dark
comedy, on the other hand, is pervaded by a general gloom. It is still a play
with a happy ending and it contains several amusing scenes and episodes with
some display of wit and homour but the comic elements in such a play are
pushed into the background by the tone and atmosphere of seriousness and
gravity.
Q. 19. What is a Anti-sentimental comedy?
Ans. Goldsmith and Sheridan reacted against the prevalent type of comedy
and treid to revive once again the spirit of true comedy. Goldsmith through his
‘She Stoops To Conquer and Sheridan through ‘The Rivals’, ‘The School for
Scandal’ and ‘The Critic’ gave a dead blow to this kind of comedy and once
again brought fun and homour to the English taste. There are laughing comedies
full of pure fun and ridicule the Epurious brand of comedy dominant in the
age. In the Second Prologue to the Rivals’, Sheridan ridicules the sentimental
Muse and calls her, “The goddess of the woeful conuntenances.” The prologue
is a powerful plea for the revival of the true spirit of comedy which consists of
fun and laughter.
Q. 20. What do you understand by anachronism?
Ans. Anachornism is false assignment of an event, a person, a scene,
language in fact anything to a time what that event or thing or person was not
in existence.
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Q. 21. What do you understand by ambiguity?
Ans. After the publication in 1930 of ‘Seven types of Ambiguity’ by
William Empson, the word became a critical and academic cliche for the double
or multiple meanings that may be intended by words and phrases in poetry.
Though a reader’s alertness to the overtones and undertones of language may
increase both pleasure and mental profit, it may also with less advantage induce
a cryptogrammatic attitude to literature.
Q. 22. What do you know about a ‘Angry Youngman’?
Ans. This phrase ‘angry youngman’ did not gain wide spread currency
until ‘Look Back In Anger’ by John Osborne was regarded as a pioneering
new type of drama. The title was popularly attached to social misfits reacting
to the self recognition of their own personal inadequacy. Kingsley, Amis Johns
Wian and John Braine are usually called angry youngman.
Q. 23. What do you know about Baroque?
Ans. Baroque is a style in architecture and its chief characteristic is over
elaboration which almost obscures the underlying order or pattern.
The term is extended to apply to an extravagant and luxurious literary
style.
Q. 24. What do you know about Blank Verse?
Ans. A Blank verse is a five foot unrhymed iambic verse. This blank
verse is used by Christopher Marlowe, Shakespeare and Milton.
Q. 25. Tell us the names of the Bloomsbury group?
Ans. This group included Virginia Leonard Woolf, Lytton Strachey. J.M.
Keynes, E.M. Forester, Bertrand Russell and Desmond MacCarthy.
Q. 26. What is a burlesque?
Ans. Burlesque is a work designiated to ridicule attitude, style or subject
matter by either handling an elevated subject in trivial manner or a trivial one
treated with mock dignity.
Q. 27. What is Closet Drama?
Ans. A closet drama is designed for reading rather than performance.
Q. 28. What is a dirge?
Ans. A dirge is song of grief, lamentation and mourning.
Q. 29. What is known as denuouement?
Ans. A denuouement is the final unravelling of the plote in drama or fiction.
Q. 30. What is an Eclogue?
Ans. An eclogue is a short pastoral poem in which Shepherds converse
with one another.
Q. 31. What is Apistolary novel?
Ans. An epistolary novel is written in the form of letters like Richardson’s
‘Pamela’.
Q. 32. What do you know about Euphuism?
Ans. Euphuism is an affected literary style, originating in the 15th century
characterized by a wide, vocabulary alliteration, consonance, verbal antithesis
and odd combination of words.
Q. 33. What do you know about Existentialism?
Ans. Kierkegaard is the pioneer of Existentialism. He has stressed the
idea that in God man may find freedom from tension, in Him, the finite and the
infinite are one. There are also atheistic existentiablists who follow Jean Paul
Satre and Martin Heidegger who believe that man is alone in a godless world.
