Life & Literature

The dilemma of Achebe and Soyinka in terms of African sense and sensibility

2011-12-10T02:18:00.001-08:00

The dilemma of Achebe and Soyinka in terms of African sense and sensibility

Based on the premise that literature is a cultural production, modern African literature expresses the socio-cultural, historical, and other experiences as well as the sensibility of its people. Literary works that focus on certain criteria of cultural acceptability, African-ness, or Africanity constitute modern African literature and its canon. Since modern African literature is still relatively young compared to Western literatures, there have been debates and controversies over what is truly African literature. It is in the context of the people’s overall experience and the aesthetic considerations involved that canonisation will be discussed. Among these issues are the language of modern African literature and the current debate as to whether African writers in the West writing and publishing there are still African writers. Cultural identity and what constitutes what Abiola Irele describes as “the African imagination” will thus be the touchstones of any African literary canon. As a result of the postcolonial experience shared by many African and Asian societies, many of the issues relating to African literature.

African writers have an enduring propensity for social and political commitment. Their texts mostly reflect and refract the socio-political events in their societies. Initially, African literature was a tool for celebrating the heroic grandeur of the African past; later it was used for anti-colonial struggle. Presently, it is being employed as a veritable weapon for depicting the postcolonial disillusionment in African nations. Therefore, African literature is always chained to the experiences of the peoples of the continent. In this paper, an attempt is made to examine the dilemma of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka in terms of African sense and sensibility.

To examine the dilemma some questions are come out in front of us; Was it literature produced in Africa or about Africa? Could African literature be on any subject, or must it have an African theme? Should it embrace the whole continent or south of the Sahara, or just black Africa? And then the question of language; should it be in indigenous African languages or should it include Arabic, English, French, Portuguese, Afrikaans, and so on? The most striking question is about “Postcolonial Literature.” Does the “Postcolonial Literature” fulfill the expectation of the African Writers or solve the problem of dilemma? We can examine this problem by going through the writings of Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka. But firstly we should know what "Postcolonial Literature" is.

"Postcolonial Literature" is a hot commodity these days. On the one hand writers like Salman Rushdie and Arundhati Roy are best-selling authors; and on the other hand, no college English department worth its salt wants to be without a scholar who can knowledgeably discourse about postcolonial theory.

Taken literally, the term "postcolonial literature" would seem to label literature written by people living in countries formerly colonized by other nations. This is undoubtedly what the term originally meant, but there are many problems with this definition.

Many "postcolonial" authors do not share the general orientation of postcolonial scholars toward engaging in an ongoing critique of colonialism. Nigerian writers Chinua Achebe and Wole Soyinka, for instance, after writing powerful indictments of the British in their country, turned to exposing the deeds of native-born dictators and corrupt officials within their independent homeland. Although postcolonial scholars would explain this corruption as a by-product of colonialism, such authors commonly have little interest in pursuing this train of thought.

Indeed, "postcolonial" writers often move to England or North America because they have been exiled, or because they find a more receptive audience there, or simply in search of a more comfortable mode of living and even sometimes like Soyinka call upon the governments of these "neocolonialist" nations to come to the aid of freedom movements seeking to overthrow native tyrants.

It is notable that whenever writers from the postcolonial world like Soyinka, Derek Walcott, or Rushdie receive wide recognition they are denounced as unrepresentative and inferior to other, more obscure but more "legitimate" spokespeople.

Faced with the dilemma of wanting to make positive claims for certain ethnic groups or nationalities while simultaneously acknowledging individualism, some critics have put forward the concept of "strategic essentialism" in which one can speak in rather simplified forms of group identity for the purposes of struggle while debating within the group the finer shades of difference.

There are two major problems with this strategy, however. First, there are always dissenters within each group who speak out against the new corporate identity, and they are especially likely to be taken seriously by the very audiences targeted by strategic essentialism. Second, white conservatives have caught on to this strategy: they routinely denounce affirmative action, for instance, by quoting Martin Luther King, as if his only goal was "color blindness" rather than real economic and social equality. They snipe, fairly effectively, at any group, which puts forward corporate claims for any ethnic group by calling them racist. Strategic essentialism envisions a world in which internal debates among oppressed people can be sealed off from public debates with oppressors. Such a world does not exist.

The more it is examined, the more the postcolonial sphere crumbles. Though Jamaican, Nigerian, and Indian writers have much to say to each other; it is not clear that they should be lumped together.

In 1962 a conference of African literature in English language, the first African Writers Conference was held at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda. It was attended by many prominent African writers, including Chinua Achebe (winner of the Commonwealth Prize), Wole Soyinka (later Nobel Laureate in Literature), Ezekiel Mphahlele, Lewis Nkosi, Ngugi wa Thiong'o (then known as James Ngugi) and Rajat Neogy (founder of Transition Magazine).

The conference dealt with the issue of how the legacy of colonialism had left the African writer with a dilemma with regard to the language choice in writing. The questions raised and debated at the conference were:

· What constitutes African literature?

· Is it literature written by Africans, literature that depicts the African experience?

· Does African literature have to be written in African languages?

At the conference, several nationalist writers refused to acknowledge any literature written in non-African languages as being African literature. The conference is often regarded as a major milestone in African literature, and is thought to have defined many African authors' style of writing.

Achebe, a Nigerian novelist, poet, and short story writer, records transition, transformation, and tragedy in the modern history of his people. It has been noted "his realistic treatment of Nigerian life is as valuable anthropologically and sociologically as it is creatively. As chinua Achebe himself puts it in a lecture delivered in 1964 to the Nigerian Literary Association:

“The worst thing that can happen to any people is the loss of their dignity and self-respect. The writer’s duty is to help them regain it by showing them in human terms what happened to them, what they lost. There is a saying in Igbo that a man who can’t tell where the rain began to beat him cannot know where he dried his body. The writer can tell the people where the rain began to beat them. In Africa cannot perform this task unless he has a proper sense of history.”

Things Fall Apart is primarily a realist novel, period. Therefore, it is hardly likely to romanticize, sentimentalize or falsify either the pre-colonial experience, or critical, but not single, moment of colonial encounter when Achebe’s represented and reinvented tribes first severally experienced and sustained the shock of the impact, on their total way of life which had been sediment and sustained over centuries, of an advanced and modernised Europe culture.

This impact is felt and experienced in three main spheres of social-cultural activity- religion, trade and legal system, this last backed by police and military. Achebe assimilates and absorbs into his narrative a general history of the colonial impact directly, concretely, empirically and existentially, through his depiction of how it changed and scarred local lives in separate but also representative places like, for example, Umoufia, Mbanta, and Abame.

Things Fall Apart turns out to present the whole tragic drama of a society, vividly and concretely enacted in the tragic destiny of a representative individual. This use of an individual character as a symbolic receptacle, the living theatre, of a social dilemma, is what gives Achebe's novels their real measure of strength—it explains what for me is the weakness of his second novel: No Longer at Ease, and the achievement of his third novel, Arrow of God.

Like Chinua Achebe, Wole Soyinka also has been suffering from the dilemma of African’s sense and sensibility. He was born to Yoruba parents in 1934. His works are really artistic hybrids of mixed Yoruba and European parentage, blending African themes, imagery and performances idioms with Western techniques and stylistic influences. Though he has spoken of the Yoruba in which he grew up as “one seamless existence” of Christian and Yoruba elements- Bible stories and indigenous folklore- the impression left by his account of his parsonage-based childhood in Ake is that, in his upbringing as in his schooling, Christianity was a primary and Yoruba religion a secondary influence, and that he came late to the latter, perhaps with some of the fanaticism of the convert as well as the sharpened objectivity of the outsider. It was not until his mid twenties, and after a Western academic education, that Soyinka undertook any firsthand study of indigenous ritual, religious, and dramatic forms. Nevertheless, the Yoruba heritage has been famous throughout its diasporic history for its quiet resilience and capacity for survival in foreign languages and cultures, not to mention artistic forms and theories, and the remarkable ease with which Soyinka “gave up Christianity” when the “first opportunity” arose evinces a deep and abiding substratum of Yoruba but a Yoruba-based eclecticism. The celebrative festivals that are so crucial to farming peoples and punctuate the Yoruba agricultural year supply his early plays with their atmospherics, moral symbolism and structural design. Though the tonality of Yoruba- a musical language chanted rather than spoken- does not translate into English, its wealth of images, proverbs, and folkloric motifs survives the transplantation to foreign forms in Soyinka’s works. According to Martin Tucker;

“Soyinka’s plays, on one level, are about the conflict between past and present, between tribal beliefs and modern expediency. He was both critical and appreciative of both ways of life. What he was most attached to were those universal features of character that distinguish a man no matter when he was born.”

Generally, the plays of Wole Soyinka, like those of Bernard Shaw, are triggered off by a real-life incident. The Lion and the Jewel was triggered by Soyinka’s reading about Charlie Chaplin’s marriage at the age of nearly sixty to the teenaged Oona O’nell, daughter of the American playwright Eugene O’Nell. Like The Swamp Dwellers, The Lion and the Jewel deals with traditional village life experimenting with mime and dance elements as an integral part of the comedy. It is rollicking comic satire of the clash between the self-indulgent, crafty but shrewd tribal chieftainship and superficially Westernised at the primary school-master lever.

In The Lion and the Jewel there is ample use of dance, song and mime. The play is very simple in its structure and is a musical. It shows deep familiarity of Soyinka with the various aspects of African tradition and also the influences of the modern world on the African mind.

In 2011, under the aegis of African Heritage Research Library and Cultural Centre, a writers' enclave has been built in honor of Professor Wole Soyinka. The location is Adeyipo Village, Lagelu Local Government Area, Ibadan, Oyo State, Nigeria. The main objectives of the Enclave, amongst others, are:

· To promote African and World Literatures.

