In the Prologue to the Canterbury Tales Chaucer frequently uses the device of contrast as a major means of characterization. One of the most striking of these contrasts is that between the prominent w...
England during the reign of Queen Victoria developed strange features, some of which were quite contradictory. In the latter half of the 19th century while at home England had absorbed the essential f...
Michel Facoult once pointed out how private conversations among women constitute a world which plays a counter subversive role in relation to the male dominated society and prepares the way for securi...
Arnold essay On the Modern Elements in Literature was occasioned by an unusual event, his election to the Chair of Poetry in Oxford. Unusually still, he did not choose to eulogise any person or instit...
The tragic hero’s downfall, said Aristotle, in the Poetics, was brought upon not by vice and depravity but by some error of judgement. Aristotle’s theory is not the final word on tragedy, but it happe...
There arises a sharp controversy among critics as to whether or not Jane Austen, while writing her novels, consciously had in mind certain serious moral concerns of her times; whether or not as a nove...
John Donne’s life, more than any poet’s, illustrates how the Elizabethan and Jacobean views of the world, which was based medieval world view, came to collide with the Renaissance one provided by the...
Albert Camus in Le Mythe de Sisyphe summed up human existence on earth by drawing a parallel with the myth of Sisyphe. Sisyphe, cursed by Zeus, constantly fails despite his incessant attempts to keep ...