" Ghosts”, meaning “those who come back” refers to people, ideas or beliefs from the past that affects life in the present. The prevalence of such “ghosts” is a major theme in the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts, written in 1881, a powerful as also a controversial play. Taboo topics,... Sign in to see full entry.
The five Lucy poems composed by Wordsworth four were printed in Lyrical Ballads of 1800. These four poems, all in the lyrical vein, are sober meditations on the death or apprehension of death of a girl who was the object of a deep and tender love. The love is not impassioned but meditated in... Sign in to see full entry.
Modem critics have held many different views of Milton’s Paradise Lost. Among these the major objection has been that the Book, a twelve volume epic, is militantly Christian and does not adhere to diverse viewpoints of the modern age. Milton’s religious views are actually a mirror of the age in... Sign in to see full entry.
The long-drawn ten years’ war in Troy has ended. The ship of Odysseus (that is, Ulysses) sets sail for homeward journey. The mariners sight land. A few of them go to explore the region. The air, languid, all quiet reigned. The streams seemed slumberous in movement. It was a land where nothing... Sign in to see full entry.
A classical dramatic literature, Anton Chekov’s The Cherry Orchard serves as a fluid and complex symbol that has different meanings with different classes of people and also with the changing times. At one time when the cherry orchard was in bloom and laden with fruits, it was a source of great... Sign in to see full entry.
A while back, I finished reading Gustave Flaubert’s famous controversial novel, Madame Bovary. It struck me as an ingenuous work of art with a seminal depiction of the reality of the mid-nineteenth century French cultural mores and ethics. Published in 1857, after the novel was acquitted by the... Sign in to see full entry.
Dryden's Mac Flecknoe was written in 1678 and published in 1682. The title of the poem was the result of a literary and personal quarrel between Dryden and Thomas Shadwell, a minor playwright. The play is full of allusions to literary figures, plays, poems and publishers. Mac Flecknoe is a... Sign in to see full entry.
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight (1798) opens with an atmosphere outside of Coleridge’s home with the frost performing its ministry, making everything so desolate and bitterly cold that the owlets cry out loud; the eerie surrounding is otherwise ‘too calm’ as to vex the concealed musings... Sign in to see full entry.
The inherent resident quarter of all beings is universal: a body is otherwise a corpse without the spirit as its body-current or the life-giving force. At the outside, the body is one extremity; in between are progresssively, the layers of our diffentiated existence -- the mind (emotions, feelings),... Sign in to see full entry.
Much Ado About Nothing is the nearest approach to the Comedy of Errors as practised by William Congreve, where sentiment or passion is conveyed either by indifference or downright contradiction. The hero and the heroine of Much Ado, Benedick and Beatrice, by their very bickerings, assume a social... Sign in to see full entry.