Many of Rudyard Kipling’s earliest short stories are set in the India of his early childhood years in Bombay and his newspaper days in Lahore. The intervening years at school in England had perhaps increased his sensitivity to the exotic… Read More ›
During his life, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was a figure of controversy and so became reasonably well known in literary circles. Two of his works were recognized with prizes: Manuscript Found in a Bottle and The Gold-Bug. The Raven, his most… Read More ›
Barbara Kingsolver’s (born. April 8, 1955) short stories are notable for their clear-eyed, sometimes ironic, and always empathic look at the daily lives of ordinary people. Her narrators are mostly female or compassionate omniscient voices telling stories of homecomings, intergenerational… Read More ›
Jamaica Kincaid (born, May 25, 1949) is noted for her lyrical use of language. Her short stories and novels have a hypnotic, poetic quality that results from her utilization of rhythm and repetition. Her images, drawn from her West Indian childhood, recall… Read More ›
In August, 1904, James Joyce (2 February 1882 – 13 January 1941) wrote to his friend C. P. Curran: “I am writing a series of epicleti. . . . I call the series Dubliners to betray the soul of that… Read More ›
Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s (7 May 1927 – 3 April 2013) lack of ties to any one place may account for her objectivity as a writer. However, her detachment does not prevent her from empathizing with her characters, nor does her… Read More ›
T.S. Eliot’s essay Tradition and the Individual Talent was first published as an anonymous piece in The Egoist, a London literary review, in September and December 1919 and subsequently included by Eliot in his first collection of essays, The Sacred Wood,… Read More ›
When a young reader wrote to Sarah Orne Jewett (September 3, 1849 – June 24, 1909) in 1899 to express admiration of her stories for girls, Jewett encouraged her to continue reading: You will always have the happiness of finding friendships… Read More ›
Henry James (15 April 1843 –28 February 1916) believed that an author must be granted his donnée, or central idea, and then be judged on the execution of his material. James’s stories are about members of high society. The characters… Read More ›
Shirley Jackson’s (December 14, 1916 – August 8, 1965) stories seem to center on a single concern: Almost every story is about a protagonist’s discovering or failing to discover or successfully ignoring an alternate way of perceiving a set of… Read More ›
Washington Irving’s (April 3, 1783 – November 28, 1859) masterpiece, The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent., has a historical importance few American books can match. No previous American book achieved a really significant popular and critical success in England,… Read More ›
The bulk of Zora Neale Hurston’s (1891 –1960) short fiction is set in her native Florida, as are most of her novels. Even when the setting is not Florida, however, the stories are informed by the life, habits, beliefs, and… Read More ›
Langston Hughes (February 1, 1901 – May 22, 1967) records in The Big Sea: An Autobiography (1940) his feelings upon first seeing Africa: “when I saw the dust-green hills in the sunlight, something took hold of me inside. My Africa,… Read More ›
O. Henry’s (September 11, 1862 – June 5, 1910) widely varied background provided not only plots for his tales but also characters drawn from all walks of life. Ham in “The Hiding of Black Chief,” Caesar in “A Municipal Report,”… Read More ›
Amy Hempel (born December 14, 1951) is one of the original short-story writers upon whom the term “minimalist” was conferred but, as several critics have noted, “miniaturist” may be a more accurate term. Some of her stories are very short… Read More ›
In any discussion of Bret Harte (August 25, 1836 – May 5, 1902), one must begin by making a clear distinction between importance and quality, that is, between the influence of an author’s work and its intrinsic value. That Harte… Read More ›
Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 – 13 July 2014) is a distinguished novelist and short-story writer. About Selected Stories, drawn from her earlier volumes of stories, a reviewer said that the stories “are marked by the courage of moral vision… Read More ›
Hamlin Garland’s (September 14, 1860 – March 4, 1940) most enduring short stories are those dealing with the Middle Border (the prairie lands of Iowa, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Nebraska, and the Dakotas). Collected for the most part in four books, they… Read More ›
