E.M.Forster’s novel ‘A Passage to India’ narrates the social and political condition of the days of the British Raj and the relation between the colonial masters and their Indian subjects. The relationship was strained and fragile. The novel presents the fractious and mistrustful sentiment that permeated this unequal relation and even gestures or attitudes which…
Anne Bronte’s The Tenant of Wildfel Hall is unlike any novel that I have read so far. Not getting into the details of the story which was considered far too liberal or immoral for those times, I shall touch upon the power of the novel for presenting two remarkable characters in Mr. Arthur Huntingdon and…
Mark Twain’s ‘The Prince and the Pauper’ is a romantic tale of mistaken identity and how the situation of the Prince, who is identical in appearance to the pauper, becomes miserable after the exchange. His romantic notion of freedom and liberty from the artifice and monotony of his existence turns out to be an irreversible…
In my Plus 2 Advanced English course, we had a one act play titled ‘The Little Man ‘written by John Galsworthy. It is a play about the Universality of the little man who is far taller than all the other characters in the play. What he lacks in terms of physical attributes is more than…
A novel that I had wanted to read for a very long time; a story about the dictator Trujillo who ruled the Dominican Republic for 30 years. The novel is arranged as an episodic narrative tale which follows the events of the deadly, brutal regime from three points of view, that of Urania Cabral, the…
Plot is the way in which a story is narrated. The domain of the plot belongs entirely to the craft of the novelist where as the story belongs to the imagination of the novelist. To generate interest and also to sustain it, the novelist has to make use of this device, as a story told…
I remember a book by G.K.Chesterton that I had read in fragments. I couldn’t complete it because of the untidiness of the book and the small typeset that strained my eyes. I was extremely impressed by the small bits that I read. Chesterton describes his travels on horseback across the English country side. He is the most carefree traveler who lets place and time take care of all his needs.
I was deeply enchanted after reading Nelson Mandela’s ‘Long walk to Freedom.’ What I found most interesting was the question the author poses to himself; Should an individual live for his family or the society; a question obviously confronted by many great freedom fighters. Mandela’s life belongs to the category of saints and apostles for…
It has been a long time since I have left my village to live in a city. A city dweller left without anything to do has to find ways to consume time. A village has its charms and interests which give a feeling of time standing still and an unchanging scene. After a long time I made a chance visit to a village and could see a fair.
Irony penetrates the structure of the novel Pride and Prejudice. The irony of Jane Austen is very subtle and we can understand it only when we understand the emphasis and the tone of her language. The very opening sentence of the novel is a fine specimen of verbal irony. “It is a truth universally acknowledged…