Both the groups of existentialists however hold certain elements in common,
the concern with man’s being, the feeling that reason is insufficient to understand
the mysteries of the universe.
Q. 34. What do you know about Expressionism?
Ans. Expressionism is a literary movement dominant especially in Germany
during the decade following the First World War. It borrowed its name from a
more precisely definable movement in painting in which external realism was
abandoned in favour of a more subjective approach.
Q. 35. What do you know about Idyll?
Ans. Idyll is a short lyrical poem deseriptive of everday life amid natural,
often pastoral even romantic surroundings.
Q. 36. What do you know about Imagism?
Ans. Imagism is a school of poetry which flourished under the leadership
of Ezra Pound and Amy Lowell in the second decade (1913-1918) of the
twentieth century. The Imagists employed the language of common speech,
mostly wrote in free verse, and effected the utmost economy in the use of
words.
Q. 37. What do you know about Mondoy?
Ans. Monody is a poem of mouring spoken by one person only. Like John
Milton’s Lycidas, Matthew Arnold’s Thyrsis are monody.
Q. 38. What do you know about Peripeteia?
Ans. Peripeteia is a sudden change of fortune in a play or story.
Q. 39. Give some definitions of poetry?
Ans. (i) Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings, it takes
its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. (William Wordsworth)
(ii) Poetry in a general sense, may be defined to be the expression of the
imagination. (P.B. Shelley)
(iii) By poetry we mean the art of simplifying words in such a manner as
to produce an illusion on the imagination, the art of doing by means of words
the painter does by means of colours. (Macaulay)
Q. 40. Name some of the important playwrights of ‘problem plays’?
Ans. The important playwrights of ‘problem plays’ are T.W. Robertson,
Literary Forms 123. 124. A HAND BOOK OF VIVA-VOCE
Henry Arthur Jones, Sir Arthur Wing Penerio, George Bernard Shaw, John
Galsworthy, Harley Granville—Barker.
Q. 41. What do you know about Satanic School?
Ans. This term Satanic School was first used by Robert Southey to refer
to Byron, Moore, P.B. Shelley, Hunt and others. This romantic group was said
to scorn for all moral rules and the accepted tentes of Christianity.
Q. 42. What is Surrealism in literature?
Ans. Surrealism is the name given to a twentieth century movement among
certain writers and painters. Sir Herbert Read is the chief exponent of this
movement. The modern Surrealist poets like Dylan Thomas show us a series
of moods from challenge to heroic despair.
Q. 43. What is Aestheticism?
Ans. The term aesthetics is derived from a Greek Word which means
perceptible by the senses. Beautiful, sublime and ludicrous are known as
aesthetic feelings or emotions.
Q. 44. What is an Opera?
Ans. Opera is derived from an Italian word, meaning work but now it is
used for a drama set to music, as distinguished from plays in which the music
is merely incidental. The first English work that may be called an opera was D’
Avenant’s ‘Seige of Rhodes’. In the 18th century Thomas Gray wrote the
‘Beggar’s Opera’ (1728).
Q. 45. Differentiate between a dramatic Monologue and a Soliloquy?
Ans. Though dramatic monologue is generally poetic in form, it is
addressed to a silent and passive audience. Whose presence is presumed. A
soliloquy is not addressed to any one, it is the actor’s private thoughts uttered
aloud on the stage.
Q. 46. What is Transcendentalism?
Ans. Transcendentalism is based upon the recognition of a priori element
in human knowledge or independent of experience which is vague and illusive
in philosophy. In America, it was a reaction against Puritan prejudices and old
fashioned metaphysics. This movement is associated with Kant, Schegel R.W.
Emerson, Coleridge, P.B. Shelley and Robert Browning.
Q. 47. What do you know about Cubism?
Ans. The Spanish painter Picasso gave rise to the creed which purports to
paint Nature as solid block of spheres and cones. It introduces a third dimension
in art and literature. In this way this is called cublism.
Q. 48. What is Threnody?
Ans. Threnody is a song of lamentation.