Gabriel García Márquez’s (1927 – 2014) fiction is characterized by a thread of common themes, events, and characters that seem to link his work together into one multifaceted portrayal of the experiences of Latin American life. From the influences of his… Read More ›
The often somber tone of Mavis Gallant’s (11 August 1922 – 18 February 2014) work is strengthened by the combination of acute lucidness and understated stylistic richness. Gallant is a remarkable observer. She succeeds in creating worlds that are both… Read More ›
All of Forster’s best-known and most anthologized stories appeared first in two collections, The Celestial Omnibus and The Eternal Moment. The words “celestial” and “eternal” are especially significant because a typical E. M. Forster story features a protagonist who is… Read More ›
Gustave Flaubert’s (12 December 1821 – 8 May 1880) Three Tales, published during the year 1877, when he was fifty-six years old, reflects the variety of styles of his literary production as a whole. “Un Coeur simple” (“A Simple Heart”)… Read More ›
F. Scott Fitzgerald (September 24, 1896 – December 21, 1940) was a professional writer who was also a literary artist. In practical terms this meant that he had to support himself by writing short stories for popular magazines in order… Read More ›
William Faulkner (1897-1962) has been credited with having the imagination to see, before other serious writers saw, the tremendous potential for drama, pathos, and sophisticated humor in the history and people of the South. In using this material and, in… Read More ›
Just as fiction in general has opened up to a diverse ethnic spectrum of writers, so too has short fiction, and Louise Erdrich’s (born Karen Louise Erdrich, June 7, 1954) stories stand as excellent examples of contemporary Native American literature…. Read More ›
Because most of Ralph Ellison’s (March 1, 1913 – April 16, 1994) short fiction was written before his career as a novelist began, his short stories are often analyzed biographically, as the training ground for the novelist he was to… Read More ›
Chicago has a long tradition of producing fine writers who use the city as their literary landscape. Gwendolyn Brooks, Carl Sandburg, Upton Sinclair, and The odore Dreiser, among others, belong to this tradition. Stuart Dybek, while drawing heavily on the… Read More ›
Among American story writers of the twentieth century, the one to whom Andre Dubus is most often compared is Flannery O’Connor. Although Dubus’s works are not generally marked by the wry, ironic wit that permeates O’Connor’s work, both writers are… Read More ›
In spite of his desire to be acknowledged as a writer of “serious” literature, Arthur Conan Doyle (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) is destined to be remembered as the creator of a fictional character who has taken on… Read More ›
Fyodor Dostoevski’s (11 November 1821 – 9 February 1881) works fall into two periods that coincide with the time before his imprisonment and following it. The seven-year hiatus in his creative output between 1849 and 1857 corresponds to the four years… Read More ›
Isak Dinesen (Karen Blixen) (born 17 April 1885 – 7 September 1962) reacted against the psychological and social realism of contemporary Danish literature and looked back to the Romantic storytellers for inspiration. Like them, she preferred the longer, drawn-out tale to… Read More ›
Walter de la Mare’s (25 April 1873 – 22 June 1956) stories take the form both of wish fulfillment and nightmare projections. Believing that the everyday world of mundane experience is a veil hiding a “real” world, de la Mare… Read More ›
Perhaps because his writing career was so short, critics have devoted much space to Stephen Crane’s (November 1, 1871 – June 5, 1900) slight, decidedly apprentice series of sketches collectively entitled The Sullivan County Tales. One trait that the sketches… Read More ›
Influenced by the European movements of nineteenth century Symbolism and twentieth century Surrealism, Julio Cortázar (26 August 1914 – 12 February 1984) combines symbols, dreams, and the fantastic with what seems to be an ordinary, realistic situation in order to… Read More ›
The unique quality of A. E. Coppard’s short fiction derives from his powers as a lyrical writer, his sympathetic understanding of the rural, lower-class folk who organically inhabit the English countryside so memorably evoked in his tales, and his “uncanny… Read More ›