· To provide a conducive atmosphere for the improvement of writers' craft.

· To increase world-wide knowledge and appreciation of African literatures.

· To raise the standard of African literature toward ensuring its active participation in cultural and national development.

· To initiate an endowment for a prestigious African Writers' Prize.

It is hoped that their works will impact positively on the lives of all categories of literary audience; youth, adult and the general public, throughout Africa and the entire world.

References:

1. ‘Date-Line on Soyinka; New Theatre Magazine.

2. Asiatic, Volume-3, Number-1, June-2009

3. Wole Soyinka; Politics, Poetics and Postcolonialism by Biodun Jeyifo, Cornell University.

4. Black Africa Literature in English, 1982-1986

5. www.wikipedia.org

6. www.sparknotes.com

7. www.enotes.com

Mrs Dalloway by Virginia Woolf

2011-10-16T02:48:00.000-07:00

Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.

For Lucy had her work cut out for her. The doors would be taken off their hinges; Rumpelmayer’s men were coming. And then, thought Clarissa Dalloway, what a morning — fresh as if issued to children on a beach.
What a lark! What a plunge! For so it had always seemed to her, when, with a little squeak of the hinges, which she could hear now, she had burst open the French windows and plunged at Bourton into the open air. How fresh, how calm, stiller than this of course, the air was in the early morning; like the flap of a wave; the kiss of a wave; chill and sharp and yet (for a girl of eighteen as she then was) solemn, feeling as she did, standing there at the open window, that something awful was about to happen; looking at the flowers, at the trees with the smoke winding off them and the rooks rising, falling; standing and looking until Peter Walsh said, “Musing among the vegetables?”— was that it?—“I prefer men to cauliflowers”— was that it? He must have said it at breakfast one morning when she had gone out on to the terrace — Peter Walsh. He would be back from India one of these days, June or July, she forgot which, for his letters were awfully dull; it was his sayings one remembered; his eyes, his pocket-knife, his smile, his grumpiness and, when millions of things had utterly vanished — how strange it was!— a few sayings like this about cabbages

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Report on The Caretaker by Harold Pinter

2011-09-27T02:45:00.000-07:00

“I went into a room and saw one person standing up and one person sitting down, and few weeks later I wrote The Room. I went into another room and saw two people sitting down, and a few years later I wrote The Birthday Party. I looked through a door into a third room and saw two people standing up and I wrote The Caretaker.”- Harold Pinter’s tongue for how he wrote The Caretaker.

The Caretaker is a play by Harold Pinter. It was first published by both Encore Publishing and Eyre Methuen in 1960. The action of the play takes place in a house in west London. This play is a study of the unexpected strength of family ties against an intruder. Family relationships are one of the main thematic concerns of the play.

Another prevalent theme is the characters' inability to communicate productively with one another. The play depends more on dialogue than on action; however, though there are fleeting moments in which each of them does seem to reach some understanding with the other, more often, they avoid communicating with one another as a result of their own psychological insecurities and self-concerns. The theme of isolation appears to result from the characters' inability to communicate with one another, and the characters' own narrowness seems to make worse their difficulty in communicating with others.

The characters also engage in deceiving one another and themselves. Davies uses an assumed name and has convinced himself that he is really going to resolve his problems relating to his lack of identity papers, even though he appears too lazy to take any such responsibility for his own actions and blames. Aston believes that his dream of building a shed will eventually reach completion, despite his mental disability. Mick believes that his ambitions for a successful career outweigh his responsibility to care for his mentally damaged brother. In the end however all three men are deceiving themselves. Their lives may continue on beyond the end of the play just as they are at the beginning and throughout it. The deceit and isolation in the play lead to a world where time, place, identity, and language are ambiguous and fluid.

The language and plot of The Caretaker blends realism with the Theatre of the Absurd. In the Theatre of the Absurd language is used in a manner that heightens the audience's awareness of the language itself, often through repetition of dialogue. The play has often been compared to Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, and other absurd plays because of its apparent lack of plot and action.

The Caretaker is filled with exaggerate rants and the language is either choppy dialogue or long speeches that are a vocalized train of thought. Although, the text is presented in a casual way there is always a message behind its simplicity. Pinter is often concerned with "communication itself, or rather the deliberate evasion of communication".

The play's disconnected language and rhythms are musically balanced through strategically placed pauses. Pinter toys with silence, where it is used in the play and what emphasis it places on the words when they are at last spoken.

The Caretaker is a drama of mixed modes; both tragic and comic, it is a tragicomedy. Elements of comedy appear in the monologues of Davies and Mick, and the characters' interactions at times even approach farce. For instance, the first scene of Act Two, which critics have compared to the hat and shoe sequences in Beckett's Waiting for Godot, is particularly farcical:

ASTON offers the bag to DAVIES.
MICK grabs it.
ASTON takes it.
MICK grabs it.
DAVIES reaches for it.
ASTON takes it.
MICK reaches for it.
ASTON gives it to DAVIES.
MICK grabs it. Pause.

Davies' confusion, repetitions, and attempts to deceive both brothers and to play each one against the other are also farcical. Davies has pretended to be someone else and using an assumed name, "Bernard Jenkins". But, in response to separate inquiries by Aston and Mick, it appears that Davies' real name is not really "Bernard Jenkins" but that it is "Mac Davies" and that he is actually Welsh and not English, a fact that he is attempting to conceal throughout the play and that motivates him to "get down to Sidcup", the past location of a British Army Records Office, to get his identity "papers".

The elements of tragedy occur in Aston's climactic monologue about his shock treatments in "that place" and at the end of the play, though the ending is still somewhat ambiguous: at the very end, it appears that the brothers are turning Davies, an old homeless man, out of what may be his last chance for shelter, mainly because of his inabilities to adjust socially to one another, or their respective "anti-social" qualities.

We can summarize the play by saying:

“Aston, a young man in his early thirties, rescues a poor old tramp from a fight. He brings him home to his room in a large house, gives him a place to sleep and offers him a job as caretaker. The tramp is reluctant to take the job, but he obviously likes the shelter and struggles to establish a foothold in the room. Mick, Aston’s younger brother, sees through the old man immediately and reacts by threatening him with violence, yet stops short of throwing him out, possibly out of respect for his brother. The three are caught up in a battle for power and territory that centres absurdly on a room full of junk. Davies, the old man, tries to play one brother against the other in his fight for space and status, changing his alliances constantly as he struggles to possess and hold a position in the house. The way that these three characters behave with each other has had the power to captivate audiences since the play’s first production in 1960. It deals with human responses that are basic to all mankind and that express a darker sense of man’s insecurity, aggressiveness or hypocrisy. In addition to the characters’ pursuit of status and power over one another, other themes that are touched on in the play include self delusion, the difficulty of communication, racism, family, mental illness and the plight of the poor. The depth and perception shown in the author’s dialogue, plus his use of both comedy and tragedy, all contribute to The Caretaker’s reputation as a modern masterpiece.”

A Passage to India

2011-09-14T03:30:00.000-07:00

Themes, Motifs & Symbols

The Difficulty of English-Indian Friendship

A Passage to India begins and ends by posing the question of whether it is possible for an Englishman and an Indian to ever be friends, at least within the context of British colonialism. Forster uses this question as a framework to explore the general issue of Britain’s political control of India on a more personal level, through the friendship between Aziz and Fielding. At the beginning of the novel, Aziz is scornful of the English, wishing only to consider them comically or ignore them completely. Yet the intuitive connection Aziz feels with Mrs. Moore in the mosque opens him to the possibility of friendship with Fielding. Through the first half of the novel, Fielding and Aziz represent a positive model of liberal humanism: Forster suggests that British rule in India could be successful and respectful if only English and Indians treated each other as Fielding and Aziz treat each other—as worthy individuals who connect through frankness, intelligence, and good will. Yet in the aftermath of the novel’s climax—Adela’s accusation that Aziz attempted to assault her and her subsequent disavowal of this accusation at the trial—Aziz and Fielding’s friendship falls apart. The strains on their relationship are external in nature, as Aziz and Fielding both suffer from the tendencies of their cultures. Aziz tends to let his imagination run away with him and to let suspicion harden into a grudge. Fielding suffers from an English literalism and rationalism that blind him to Aziz’s true feelings and make Fielding too stilted to reach out to Aziz through conversations or letters. Furthermore, their respective Indian and English communities pull them apart through their mutual stereotyping. As we see at the end of the novel, even the landscape of India seems to oppress their friendship. Forster’s final vision of the possibility of English-Indian friendship is a pessimistic one, yet it is qualified by the possibility of friendship on English soil, or after the liberation of India. As the landscape itself seems to imply at the end of the novel, such a friendship may be possible eventually, but “not yet.”

