Of all the truisms about Jane Austen, the favourite for the past centuries is that a little interest is taken by her in the broad concerns of national life. It is a proposition which seems quite obvious to the readers of Pride and Prejudice or any other of Austen’s works. Winston Churchill exclaims, “What calm l…

Shooting an Elephant as a Postcolonial Essay Louis Cazamian in A History of English Literature declares George Orwell's work as a whole to be "the citizen's manifesto against the powers that be" . Even from his youth, Orwell rejected many of the accepted social and political conventions, a…

La Belle Dame Sans Merci is the glory of romantic poetry . In it the medieval revival which constitutes one of the most significant aspects of romanticism reaches its culmination. Keats was ever enamoured of the Middle Ages. But it was the external glitter and glamour of the Middle Ages that captivated him. The…

What is Modernism? Modernism is variously argued to be a period, style, genre, or combination of the above; but it is first of all a word; one which exists alongside cognate words. It’s stem, ‘Modern', is a term that, from the Latin ‘modo’, means 'current’, and so has a far wider currency and range o…

Sarojini Naidu as a Lyric Poet Indian poet and political activist Sarojini Naidu , known as ' Bharatiya Kokila ' (The Nightingale of India), was a prolific poet, whose work drew wide acclaim, and influenced generations of writers. Her brilliance is deeply observed in the sublime and lofty songs that …

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On the Modern Element in Literature is the inaugural lecture of Mathew Arnold delivered as a professor of poetry at Oxford in the year 1857. In this essay, he shows us how an age can rise above the false ideology of modernism by strictly following the rich convention of the past, especially those of ancient Gre…