Listen Carefully

 Sometimes I may not say but it's hurt

I don't wanna spoil mood of other so I put smile on my face..
If I am silent than never think I am stupid
But it's my kind nature to not insult anyone

Yes I love to be shaped but I never ask you to give me tips
Whatever you are for me but make sure my plastic smile for you is formality
Selfishness of world is so sweet
Just like framed song

I listen the music I love
May be its third category for others but u better mind your own business
Don't contribute in shaping of my life
I know very well myself.

Because it's me.

Lady Cobra

Waste Land

                            Waste Land

                               T.S. Eliot

 About Poet:

T.S. Eliot was a groundbreaking 20th century poet who is known widely for his work "The Waste Land."

T.S. Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1888. He published his first poetic masterpiece, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," in 1915. In 1921, he wrote the poem "The Waste Land" while recovering from exhaustion. The dense, allusion-heavy poem went on to redefine the genre and become one of the most talked about poems in literary history. For his lifetime of poetic innovation, Eliot won the Order of Merit and the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1948. Part of the ex-pat community of the 1920s, he spent most of his life in Europe, dying in London, England, in 1965.

The Waste Land

The Burial of the Dead

It's not the cheeriest of starts, and it gets even drearier from there. The poem's speaker talks about how spring is an awful time of year, stirring up memories of bygone days and unfulfilled desires. Then the poem shifts into specific childhood memories of a woman named Marie. This is followed by a description of tangled, dead trees and land that isn't great for growing stuff. Suddenly, you're in a room with a "clairvoyant" or spiritual medium named Madame Sosostris, who reads you your fortune. And if that weren't enough, you then watch a crowd of people "flow[ing] over London Bridge" like zombies (62). Moving right along…

A Game of Chess

You are transported to the glittery room of a lavish woman, and you notice that hanging from the wall is an image of "the change of Philomel," a woman from Greek myth who was raped by King Tereus and then changed into a nightingale. Some anxious person says that their nerves are bad, and asks you to stay the night. This is followed by a couple of fragments vaguely asking you what you know and remember. The section finishes with a scene of two women chatting and trying to sneak in a few more drinks before closing time at the bar.

The Fire Sermon

Section three opens with a speaker who's hanging out beside London's River Thames and feeling bad about the fact that there's no magic left in the world. The focus swoops back to the story of Philomela for a second, then another speaker talks about how he might have been asked for weekend of sex by a "Smyrna merchant" (209). Next, you're hearing from Tiresias, a blind prophet from myth who was turned into a woman for seven years by the goddess Hera. You hear about a scene where a modern young man and woman—both not much to look at—are having this really awful, loveless sex. Finally, you overhear someone singing a popular song, which in the context of this poem just sounds depressing.

Death By Water

In a brief scene, you watch as a dead sailor named Phlebas decays at the bottom of the ocean, and the poem tells you to think of this young man whenever you start feeling too proud. Good tip, T.S.

What the Thunder Said

Section five takes you to a stony landscape with no water. There are two people walking, and one notices in his peripheral vision that a third person is with them. When he looks over, though, this other person disappears (it's like one of those squiggly lines that dance in the corner of your eye). In a dramatic moment, thunder cracks over the scene, and its noise seems to say three words in Sanskrit: Datta, Dayadhvam, and Damyata, which command you to "Give," "Sympathize," and "Control." This is followed by a repetition of the word Shantih, which means "the peace that passeth all understanding." After all that slogging, T.S. maybe gives us a little hope with this final word. Then again, maybe not.

Grecian urn

                              Ode To The Grecian Urn
                                          John Keats

                                                                        

English Romantic lyric poet John Keats was dedicated to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery that expressed a philosophy through classical legend.

Born in London, England, on October 31, 1795, John Keats devoted his short life to the perfection of poetry marked by vivid imagery, great sensuous appeal and an attempt to express a philosophy through classical legend. In 1818 he went on a walking tour in the Lake District. His exposure and overexertion on that trip brought on the first symptoms of the tuberculosis, which ended his life.

Poem:

Thou still unravish'd bride of quietness,

       Thou foster-child of silence and slow time,

Sylvan historian, who canst thus express

       A flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme:

What leaf-fring'd legend haunts about thy shape

       Of deities or mortals, or of both,

               In Tempe or the dales of Arcady?

       What men or gods are these? What maidens loth?

What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape?

               What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard

       Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on;

Not to the sensual ear, but, more endear'd,

       Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone:

Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave

       Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare;

               Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss,

Though winning near the goal yet, do not grieve;

       She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss,

               For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!

Ah, happy, happy boughs! that cannot shed

         Your leaves, nor ever bid the Spring adieu;

And, happy melodist, unwearied,

         For ever piping songs for ever new;

More happy love! more happy, happy love!

         For ever warm and still to be enjoy'd,

                For ever panting, and for ever young;

All breathing human passion far above,

         That leaves a heart high-sorrowful and cloy'd,

                A burning forehead, and a parching tongue.

Who are these coming to the sacrifice?