The Unity of All Living Things

Though the main characters of A Passage to India are generally Christian or Muslim, Hinduism also plays a large thematic role in the novel. The aspect of Hinduism with which Forster is particularly concerned is the religion’s ideal of all living things, from the lowliest to the highest, united in love as one. This vision of the universe appears to offer redemption to India through mysticism, as individual differences disappear into a peaceful collectivity that does not recognize hierarchies. Individual blame and intrigue is forgone in favor of attention to higher, spiritual matters. Professor Godbole, the most visible Hindu in the novel, is Forster’s mouthpiece for this idea of the unity of all living things. Godbole alone remains aloof from the drama of the plot, refraining from taking sides by recognizing that all are implicated in the evil of Marabar. Mrs. Moore, also, shows openness to this aspect of Hinduism. Though she is a Christian, her experience of India has made her dissatisfied with what she perceives as the smallness of Christianity. Mrs. Moore appears to feel a great sense of connection with all living creatures, as evidenced by her respect for the wasp in her bedroom. Yet, through Mrs. Moore, Forster also shows that the vision of the oneness of all living things can be terrifying. As we see in Mrs. Moore’s experience with the echo that negates everything into “boum” in Marabar, such oneness provides unity but also makes all elements of the universe one and the same—a realization that, it is implied, ultimately kills Mrs. Moore. Godbole is not troubled by the idea that negation is an inevitable result when all things come together as one. Mrs. Moore, however, loses interest in the world of relationships after envisioning this lack of distinctions as a horror. Moreover, though Forster generally endorses the Hindu idea of the oneness of all living things, he also suggests that there may be inherent problems with it. Even Godbole, for example, seems to recognize that something—if only a stone—must be left out of the vision of oneness if the vision is to cohere. This problem of exclusion is, in a sense, merely another manifestation of the individual difference and hierarchy that Hinduism promises to overcome.

The “Muddle” of India

Forster takes great care to strike a distinction between the ideas of “muddle” and “mystery” in A Passage to India. “Muddle” has connotations of dangerous and disorienting disorder, whereas “mystery” suggests a mystical, orderly plan by a spiritual force that is greater than man. Fielding, who acts as Forster’s primary mouthpiece in the novel, admits that India is a “muddle,” while figures such as Mrs. Moore and Godbole view India as a mystery. The muddle that is India in the novel appears to work from the ground up: the very landscape and architecture of the countryside is formless, and the natural life of plants and animals defies identification. This muddled quality to the environment is mirrored in the makeup of India’s native population, which is mixed into a muddle of different religious, ethnic, linguistic, and regional groups. The muddle of India disorients Adela the most; indeed, the events at the Marabar Caves that trouble her so much can be seen as a manifestation of this muddle. By the end of the novel, we are still not sure what actually has happened in the caves. Forster suggests that Adela’s feelings about Ronny become externalized and muddled in the caves, and that she suddenly experiences these feelings as something outside of her. The muddle of India also affects Aziz and Fielding’s friendship, as their good intentions are derailed by the chaos of cross-cultural signals. Though Forster is sympathetic to India and Indians in the novel, his overwhelming depiction of India as a muddle matches the manner in which many Western writers of his day treated the East in their works. As the noted critic Edward Said has pointed out, these authors’ “orientalizing” of the East made Western logic and capability appear self-evident, and, by extension, portrayed the West’s domination of the East as reasonable or even necessary.

The Negligence of British Colonial Government

Though A Passage to India is in many ways a highly symbolic, or even mystical, text, it also aims to be a realistic documentation of the attitudes of British colonial officials in India. Forster spends large sections of the novel characterizing different typical attitudes the English hold toward the Indians whom they control. Forster’s satire is most harsh toward Englishwomen, whom the author depicts as overwhelmingly racist, self-righteous, and viciously condescending to the native population. Some of the Englishmen in the novel are as nasty as the women, but Forster more often identifies Englishmen as men who, though condescending and unable to relate to Indians on an individual level, are largely well-meaning and invested in their jobs. For all Forster’s criticism of the British manner of governing India, however, he does not appear to question the right of the British Empire to rule India. He suggests that the British would be well served by becoming kinder and more sympathetic to the Indians with whom they live, but he does not suggest that the British should abandon India outright. Even this lesser critique is never overtly stated in the novel, but implied through biting satire.

Motifs

Motifs are recurring structures, contrasts, or literary devices that can help to develop and inform the text’s major themes.

The Echo

The echo begins at the Marabar Caves: first Mrs. Moore and then Adela hear the echo and are haunted by it in the weeks to come. The echo’s sound is “boum”—a sound it returns regardless of what noise or utterance is originally made. This negation of difference embodies the frightening flip side of the seemingly positive Hindu vision of the oneness and unity of all living things. If all people and things become the same thing, then no distinction can be made between good and evil. No value system can exist. The echo plagues Mrs. Moore until her death, causing her to abandon her beliefs and cease to care about human relationships. Adela, however, ultimately escapes the echo by using its message of impersonality to help her realize Aziz’s innocence.

Eastern and Western Architecture

Forster spends time detailing both Eastern and Western architecture in A Passage to India. Three architectural structures—though one is naturally occurring—provide the outline for the book’s three sections, “Mosque,” “Caves,” and “Temple.” Forster presents the aesthetics of Eastern and Western structures as indicative of the differences of the respective cultures as a whole. In India, architecture is confused and formless: interiors blend into exterior gardens, earth and buildings compete with each other, and structures appear unfinished or drab. As such, Indian architecture mirrors the muddle of India itself and what Forster sees as the Indians’ characteristic inattention to form and logic. Occasionally, however, Forster takes a positive view of Indian architecture. The mosque in Part I and temple in Part III represent the promise of Indian openness, mysticism, and friendship. Western architecture, meanwhile, is described during Fielding’s stop in Venice on his way to England. Venice’s structures, which Fielding sees as representative of Western architecture in general, honor form and proportion and complement the earth on which they are built. Fielding reads in this architecture the self-evident correctness of Western reason—an order that, he laments, his Indian friends would not recognize or appreciate.

Godbole’s Song

At the end of Fielding’s tea party, Godbole sings for the English visitors a Hindu song, in which a milkmaid pleads for God to come to her or to her people. The song’s refrain of “Come! come” recurs throughout A Passage to India, mirroring the appeal for the entire country of salvation from something greater than itself. After the song, Godbole admits that God never comes to the milkmaid. The song greatly disheartens Mrs. Moore, setting the stage for her later spiritual apathy, her simultaneous awareness of a spiritual presence and lack of confidence in spiritualism as a redeeming force. Godbole seemingly intends his song as a message or lesson that recognition of the potential existence of a God figure can bring the world together and erode differences—after all, Godbole himself sings the part of a young milkmaid. Forster uses the refrain of Godbole’s song, “Come! come,” to suggest that India’s redemption is yet to come.

Symbols

Symbols are objects, characters, figures, or colors used to represent abstract ideas or concepts.

The Marabar Caves

The Marabar Caves represent all that is alien about nature. The caves are older than anything else on the earth and embody nothingness and emptiness—a literal void in the earth. They defy both English and Indians to act as guides to them, and their strange beauty and menace unsettles visitors. The caves’ alien quality also has the power to make visitors such as Mrs. Moore and Adela confront parts of themselves or the universe that they have not previously recognized. The all-reducing echo of the caves causes Mrs. Moore to see the darker side of her spirituality—a waning commitment to the world of relationships and a growing ambivalence about God. Adela confronts the shame and embarrassment of her realization that she and Ronny are not actually attracted to each other, and that she might be attracted to no one. In this sense, the caves both destroy meaning, in reducing all utterances to the same sound, and expose or narrate the unspeakable, the aspects of the universe that the caves’ visitors have not yet considered.

The Green Bird

Just after Adela and Ronny agree for the first time, in Chapter VII, to break off their engagement, they notice a green bird sitting in the tree above them. Neither of them can positively identify the bird. For Adela, the bird symbolizes the unidentifiable quality of all of India: just when she thinks she can understand any aspect of India, that aspect changes or disappears. In this sense, the green bird symbolizes the muddle of India. In another capacity, the bird points to a different tension between the English and Indians. The English are obsessed with knowledge, literalness, and naming, and they use these tools as a means of gaining and maintaining power. The Indians, in contrast, are more attentive to nuance, undertone, and the emotions behind words. While the English insist on labeling things, the Indians recognize that labels can blind one to important details and differences. The unidentifiable green bird suggests the incompatibility of the English obsession with classification and order with the shifting quality of India itself—the land is, in fact, a “hundred Indias” that defy labeling and understanding.

The Wasp

The wasp appears several times in A Passage to India, usually in conjunction with the Hindu vision of the oneness of all living things. The wasp is usually depicted as the lowest creature the Hindus incorporate into their vision of universal unity. Mrs. Moore is closely associated with the wasp, as she finds one in her room and is gently appreciative of it. Her peaceful regard for the wasp signifies her own openness to the Hindu idea of collectivity, and to the mysticism and indefinable quality of India in general. However, as the wasp is the lowest creature that the Hindus visualize, it also represents the limits of the Hindu vision. The vision is not a panacea, but merely a possibility for unity and understanding in India.

Important Quotations Explained

1. In every remark [Aziz] found a meaning, but not always the true meaning, and his life though vivid was largely a dream.

This quotation occurs in Chapter VII during Aziz and Fielding’s first meeting at Fielding’s house, just before the tea party. Fielding has just made a brief comment in which he meant that the post-impressionist school of painting, to which Aziz has just made joking reference, is obscure and silly. Aziz, however, takes Fielding’s comment to mean that it is silly for Aziz to have Western cultural knowledge. Aziz’s embarrassment and discontent does not last long in this instance, but the incident foreshadows the misunderstandings that eventually break down the men’s friendship.

Aziz’s capacity for imagination and intuition leads him to genuine and deep friendships with Mrs. Moore and Fielding. However, Forster also shows that Aziz’s intuition, which lacks grounding in fact, can lead him astray. In the aftermath of his trial, Aziz’s false hunch that Fielding is courting Adela Quested leads to the breakdown of the men’s relationship. In the above quotation, an early case of this false intuition, we see that Forster lays the blame for the breakdown on Aziz. Forster does not fault the difficulties of cross-cultural interaction, but rather Aziz’s overactive imagination.