Robert Coover’s (born February 4, 1932) central concern is the human being’s need for fiction. Because of the complexity of human existence, people are constantly inventing patterns that give them an illusion of order in a chaotic world. For Coover,… Read More ›
Throughout his career, Joseph Conrad (3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) returned to a constellation of central themes that were expressed through the actions of his characters and, more important, through those characters’ reactions to events around them. These… Read More ›
Exposed in his childhood to both the pulp magazines of Hugo Gernsback and the English literary tradition of fantasy and science fiction, Arthur C. Clarke (16 December 1917 – 19 March 2008) sometimes forges an uneasy alliance between the two… Read More ›
Walter Van Tilburg Clark (August 3, 1909 – November 10, 1971) once wrote that the primary impulse of the arts has been religious and ritualistic—with the central hope of “propitiating or enlisting Nature, the Gods, God, or whatever name one… Read More ›
Sandra Cisneros (born December 20, 1954) said that she writes about the memories that will not let her sleep at night—about the stories that are waiting to be told. Drawing on the memories of her childhood and her cultural identity—the… Read More ›
Before he began writing his Father Brown stories, G. K. Chesterton (29 May 1874 – 14 June 1936) had already published one book of detective fiction. In The Man Who Was Thursday, Chesterton created a detective named Gabriel Syme, who… Read More ›
Geoffrey Chaucer’s best-known works are Troilus and Criseyde and the unfinished The Canterbury Tales, with the Book of the Duchess, the Hous of Fame, the Parlement of Foules, and The Legend of Good Women positioned in the second rank. In… Read More ›
Nearly everything written about Raymond Carver (May 25, 1938 – August 2, 1988) begins with two observations: He is a minimalist, and he writes about working-class people. Even when the critic is sympathetic, this dual categorization tends to stigmatize Carver… Read More ›
Saul Bellow’s (1915 – 2005) stature in large measure owes something to the depths to which he plumbed the modern condition. He addressed the disorder of the modern age, with all its horror and darkness as well as its great… Read More ›
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Extra Ordinary Gazette Date: 11.12.2019 Last Date : 15.01.2020 English – Category No. 287/2019 Objective Examination Pattern Module 1 – Chaucer to Neo Classicism (10 Marks) Module 2 – The Romantics and the Victorians (10 Marks) Module 3 – Twentieth… Read More ›
QUESTION 1 ANSWER: 1 QUESTION 2 ANSWER: 1 QUESTION 3 ANSWER: 3 QUESTION 4 ANSWER: 2 QUESTION 5 ANSWER: 3 QUESTION 6 ANSWER: 3 QUESTION 7 ANSWER: 2 QUESTION 8 ANSWER: 3 QUESTION 9 ANSWER: 1 QUESTION 10 ANSWER: 2… Read More ›
Franz Kafka’s (3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924) stories are not about love or success. They do not leave the reader feeling comfortable. Writing was, for him, a necessity. On August 6, 1914, Kafka wrote in his diary: “My… Read More ›
Although his active literary career began in 1880 and lasted only ten years, Guy de Maupassant was nevertheless an extraordinarily productive writer whose short stories dealt with such diverse themes as war, prostitution, marital infidelity, religion, madness, cultural misunderstanding between… Read More ›
Until the 1970’s, Kate Chopin (1850–1904) was known best literarily, if at all, as a “local colorist,” primarily for her tales of life in New Orleans and rural Louisiana. Chopin manages in these stories (about twothirds of her total output)… Read More ›
Any study of Ernest Hemingway’s (July 21, 1899 – July 2, 1961) short stories must begin with a discussion of style. Reacting against the overblown, rhetorical, and often bombastic narrative techniques of his predecessors, Hemingway spent considerable time as a… Read More ›
Nathaniel Hawthorne’s reading in American colonial history confirmed his basically ambivalent attitude toward the American past, particularly the form that Puritanism took in the New England colonies. Especially interested in the intensity of the Puritan-Cavalier rivalry, the Puritan inclination to… Read More ›
“Goodness has only once found a perfect incarnation in a human body and never will again, but evil can always find a home there. Human nature is not black and white but black and grey.” So said Graham Greene in… Read More ›
