T.S. Eliot's Discussion about Tradition

T.S. Eliot has divided his famous essay Tradition and the Individual Talents into three parts. In first part he has discussed about Tradition, in the second part he has mentioned about Impersonal Theory or Theory of Impersonality and in his last part he has discussed the summary of the whole writing. 

Tradition: Tradition is a matter of much wider significance, which should positively be discouraged. In other word it can be explained that, tradition is a belief, custom, story or practice handed down from generation to generation by demonstration or word of mouth.

Sir Roger at Church

Joseph Addison 

I AM always very well pleased with a country Sunday; and think, if keeping holy the seventh day were only a human institution, it would be the best method that could have been thought of for the polishing and civilizing of mankind. It is certain the country-people would soon degenerate into a kind of savages and barbarians, were there not such frequent returns of a stated time, in which the whole village meet together with their best faces, and in their cleanliest habits, to converse with one another upon indifferent subjects, hear their duties explained to them, and join together in adoration of the Supreme Being.

Summary of The Garden Party

"The Garden Party" opens with frantic preparations being made. The cloudless summer day is perfect for the garden party at the home of Sheridan family. Before breakfast ends, four workmen arrive to set up the marquee. Because Meg has just washed her hair and Jose is still in her petticoat, Mrs. Sheridan assigns the task of supervising the men to Laura. Taking a piece of buttered bread with her, Laura goes outside to begin her task.

Of Studies

Francis Bacon

Studies serve for delight, for ornament, and for ability. Their chief use for delight is in privateness and retiring; for ornament, is in discourse; and for ability, is in the judgment and disposition of business. For expert men can execute, and perhaps judge of particulars, one by one; but the general counsels, and the plots and marshalling of affairs, come best from those that are learned. To spend too much time in studies is sloth;

Shooting an Elephant

George Orwell

In Moulmein, in lower Burma, I was hated by large numbers of people – the only time in my life that I have been important enough for this to happen to me. I was sub-divisional police officer of the town, and in an aimless, petty kind of way anti-European feeling was very bitter. No one had the guts to raise a riot, but if a European woman went through the bazaars alone somebody would probably spit betel juice over her dress. As a police officer I was an obvious target and was baited whenever it seemed safe to do so.

Araby

James Joyce

North Richmond Street, being blind, was a quiet street except at the hour when the Christian Brothers' School set the boys free. An uninhabited house of two storeys stood at the blind end, detached from its neighbours in a square ground. The other houses of the street, conscious of decent lives within them, gazed at one another with brown imperturbable faces.

The Garden Party

 Katherine Mansfield

 And after all the weather was ideal. They could not have had a more perfect day for a garden-party if they had ordered it. Windless, warm, the sky without a cloud. Only the blue was veiled with a haze of light gold, as it is sometimes in early summer. The gardener had been up since dawn, mowing the lawns and sweeping them, until the grass and the dark flat rosettes where the daisy plants had been seemed to shine.

The Sun Will Rise

The year is the worst year in Sihab’s life. In the beginning of this year he lost his business and work which were the only earning source of his life and education and also family. Then gradually he lost his tuitions and also lost his all powers of creativity only for the poverty. So his life became hard to harder and he was bound to make rough behave with others. That time he realized really poverty makes a man so much cruel. An event which he was bound to explain; one day bearing a lot of pain and suffering in his head, he was going to his tuition, on the way when he was near at his student’s house, suddenly his phone rang out.

My Last Duchess

   Robert Browning

That's my last Duchess painted on the wall,
Looking as if she were alive. I call
That piece a wonder, now: Fra Pandolf's hands
Worked busily a day, and there she stands.
Will't please you sit and look at her? I said
"Fra Pandolf" by design, for never read
Strangers like you that pictured countenance,
The depth and passion of its earnest glance,
But to myself they turned (since none puts by
the curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

John Keats as an Escapist

 Firstly, all the poets of Keats’s time were influenced by the ideas and ideals of the French Revolution. The ideas of the French Revolution had awakened the youthful nature of both Wordsworth and Coleridge; they had moved the wrath of Scott; they had worked like Yeats on Byron and brought forth new matter for Shelly. There was only one poet, Keats, of that age whom they could not affect on any way whatsoever.

Daffodil

I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud

                    BY WILLIAM WORDSWORTH

I wandered lonely as a cloud

That floats on high o'er vales and hills,

When all at once I saw a crowd,

A host, of golden daffodils;

Beside the lake, beneath the trees,

Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine

And twinkle on the Milky Way,

The Sun Also Rises

Ernest Hemingway 

Major Characters of This Novel:

Jake Barnes  

Lady Brett Ashley 

Robert Cohn 

Araby

James Joyce 


Short Summary of Araby 

Summary: Araby is a great creation of James Joyce which is full of dark and light sides. It is also the awakening of a boy to how different the world is compared to how he would like to see it. It is also the realization of the boy about the difference between the ideal world of his imagination and the base reality of life. In the beginning of this fiction we find that the nameless narrator of the story talks about life on North Richmond Street. The former resident of their apartment was a priest who died and at the time of his departure he kept some books, so the young boy narrator and, who is also the protagonist of this story, sometimes looks at them.  He stays with his aunt and uncle. He looked superficially pure and innocent who loves to play with his rustic friends every leisure periods.