Q. 49. What do you know about Bombast?
Ans. Bombast meant ‘Cotton stuffing’. The word was adopted to signify
verbose and inflated diction that is disproportionate to the matter it expresses.
Bombast is a frequent component in the heroic drama of the late 17th century.
Q. 50. What do you know about Caroline Age?
Ans. The reign of Charles I 1625-1649, is called Caroline age. This name
is derived from ‘Carolus’ the latin version of ‘Charles’. This was the time of
the English Civil War fought between the supporters of the king and the
supporters of the Parliament. This group includes Richard Lovelace, Sir John
Suckling, Thomas Carew and Robert Herrick.
Q. 51. What do you know about Comedy of Humours?
Ans. It is a type of comedy which Ben Jonson the Elizabethan playwright
based on the ancient but still current physiological theory of the four humours.
The humours were held to be the four primary fluids-blood, phlegm, choler
and melancholy. In Jonson’s comedy of humours each of the major characters
instead of being a well-balanced individual, has a preponderant humour that
gives him a characteristic distortion or eccentricity of disposition.
Q. 52. What do you know about ‘Deus Ex Machina’?
Ans. It is a Latin world for ‘a god from a machine’. It describes the practice
of some Greek playwrights to end the drama with a god who was lowered to
the stage by a mechanical apparatus and by his judgement and commands,
solved the problems of the human characters. This phrase in now used for any
forced and imporbable device by which a hard-pressed author makes shift to
resolve his plot.
Q. 53. What do you know about Doggerel?
Ans. Doggerel is a term applied to rough, heavy footed and jerky
versification. It may be the result of ineptitude on the part of the versifier, but
is sometimes deliberately employed by very able poets for satiric, comic or
rollicking effect.
Q. 54. What do you understand by literature of the absurd?
Ans. This name is applied to a number of works in drama and prose fiction
which have in common the sense that the human condition is essentially and
ineradicably absurd. Samuel Beckett, the most influential writers of this
movement is an Irishman living in Paris who wrote in French and then translated
many of this works into English.
!
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Chapter 17
LITERARY THEORY AND CRITICISM
Types of Literary Criticism
1. Legislative Criticism—It seeks to teach writers how to write and laid
down canons, rules, formulae of liteary composition.
2. Judicial Criticism—It seeks to pronounce Judgement on works of
literature on the basis of certain rules. Dr. Johnson may be regarded as the
most powerful exponent of this kind of criticism.
3. Theoretical Criticism—This kind of criticism deals with literary
aesthetics. Attention is focussed on particular works, but on literature in general,
a study is made of the process of creation and the basic principles of artistic
beauty.
4. Evaluative Criticism—Evalautive criticism is criticism which is
concerned with the assessment or evaluation of the worth and significance of a
work of art.
5. Impressionistic Criticism—IMpressionistic criticism is criticism which
seeks merely to record what Anatole France calls, “the adventures of the soul
among the master pieces.”
6. Textual or Ontological Criticism—For the ontological critic, the Text
under consideration is the thing in itself, and it is examined and analysed without
any consideration of such extrinsic factors as biography, history, sociology,
psychology etc.
7. Descriptive Criticism—The descriptive criticism beings in self
justification with poets discussing their own works and defending them against
hostile attacks as Dryden has done in his innumerable Prefaces.
8. Psychological Criticism—Psychology has provided the critic with a
more precise language with which to discuss the creative process it enables the
critic to study the interior life of the writer and then to study his works with
reference to it.
9. Comparative Criticism—Comparative Criticism is criticism which
seeks to evaluate a work by comparing it with other works of a similar nature,
either in one’s own language or in other languages.
10. Archetypal Criticism—The archetypal criticism is based on the
Freud’s theory of collective consciousness that civilized man preserves though
unconsciously by, those pre historical areas of knowledge, which he articulated
obliquely in primitive myths.