Nikolai Gogol (31 March 1809 – 4 March 1852) combines the consummate stylist with the innocent spectator, flourishes and flounces with pure human emotion, naturalism with delicate sensitivity. He bridges the period between Romanticism and realism in Russian literature. He… Read More ›
Leo Tolstoy’s (9 September 1828 – 20 November 1910) ego embraces the world, so that he is always at the center of his fictive creation, filling his books with his struggles, personae, problems, questions, and quests for answers, and above… Read More ›
Dylan Thomas’s ten stories in Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog are charming reminiscences of his relatives, school friends, and neighbors in the town where he grew up. Their wit and accessibility made them immediately popular, in contrast… Read More ›
R. K. Narayan (10 October 1906 – 13 May 2001) said that he found English the most rewarding medium to employ for his writing because it came to him very easily: “English is a very adaptable language. And it’s so… Read More ›
Muriel Spark (1 February 1918 – 13 April 2006) was an adept storyteller with a narrative voice that was often distant or aloof. Her tales are psychologically interesting because Spark was reluctant to reveal all that her characters think and… Read More ›
Isaac Bashevis Singer (November 11, 1903 – July 24, 1991) relished the short story; he believed that it offered, much more than the novel, the possibility of perfection. His stories, however, seldom reveal signs of a painstaking artisan conscious of… Read More ›
The brilliant satirist of the mind and manners of an upper-crust Great Britain that World War I would obliterate, Saki (18 December 1870 – 14 November 1916) operates within a rich national tradition that stretches from the towering figure of… Read More ›
One of Margaret Atwood’s (born November 18, 1939) central themes is storytelling itself, and most of her fiction relates to that theme in some way. The short-story collections each focus on key issues. Dancing Girls is primarily concerned with otherness,… Read More ›
Jorge Luis Borges (1899 – 1986) may be, quite simply, the single most important writer of short fiction in the history of Latino literature. The stories he published in his collections Ficciones, 1935-1944 and El Aleph, particularly the former, not… Read More ›
Alice Munro (born 10 July 1931) is first and foremost a writer of short fiction. However, the line between long and short fiction is sometimes blurred in her writings. She has published one book that is generally classified as a… Read More ›
STATE ELIGIBILITY TEST (ENGLISH) PROVISIONAL ANSWER KEY EXAM CONDUCTED ON 29 SEPTEMBER 2019 Which character in Chaucer’s General Prologue was stout and brawny, with a wart on his nose? A) The Summoner B) The Monk C) The Miller D) The PardonerANSWER:… Read More ›
In his lifetime, Anton Chekhov (29 January 1860 – 15 July 1904) gained considerable critical acclaim. In 1888, he won the Pushkin Prize for his fiction, and in 1900, he was selected to honorary membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences for both… Read More ›
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DETAILED SOLUTION MOCK TEST 3 UGC NTA NET JRF ENGLISH EXAM 1. The term invective refers to (A) The abusive writing or speech in which there is harsh denunciation of some person or thing. (B) An insulting writing attack upon… Read More ›
University of Kannur M.Phil Entrance Examination, August 2019 Department of Studies in English, Thalassery Campus Exam Date: 02 August 2019. Time: 2 Hours … Read More ›
PDF MOCK TEST 3 UGC NTA NET JRF ENGLISH EXAM All questions are compulsory and each carry equal marks. Time 35 Minutes 1. The term invective refers to (A) The abusive writing or speech in which there is harsh denunciation of… Read More ›
PDF MOCK TEST 2 UGC NTA NET JRF English Exam Solved Paper All questions are compulsory and each carry equal marks. Time 35 Minutes 1. Which of the following statements on Pathetic Fallacy is NOT TRUE? (A) This term applies to… Read More ›
PDF MOCK TEST 2 UGC NTA NET JRF ENGLISH EXAM All questions are compulsory and each carry equal marks. Time 35 Minutes 1. Which of the following statements on Pathetic Fallacy is NOT TRUE? (A) This term applies to descriptions that… Read More ›
PDF of UGC NTA NET JRF ENGLISH EXAM MOCK TEST 1 Solved 1. Bertolt Brecht’s Epic Theatre (a) turns the spectator into an observer (b) wears down the spectator’s capacity for action (c) relies on argument (d) presents man as… Read More ›
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University of Calicut
M.A. English Literatue
ENG1 CO2 British Literature 19th Century Materials
University of Calicut
