English Literature

The Way of the World In The Way of the World, his last comedy, Congreve seems to come to realise the importance for providing an ideal pair of man and woman, ideal in the sense that the pair could be taken for models in the life-style of the period. But this was almost impossible task, where the stage was occupied by men and women, sophisticated, immoral, regardless of the larger world around them, and preoccupied with the self-conceited rhetoric as an weapon to justify their immoral activities within a small and restricted area of social operation. Congreve could not avoid this, and for this, he had to pave his way through the society by presenting a plot which, though complicated enough for a resolution, aims at the ideal union between the hero and heroine� Mirabell and Millament . They emerge as the triumphant culmination of the representative characters of the whole period, of course not types, for they are real enough to be human. Congreve endow...

Scope of Linguistics The scope of Linguistics is vast and huge. And its covers a wide range of fields and topics. Thus, Phonetics is concerned with the sounds of languages, phonology with the way sounds are used in individual languages, morphology with the structure of words, syntax with the structure of phrases and sentences, and semantics with the study of meaning. A number of linguistic fields study the relations between language and the subject matter of related academic disciplines, such as sociolinguistics (sociology and language) and psycholinguistics (psychology and language). In principle, applied linguistics is any application of linguistic methods or results to solve problems related to language, but in practice it tends to be restricted to second-language instruction. However, the scope of Linguistics is given below: Phonetics (from the Greek: f???, phone, "sound, voice") is the subfield of linguistics that comprises the study o...

> > In Preface to Shakespeare, Johnson has shown the merits and demerits of Shakespeare based on the plays he has edited. Here he gives the readers some sound ideas about the virtues and faults of Shakespeare. That Shakespeare's characters have am interaction with nature and that his works have a universal appeal are the major assertions of Johnson in favour of Shakespeare's merits and what he says about the demerit of Shakespeare is that Shakespeare tries more to please his audience than to instruct them which is a serious fault because it is always a writer's duty to make the world morally better. However, what Johnson has seen as the merits and demerits of Shakespeare are given below: Merits of Shakespeare: At first Johnson explicates Shakespeare's virtues after explaining what merit can be determined by the Shakespeare's enduring popularity. He proceeds thence to elevate Shakespeare as the poet...

Browning's Philosophy of Life (Optimism) Browning is a very consistent thinker of optimistic philosophy of life. And as an optimist, he is a moralist and a religious teacher. His optimism is based on life's realities. Life is full of imperfection but in this very imperfection lies hope, according to Browning's philosophical views. Actually the philosophy of Browning is the philosophy of a man looking at the world with more than a glimmer of hope in his eyes. He holds a very distinct place among the writers of the Victorian Age. He is an uncompromising foe of "Scientific Materialism". He preaches God and universality as the central truth of his philosophy of life. There are a lot of confusions and conflicts in this age. There are the conflicts between art and life, art and morality, content and form, man and woman, classic education and progressive education, flesh and spirit, body and soul and what not. In this entire ...

Arnold belonged and hence he is referred to as the poet of Victorian unrest. Victorian age was the period of material prosperity, the expansion of democracy and the growth of science which had hardly any appeal to him. He is certainly more violent than anybody else to the spiritual distress of his age and this is why he is called a poet Victorian unrest and spiritual distress which is clearly shown in his poetry. In his famous poem 'Doves beach', he reacted more violently to the spiritual distress and meaningless of his age. He says religion and traditional values are east dying out. Materialism, scepticism and agnosticism are the order of the day. Men do not find comfort and happiness in Arid world .he says, "Hath really neither joy nor love nor light Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;" To him, contemporary life had on meaning or direction .life to him appears to be full of darkness and gloom and he feels like a...

Character of Rosalind Rosalind, one of the Shakespeare's brightest and subtlest heroines. Rosalind, the heroine of "As You Like It", is the daughter of the banished Duke Senior, niece to the usurping Duke Frederick, and the affectionate cousin, and inseparable friend of Celia. She is intelligent, sympathetic and creative. This is why critics after critics have vexed eloquent in their praises of her. Thus, S.A. Brooke writes, "She is fresher than the dew in the forest". Her wit and Wisdom: In the forest, she is all vivacity and sparkling wit. Her wit, her wisdom, her sound commonsense, her illuminating good sense, and her essential womanliness are all revealed in the free and uninhibited atmosphere of the forest of Arden. She bubbles over with animal spirits, and her mind thinks as rapidly as her heart feels, she skips from one subject to another exuberantly. Truly, "You shall never take her without her answer unless yo...

Conceit in Donne's poetry Many of John Donne's poems contain metaphysical conceits and intellectual reasoning to build a deeper understanding of the speaker's emotional state. A conceit can be defined as an extended, unconventional metaphor between objects that appear to be unrelated. Metaphysical conceit is a highly ingenious kind of conceit widely used by the metaphysical poets. It often exploits verbal logic to the point of the grotesque and sometimes creates such extravagant turns on meaning that they become absurd. The metaphysical conceit is characteristic of seventeenth century writers influence by John Donne, and became popular again in this century after the revival of the metaphysical poets. However, Donne is exceptionally good at creating unusual unions between different elements in order to illustrate his point and form a persuasive argument in his poems. By using metaphysical conceits in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mournin...