         To what green altar, O mysterious priest,

Lead'st thou that heifer lowing at the skies,

         And all her silken flanks with garlands drest?

What little town by river or sea shore,

         Or mountain-built with peaceful citadel,

                Is emptied of this folk, this pious morn?

And, little town, thy streets for evermore

         Will silent be; and not a soul to tell

                Why thou art desolate, can e'er return.

O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede

         Of marble men and maidens overwrought,

With forest branches and the trodden weed;

         Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral!

         When old age shall this generation waste,

                Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st,

         "Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

                Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know."

Analysis of the poem:

Written in 1819, ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn’ was the third of the five ‘great odes’ of 1819, which are generally believed to have been written in the following order – Psyche, Nightingale, Grecian Urn, Melancholy, and Autumn. Of the five, Grecian Urn and Melancholy are merely dated ‘1819’. Critics have used vague references in Keats’s letters as well as thematic progression to assign order.

The urn, in other words, begins by quoting Sir Joshua (for Keats and his readers, the world’s greatest authority on art of all kinds), implicitly affirms the sufficiency of human intellect, explicitly affirms the equation of beauty and truth, and pronounces this knowledge entirely sufficient to create the elegant geometry of such superb art as the urn.

    In ancient it was painting which has made the culture alive till today. Here the Grecian urn has            also represented the culture of human before civilization or we can say that it was the life of                different civilization. which is different from our civilization.

Reference and cited:
Some Quotations in Keats’s Poetry’ by Dennis R. Dean. From the Philological Quarterly. Volume: 76. Issue: 1, 1997.
https://englishhistory.net/keats/poetry/odeonagrecianurn/
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems-and-poets/poems/detail/44477
http://www.biography.com/people/john-keats-9361568

Waiting for Godot

                       Waiting for Godot

                         Samuel Bucket

Samuel Bucket:

20th century Irish novelist, playwright and poet Samuel Beckett penned the play Waiting for Godot. In 1969, he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.

Samuel Beckett was born on April 13, 1906, in Dublin, Ireland. During the 1930s and 1940s he wrote his first novels and short stories. He wrote a trilogy of novels in the 1950s as well as famous plays like Waiting for Godot. In 1969 he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. His later works included poetry and short story collections and novellas. He died on December 22, 1989 in Paris, France.

 Plot Overview:

Two men, Vladimir and Estragon, meet near a tree. They converse on various topics and reveal that they are waiting there for a man named Godot. While they wait, two other men enter. Pozzo is on his way to the market to sell his slave, Lucky. He pauses for a while to converse with Vladimir and Estragon. Lucky entertains them by dancing and thinking, and Pozzo and Lucky leave.

After Pozzo and Lucky leave, a boy enters and tells Vladimir that he is a messenger from Godot. He tells Vladimir that Godot will not be coming tonight, but that he will surely come tomorrow. Vladimir asks him some questions about Godot and the boy departs. After his departure, Vladimir and Estragon decide to leave, but they do not move as the curtain falls.
The next night, Vladimir and Estragon again meet near the tree to wait for Godot. Lucky and Pozzo enter again, but this time Pozzo is blind and Lucky is dumb. Pozzo does not remember meeting the two men the night before. They leave and Vladimir and Estragon continue to wait.
Shortly after, the boy enters and once again tells Vladimir that Godot will not be coming. He insists that he did not speak to Vladimir yesterday. After he leaves, Estragon and Vladimir decide to leave, but again they do not move as the curtain falls, ending the play.

 Theater of Absurd:

 

The Theatre of the Absurd shows the world as an incomprehensible place. The spectators see the happenings on the stage entirely from the outside. Without ever understanding the full meaning of these strange patterns of events as newly arrived visitors might watch life in a country of which they have not yet mastered the language.

The estrangement impact  is a dramatic and realistic gadget "which keeps the gathering of people from losing itself latently and totally in the character made by the performing artist, and which subsequently drives the group of onlookers to be a deliberately basic eyewitness. The term was authored by writer Berthold Brecht to portray the feel of epic theater. The primary absurdist plays stunned groups of onlookers at their debuts; however their strategies are currently basic in Cutting Edge Theater and in some standard works. Contemporary writers whose work demonstrates the impact of the theater of the ludicrous incorporate American playwrights Edward Albee and Sam Sheppard, British producers Harold Pinter and Tom Stoppard, German screenwriters Günter Grass and Peter Weiss, Swiss producer Max Frisch, and Czech screenwriter Vaclav Havel.

CITED:
https://www.google.co.in/search?q=waiting+for+godot&client=ubuntu&hs=gzH&channel=fs&source=lnms&tbm=isch&sa=X&ved=0ahUKEwjF2MTU8-TSAhVIN48KHVXMAKIQ_AUICigD&biw=1319&bih=671#imgrc=dPqupcSKsdmuDM:
http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/godot/summary.html
http://www.risenotes.com/godot/Waiting-for-Godot-intro.php
http://rajyagururavi24.blogspot.in/2016/11/what-is-theatre-of-absurd-explain.html

Belongig to the theatre of the absurd, the play, "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Becket is considered the mirror to the modern man's state of chaotic sense of loss and senselessness in an era of confusion and decadence. The playwright depicts the irrelevance of time where human suffering has reached the climax of it's existence. Two tramps are introduced as miserable creatures repeating the tiresome exercise of waiting for Godot without any change in routine. The characters are, primarily, two tramps that seem to represent human destiny in a vague manner while the two tramps are fatigued of being humans anymore. They are tired and exhausted.