Summary of Gulliver’s Travels

     Jonathan Swift

Book I and Book II (shortly)

Chapter 01

On this voyage, Gulliver goes to the sea as a surgeon on the merchant ship,Antelope. The ship is destroyed during a heavy windstorm, and Gulliver, the only survivor, swims to a nearby island, Lilliput. Being nearly exhausted from the ordeal, he falls asleep. Upon awakening, he finds that the island’s inhabitants, who are no larger than six inches tall, have captured him. After the inhabitants examine Gulliver and provide him with food, the Emperor of this country orders his subjects to move Gulliver to a little-used temple, the only place large enough to house him.

T.S. Eliot as a Critic

Eliot is one of the greatest literary critics of England from the point of view of the greater part and quality of his critical writings. His five hundred and odd (strange, funny) essays occasionally published as reviews (analysis) and articles had a far-reaching (extensive, broad) influence on literary criticism in the country. His criticism was revolutionary which inverted the critical tradition of the whole English speaking work. John Hayward says: “I cannot think of a critic who has been more widely read and discussed in his own life-time; and not only in English, but in almost every language, except Russian.”

Tithonus

Alfred Lord Tennyson

The woods decay, the woods decay and fall,
The vapours weep their burthen to the ground,
Man comes and tills the field and lies beneath,
And after many a summer dies the swan.
Me only cruel immortality
Consumes: I wither slowly in thine arms,
Here at the quiet limit of the world,
A white-haired shadow roaming like a dream
The ever-silent spaces of the East,
Far-folded mists, and gleaming halls of morn.

American Transcendentalism

Introduction: In Literature, Transcendentalism was considered as philosophical and literary movement that flourished in New England from about 1836 to 1860. It derived some of its basic idealistic concepts from romantic German philosophy, notably which of Immanuel Kant and from such English authors as Carlyle, Coleridge and Wordsworth. The beliefs that God is immanent in each person and in nature and that individual intuition is the highest source of knowledge led to an optimistic emphasis on individualism, self-reliance, and rejection of traditional authority.

Stopping By Woods on a Snowy Evening

             Robert Frost

Whose woods these are I think I know.
His house is in the village though;
He will not see me stopping here
To watch his woods fill up with snow.

My little horse must think it queer
To stop without a farmhouse near
Between the woods and frozen lake
The darkest evening of the year.

Age of English Literature

Age of English Literature

Time Span, Terms, Movements, Examples
600-1200 Old English (Anglo-Saxon)			Beowulf
1200-1500 Middle English			Geoffrey Chaucer
1500-1660 The English Renaissance
1500-1558	Tudor Period	Humanist Era	Thomas More, John Skelton
1558-1603	Elizabethan Period	High Renaissance	Edmund Spenser,Sir Philip Sidney, William Shakespeare
1603-1625	Jacobean Period	Mannerist Style (1590-1640) other styles: Metaphysical Poets; Devotional Poets	Shakespeare, John Donne, George Herbert,Emilia Lanyer
1625-1649	Caroline Period		John Ford, John Milton
1649-1660	The Commonwealth & The Protectorate	Baroque Style, and later, Rococo Style	Milton, Andrew Marvell, Thomas Hobbes
1660-1700	The Restoration		John Dryden
1700-1800	The Eighteenth Century	The Enlightenment; Neoclassical Period;The Augustan Age	Alexander Pope,Jonathan Swift, Samuel Johnson
1785-1830	Romanticism	The Age of Revolution	William Wordsworth,S.T. Coleridge, Jane Austen, the Brontës
1830-1901	Victorian Period	Early, Middle and Late Victorian	Charles Dickens, George Eliot, Robert Browning, Alfred, Lord Tennyson
1901-1960	Modern Period	The Edwardian Era(1901-1910); The Georgian Era (1910-1914)	G.M. Hopkins,H.G. Wells, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, T.S. Eliot
1960-	Postmodern and Contemporary Period		Ted Hughes, Doris Lessing, John Fowles, Don DeLillo, A.S. Byatt

Edited by: Mahbub Murad. Dhaka, Bangladesh. Cell: +8801919879309, +8801761519111. Email: Mahbub_murad@yahoo.com 

Victorian Literature

Victorian literature is the literature produced during the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901).      It forms a link and transition between the writers of the romantic period and the very different literature of the 20^th century. The 19th century saw the novel become the leading form of literature in English. The works by pre-Victorian writers such as Jane Austen and Walter Scott had perfected both closely-observed social satire and adventure stories. Popular works opened a market for the novel amongst a reading public. The 19th century is often regarded as a high point in British literature as well as in other countries such as France, the United States and Russian Books, and novels in particular, became ubiquitous, and the "Victorian novelist" created legacy works with continuing appeal.