Greek Criticism
1. Plato (427-387 B.C.) Main Works—The Dialogues, Ion, Lysis,
Gorgias, Symposium, Phaedrus, Republic.
2. Aristotle (384-322 B.B.) Main Works—Dialogues, On Monarchy,
Natural History, Organon or The Instrument of Correct Thinking, Rhetoric,
Logic, Educational Ethics, Nicomachean Ethics, Physics, Metaphysics, Politics,
Poetics.
(i) Aristotele’s Definition of Tragedy—“Tragedy is the imitation of an
action, serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude, in a language beautified
in different parts with different kinds of embellishment through actions and
narration and through scenes of ‘pity’ and fear bringing about the ‘Catharsis’
of these emotions.”
(ii) Aristotle gave the Comparative Study of Plot and Character.
(iii) Aristotle gave the Theory of lmitation.
(iv) Aristotle gave the Theory of Ideal Tragic Hero.
(v) Aristotle gave the Theory of Catharsis.
Graeco-Roman Criticism
1. Horace—’Ars Poetica’.
2. Longinus—’Or the Sublime’.
Sources of Sublimity—
(a) Grandeur of thought.
(b) Passion.
(c) The Use of Figures.
(d) Diction.
(e) Dignified Composition.
Renaissance Criticism
I. Sir Philip Sidney—An Apology for Poetry.
Gosson’s attack on poetry was the occassion for this book.
1. Definition of Poetry—“Poetry is an art of imitation for so Aristotle
termeth it, that is to say, a representive counter feiting or figuring forth. To
speak metaphorically, a speaking picture, with this end to teach and delight.”
2. Poetry its superiority over philosophy and history.
3. Puritan objections to Poetry : Sidney’s defence of it.
(II) Ben Jonson—He thought the ancients as guides not commanders.
“Let Aristotle, and others have their dues, but if we can make further discoveries
of truth and fitness than they. Whey are we emried.”
His famous remark on Spenser : “Spenser writ no language”.
His famous ramark on Shakespeare : “Shakespeare wanted art”.
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Neo-Classical Criticism
(I) John Dryden (1631-1700)—Father of English Criticism.
His Works—Essay on Heroic Tragedy, Essay on Fables, Essay on
Dramatic Poetry.
Essay on Dramatic Poetry—It shows Dryden as the father of comparative
and historical criticism. In the preface he says that his aim was to vindicate the
honour of our English writers from the censure of those who unjustly prefer
the French.
There are four speakers on intelocutors and the setting is dramatic. Crites
speaks for ancients. Eugenius Speaks for moderns. Lisideius speaks for French
drama, superiority of the French over English. Neander speaks for superiority
of the English over French (In defence of rhyme).
Dryden’s Comments
1. “I admire him (Ben Jonson) but I love Shakespeare. Ben may be more
correct but Shakespeare has greater wit.”
2. Of Shakespare he enthusiastically says that “of all modern and ancient
poets he had the largest and the most comprehensive soul.” Dryden’s liberal
classicism, the three unities.
(II) Joseph Addison (1672-1719)—
His Works—’An account of the greatest english poets. Discourse on
Models, The Remarks on Italy.
(III) Alexander Poep (1688-1744)—
His Works—Essay on criticism, Imitations of the Epistles of Horace to
Augutus.
(IV) Dr Samuel Johnson—It was Dr. Johnson who first called Dryden
‘the father of English criticism as the writer who first taught us to determine
upon principles the merit of composition.
His Works—Preface to Shakespeare, Lives of the Poets, His ‘Life of
Milton’ is a piece of Biographical criticism.
1. Tragi-comedy—Johnson’s defence of it.
2. Shakespeare’s Comic Genius—Faults of his tragedies.
3. The Unities—Johnson defended Tragi-Comedy and the Three Unities.
Romantic Criticism
(I) William Wordsworth (1770-1850)—Preface to Lyrical Ballads
(1798).
Wordsworth Conception of Poetry—“Poetry is the spontaneous
overflow of powerful passion recollected in tranquility.” He calls poetry, “the
most philosophical of all writings, ‘the breath and finer spirit of all knowledge.”