Read more at: http://www.risenotes.com/godot/Waiting-for-Godot-intro.php
Copyright © RiseNotes.com

Belongig to the theatre of the absurd, the play, "Waiting for Godot" by Samuel Becket is considered the mirror to the modern man's state of chaotic sense of loss and senselessness in an era of confusion and decadence. The playwright depicts the irrelevance of time where human suffering has reached the climax of it's existence. Two tramps are introduced as miserable creatures repeating the tiresome exercise of waiting for Godot without any change in routine. The characters are, primarily, two tramps that seem to represent human destiny in a vague manner while the two tramps are fatigued of being humans anymore. They are tired and exhausted.

Read more at: http://www.risenotes.com/godot/Waiting-for-Godot-intro.php
Copyright © RiseNotes.coAbsurd Play:

To The Lighthouse

                        To The Lighthouse

                          Virginia Woolf

English author Virginia Woolf wrote modernist classics including Mrs. Dalloway and To the Lighthouse, as well as pioneering feminist texts, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas.

Born into a privileged English household in 1882, author Virginia Woolf was raised by free-thinking parents. She began writing as a young girl and published her first novel, The Voyage Out, in 1915. She wrote modernist classics including Mrs. Dalloway, To the Lighthouse and Orlando, as well as pioneering feminist works, A Room of One's Own and Three Guineas. In her personal life, she suffered bouts of deep depression. She committed suicide in 1941, at the age of 59.

TO THE LIGHTHOUSE

Published in 1927, To the Lighthouse is sandwiched between Virginia Woolf’s other two most famous novels, Mrs. Dalloway (1925) and Orlando (1928). In our opinion, Woolf is totally at her best here, as she engages with her ongoing themes of memory, family, and fiction.

To the Lightbouse takes on some elements of Woolf’s own life: she felt stifled by her father in much the same way that Mr. Ramsay squeezes the life out of his children. And the sudden deaths of her mother and her sister Stella left her in deep mourning (echoes of Mrs. Ramsay and Prue’s deaths in To the Lighthouse).

What makes To the Lighthouse important in literary terms is Woolf’s ambitious formal experimentation. She’s really working her signature style in this novel, as she takes two days, separated by ten years, to evoke a whole picture of the Ramsay family life. Woolf is a great example of the Show Don’t Tell School of Narration. Instead of sketching us a stiffly realistic portrait of her characters, Woolf goes for the emotional impact of their internal landscapes.

PLOT OVERVIEW:

Part One spans approximately seven hours and takes up more than half the book. It’s set at the Ramsay’s summer home, where the Ramsays and their eight children are entertaining a number of friends and colleagues. The novel begins with James Ramsay, age six, wanting to go to the Lighthouse that’s across the bay from the Ramsays’ summer home. His mother, Mrs. Ramsay, holds out hope that the weather will be good tomorrow so they can go to the Lighthouse, but Mr. Ramsay is adamant that the weather will be awful. Charles Tansley, one of Mr. Ramsay’s visiting students, chimes in and supports Mr. Ramsay’s view that the weather will be rotten. He’s a very socially awkward young man who is obsessed with his dissertation.

Numerous small bits of action occur. For example, after lunch, Mrs. Ramsay takes pity on Mr. Tansley and asks him to accompany her into town. By the end of the trip, Mr. Tansley is in love with the much older, but still beautiful, Mrs. Ramsay (by the way, she is 50). Later, as she sits in a window and reads a fairy tale to James, Mrs. Ramsay remembers that she must keep her head down for Lily Briscoe’s painting. (If you’re wondering who Lily is, we are in the same boat. Although, we gather she’s a family friend.) Mrs. Ramsay has the fleeting thought that Lily will have a hard time getting married, but she likes Lily anyway and decides that Lily should marry William Bankes, an old friend of Mr. Ramsay’s.

William Bankes, who is also visiting the Ramsays, comes up to Lily and the two of them go for a walk. They talk about Mr. Ramsay. Meanwhile, Mr. Ramsay walks along the lawn and worries about mortality and his legacy to humankind, and then pesters Mrs. Ramsay to soothe his ego. Mrs. Ramsay does calm her husband, and then starts worrying about Paul (the Ramsays’ guest), Minta (another guest), Nancy Ramsay (daughter), and Andrew (son), who are not yet back from the beach. She hopes that Paul has proposed to Minta.