This flaw in Aziz’s character, in a sense, also stands for a flaw of India itself. Forster presents Aziz’s attitudes toward others as unfounded in reality. Cut off from a logical cause, Aziz’s responses damage relationships rather than build them. This cut-off quality is later mirrored in the very landscape of India: the land around the Marabar Caves, described in Chapter XIV, appears “cut off at its root” and “infected with illusion.” Forster presents India and Aziz as somewhat threatening to the logical and reasonable apprehension and reaction to reality that the author sees as epitomized by Western order.

This type of narrative comment that diagnoses Aziz’s character is characteristic of Forster’s writing. The author is concerned with presenting actions and dialogue, but he also seeks to draw comparisons and distinctions, to categorize and characterize. Indeed, Forster tells and comments as much as he shows. Still, not all of Forster’s narrative diagnoses can be taken as absolute truth that stands throughout the novel. Though Forster depicts Aziz’s imaginativeness as a handicap here, in other scenes we see that Forster values it.

2. Fielding did not even want to [correct Aziz]; he had dulled his craving for verbal truth and cared chiefly for truth of mood. As for Miss Quested, she accepted everything Aziz said as true verbally. In her ignorance, she regarded him as “India,” and never surmised that his outlook was limited and his method inaccurate, and that no one is India.

This passage, occurring at Fielding’s tea party later in Chapter VII, highlights a major distinction between the English and the Indians. Forster shows that Indians value the emotion and purpose behind a statement more than the literal words being stated. Indeed, we see that Aziz often tells lies—or, at least, lies by English standards—that are nonetheless truthful to Aziz himself because they reflect his desire to be hospitable, or because they serve to keep a conversation progressing smoothly. Similarly, other Indians, such as the Nawab Bahadur, give elaborate speeches that seem to have no coherent point, but that serve to rescue the other party from disgrace or impoliteness. Whereas the Indians seem to favor indirect speech, the English value statements primarily on the basis of literal truth. The English are incapable of intuiting the larger purpose or underlying tone behind a speech. Fielding’s ability, as seen in this quotation, to respect statements for their mood as well as their truth, shows that he has learned cross-cultural lessons and can interact with Indians on their own standards, rather than his own.

This passage also highlights a problem with Adela’s approach to India. Adela is still caught up with English literalism, even though she is well meaning and her intelligent individualism sets her apart from the rest of the English. Without a capacity for sympathy or affectionate understanding, Adela cannot realize that she is evaluating Indians on her own terms, rather than their terms. Adela’s relationship with Aziz is, in this sense, without understanding or compassion. Rather, it is somewhat materialistic—Adela wants to know the “real India,” and she expects Aziz to render it for her. This goal in itself is Adela’s second mistake: whereas she seeks a single India, the real India exists in hundreds of guises, and no single Indian can offer an entire sense of it.

3. [Mrs. Moore] felt increasingly (vision or nightmare?) that, though people are important, the relations between them are not, and that in particular too much fuss has been made over marriage.

This quotation, appearing in Chapter XIV during the train ride to the Marabar Caves, foreshadows Mrs. Moore’s upcoming crisis with the cave echo. Ever since setting foot in India—or, more specifically, since hearing Godbole’s religious song in Chapter VII—Mrs. Moore has felt a spiritual presence larger than her own Christian God. The largeness of this presence frightens Mrs. Moore and convinces her that human interactions are petty and meaningless. Her crisis at Marabar reinforces this feeling and leads her to paralyzing apathy. Mrs. Moore’s vision, which shows that something larger than man encompasses the entire world and renders it equal, is a sort of negative version of Godbole’s Hindu vision. The Hindu vision of the oneness of all living things finds comfort and joy in surrendering individual existence to the collective. Though Mrs. Moore takes this vision of impersonality to mean that human relationships are meaningless, the vision can also be liberating. Indeed, it is through a similar vision of impersonality that Adela is able to realize that Aziz is innocent and that she must proclaim him so, regardless of the cost to her own person and reputation.

This passage also evinces Forster’s subtle critique of the institution of marriage. Mrs. Moore and Fielding, both potential mouthpieces for Forster himself, express distaste for marriage, specifically because it does not lead to a fruitful relationship that enlightens one about oneself or others. Few marriages exist in A Passage to India; indeed, we witness the breakdown of two—Ronny and Adela’s before it even starts, and the McBrydes’ through adultery. As such, Forster implies that the English sentimentalize the domestic structure of husband, wife, and children. They view this structure as a sacred symbol of all that is good about the British Empire, though the author contends that, in reality, domestic situations can lead to trouble and ignorance.

4. “Your emotions never seem in proportion to their objects, Aziz.”
“Is emotion a sack of potatoes, so much the pound, to be measured out? Am I a machine?”

This exchange occurs in Chapter XXVII, as Aziz and Fielding’s relationship begins to break down in the face of Fielding’s new respect and advocacy for Adela. Though Aziz and Fielding have several misunderstandings during this time, their main conflict centers on the issue of reparation money from Adela. Aziz seeks damages from Adela in the aftermath of the trial, but Fielding believes that Adela should be given some credit for her bravery, rather than ruined financially. Fielding points out that Aziz loves Mrs. Moore, who has done nothing for Aziz, but begrudges Adela even after she has risked her own reputation and marriage to eventually pronounce Aziz innocent. Aziz and Fielding’s disagreement over this issue demonstrates the larger disparity between their worldviews. Fielding, who values logic and reason, sees Aziz as fickle and irrational because he bases his feelings on intuitions and connections that Fielding cannot see or understand. Aziz, conversely, sees Fielding as succumbing to the materialism and literalism of the rest of the English. The two men often have lively conversations, but this quotation shows one new trend in their discussions: they directly disagree with each other and say so. Notably, Fielding is often the one who initially expresses dissatisfaction with Aziz’s behavior or opinions. Fielding becomes more judgmental and less patient in the aftermath of the trial.

This quotation also highlights the larger issue of British rule over India. Britain’s control of India began initially as a capitalist venture with the British East India Company. As such, Britain appears to see itself as taking the muddle and inefficiency of India and turning it into an orderly, profitable, capitalist system. Aziz objects to this kind of materialism, believing it values profit and efficiency over intangible matters of spirit and love.

5. Were there worlds beyond which they could never touch, or did all that is possible enter their consciousness? They could not tell. . . . Perhaps life is a mystery, not a muddle. . . . Perhaps the hundred Indias which fuss and squabble so tiresomely are one, and the universe they mirror is one. They had not the apparatus for judging.

In this quotation from Chapter XXIX, which details Fielding’s and Adela’s reactions to Adela’s strange experience at Marabar, Forster shows the inadequacy of English rationalism to evaluate mystical India. Adela is unable to articulate her frightening experience in the caves, even after her vision at the trial shows her Aziz’s innocence. She and Fielding both approach the problem logically, attempting to outline a number of possible explanations: hallucination, the absence of the guide, and so on. Though Adela and Fielding are committed to rationally explaining the occurrence, each of their explanations falls short of Adela’s experience. Here, we begin to see that Adela’s experience in the cave stands as a sort of synecdoche—a metaphor that takes a part for the whole—for the entire experience of the foreignness of India. Like Marabar, India presents a confused set of stimulants, not all of which can be incorporated into a dominant explanation or interpretation. The only possible way to understand and classify the chaos of Marabar and India is to ascribe these mysteries to a force larger than humanity—a mystical force. Once mysticism is acknowledged, the “muddle” of Marabar becomes a “mystery,” and the strangeness of India comes to appear as a coherent whole.

This passage also shows Fielding and Aziz coming closer to each other through mutual respect and similar experience. Though Fielding does not like Adela for much of the novel, disagreeing with her theoretical and unemotional approach to Indians and India, the two do share a level of rationalism and non-spiritualism. Both are -atheists in a way and cannot truly fathom mystical presence as Mrs. Moore can. Fielding begins to respect Adela for her frank objectivity and her willingness to admit that she is unable to explain what happened in the caves. Through conversations like this one, Adela and Fielding grow closer by acknowledging the strangeness of the India around them. Aziz senses that this is the tenor of Adela and Fielding’s friendship, and he begins to resent Fielding for it.

Study Questions & Essay Topics

1. What do Adela and Mrs. Moore hope to get out of their visit to India? Do they succeed?

From the outset, both Mrs. Moore and Adela assert that their desire is to see the “real India” while they are in the country. Both women are frustrated with the lack of interaction between the English and the Indians, and they hope to get an authentic view of India rather than the standard tour for visiting colonials. Of the two, Mrs. Moore is less vocal than Adela in her impatience to discover the spirit of India, and she seems to be provisionally more successful in her goal. While Adela mopes in the Chandrapore Club, Mrs. Moore is already out on her own meeting Aziz in the mosque. Mrs. Moore, it seems, gets closer to a real sense of India because she seeks it out within Indians themselves, approaching them with sincere sympathy and interest. She does not desire to learn facts about Indian culture, but to forge a personal, individual connection. Adela, on the other hand, does not look to Indians for a glimpse of the “real India.” Instead, she operates in a somewhat academic vein, going around and trying to gather information and impressions of the country. Adela wishes to get in contact with the “spirit” behind the “frieze” of India, but she skips the step in between. Rather than regard Indians as people like herself, she seems to view them as subjects for intellectual study.

Ultimately, both women largely fail in their quest to see the “real India.” Adela is thwarted before she even begins: her engagement to Ronny forces her to give up her quest for communion with India and to take her place among the ranks of the rest of the Englishwomen in Chandrapore. Mrs. Moore, at least, realizes her mistaken quest before leaving India. On her train ride back to the coast to catch a return ship to England, Mrs. Moore begins to understand that she and Adela have both been misguided in their search for a single India. Mrs. Moore realizes that India exists in hundreds of ways and that it cannot be fathomed by a single mind or in a single visit.