Wordsworth’s theory of Poetic Diction—In the Preface Wordsworth
told his purpose “to choose incidents and situations from common life. He
also intended to use a selection of language really used by men.”
In one of his letters he writes, “Every great poet is a teacher, I wish either
to be considered as a teacher, or as nothing.”
There neither is nor can be an essential difference between prose and
metrical composition.
(II) S.T. Coleridge—
His Works—Biographia Literaria, Lectures on Shakespeare and other
Poets etc.
His views on Imagination and Fancy—“The Imagination then I consider
either as primary or secondary. The primary imagination I hold to be the living
power and prime agent to all human perception and as a repetition in the finite
mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I am. The secondary, I consider
as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical
with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree and in
the moe of its operation. It dissovles, diffuses, dissipates in order to re-create,
or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still, at all events, it struggles
to idealize and to unify.”
“Fancy on the contrary has no other counters to play with but fixities and
definities. The fancy is indeed no other than a mode f memory exanicipated
from the order of time and space, and blended with, and modified by that
empirical phenomenon of the will which he expresses by the word choice. But
equally with the ordinary memory it must receive all its materials ready-made
from the laws of association.” It is esemplastic ‘a shaping and modifying power’,
which by its ‘plastic stress’ re-shapes objects of the external world and steeps
them with a glory and dream that never was on sea and land.
Coleridge’s Criticism of Wordsworth—To Wordswroth’s contention that
there is no essential difference between the language of poetry and that of
prose, Coleridge replies that there is and there ought to be, an essential difference
between the language of prose and that of poetry. The language of poetry differs
from that of prose in the same way in which the language of prose differs and
ought to differ from the language of conversation and as reading differs from
talking. Colerdige’s phrase ‘Willing of disbelief.”
(III) P.B. Shelley—
His Work—The Defence of Poetry.
Victorian Criticism
(I) Matthew Arnold—
His Works—The Preface to the Poems, 1853, On Translating Homer
1816, Essays in Literature, Culture and Anarchy, Literature and Dogma, God
and the Bible.
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Poetry as Criticism of Life—Arnold has defined poetry himself as
criticism of life as the noble and laws of poetic truth and poetic beauty as truth
and seriousness of substance and matter and felicity and perfection of diction
and manner.
The Touchstone Method
Arnold’s Comments—Shelley is a beautiful and ineffectual angel beating
in the void his luminous wings, in vain.
(II) Walter Pater—His Works—Studies in the History of the
Renaissance, Marius, the Epicurean, Appreciations.
Pater’s Aestheticism—Art for Art’s Sake.
20th Century Criticism
1. T.S. Eliot (1888-1965)—His Works—The Use of Poerty and the Use
of Criticism, The Idea of a Christian Society, Notes Towards a Definition a
Culture, Selected Essays, On Poetry and Poets, To Criticse the Critic.
(a) Objective Co-relative—T.S. Eliot defines objective Co-relative as “a
set of objects, a situation, a chain of events, which shall be the formula.”
(b) Dissociation of Sensibility—This phrase was first used by Eliot in
his essay on Metaphysical Poets. Dissociation of Sensibility means “a fusion
of thought and feeling ‘a recreation of thought into feeling’, a direct sensuous
apprehension of thought.”
(c) Tradition and Individual Talent—A writer with the sense of tradition
is fully conscious of his own generation, of his place in the present, but he is
also acutely conscious of his relationship with the writers of the past.
(d) Impersonality of Poetry
(e) Poetry as Escape from Personality—According to Elito ‘Poetry is
not a turning loose of emotion, but an escape from emotion, it is not the
expression of personality but on escape from personality.
The New Criticism
1. I.A. Richards—His Works—The Meaning of Meaning, The Principles
of Literary Criticism, The Practical Criticism—(i) The Value of Metaphors,
(ii) His Psychological Approach.