At dinner, Mrs. Ramsay triumphs. The food is delicious; she is beautiful; Mr. Bankes has stayed for dinner; and Paul’s proposal to Minta has been accepted. She wishes she could freeze the moment but knows it is already part of the past. She tucks her youngest two children into bed and then sits with her husband as he reads. They make small talk and she knows he wants her to say, "I love you," though she refuses. She gets out of it by smiling at him and telling him that he was right – the weather will be bad tomorrow and they will not be able to visit the Lighthouse.

Part Two compresses ten years into about twenty pages. All the traditionally important information in a story (read: what happened to the characters) is briefly imparted in brackets. We learn that Mrs. Ramsay, Prue Ramsay (daughter), and Andrew Ramsay (son) have died. Mrs. Ramsay died at night; Prue died in childbirth (after first getting married); and Andrew died when a shell exploded in France. Oh, right. There also happens to be a war going on – World War I – which gets glossed over in favor of extended descriptions of the weather and the summer house by the sea.

Part Three takes place at the summer house and begins with Mr. Ramsay and two of his children, Cam and James, finally going to the Lighthouse, and Lily working on the painting of Mrs. Ramsay that she never finished. Via Lily’s thoughts, we hear that she never married, but remained good friends with William Bankes. Paul and Minta’s marriage fell apart. Mr. Ramsay, Cam, and James actually make it to the Lighthouse. Lily finishes her painting. Throughout this last part of the novel, it’s clear that Mrs. Ramsay is sorely missed.

THEME OF CONSCIOUSNESS

Virginia Woolf’s novel To the Lighthouse delves into the minds of its characters in a stream of consciousness approach. The characters’ thoughts and feelings blend into one another, and the outward actions and dialogue come second to the inward emotions and ruminations. In the dinner party sequence, for instance, Woolf changes the point of view frequently, with transitions often marked by the sparse dialogue. While shifting the point of view from person to person, Woolf develops her characters through their thoughts, memories, and reactions to each other.
 
Chapter XVII of The Window begins with Mrs. Ramsay wondering what she has done with her life, as she directs guests to their seats and ladles out soup. She sees her husband at the far end of the table, frowning. “What at? She did not know. She did not mind. She could not understand how she had ever felt any emotion or affection for him” (83). As she thinks about her displeasure and disconnectedness with Mr. Ramsay, Mrs. Ramsay notes that she would not speak out loud her inner feelings. There is a strict difference between her actions and her thoughts:

Raising her eyebrows at the discrepancy—that was what she was thinking, this was what she was doing—ladling out soup—she felt, more and more strongly, outside that eddy.

Birthday Party

                          Birthday Party

                           Herold Pinter

Harold Pinter was a Nobel Prize-winning English playwright, screenwriter, director and actor. One of the most influential modern British dramatists, his writing career spanned more than 50 years. His best-known plays include The Birthday Party (1957), The Homecoming (1964), and Betrayal (1978), each of which he adapted for the screen. His screenplay adaptations of others' works include The Servant (1963), The Go-Between (1971), The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981), The Trial (1993), and Sleuth (2007). He also directed or acted in radio, stage, television, and film productions of his own and others' works
Birthday Party- Play

                             Play- Birthday Party

Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party, was the playwright's first commercially-produced, full-length play. He began writing the work after acting in a theatrical tour, during which, in Eastbourne, England, he had lived in "filthy insane digs." There he became acquainted with "a great bulging scrag of a woman" and a man who stayed in the seedy place. The flophouse became the model for the rundown boarding house of the play and the woman and her tenant the models, respectively, for the characters of Meg Boles and Stanley Webber.

In an earlier work, The Room, a one-act play, Pinter had worked on themes and motifs that he would carry over into The Birthday Party and some of his succeeding plays. Among these themes are the failure of language to serve as an adequate tool of communication, the use of place as a sanctum that is violated by menacing intruders, and the surrealistic confusions that obscure or distort fact.

                                      Absurdity

As in many absurdist works, The Birthday Party is full of disjointed information that defies efforts to distinguish between reality and illusion. For example, despite the presentation of personal information on Stanley and his two persecutors, who or what they really are remains a mystery. Goldberg, in particular, provides all sorts of information about his background, but he offers only oblique clues as to why he has intruded upon Stanley's life.

What has Stanley done to deserve persecution? The facts of his past are so unclear that his claim to be a pianist may even be false. The Birthday Party influences the audience to doubt anything with certainty, which as it does in Kafka's work, intensifies the dreadful angst experienced by the protagonist. This effect is achieved through truncated dialogue, by Pinter's deliberate failure to provide conclusive or consistent information, and by his use of ambiguity and nonsense...

 

Things fall apart

                   Things Fall Apart

            Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe

Chinua Achebe:
Albert Chinụalụmọgụ Achebe was a Nigerian novelist, poet, professor, and critic. His first novel Things Fall Apart (1958), often considered his best, is the most widely read book in modern African literature.
Raised by his parents in the Igbo town of Ogidi in South-Eastern Nigeria, Achebe excelled at school and won a scholarship to study medicine, but changed his studies to English literature at University College (now the University of Ibadan). He became fascinated with world religions and traditional African cultures, and began writing stories as a university student.  Achebe wrote his novels in English and defended the use of English, a "language of colonizers", in African literature. In 1975, his lecture An Image of Africa: Racism in Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" featured a famous criticism of Joseph Conrad as "a thoroughgoing racist"; it was later published in The Massachusetts Review amid some controversy.