2. What causes Adela’s breakdown? Why does she accuse Aziz? What qualities enable her to admit the truth at the trial?

Adela is an intelligent and inquisitive girl, but she has a limited worldview, and is, as Fielding puts it, a “prig.” Adela has come to India to experience an adventure and to gauge her desire to marry Ronny. During the early stages of the visit, she weighs both her emotions and her experiences with an almost clinical precision. Adela wants to see the “real India,” which apparently means an India unfiltered through the lens of English people and colonial institutions. But in her desire to have a single authentic experience and a single authentic understanding of India, Adela is unable to take in the complexity of her surroundings, which have been muddled even further by the presence of the English. There is no real India; there are a hundred real Indias. But Adela’s attempt to make her Indian experience match her comfortable preconceptions cannot prepare her for this fact. As the muddle of India slowly works its way into her mind, it undermines her preconceptions without giving her anything with which to replace them.

On the way to the Marabar Caves, Adela realizes for the first time that she does not love Ronny. The sheer incomprehensibility of experience—as represented by the echo in the caves—overwhelms her for the first time. Traumatized, Adela feels not only as though her world is breaking down, but as though India itself is responsible for the breakdown. This idea solidifies in her mind as the idea that Aziz, an Indian, has attacked and attempted to rape her. Still, Adela is committed to the truth and has a strong mind. When she sees Aziz at the trial, she reenters the scene in her mind in a sort of disembodied vision. She realizes that her actions are ruining a real person’s life, and she is therefore able to pull back and withdraw her charge before a verdict can be handed down.

3. What purpose does Part III, “Temple,” play in A Passage to India?

The first issue that Forster addresses in A Passage to India is whether or not an Englishman and an Indian can be friends. Parts I and II of the novel depict the friendship of Aziz and Fielding, first on the ascendant, and then as it breaks apart. Part II leaves us with a pessimistic sense that cross-cultural communication is futile, and that such friendships cause more hurt than good. Part III, however, gives us a measured resolution to this issue. In this final section of the novel, Fielding and Aziz meet again after two years and resolve their misunderstandings—though not their differences. Forster shows that while outside forces can make cross-cultural friendships nearly impossible, the friendships themselves, whether successful or not, are still a valuable experience. The pessimistic ending of Part II is thus tempered by Forster’s depiction of Aziz and Fielding in Part III.

Additionally, Forster uses Part III to address the issue of how a foreigner can best understand and make peace with the “muddle” of India. Throughout Parts I and II, Forster shows several main characters—Mrs. Moore, Adela, Fielding—experiencing spiritual crises in the face of the chaos of Indian experience. Part III, which is set in the Hindu state of Mau during a Hindu religious festival, offers the Hindu vision of the oneness of all living things as a possible answer to the problem of comprehending India. The most mystical characters of the novel take the spotlight in Part III. Godbole serves in Mau as an educator and religious figure, and Mrs. Moore reappears through her two children, Ralph and Stella. If Forster is pessimistic about Fielding and Aziz’s friendship, in Part III he at least offers the collectivity of Hindu love as a potential source of hope and redeeming possibility.

Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy

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Study Questions of Anna Karenina:
1. There are two main plotlines in Anna Karenina—one involving Anna and Vronsky, the other involving Levin and Kitty. These two threads run parallel for most of the novel but occasionally intersect. Where are these intersections? What purpose do they serve in the overall scheme of the novel?

Answer:

Tolstoy explained in a famous letter—in response to a reviewer who accused the author of not structuring the plot of Anna Karenina carefully enough—that the Anna and Levin story lines are the two “vaults” of the novel but that the intersection or “cornerstone” joining them is not immediately visible. We must search out this intersection. The moments of the plot at which the two stories come together are few: Vronsky’s initial courtship of Kitty is one, and Levin’s meeting with Anna is another. The latter scene is loaded with importance for us, but the former occurs before we know how the plot will develop, so it is the more easily forgotten instance of crossover. But this former scene is nonetheless of great importance. When we consider what a marriage between Vronsky and Kitty might have been like, we are forced to assess the differences between Anna and Kitty as romantic partners for Vronsky—as well as the differences between Vronsky and Levin as mates for Kitty. While Kitty is instinctively comfortable with and sympathetic to Levin, she feels a strong romantic and sensual pull toward Vronsky. As Tolstoy repeatedly hints that good marriages are founded not on romance but on trusting companionship, we are invited to see Vronsky’s rejection of Kitty as a blessing in disguise, saving her from the deceptive lures of romantic passion. Likewise, Vronsky’s life with Kitty likely would have been more traditional and stable, and probably happier—though perhaps less rich and varied—than his life with Anna. In a life with the somewhat pedestrian Kitty, Vronsky surely would not have settled in Italy, started painting, or embarked on his grand hospital building project. It is Anna who nourishes such ambitions in him. Such “what if” questions, prompted by Tolstoy’s early but momentary joining of Vronsky and Kitty, encourage us to compare, analyze, and reflect in the way that a profound novel of ideas demands.

2. Though we might expect Anna and Vronsky’s flight to Italy to be an important turning point in Anna Karenina, in fact very little takes place in the Italian section of the novel. Why does Tolstoy bypass such a potential for drama by making the Italian sojourn so uneventful?

Answer:

Tolstoy’s decision to send Anna and Vronsky to Italy on their would-be honeymoon is an intentional attempt to set us up for disappointment—a disappointment that is crucial for our understanding of how ill-fated their relationship is. Italy, associated with romance and passion in Tolstoy’s time as much as now, figured as a dreamy paradise for lovers in popular love stories of the time. On one hand, Tolstoy purposely plays on that stereotype by sending his loving couple there, showing Anna happy in her Italian palazzo. On the other hand, he plays against the stereotype by presenting Anna and Vronsky’s Italian experience as curiously empty and uneventful. Indeed, their stay in Italy is less the grand culmination of their affair than an extended pause that makes us—and perhaps the lovers, too—wonder what will come next. They have little to do in Italy besides stroll, dabble at painting, and buy works of art. There are no fancy dress balls, officers’ races, or any of the other venues for social interaction that filled their lives before. The lack is noticeable.
What is missing in Italy, then, is Anna’s and Vronsky’s integration into society as a couple. Curiously, the very thing they have yearned to escape—Russian society—is what earlier gave structure and meaning to their existences. Italy cannot provide this structure, as Anna and Vronsky do not join Italian society and do not even seem to meet any Italians—not one Italian is fleshed out as a character in this section. The couple lives in a social vacuum, and the emptiness of their experience foreshadows the disappointments of their later life as outsiders to society.

3. The sudden turn toward the broad nationalism and politics of the “Slavic question” at the end of the novel comes as a stark contrast with the more family-based, personal focus of the earlier parts of the novel. Why might Tolstoy end his novel about happiness and the meaning of life with this thematic twist?

Answer:

Though Tolstoy was sympathetic to the plight of Slavic peoples under Turkish rule, he was skeptical of all nationalistic and patriotic bandwagons. He saw such group movements as based on a fantasy of solidarity rather than on actual, loving relationships between humans. He opposed war in general, later inspiring Gandhi with his pacifism, and wished to convey this sentiment in Anna Karenina. Though Tolstoy does not explicitly state his views on the Slavic issue in the novel, we nonetheless get hints that he is not a full supporter. Levin, who is often Tolstoy’s alter ego in the novel, opposes the Slavic cause. He complains that the cause purports to act on behalf of the Russian people when in fact most common Russians know nothing about it—the cause is largely a fantasy cooked up by newspapers to boost circulation.

Tolstoy also uses the Slavic question to offer a psychological diagnosis of why men become militant. When Vronsky and Koznyshev both get pulled into the cause of war in defense of the southern Slavs, Tolstoy throws a bit of cold water on their enthusiasm by showing how, in both men’s lives, political activism may cover up a traumatic personal loss. Koznyshev endures the devastating realization that his recently published book, a six-year labor of love, is worthless and unread; Vronsky, meanwhile, loses Anna, the love of his life. These losses prompt both men to sign up with the Slavic cause, partly as a means of distracting themselves. In this view of political activism and warfare as substitutes for fulfillment in private life, Tolstoy shows us the illusory side of government and statecraft. What Vronsky and Koznyshev both mistakenly aim for in their political activism is what Levin succeeds in finding in his everyday life—a sense of belonging to something larger than oneself. Koznyshev invents a fantasy of the Slavic people in order to assert his ties to the cause, but it is as mentally fabricated as his earlier research was—not real and experienced as Levin’s ties with Kitty, Mitya, and his peasants are. The Slavic cause at the end of the novel reminds us that everyone needs connections with others, but some of us invent false connections rather than seek out real ones.

Discussion of the answer of The Prince by Machiavelli

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The Prince:

Question and Answer

1. How does Machiavelli view human nature?

Machiavelli differs from the many political theorists who offer conceptions of a “natural state,” a presocial condition arising solely from human instinct and character. But while Machiavelli never puts forth a vision of what society would be like without civil government, he nonetheless presents a coherent, although not particularly comprehensive, vision of human nature.

Machiavelli mentions explicitly a number of traits innate among humans. People are generally self-interested, although their affections for others can be won and lost. They remain content and happy so long they avoid affliction or oppression. They might be trustworthy in prosperous times, but they can turn selfish, deceitful, and profit-driven in adverse times. They admire honor, generosity, courage, and piety in others, but most do not harbor these virtues. Ambition lies among those who have achieved some power, but most common people are satisfied with the way things are and therefore do not yearn to improve on the status quo. People will naturally feel obligated after receiving a favor or service, and this bond is usually not broken capriciously. Nevertheless, loyalties are won and lost, and goodwill is never absolute.