2. William Empson—His Works—Seven Types of Ambiguity.
3. Cleanth Brooks—His Works—The Well Wronght Urn Modern Poetry
and Tradition, Understanding Poetry with R.P. Warren.
4. T.E. Hulme—His Works—Speculations.
5. R.P. Blackmur—Hiw Works—The Double Agent, The Expanse of
Greatness, The Enabling Act of Criticism, New Criticism, Language as Gesture,
Lion and The Honeycomb.
6. J.C. Ranson—His Works—God without Thunder, The World’s Body.
7. Allen Tate—His Works—Tension in Poetry, Reason in Madness,
Reactionary Essays on the limits of Poetry, The Hovering Fly, The Forlorn
Demon.
8. Yvor Winters—His Works—The Anatomy of Non-sense.
Literary Theory
Literary criticism has become a part and parcel of literary tradition in our
country. Hence literary criticism now offers such a building variety of theory
and practice that it is almost difficult to find a way out. There are many literary
theories like Structuralism, Post-stucturalism, Deconstruction, Post-modernism,
Feminism and Reader’s Response Theories.
Post-Structuralism
Post-Structuralism as its name implies is actually a growth of structuralism.
Structuralism, which had its heyday during the 60s gets the first blow in the
middle of the 70s when a basic paper entitled “Structure, Sign and Play in the
Discourse of Human Sciences” by the French philosopher jacques Derrida
was presented in John Hopkins University in 1966.
Besides Derdida, the other three who helped to develop the Post-
Structuralism in the 70s are Lacan (a French Psychologist), Michael Foucault
and Gulia Kristeva.
Foucault’s aim is to show the operation of power. The Post-Structuralism
challenges Strucutralism. Strucutralism owes its origin to Saussurian linguistics.
Saussure’s idea of linguistic meaning depends on the concept of ‘sing’. Sign is
composed of ‘signifier’ and ‘singified’ is actually a concept, an idea or a thought
to say. The Post-Structuralists challenge Saussure’s anthroplological concept
of sign, which Saussure unconsciously holds to show how the signifier and the
signified are far from being united and opposite to each other.
Decentering is the major aspect which differentiates Post-Structuralism
from Structuralism. According to Post-Structuralists, ‘centre’ is an illusion,
everywhere there is a play of difference. Roland Barthes’ essay ‘Death of
Author’ and Michael Foucault’s essay ‘What is an Author’ suggest that an
author is not responsible for the verbal meaning of the text.
The work of Jacques Derrida in the 1960s is generally considered of crucial
importance in the rise of Post-Structuralism. In three seminal works—of
Gramamtology, Speech and Phenomena and Writing and Difference—Derrida
called into question the notion of centres, unity, identity, signification.
Key Thinkers
1. Roland Barthes—His work is ‘The Death of the Author’.
American Deconstruction
(1) Paul de Man—One of the most important members of the Yale School
of Deconstruction.
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(2) Geoffrey Hartman
(3) J. Hillis Miller—His works are Poets of Reality, Fiction and Repetition.
(4) Harold Bloom—His famous works is Shakespeare. The Invention of
the Human.
(5) Michel Foucalt
Derrida’s Theory of Deconstruction—Deconstruction is not destruction
or decomposition, nor is dismantling of the structure, of the text, it is
‘reconstruction’. Deconstruction is a procedure where oppositions, not
opposites, are shown. Deconstruction was elaborated in his three major works
(a) ‘Of Grammatology (b) Writing and Difference, (c) ‘Speech and Phonemena’
which were published towads the end of the 60s of this century. Derrida’s aim
was to deconstruct a text, to show there is no centre to control the play of
signifiers.
Psycho-analytic Criticism
Sigmund Freud’s extraordinary work on dream, hysteria, sexuality and
civilisation form the basis of psycho-analytic criticism. Freud’s main discovery
was the role of the unconscious in human lives. Freud identified three ‘levels’
of personality.
(a) the Ego—which is conscious.