                       Things Fall Apart

When Things Fall Apart was first published, Achebe announced that one of his purposes was to present a complex, dynamic society to a Western audience who perceived African society as primitive, simple, and backward. Unless Africans could tell their side of their story, Achebe believed that the African experience would forever be "mis told," even by such well-meaning authors as Joyce Cary in Mister Johnson. Cary worked in Nigeria as a colonial administrator and was sympathetic to the Nigerian people.

Yet Achebe feels that Cary, along with other Western writers such as Joseph Conrad, misunderstood Africa. Many European writers have presented the continent as a dark place inhabited by people with impenetrable, primitive minds; Achebe considers this reductionist portrayal of Africa racist. He points to Conrad, who wrote against imperialism but reduced Africans to mysterious, animistic, and exotic "others." In an interview published in 1994, Achebe explains that his anger about the inaccurate portrayal of African culture by white colonial writers does not imply that students should not read works by Conrad or Cary. On the contrary, Achebe urges students to read such works in order to better understand the racism of the colonial era.

Cited:
www.cliffsnotes.com

Middlemarch

                        Middlemarch 

                         George Eliot

                                George Eliot:

Mary Anne Evans (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880; alternatively "Mary Ann" or "Marian"), known by her pen name George Eliot, was an English novelist, poet, journalist, translator and one of the leading writers of the Victorian era. She is the author of seven novels, including Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876), most of which are set in provincial England and known for their realism and psychological insight.

                               About The Novel:

Middlemarch is a huge book. In fact, it's of the longest novels ever written in English. But the reason that it was – and is – so popular is that there's something in it for everyone. Yes, it's about marriage, but it's also about science, politics, reform, and second chances… 

If we had to sum up Middlemarch in just a few words, we might say that it's a novel about social and political reform. But it's also a novel about love and marriage. And about trying and failing. And about second chances. It is, in other words, a huge and wide-ranging novel. And we do mean huge: the edition we're using (the 1994 Penguin edition, edited by Rosemary Ashton) is 838 pages long. That's a lot of pages, but then, Eliot had a lot to say.

The length of the novel actually forced Eliot's agent (and long-time lover), George Henry Lewes, to invent a new way to publish it. For most of the 19th-century, novels were published in one of two ways – either broken into installments of one or two chapters to be printed in a magazine (like Charles Dickens's novels), or published in 3-volume hardbacks (called triple deckers). But Middlemarch was too big to fit into three volumes, and publishing it a chapter or two at a time would take forever. So Lewes arranged to have it printed in eight installments over the course of sixteen months to get people hooked on the story, and then to print it altogether in four volumes. This was a great move by Lewes – Middlemarch sold like crazy, and confirmed Eliot's reputation as the greatest living English novelist.

It was socially and politically relevant when it first came out: it was published in 1870-71, just four years after the 2nd Reform Bill was passed in Parliament. Reform was a big deal in 19th-century England. Who would get to vote, and who would take care of poor people, and healthcare, and minimum wages – everyone had some pet reform project they wanted to bring before Parliament. But Eliot didn't want to write a novel about something that had just taken place, so she set the novel forty years earlier, in 1830 – just before the First Reform Bill was passed.

 Eliot believed that it takes time to understand historical events – it's impossible to understand all the consequences of something right after it takes place. It's like how all the best Vietnam War movies were made at least 5-10 years after the end of the conflict. Forty years, Eliot reasoned, was the perfect amount of distance: it's long enough that people have gained some perspective on what happened back then, but it's recent enough that the events are still pretty familiar.  

Doctor Faustus

                                 Doctor Faustus

                           Christopher Marlow

About Author:

Christopher Marlowe, also known as Kit Marlowe (26 February 1564 – 30 May 1593), was an English playwright, poet and translator of the Elizabethan era. Marlowe was the foremost Elizabethan tragedian of his day. He greatly influenced William Shakespeare, who was born in the same year as Marlowe and who rose to become the pre-eminent Elizabethan playwright after Marlowe's mysterious early death. Marlowe's plays are known for the use of blank verse and their overreaching protagonists.

  About Book:

This one's got it all, folks: devils, damsels, and dastardly deeds. Doctor Faustus is the story of a great scholar who decides a little magical Major will cure his ennui. The catch? He has to sign his soul over to the devil in order to get that major work in'.
The legend of Faustus was already well-known in Europe by the time Christopher Marlowe turned it into a play in 1594. It had been making the rounds as a folktale in Germany since the early 1500s, and was translated into English and published in England in the 1590s as a chapbook (that's the Renaissance version of a pulp paperback) entitled "The History of the Damnable Life, and Deserved Death, of Doctor Iohn Faustus." So Marlowe had all kinds of sources to draw from when it came to bringing the devil to life.
And boy did he ever bring him to life. We know Doctor Faustus was immediately popular with audiences because it was actually published in 1604. That's something that only happened if people were really clamoring for a printed version of their favorite play. Apparently Doctor Faustus struck a chord or two in the hearts and minds of its renaissance audience.