These statements about human nature often serve as justification for much of Machiavelli’s advice to princes. For example, a prince should never trust mercenary leaders because they, like most leaders, are overly ambitious. At the same time, while many of Machiavelli’s remarks on the subject seem reasonable, most are assumptions not grounded in evidence or popular notions and can easily be criticized. For example, a Hobbesian might argue that Machiavelli puts too much faith in people’s ability to remain content in the absence of government force. A related issue to explore, then, might be the extent to which Machiavelli’s political theory relies too heavily on any single, possibly fallacious depiction of human nature.

2. Is Machiavelli’s book “evil”? What role does virtue play in Macchiavelli’s state?

Some of the advice to rulers found in The Prince—most famously, the defense of cruelty toward subjects—has led to criticism that Machiavelli’s book is evil or amoral. Moreover, the explicit separation of politics from ethics and metaphysics seems to indicate that there is no role for any kind of virtue in Machiavelli’s state.

However, Machiavelli never advocates cruelty or other vices for their own sake. He advocates them only in the interests of safeguarding the state, which, in Machiavelli’s view, is a kind of ultimate good in its own right. Nor does he advocate that virtue should be shunned for its own sake. Indeed, Machiavelli states several times that when it is in the interests of the state, a prince must strive to act virtuously. But virtue should never take precedence over the state. Thus, generosity, which might be admired by others, is actually detrimental to the future prosperity of the state. It is for this reason alone that a prince should avoid it.

Machiavelli’s conception of virtue as defined in The Prince is not quite the same as that of classical theorists. Whereas Aristotle and others defined virtue in relation to some highest “good,” Machiavelli settles for a much more simplistic definition: that which receives the praise of others. Thus, generosity is a virtue, in the Machiavellian sense, only because other people praise it.

3. Compare and contrast the different ways in which a prince can rise to power.

According to Machiavelli, there are four main ways a prince can come into power. The first way is through prowess, meaning personal skill and ability. The second is through fortune, meaning good luck or the charity of friends. The third way is through crime, such as through a coup, conspiracy, or assassination. The fourth way is constitutional, meaning through the official support of either nobles or common people.

The most important comparison to be made is that between prowess and fortune. Obtaining a state through prowess is clearly more demanding than benefiting from simple good luck. But a prince gifted with his own prowess is possessed of a strong foundation to maintain that rule, whereas fortune is unpredictable and may lead as easily to a prince’s deposition as it had to his rise. Thus, maintaining rule is much easier when a prince has used his own skill. Because the maintenance of rule is most important to Machiavelli, he concludes that prowess is a better route to become a prince.

A second comparison might be made between criminal and constitutional means of achieving power. Here, the main point of difference is not the skill and experience of the prince but popular attitudes toward the prince. A prince who comes to power through crime runs the greatest risk because he may be forced to commit some cruelty toward his subjects, endangering himself by breeding hatred and resentment among the populace. A constitutional prince, however, comes to power with the support of either the nobles or commoners, and his job consists mainly of keeping the unsupportive group satisfied with his rule.

To sum up, prowess is to be preferred over fortune because prowess leads to a more effective ruler who is likely to garner lasting glory. Constitutional princes are preferable to criminal princes not only because they are more effective, but also because a criminal prince can achieve nothing other than power. A constitutional prince can achieve both power and glory.

The Prince

2011-03-09T04:43:00.000-08:00

Themes

Statesmanship & Warcraft

Machiavelli believes that good laws follow naturally from a good military. His famous statement that “the presence of sound military forces indicates the presence of sound laws” describes the relationship between developing states and war in The Prince. Machiavelli reverses the conventional understanding of war as a necessary, but not definitive, element of the development of states, and instead asserts that successful war is the very foundation upon which all states are built. Much of The Prince is devoted to describing exactly what it means to conduct a good war: how to effectively fortify a city, how to treat subjects in newly acquired territories, and how to prevent domestic insurrection that would distract from a successful war. But Machiavelli’s description of war encompasses more than just the direct use of military force—it comprises international diplomacy, domestic politics, tactical strategy, geographic mastery, and historical analysis. Within the context of Machiavelli’s Italy—when cities were constantly threatened by neighboring principalities and the area had suffered through power struggles for many years—his method of viewing almost all affairs of state through a military lens was a timely innovation in political thinking.

Goodwill & Hatred

To remain in power, a prince must avoid the hatred of his people. It is not necessary for him to be loved; in fact, it is often better for him to be feared. Being hated, however, can cause a prince’s downfall. This assertion might seem incompatible with Machiavelli’s statements on the utility of cruelty, but Machiavelli advocates the use of cruelty only insofar as it does not compromise the long-term goodwill of the people. The people’s goodwill is always the best defense against both domestic insurrection and foreign aggression. Machiavelli warns princes against doing things that might result in hatred, such as the confiscation of property or the dissolution of traditional institutions. Even installations that are normally valued for military use, such as fortresses, should be judged primarily on their potential to garner support for the prince. Indeed, only when he is absolutely sure that the people who hate him will never be able to rise against him can a prince cease to worry about incurring the hatred of any of his subjects. Ultimately, however, obtaining the goodwill of the people has little or nothing to do with a desire for the overall happiness of the populace. Rather, goodwill is a political instrument to ensure the stability of the prince’s reign.

Free Will

Machiavelli often uses the words “prowess” and “fortune” to describe two distinct ways in which a prince can come to power. “Prowess” refers to an individual’s talents, while “fortune” implies chance or luck. Part of Machiavelli’s aim in writing The Prince is to investigate how much of a prince’s success or failure is caused by his own free will and how much is determined by nature or the environment in which he lives. Machiavelli applies this question specifically to the failure of past Italian princes. In Chapter XXV, Machiavelli discusses the role of fortune in determining human affairs. He attempts to compromise between free will and determinism by arguing that fortune controls half of human actions and leaves the other half to free will. However, Machiavelli also argues that through foresight—a quality that he champions throughout the book—people can shield themselves against fortune’s vicissitudes. Thus, Machiavelli can be described as confident in the power of human beings to shape their destinies to a degree, but equally confident that human control over events is never absolute.

Virtue

Machiavelli defines virtues as qualities that are praised by others, such as generosity, compassion, and piety. He argues that a prince should always try to appear virtuous, but that acting virtuously for virtue’s sake can prove detrimental to the principality. A prince should not necessarily avoid vices such as cruelty or dishonesty if employing them will benefit the state. Cruelty and other vices should not be pursued for their own sake, just as virtue should not be pursued for its own sake: virtues and vices should be conceived as means to an end. Every action the prince takes must be considered in light of its effect on the state, not in terms of its intrinsic moral value.

Human Nature

Love endures by a bond which men, being scoundrels, may break whenever it serves their advantage to do so; but fear is supported by the dread of pain, which is ever present.

Machiavelli asserts that a number of traits are inherent in human nature. People are generally self-interested, although their affection for others can be won and lost. They are content and happy so long they are not victims of something terrible. They may be trustworthy in prosperous times, but they will quickly turn selfish, deceitful, and profit-driven in times of adversity. People admire honor, generosity, courage, and piety in others, but most of them do not exhibit these virtues themselves. Ambition is commonly found among those who have achieved some power, but most common people are satisfied with the status quo and therefore do not yearn for increased status. People will naturally feel a sense of obligation after receiving a favor or service, and this bond is usually not easily broken. Nevertheless, loyalties are won and lost, and goodwill is never absolute. Such statements about human nature are often offered up as justifications for the book’s advice to princes. While Machiavelli backs up his political arguments with concrete historical evidence, his statements about society and human nature sometimes have the character of assumptions rather than observations.

Overview of the Prince

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Overview of The Prince

Machiavelli composed The Prince as a practical guide for ruling. This goal is evident from the very beginning, the dedication of the book to Lorenzo de’ Medici, the ruler of Florence. The Prince is not particularly theoretical or abstract; its prose is simple and its logic straightforward. These traits underscore Machiavelli’s desire to provide practical, easily understandable advice.
The first two chapters describe the book’s scope. The Prince is concerned with autocratic regimes, not with republican regimes. The first chapter defines the various types of principalities and princes; in doing so, it constructs an outline for the rest of the book. Chapter III comprehensively describes how to maintain composite principalities—that is, principalities that are newly created or annexed from another power, so that the prince is not familiar to the people he rules. Chapter III also introduces the book’s main concerns—power politics, warcraft, and popular goodwill—in an encapsulated form.
Chapters IV through XIV constitute the heart of the book. Machiavelli offers practical advice on a variety of matters, including the advantages and disadvantages that attend various routes to power, how to acquire and hold new states, how to deal with internal insurrection, how to make alliances, and how to maintain a strong military. Implicit in these chapters are Machiavelli’s views regarding free will, human nature, and ethics, but these ideas do not manifest themselves explicitly as topics of discussion until later.
Chapters XV to XXIII focus on the qualities of the prince himself. Broadly speaking, this discussion is guided by Machiavelli’s underlying view that lofty ideals translate into bad government. This premise is especially true with respect to personal virtue. Certain virtues may be admired for their own sake, but for a prince to act in accordance with virtue is often detrimental to the state. Similarly, certain vices may be frowned upon, but vicious actions are sometimes indispensable to the good of the state. Machiavelli combines this line of reasoning with another: the theme that obtaining the goodwill of the populace is the best way to maintain power. Thus, the appearance of virtue may be more important than true virtue, which may be seen as a liability.
The final sections of The Prince link the book to a specific historical context: Italy’s disunity. Machiavelli sets down his account and explanation of the failure of past Italian rulers and concludes with an impassioned plea to the future rulers of the nation. Machiavelli asserts the belief that only Lorenzo de’ Medici, to whom the book is dedicated, can restore Italy’s honor and pride.