(b) the Super Ego—which is the conscience.
(c) the Id—which is unconscious.
Key Thinkers
1. Ernest Jones—Ernest Jones is better known for his masive work—
The Life and Work of Sigmund Freud.
2. Jacques Lacan—He is certainly the most influential psychoanalytic
thinker since Freud. Lacan’s works available in Ecrits are : The Four
Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis and the Seminars of Jacques Lacan.
Feminism
Writers like Mary Wollstonecraft in ‘A Vindication of the Rights of
Woman’ (1792), male authors like J.S. Mill in the ‘Subjection of Women’
(1869) and Fredrich Engels in the Origin of the Family (1884) wrote of the
need to rethink the role of women and social opperession, against them. With
the 1960s, the Women’s Movement became a major political force. While the
movement took various issues for the gender debate (including science, politics,
economics, culture, epistemology) literary critics influenced by the Movement
undertook a whole new project.
Basic Themes of Feminist Criticism
(a) Theme of female aesthetics.
(b) Gynocriticism.
(c) Concept of Canon formation.
(d) Feminine writing on the female subject on the literary identity of woman.
Key Thinkers
(1) Virgiaia Woolf—Woolf in ‘A Room of One’s Own’ (1929) and ‘Three
Guineas’ (1938) has analysed the gender biases and oppressive structure in
pedagogic practices to mediate upon the woman’s question.
(2) Simone de Beauvior—Her ‘The Second Sex’ (1949) seeks to
understand the relegation of the woman into a ‘second sex’.
(3) Kate Millett—His famous work is ‘Sexual Politics’ (1969).
(4) Juliet Mitchell—Her famous works are ‘Psychoanalysis and
Feminism’ (1974) and her collaborative work with Jacqueline Rose is ‘Feminine
Sexuality’ (1982).
(5) Elaine Showlater—Her famous works—‘The New Feminist Criticism’
(1985) and ‘Speaking of Gender’ (1989).
The New Historicism
The New historicists practise an extremely close reading of texts. The
New Historicism may be defined as a simultaneous reading of literary and
non-literary texts, and demonstrating how a work of art may be read and
interpreted on terms of its context of other texts, such as those from economics,
legal tracts and medical records.
Key Thinkers
Stephen Greenblatt
Post-Colonial Studies
‘Post-Colonial’ genrerally refers to writing of nations, peoples, cultures,
who were once coloured by European powers. Post-Colonial theory is an attempt
to uncover the Colonial ideologies implicit in European texts about the other.
The term ‘Post-Colonial literature’ now replaces the traditional category of
‘Commonwealth Literature’ or ‘Third World Literature’.
Key Thinkers
1. Frantz Fanon—Fanon’s works—The Wretched of the Earth (1963),
A Dying Colonialism (1965), and Black Skins, White Masks (1967) were
pioneer studies in the psychological aspects of colonialism.
2. Ngugi Wa Thiong’o—Decolonising the Mind (1986).
3. Edward Said—Orientalism, Culture and Imperialism.
4. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak—A Critique of Post-Colonial Reason.
5. Homi K. Bhabha—The Location of Culture (1994).
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Post-Modernism
The term ‘Post-Modernism’ was popularised in literary criticism during
the 1960s and 70s by critics like Shab Hassan, Irving Howe, Leslie Fiedler and
others. The term ‘Post-Modernism’ surfaced in the Anglo-American critical
discourse during the 1950s and in a very significant way in the 1960s. Even
though critics like Jean Francis Lyotard, Linda Hutcheon, David Loge have
tried to define ‘Post-Modernism’, the term eludes definition so much so that
‘one critic’s Post-Modernism is another critic’s modernism.
According to Jean Francois Lyotard, “Post-Modernism is incredulity
towards metanarratives.”
David Lodge, however, lists five techniques which may well be said as
typical of Post-Modern fiction. They are—
1. Contradiction—Cancels itself out as it goes along.
2. Permutation—Alternative narrative lines in the same text.
3. Discontinuity—Disrupting the continuity of his discourse by
unpredictable swerves of tone, metafictional asides to the reader, blank spaces
in the text, contradiction and permutation.