Plot Overview: 

Doctor Faustus, a well-respected German scholar, grows dissatisfied with the limits of traditional forms of knowledge—logic, medicine, law, and religion—and decides that he wants to learn to practice magic. His friends Valdes and Cornelius instruct him in the black arts, and he begins his new career as a magician by summoning up Mephastophilis, a devil. Despite Mephastophilis’s warnings about the horrors of hell, Faustus tells the devil to return to his master, Lucifer, with an offer of Faustus’s soul in exchange for twenty-four years of service from Mephastophilis. Meanwhile, Wagner, Faustus’s servant, has picked up some magical ability and uses it to press a clown named Robin into his service.

Mephastophilis returns to Faustus with word that Lucifer has accepted Faustus’s offer. Faustus experiences some misgivings and wonders if he should repent and save his soul; in the end, though, he agrees to the deal, signing it with his blood. As soon as he does so, the words “Homo fuge,” Latin for “O man, fly,” appear branded on his arm. Faustus again has second thoughts, but Mephastophilis bestows rich gifts on him and gives him a book of spells to learn. Later, Mephastophilis answers all of his questions about the nature of the world, refusing to answer only when Faustus asks him who made the universe. This refusal prompts yet another bout of misgivings in Faustus, but Mephastophilis and Lucifer bring in personifications of the Seven Deadly Sins to prance about in front of Faustus, and he is impressed enough to quiet his doubts.
Armed with his new powers and attended by Mephastophilis, Faustus begins to travel. He goes to the pope’s court in Rome, makes himself invisible, and plays a series of tricks. He disrupts the pope’s banquet by stealing food and boxing the pope’s ears. Following this incident, he travels through the courts of Europe, with his fame spreading as he goes. Eventually, he is invited to the court of the German emperor, Charles V (the enemy of the pope), who asks Faustus to allow him to see Alexander the Great, the famed fourth-century b.c. Macedonian king and conqueror. Faustus conjures up an image of Alexander, and Charles is suitably impressed. A knight scoffs at Faustus’s powers, and Faustus chastises him by making antlers sprout from his head. Furious, the knight vows revenge.
Meanwhile, Robin, Wagner’s clown, has picked up some magic on his own, and with his fellow stablehand, Rafe, he undergoes a number of comic misadventures. At one point, he manages to summon Mephastophilis, who threatens to turn Robin and Rafe into animals (or perhaps even does transform them; the text isn’t clear) to punish them for their foolishness.
Faustus then goes on with his travels, playing a trick on a horse-courser along the way. Faustus sells him a horse that turns into a heap of straw when ridden into a river. Eventually, Faustus is invited to the court of the Duke of Vanholt, where he performs various feats. The horse-courser shows up there, along with Robin, a man named Dick (Rafe in the A text), and various others who have fallen victim to Faustus’s trickery. But Faustus casts spells on them and sends them on their way, to the amusement of the duke and duchess.
As the twenty-four years of his deal with Lucifer come to a close, Faustus begins to dread his impending death. He has Mephastophilis call up Helen of Troy, the famous beauty from the ancient world, and uses her presence to impress a group of scholars. An old man urges Faustus to repent, but Faustus drives him away. Faustus summons Helen again and exclaims rapturously about her beauty. But time is growing short. Faustus tells the scholars about his pact, and they are horror-stricken and resolve to pray for him. On the final night before the expiration of the twenty-four years, Faustus is overcome by fear and remorse. He begs for mercy, but it is too late. At midnight, a host of devils appears and carries his soul off to hell. In the morning, the scholars find Faustus’s limbs and decide to hold a funeral for him.

Sense of Ending

                           Sense Of Ending

                             Julian Barnes

About Author

Julian Patrick Barnes (born 19 January 1946) is an English writer. Barnes won the Man Booker Prize for his book The Sense of an Ending (2011), and three of his earlier books had been shortlisted for the Booker Prize: Flaubert's Parrot (1984), England, England (1998), and Arthur & George (2005). He has also written crime fiction under the pseudonym Dan Kavanagh. In addition to novels, Barnes has published collections of essays and short stories.

About the Novel:

The book's narrator, Tony Webster, is a rueful, solitary sixty something like the Flaubert-fixated Geoffrey Braithwaite, but he describes an early-Sixties adolescence similar to that of Christopher Lloyd in Metroland - commuting from the suburbs to a London day school, envying a friend who reinforces his lack of daring and glamor. The friend is Adrian, introduced, like Charles Bovary, as the "new boy" in class, but he turns out to have more in common with Christopher's Jewish friend Toni, whose "swarthy, thick-lipped Middle European features" emphasized Christopher's "snub-nosed, indeterminately English face".