English Literature

2011-02-18T20:48:00.000-08:00

English literature

William Shakespeare
English literature is the literature written in the English language, including literature composed in English by writers not necessarily from England; for example, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Joseph Conrad was born in Poland, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poe was American, V.S. Naipaul was born in Trinidad, and Vladimir Nabokov was Russian, but all are considered important writers in the history of English literature. In other words, English literature is as diverse as the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world. In academia, the term often labels departments and programmes practising English studies in secondary and tertiary educational systems. Despite the variety of authors of English literature, the works of William Shakespeare remain paramount throughout the English-speaking world.
This article primarily deals with some of the literature from Britain written in English. For literature from specific English-speaking regions, consult the see also section, bottom of the page.
Old English
The first works in English, written in Old English, appeared in the early Middle Ages (the oldest surviving text is Cædmon's Hymn). The oral tradition was very strong in the early English culture and most literary works were written to be performed. Epic poems were thus very popular and many, including Beowulf, have survived to the present day in the rich corpus of Anglo-Saxon literature that closely resemble today's Icelandic, Norwegian, North Frisian and the Northumbrian and Scots English dialects of modern English. Much Old English verse in the extant manuscripts is probably a "milder" adaptation of the earlier Germanic war poems from the continent. When such poetry was brought to England it was still being handed down orally from one generation to another, and the constant presence of alliterative verse, or .consonant rhyme (today's newspaper headlines and marketing abundantly use this technique such as in Big is Better) helped the Anglo-Saxon peoples remember it. Such rhyme is a feature of Germanic languages and is opposed to vocalic or end-rhyme of Romance languages. But the first written literature dates to the early Christian monasteries founded by St. Augustine of Canterbury and his disciples and it is reasonable to believe that it was somehow adapted to suit to needs of Christian readers.
Middle English literature
In the 12th century, a new form of English now known as Middle English evolved. This is the earliest form of English literature which is comprehensible to modern readers and listeners, albeit not easily. Middle English lasts up until the 1470s, when the Chancery Standard, a form of London-based English, became widespread and the printing press regularized the language. Middle English Bible translations, notably Wyclif's Bible, helped to establish English as a literary language.

Geoffrey Chaucer
There are three main categories of Middle English Literature: Religious, Courtly love, and Arthurian. William Langland's Piers Plowman is considered by many critics to be one of the early great works of English literature along with Chaucer's Canterbury Tales and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (most likely by the Pearl Poet) during the Middle Ages. It is also the first allusion to a literary tradition of the legendary English archer, swordsman, and outlaw Robin Hood.
The most significant Middle English author was Geoffrey Chaucer who was active in the late 14th century. Often regarded as the father of English literature, Chaucer is widely credited as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular English language, rather than French or Latin. The Canterbury Tales was Chaucer's magnum opus, and a towering achievement of Western culture. The first recorded association of Valentine's Day with romantic love is in Chaucer's Parlement of Foules 1382.[1]

The multilingual audience for literature in the 14th century can be illustrated by the example of John Gower, who wrote in Latin, Middle English and Anglo-Norman.
Among the many religious works are those in the Katherine Group and the writings of Julian of Norwich and Richard Rolle.
Since at least the 14th century, poetry in English has been written in Ireland and by Irish writers abroad. The earliest poem in English by a Welsh poet dates from about 1470.

Renaissance literature
Following the introduction of a printing press into England by William Caxton in 1476, vernacular literature flourished. The Reformation inspired the production of vernacular liturgy which led to the Book of Common Prayer, a lasting influence on literary English language. The poetry, drama, and prose produced under both Queen Elizabeth I and King James I constitute what is today labelled as Early modern (or Renaissance).

Early Modern period

Elizabethan Era

The Elizabethan era saw a great flourishing of literature, especially in the field of drama. The Italian Renaissance had rediscovered the ancient Greek and Roman theatre, and this was instrumental in the development of the new drama, which was then beginning to evolve apart from the old mystery and miracle plays of the Middle Ages. The Italians were particularly inspired by Seneca (a major tragic playwright and philosopher, the tutor of Nero) and Plautus (its comic clichés, especially that of the boasting soldier had a powerful influence on the Renaissance and after). However, the Italian tragedies embraced a principle contrary to Seneca's ethics: showing blood and violence on the stage. In Seneca's plays such scenes were only acted by the characters. But the English playwrights were intrigued by Italian model: a conspicuous community of Italian actors had settled in London and Giovanni Florio had brought much of the Italian language and culture to England. It is also true that the Elizabethan Era was a very violent age and that the high incidence of political assassinations in Renaissance Italy (embodied by Niccolò Machiavelli's The Prince) did little to calm fears of popish plots. As a result, representing that kind of violence on the stage was probably more cathartic for the Elizabethan spectator. Following earlier Elizabethan plays such as Gorboduc by Sackville & Norton and The Spanish Tragedy by Kyd that was to provide much material for Hamlet, William Shakespeare stands out in this period as a poet and playwright as yet unsurpassed. Shakespeare was not a man of letters by profession, and probably had only some grammar school education. He was neither a lawyer, nor an aristocrat as the "university wits" that had monopolised the English stage when he started writing. But he was very gifted and incredibly versatile, and he surpassed "professionals" as Robert Greene who mocked this "shake-scene" of low origins. Though most dramas met with great success, it is in his later years (marked by the early reign of James I) that he wrote what have been considered his greatest plays: Hamlet, Romeo and Juliet, Othello, King Lear, Macbeth, Antony and Cleopatra, and The Tempest, a tragicomedy that inscribes within the main drama a brilliant pageant to the new king. Shakespeare also popularized the English sonnet which made significant changes to Petrarch's model.

The sonnet was introduced into English by Thomas Wyatt in the early 16th century. Poems intended to be set to music as songs, such as by Thomas Campion, became popular as printed literature was disseminated more widely in households. See English Madrigal School. Other important figures in Elizabethan theatre include Christopher Marlowe, Thomas Dekker, John Fletcher and Francis Beaumont. Had Marlowe (1564–1593) not been stabbed at twenty-nine in a tavern brawl, says Anthony Burgess, he might have rivalled, if not equalled Shakespeare himself for his poetic gifts. Remarkably, he was born only a few weeks before Shakespeare and must have known him well. Marlowe's subject matter, though, is different: it focuses more on the moral drama of the renaissance man than any other thing. Marlowe was fascinated and terrified by the new frontiers opened by modern science. Drawing on German lore, he introduced Dr. Faustus to England, a scientist and magician who is obsessed by the thirst of knowledge and the desire to push man's technological power to its limits. He acquires supernatural gifts that even allow him to go back in time and wed Helen of Troy, but at the end of his twenty-four years' covenant with the devil he has to surrender his soul to him. His dark heroes may have something of Marlowe himself, whose death remains a mystery. He was known for being an atheist, leading a lawless life, keeping many mistresses, consorting with ruffians: living the 'high life' of London's underworld. But many suspect that this might have been a cover-up for his activities as a secret agent for Elizabeth I, hinting that the 'accidental stabbing' might have been a premeditated assassination by the enemies of The Crown. Beaumont and Fletcher are less-known, but it is almost sure that they helped Shakespeare write some of his best dramas, and were quite popular at the time. It is also at this time that the city comedy genre develops. In the later 16th century English poetry was characterised by elaboration of language and extensive allusion to classical myths. The most important poets of this era include Edmund Spenser and Sir Philip Sidney. Elizabeth herself, a product of Renaissance humanism, produced occasional poems such as On Monsieur’s Departure.

Jacobean literature

After Shakespeare's death, the poet and dramatist Ben Jonson was the leading literary figure of the Jacobean era (The reign of James I). However, Jonson's aesthetics hark back to the Middle Ages rather than to the Tudor Era: his characters embody the theory of humours. According to this contemporary medical theory, behavioral differences result from a prevalence of one of the body's four "humours" (blood, phlegm, black bile, and yellow bile) over the other three; these humours correspond with the four elements of the universe: air, water, fire, and earth. This leads Jonson to exemplify such differences to the point of creating types, or clichés.

Jonson is a master of style, and a brilliant satirist. His Volpone shows how a group of scammers are fooled by a top con-artist, vice being punished by vice, virtue meting out its reward.

Others who followed Jonson's style include Beaumont and Fletcher, who wrote the brilliant comedy, The Knight of the Burning Pestle, a mockery of the rising middle class and especially of those nouveaux riches who pretend to dictate literary taste without knowing much literature at all. In the story, a couple of grocers wrangle with professional actors to have their illiterate son play a leading role in a drama. He becomes a knight-errant wearing, appropriately, a burning pestle on his shield. Seeking to win a princess' heart, the young man is ridiculed much in the way Don Quixote was. One of Beaumont and Fletcher's chief merits was that of realising how feudalism and chivalry had turned into snobbery and make-believe and that new social classes were on the rise.

Another popular style of theatre during Jacobean times was the revenge play, popularized by John Webster and Thomas Kyd. George Chapman wrote a couple of subtle revenge tragedies, but must be remembered chiefly on account of his famous translation of Homer, one that had a profound influence on all future English literature, even inspiring John Keats to write one of his best sonnets.
The King James Bible, one of the most massive translation projects in the history of English up to this time, was started in 1604 and completed in 1611. It represents the culmination of a tradition of Bible translation into English that began with the work of William Tyndale. It became the standard Bible of the Church of England, and some consider it one of the greatest literary works of all time. This project was headed by James I himself, who supervised the work of forty-seven scholars. Although many other translations into English have been made, some of which are widely considered more accurate, many aesthetically prefer the King James Bible, whose meter is made to mimic the original Hebrew verse.