M.A. English Literatue
ENG3E05 Introduction to Cultural Studies
University of Calicut M.A. English Literary Criticism and Theory Paper Scholarly Materials
University of Kannur M.A. English Literature ENG3E08 Third Semester European Fiction Scholarly Materials
University of Calicut M.A. English Literature ENG3C09 Twentieth Century British Literature Post-1940 Syllabus Section A: Poetry Dylan Thomas : Fern Hill Philip Larkin : Church Going Thom Gunn : On the Move Ted Hughes : View of a Pig Seamus… Read More ›
NTA UGC NET English June 2019 Questions and Answers
University of Calicut M.A. English Literature Materials
ENG1CO1 British Literature from Chaucer to 18th Century
The theatrical quality of du Maurier’s (13 May 1907 – 19 April 1989) novels is evidenced by the frequency and reported ease with which her works were adapted for the big screen. Alfred Hitchcock directed film versions of Jamaica Inn,… Read More ›
Arthur Conan Doyle’s (22 May 1859 – 7 July 1930) epitaph “STEEL TRUE/BLADE STRAIGHT” can also serve as an introduction to the themes of his novels, both those that feature actual medieval settings and those that center on Sherlock Holmes…. Read More ›
Agatha Christie’s (15 September 1890 – 12 January 1976) trademarks in detective fiction brought to maturity the classical tradition of the genre, which was in its adolescence when she began to write. The tradition had some stable characteristics, but she… Read More ›
Ballard (15 November 1930 – 19 April 2009) is one of a handful of writers who, after establishing early reputations as science-fiction writers, subsequently achieved a kind of “transcendence” of their genre origins to be accepted by a wider public…. Read More ›
Almost from the beginning of his career, Kingsley Amis (16 April 1922 – 22 October 1995) enjoyed the attention of numerous commentators. Because his works have been filled with innovations, surprises, and variations in techniques and themes, it is not… Read More ›
From the appearance of her first novel in 1915, Virginia Woolf’s work was received with respect—an important point, since she was extremely sensitive to criticism. Descendant of a distinguished literary family, member of the avant-garde Bloomsbury Group, herself an experienced… Read More ›
Anthony Trollope (24 April 1815 – 6 December 1882) was acknowledged during his lifetime as a prominent though not necessarily a weighty or enduring writer. He wished to entertain and he did so, at least until the late 1860’s when… Read More ›
J. R. R. Tolkien’s (3 January 1892 – 2 September 1973) fiction dismayed most of his fellow scholars at the University of Oxford as much as it delighted most of his general readers. Such reactions sprang from their recognition of… Read More ›
Long remembered as a social satirist par excellence, William Makepeace Thackeray (18 July 1811 – 24 December 1863) wrote more in the manner of Henry Fielding than of Samuel Richardson and more in the realistic vein than in the style… Read More ›
Shelley’s literary reputation rests solely on her first novel, Frankenstein. Her six other novels, which are of uneven quality, are very difficult indeed to find, even in the largest libraries. Nevertheless, Mary Shelley lays claim to a dazzling array of… Read More ›
Perhaps Richardson’s (19 August 1689 – 4 July 1761) most important contribution to the development of the novel was his concern for the nonexceptional problems of daily conduct, the relationships between men and women, and the specific class-and-caste distinctions of… Read More ›
When Wide Sargasso Sea, her last novel, was published, Jean Rhys (24 August 1890 – 14 May 1979) was described in The New York Times as the greatest living novelist. Such praise is overstated, but Rhys’s fiction, long overlooked by… Read More ›
Henry Fielding’s (22 April 1707 – 8 October 1754) lasting achievements in prose fiction—in contrast to his passing fame as an essayist, dramatist, and judge—result from his development of critical theory and from his aesthetic success in the novels themselves…. Read More ›
George Eliot’s (22 November 1819 – 22 December 1880) pivotal position in the history of the novel is attested by some of the most distinguished novelists. Reviewing Middlemarch in 1873, Henry James concluded, “It sets a limit, we think, to… Read More ›
Margaret Drabble’s (born 5 June 1939) novels charm and delight, but perhaps more significantly, they reward their readers with a distinctively modern woman’s narrative voice and their unusual blend of Victorian and modern structures and concerns. Although there seems to… Read More ›