Adrian's exoticism is neither religious nor racial, but social - he comes from "a broken home" - and intellectual: "If Alex had read Russell and Wittgenstein, Adrian had read Camus and Nietzsche." Adrian's tastes are Continental, and so is his spiritual allegiance: "I hate the way the English have of not being serious about being serious. I really hate it." In contrast to everyone else, he has a life that is "novel-worthy".

The second section of the book portrays the recent circumstances, involving an unexpected bequest, which have prompted Tony's memories of his adolescence and exacerbated his regrets about the cowardice and passivity of his middle years ("Life went by").

Having realized how little he understood as a boy, Tony errs - deafeningly - on the side of caution: "I couldn't at this distance testify", "to be true to my memory, as far as that's ever possible", "Again, I want to stress that this is my reading now of what happened then", "At least, that's how I remember it now". He is so conscientious in elabor­ating on what his story means, and so plain-spoken in setting out his character ("a man who found comfort in his own doggedness"), that the reader is left with nothing to do.

Tom Jones

                            Tom Jones

                         Henry Fielding

About Author

Henry Fielding (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) was an English novelist and dramatist best known for his rich, earthy humour and satirical prowess, and as the author of the novel Tom Jones. Additionally, he holds a significant place in the history of law enforcement, having used his authority as a magistrate to found (with his half-brother John) what some have called London's first police force, the Bow Street Runners. His younger sister, Sarah, also became a successful writer.

Tom Jones

Let's say that it's, oh, 1749, and you are author Henry Fielding. You come from a fairly aristocratic family. But sadly, your dad is also a gambler and you have no family money. You've got a great education but not much else going for you. What do you do? You become a professional writer. In fact, you write for the stage, and you have a lot of success. But the government frowns on your spicy satires and shuts you down. Now what?

Well, in the face of all of these obstacles, you don't give up. Instead, you decide to write a novel. A really long novel. And not just any novel: an introduction to a particular mode of funny realism that would influence later writers such as Charles Dickens and Mark Twain. You got it: this novel is Tom Jones.
And for any readers who might be worried that they won't be able to follow what Fielding is trying to do artistically with Tom Jones, he helpfully includes chapters of analysis of his own workas part of the novel.

It's not every book that comes with its own study guide—well played, Fielding!
And it's still exciting to read Tom Jones, because you can see Fielding working behind the scenes of the book, trying to figure out what novels should actually do from now on. Fielding wants his novel to be exciting but not too farfetched. He wants to show that novels can be funny, raunchy, truthful, and philosophical at heart. And he wants to prove that you can talk about justice, mercy, and virtue in a book with plenty of random adventures and broad sex jokes.

In other words, Henry Fielding uses Tom Jones to try and get some of the snobbery out of fiction-writing. He hates the condescending idea of "low" (or low-brow) fiction, and totally embraces the concept that books should be both instructive and fun to read. Any novel that wraps up its own commentary about censorship on the stage with a plot twist involving a local maid having sex with a wandering clown probably isn't taking itself too seriously.

Some of his contemporaries found Fielding's mix of deep thoughts and ridiculous hijinks a bit too bizarre to take. They even thought that it was immoral to tell the story of an illegitimate child (the title's Tom Jones) carving out a decent place for himself in the world.

These days, we don't worry too much that reading Tom Jones is going to set off a huge moral earthquake. But this novel might just shake up your world: Fielding creates rounded characters with plenty of serious and not-so-serious flaws. He invites us to laugh at them, as well as at Fielding as the author, and at ourselves as readers of this fast-paced, strange adventure. As Tom Jones mixes high-minded social thought and low-down, dirty action, its twists and turns continue to surprise us even now, over two hundred and fifty years after the novel's publication.

 

One Night @ Call Center

                      One Night @ Call Center

                            Chetan Bhagat

About Author:

Chetan Bhagat (born 22 April 1974) is an Indian author, columnist, screenwriter, television personality and motivational speaker, known for his English-language dramedy novels about young urban middle-class Indians.
A noted public figure, Bhagat also writes for columns about youth, career development and current affairs for The Times of India (in English) and Dainik Bhaskar (in Hindi).
Bhagat's novels have sold over seven million copies. In 2008, The New York Times cited Bhagat as "the biggest selling English language novelist in India’s history"

 One Night @ Call Center

The novel has a Prologue, in which author Chetan Bhagat encounters a beautiful woman on a train trip. She offers to tell him a story -- but will do so only on the condition that he use it for his next book. It's set at a call centre, describing the events of a single night-shift -- and she warns him (and the readers) to expect at least one unusual occurrence:

It was the night ... it was the night there was a phone call from God.

The story is narrated by Shyam Mehra, who works at the Connections call center. Here Indians man the phones all night, fielding calls from American consumers who are having trouble with their electronic goods. The company is kept afloat by its account with Western Computers and Appliances, but isn't doing spectacularly well ("call volumes are at an all-time low -- Connections is doomed") and there's talk of "rightsizing" (meaning downsizing). Shyam works in the WASG bay -- the Western Appliances Strategic Group, handling home appliance issues -- people having trouble with their refrigerators, ovens, and vacuum cleaners.

