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The Waste Land

The Waste Land is a long poem by T. S. Eliot, widely regarded as one of the most important poems of the 20th century and a central work of modernist poetry . Published in 1922, the 434-line , poem first appeared in the United Kingdom in the October issue of Eliot's The Criterion and in the United States in the November issue of The Dial . It was published in book form in December 1922. Among its famous phrases are "April is the cruellest month", "I will show you fear in a handful of dust", and the mantra in the Sanskrit language "Shantih shantih shantih". Eliot's poem loosely follows the legend of the Holy Grail and the Fisher King combined with vignettes of contemporary British society. Eliot employs many literary and cultural allusions from the Western canon, Buddhism and the Hindu Upanishads. The poem shifts between voices of satire and prophecy featuring abrupt and unannounced changes of speaker, location, and time and conjuring a va...

Robinson Crusoe

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The Life and Strange Surprizing Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, Of York, Mariner: Who lived Eight and Twenty Years, all alone in an un-inhabited Island on the Coast of America, near the Mouth of the Great River of Oroonoque; Having been cast on Shore by Shipwreck, wherein all the Men perished but himself. With An Account how he was at last as strangely deliver'd by Pyrates , commonly known as Robinson Crusoe, is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719. The first edition credited the work's protagonist Robinson Crusoe as its author, leading many readers to believe he was a real person and the book a travelogue of true incidents. Epistolary, confessional, and didactic in form, the book is presented as an autobiography of the title character (whose birth name is Robinson Kreutznaer)—a castaway who spends 28 years on a remote tropical desert island near Trinidad, encountering cannibals, captives, and mutineers, before ultimately being rescued. The st...

Hamlet

The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark , often shortened to Hamlet is a tragedyb written by William Shakespeare at an uncertain date between 1599 and 1602. Set in Denmark, the play dramatises the revenge Prince Hamlet is called to wreak upon his uncle, Claudius, by the ghost of Hamlet's father, King Hamlet. Claudius had murdered his own brother and seized the throne, also marrying his deceased brother's widow. Hamlet is Shakespeare's longest play, and is considered among the most powerful and influential works of world literature, with a story capable of "seemingly endless retelling and adaptation by others".It was one of Shakespeare's most popular works during his lifetime , and still ranks among his most performed, topping the performance list of the Royal Shakespeare Company and its predecessors in Stratford-upon-Avon since 1879. It has inspired many other writers—from Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Charles Dickens to James Joyce and Iris Murdoch—a...

The Bluest Eye

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Novel The Bluest Eye  Toni Morrison, author, professor, editor, and speaker, has penned novels, works of nonfiction, children’s books, and other works. In 1988, she won the Pulitzer Prize in fiction for her novel  Beloved . Morrison’s work has been instrumental in opening doors for a mainstream readership of African American literature. Her works are known for their exposure of racial issues through strong characterization, difficult themes, and varied points of view.  The Bluest Eye , her first novel, is based on the memory of a childhood acquaintance’s desire for blue eyes. One of Morrison’s common themes is community versus the individual. This theme confronts race issues through the consideration of the individual as other and the examination of a community’s unwillingness to provide for or support the oppressed. Early in  The Bluest Eye , Claudia MacTeer relates how she and her sister Frieda learn about their community. Thei...

The Hairy Ape

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B.A Text The Hairy Ape Considered one of America’s greatest twentieth century dramatists by scholars and critics alike, Eugene O’Neill was awarded four Pulitzer Prizes, as well as the 1936 Nobel Prize in Literature. The son of actor James O’Neill, he was educated at private schools and briefly at Princeton; after six months of illness in a tuberculosis sanatorium, he enrolled in George Pierce Baker’s playwriting course at Harvard University, an experience that solidified O’Neill’s determination to be a playwright. The Hairy Ape , a long one-act play containing eight scenes, was written in 1921 and performed in March of 1922. Its background lies in O’Neill’s own sojourn at sea, and its burly central figure, Yank, is patterned after Robert Driscoll, a stoker acquaintance of O’Neill who was similarly proud of his physical strength. Driscoll’s suicide at sea prompted O’Neill to imagine the factors that might have led to it. The play explores the place ...

Namesake

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Novel Namesake The Namesake  portrays both the immigrant experience in America, and the complexity of family loyalties that underlies all human experience. Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli, after an arranged marriage in India, emigrate to America where Ashoke achieves his dream of an engineering degree and a tenured position in a New England college. Their son Gogol, named for the Russian writer, rejects both his unique name and his Bengali heritage. In a scene central to the novel’s theme, Ashoke gives his son a volume of Nikolai Gogol’s short stories for his fourteenth birthday, hoping to explain the book’s significance in his own life. Gogol, a thoroughly Americanized teenager, is indifferent, preoccupied with his favorite Beatles recording. Such quietly revealing moments give the narrative its emotional power. The loneliness of lives lived in exile is most poignantly revealed in the late night family telephone calls from India, always an announcemen...

Daffodils

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Poem                                       " Daffodils " Wordsworth is widely known as 'Nature poet". He was one of the representatives of Romantic period. They believed in subjectivity. Nature was at the center in every piece of work. Literary artist should be free in his expression of feelings and emotions. they were completely opposite to 'Classic writers', who believed in rules and regulation.  Wordsworth was of the opinion that; " Let's throw everything and let's go to the Nature, nature will teach you everything" One can find Nature as central element in Wordsworth poems and 'Daffodils' is also not an exception. He starts his poem by saying that he was wandering as a cloud floating above high hills and valleys. He discovered a field of daffodils by a lake. he was quite amused by the beauty of flowers and stares at it again and again. the w...