4. Randomness—According to a logic of the absurd.
5. Excess—Metaphoric or metomynic devices to excess and testing them
to destruction.
Postmodernism can be understood as a conceptual strategy or a set of
strategies to cope with present day realities and human condition.
Key Thinkers
1. Jean-Francois Lyotard—With his ‘The Post-Modern Condition’, The
Differened (1988), Just Gaming (1985). Lyotard has emerged as the most
important philosopher of Post-Modernism.
2. Jean Baudrillard—His Works—Simulations (1983), America (1988),
Seducation (1990), Cool Memories (1990), The Illusion of the End (1994).
QUESTIONS
Q. 1. What is Hamartia?
Ans. Hamartia is a Greek word but Aristotle has used this word in a typical
sense for his concept of Ideal Tragic Hero. Hamartia is error of judgement.
The tragic hero falls due to Hamartia on the part of the hero as tragic flaw.
In the words of Humphrey House, “Hamartia may be accompanied by
moral imperfection, but it is not itself a moral inperfection, and in the purest
tragic situation the suffering hero is not morally to blame.”
Q. 2. Why is John Dryden called the father of English Criticism?
Ans. Before John Dryden almost all the critics of England followed the
continental critics like Aristotle, Horace, Boileau and so forth, but it was
Dryden’s distinction that he did not follow the classical criticism blindly. Dryden
opens up a new field of comparative criticism.
Q. 3. What do you know about Renaissance Criticism?
Ans. Stephen Gosson attacked poetry in his ‘School of Abuse’ (1579). Sir
Philip Sidney defends poetry in his ‘Defence of Poesie’ (1598). Ben Johnson
is the disciple of the ancients, his criticism is after Horace.
Q. 4. What is Aristotle’s Concept of Tragedy?
Ans. Aristotle defines tragedy as “the imitation of an action, serious
complete and of certain magnitude in a language beautified in different parts
with different kinds of embellishment, through actions and not narration and
through scenes of pity and fear bringing about the catharsis of these emotions.”
Q. 5. What do you know about Shakespearean Tragedy?
Ans. William Shakespeare has written four great tragedies namely ‘Hamlet,
Othello, King Lear and Macbeth. The hero of Shakespearean tragedy is of
high status. He has one fault that is called fatal flaw. Shakespeare tragedies are
concerned mainly with only one character.
Q. 6. What do you know about Catharsis?
Ans. Aristotle writes that the function of tragedy is to arouse the emotions
of pity and fear and in this way to affect the catharsis of these emotions.
Q. 7. Who has written the book ‘A Short View of the Profaneness and
Immortality of the English Stage’?
Ans. This book is written by Jeremy Collier (1650-1726).
Q. 8. What are Puritan objections of Poetry and Sidney’s defence of
it?
Ans. Sidney proceeds to answer the various objections made against poetry
by Gosson. In the first place it is objected that a man might spend his time
more profitably than by reading the figments of poets. The study of poerty is
the most profitable because it imparts delightful instructions and so moves
man to virtuous action. In the second place, poetry has been called the mother
of lies, but Sidney shows that it is less likely to tell a lie in poetry than in other
sciences.
Q. 9. Tell us about T.S. Eliot’s ‘Impersonality of Poetry’?
Ans. The artist must continually surrender himself to something which is
more valuable than himself. He must allow his poetic sensibility to be shaped
and modified by the past. In the beginning, his self, his individuality, may
assert itself, but as his powers mature there must be greater and greater extinction
of personality. He must acquire greater and greater objectivity.
Q. 10. What is Dryden’s justification of Tragi-comedy?
Ans. Dryden justified tragi-comedy on the following grounds—(a) the
contraries, when placed near, set off each other (b) continued gravity depresses
the spirit, a scene of mrith thrown in between refreshes, (c) mirth does not
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