Robinson Crusoe

                          Robinson Crusoe 

                              Daniel Defoe

About Author:

Daniel Defoe was an English trader, writer, journalist, pamphleteer, and spy, most famous for his novel Robinson Crusoe. Defoe is noted for being one of the earliest proponents of the novel, as he helped to popularise the form in Britain with others such as Samuel Richardson, and is among the founders of the English novel. He was a prolific and versatile writer, producing more than five hundred books, pamphlets, and journals on various topics, including politics, crime, religion, marriage, psychology, and the supernatural. He was also a pioneer of economic journalism.

Robinson Crusoe as post-colonial Text

Daniel Defoe wrote Robinson Crusoe at the age of fifty-nine and it was an immediate success. The story of Robinson Crusoe that has delighted the young, and the old for that matter, for over two-hundred years was actually based on an experience in the life of a seaman, Alexander Selkirk, who spent four years on the deserted island of Juan Fernandez.

The book is a kind of epic of human endeavour ceaselessly striving after some fresh comfort or betterment. Opinions differ as to the sincerity of the religious psychology; there can be no doubt as to the truth of the touches which indicate the desire for companionship. In the hierarchy of Crusoe's retainers, the parrot ranks first, because it can speak words. For sheer power of conveying a set of sensations, all writers agree that nothing can exceed the lonely man's sudden discovery of a footprint on the sand: yet the description of his landing through the surf, his flight before wave after wave, is hardly inferior. And for perfection and beauty of invention, one may cite the incident of corn blades springing up, as it first seemed, by unaccountable providence beside his cave. But like everything else that is recorded as happening to him, this seems so picturesque and yet so credible that we hardly consider the art of the narrator. If verisimilitude in fiction were the highest achievement of an artist, few could rank beside Defoe.

Sense and sensibility

                           Sense and Sensibility

                                Jane Austine

                                     About Author:

Jane Austen (16 December 1775 – 18 July 1817) was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism.

Sense and Sensibility represents neoclassical, dualistic moral world where the values of reason and restraint will finally become victorious over the impulsive, romantic sensibility. Not only that, she makes a severe satire of the hypocrisies of the eighteenth century society where the - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

SENSE AND SENSIBILITY:

Sense and Sensibility represents neoclassical, dualistic moral world where the values of reason and restraint will finally become victorious over the impulsive, romantic sensibility. Not only that, she makes a severe satire of the hypocrisies of the eighteenth century society where the - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

Sense and Sensibility represents neoclassical, dualistic moral world where the values of reason and restraint will finally become victorious over the impulsive, romantic sensibility. Not only that, she makes a severe satire of the hypocrisies of the eighteenth century society where the - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

 

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility.

Sense and Sensibility represents neoclassical, dualistic moral world where the values of reason and restraint will finally become victorious over the impulsive, romantic sensibility. Not only that, she makes a severe satire of the hypocrisies of the eighteenth century society where the aristocrats are praised and indirectly influences young minds, not to value love but to betray it just for the sake of wealth. In the novel, Lucy and Willoughby symbolize this type of people of the society. The novel in an implicit way depicts the gaps that occur between language and behavior, feeling and action. 

For Marianne the relationship is to be found on the unmediated openness of one freely expressive heart to another. But for Elinor marriage is a first social contract. This social contract is first mediated by a language, which preserves a rational and decorous civilization as a stay against humankind's baser instincts. The novel represents the two sisters who had a different approach to love and relationships. Marianne has chosen an impulsive and abstractly romantic path to life, love and relationship. Her chosen partner Willoughby is also unbelievably dashing handsome. But Willoughby turns out to be a wolf in sheep's clothing: he betrays Marianne.

By showing the tragic collapse of Marianne-Willoughby love relation, Jane Austen is trying to warn to those who tend to find love through unrestricted impulse. Through this failure of love of Marianne, Austen is expressing her dissatisfaction towards any individual attempt to form any relationship basing on abstract emotion. Austen highlights the life approach of Elinor that is based on the sense and reasoning. 

Elinor has that quality which helps her to manage her feeling at any situation, whether it be too sad or happy. She rationally and sensibly examines her relationship with Edward and its consequences. When her relation was broken up by Fanny, she perfectly controls upon her emotions and does not lose the normal framework of the mind. She possesses a good sense and because of that she can stand strong, even at the time of tragic separation from Edward. She is positively guided by her sense.

The novel presents the eighteenth century trend and the culture of love making. Moreover, it also shows what kinds of love making leads to the successful marriage. Two trends in the eighteenth century love making art are symbolized by Elinor and Marianne.

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility. - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility. - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility. - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM

Sense and Sensibility was first written in 1797 in an epistolary form. Later on she brought many changes in the form and content and finally published Sense and Sensibility in 1811 after fourteen years of preparation. She presents her concern in moralistic points, by writing her novel in an antithetical way, giving its title Sense and Sensibility - See more at: http://www.bachelorandmaster.com/britishandamericanfiction/sense-and-sensibility.html#.WM9ax5CY7qM