Besides Shakespeare, whose figure towers over the early 17th century, the major poets of the early 17th century included John Donne and the other Metaphysical poets. Influenced by continental Baroque, and taking as his subject matter both Christian mysticism and eroticism, metaphysical poetry uses unconventional or "unpoetic" figures, such as a compass or a mosquito, to reach surprise effects. For example, in "A Valediction: Forbidding Mourning", one of Donne's Songs and Sonnets, the points of a compass represent two lovers, the woman who is home, waiting, being the centre, the farther point being her lover sailing away from her. But the larger the distance, the more the hands of the compass lean to each other: separation makes love grow fonder. The paradox or the oxymoron is a constant in this poetry whose fears and anxieties also speak of a world of spiritual certainties shaken by the modern discoveries of geography and science, one that is no longer the centre of the universe. Apart from the metaphysical poetry of Donne, the 17th century is also celebrated for its Baroque poetry. Baroque poetry served the same ends as the art of the period; the Baroque style is lofty, sweeping, epic, and religious. Many of these poets have an overtly Catholic sensibility (namely Richard Crashaw) and wrote poetry for the Catholic counter-Reformation in order to establish a feeling of supremacy and mysticism that would ideally persuade newly emerging Protestant groups back toward Catholicism.

Caroline and Cromwellian literature

The turbulent years of the mid-17th century, during the reign of Charles I and the subsequent Commonwealth and Protectorate, saw a flourishing of political literature in English. Pamphlets written by sympathisers of every faction in the English civil war ran from vicious personal attacks and polemics, through many forms of propaganda, to high-minded schemes to reform the nation. Of the latter type, Leviathan by Thomas Hobbes would prove to be one of the most important works of British political philosophy. Hobbes's writings are some of the few political works from the era which are still regularly published while John Bramhall, who was Hobbes's chief critic, is largely forgotten. The period also saw a flourishing of news books, the precursors to the British newspaper, with journalists such as Henry Muddiman, Marchamont Needham, and John Birkenhead representing the views and activities of the contending parties. The frequent arrests of authors and the suppression of their works, with the consequence of foreign or underground printing, led to the proposal of a licensing system. The Areopagitica, a political pamphlet by John Milton, was written in opposition to licensing and is regarded as one of the most eloquent defenses of press freedom ever written.
Specifically in the reign of Charles I (1625 – 42), English Renaissance theatre experienced its concluding efflorescence. The last works of Ben Jonson appeared on stage and in print, along with the final generation of major voices in the drama of the age: John Ford, Philip Massinger, James Shirley, and Richard Brome. With the closure of the theatres at the start of the English Civil War in 1642, drama was suppressed for a generation, to resume only in the altered society of the English Restoration in 1660.

Samuel Pepys, took the diary beyond mere business transaction notes, into the realm of the personal
Diarists John Evelyn and Samuel Pepys depicted everyday London life and the cultural scene of the times. Their works are among the most important primary sources for the English Restoration period, and consists of eyewitness accounts of many great events, such as the Great Plague of London, and the Great Fire of London.
Other forms of literature written during this period are usually ascribed political subtexts, or their authors are grouped along political lines. The cavalier poets, active mainly before the civil war, owed much to the earlier school of metaphysical poets. The forced retirement of royalist officials after the execution of Charles I was a good thing in the case of Izaak Walton, as it gave him time to work on his book The Compleat Angler. Published in 1653, the book, ostensibly a guide to fishing, is much more: a meditation on life, leisure, and contentment. The two most important poets of Oliver Cromwell's England were Andrew Marvell and John Milton, with both producing works praising the new government; such as Marvell's An Horatian Ode upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland. Despite their republican beliefs they escaped punishment upon the Restoration of Charles II, after which Milton wrote some of his greatest poetical works (with any possible political message hidden under allegory). Thomas Browne was another writer of the period; a learned man with an extensive library, he wrote prolifically on science, religion, medicine and the esoteric.
Restoration literature

John Milton, religious epic poem Paradise Lost published in 1667.
Restoration literature includes both Paradise Lost and the Earl of Rochester's Sodom, the high spirited sexual comedy of The Country Wife and the moral wisdom of Pilgrim's Progress. It saw Locke's Two Treatises on Government, the founding of the Royal Society, the experiments of Robert Boyle and the holy meditations of Boyle, the hysterical attacks on theatres from Jeremy Collier, the pioneering of literary criticism from Dryden, and the first newspapers. The official break in literary culture caused by censorship and radically moralist standards under Cromwell's Puritan regime created a gap in literary tradition, allowing a seemingly fresh start for all forms of literature after the Restoration. During the Interregnum, the royalist forces attached to the court of Charles I went into exile with the twenty-year old Charles II. The nobility who travelled with Charles II were therefore lodged for over a decade in the midst of the continent's literary scene. Charles spent his time attending plays in France, and he developed a taste for Spanish plays. Those nobles living in Holland began to learn about mercantile exchange as well as the tolerant, rationalist prose debates that circulated in that officially tolerant nation.
The largest and most important poetic form of the era was satire. In general, publication of satire was done anonymously. There were great dangers in being associated with a satire. On the one hand, defamation law was a wide net, and it was difficult for a satirist to avoid prosecution if he were proven to have written a piece that seemed to criticize a noble. On the other hand, wealthy individuals would respond to satire as often as not by having the suspected poet physically attacked by ruffians. John Dryden was set upon for being merely suspected of having written the Satire on Mankind. A consequence of this anonymity is that a great many poems, some of them of merit, are unpublished and largely unknown.
Prose in the Restoration period is dominated by Christian religious writing, but the Restoration also saw the beginnings of two genres that would dominate later periods: fiction and journalism. Religious writing often strayed into political and economic writing, just as political and economic writing implied or directly addressed religion. The Restoration was also the time when John Locke wrote many of his philosophical works. Locke's empiricism was an attempt at understanding the basis of human understanding itself and thereby devising a proper manner for making sound decisions. These same scientific methods led Locke to his three Treatises on Government, which later inspired the thinkers in the American Revolution. As with his work on understanding, Locke moves from the most basic units of society toward the more elaborate, and, like Thomas Hobbes, he emphasizes the plastic nature of the social contract. For an age that had seen absolute monarchy overthrown, democracy attempted, democracy corrupted, and limited monarchy restored, only a flexible basis for government could be satisfying. The Restoration moderated most of the more strident sectarian writing, but radicalism persisted after the Restoration. Puritan authors such as John Milton were forced to retire from public life or adapt, and those Digger, Fifth Monarchist, Leveller, Quaker, and Anabaptist authors who had preached against monarchy and who had participated directly in the regicide of Charles I were partially suppressed. Consequently, violent writings were forced underground, and many of those who had served in the Interregnum attenuated their positions in the Restoration. John Bunyan stands out beyond other religious authors of the period. Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress is an allegory of personal salvation and a guide to the Christian life. Instead of any focus on eschatology or divine retribution, Bunyan instead writes about how the individual saint can prevail against the temptations of mind and body that threaten damnation. The book is written in a straightforward narrative and shows influence from both drama and biography, and yet it also shows an awareness of the grand allegorical tradition found in Edmund Spenser. During the Restoration period, the most common manner of getting news would have been a broadsheet publication. A single, large sheet of paper might have a written, usually partisan, account of an event. However, the period saw the beginnings of the first professional and periodical (meaning that the publication was regular) journalism in England. Journalism develops late, generally around the time of William of Orange's claiming the throne in 1689. Coincidentally or by design, England began to have newspapers just when William came to court from Amsterdam, where there were already newspapers being published.
It is impossible to satisfactorily date the beginning of the novel in English. However, long fiction and fictional biographies began to distinguish themselves from other forms in England during the Restoration period. An existing tradition of Romance fiction in France and Spain was popular in England. The "Romance" was considered a feminine form, and women were taxed with reading "novels" as a vice. One of the most significant figures in the rise of the novel in the Restoration period is Aphra Behn. She was not only the first professional female novelist, but she may be among the first professional novelists of either sex in England. Behn's most famous novel was Oroonoko in 1688. This was a biography of an entirely fictional African king who had been enslaved in Suriname. Behn's novels show the influence of tragedy and her experiences as a dramatist.
As soon as the previous Puritan regime's ban on public stage representations was lifted, the drama recreated itself quickly and abundantly. The most famous plays of the early Restoration period are the unsentimental or "hard" comedies of John Dryden, William Wycherley, and George Etherege, which reflect the atmosphere at Court, and celebrate an aristocratic macho lifestyle of unremitting sexual intrigue and conquest. After a sharp drop in both quality and quantity in the 1680s, the mid-90s saw a brief second flowering of the drama, especially comedy. Comedies like William Congreve's The Way of the World (1700), and John Vanbrugh's The Relapse (1696) and The Provoked Wife (1697) were "softer" and more middle-class in ethos, very different from the aristocratic extravaganza twenty years earlier, and aimed at a wider audience. The playwrights of the 1690s set out to appeal to more socially mixed audiences with a strong middle-class element, and to female spectators, for instance by moving the war between the sexes from the arena of intrigue into that of marriage. The focus in comedy is less on young lovers outwitting the older generation, more on marital relations after the wedding bells.
Augustan literature
The term Augustan literature derives from authors of the 1720s and 1730s themselves, who responded to a term that George I of England preferred for himself. While George I meant the title to reflect his might, they instead saw in it a reflection of Ancient Rome's transition from rough and ready literature to highly political and highly polished literature. Because of the aptness of the metaphor, the period from 1689 - 1750 was called "the Augustan Age" by critics throughout the 18th century (including Voltaire and Oliver Goldsmith). The literature of the period is overtly political and thoroughly aware of critical dictates for literature. It is an age of exuberance and scandal, of enormous energy and inventiveness and outrage, that reflected an era when English, Scottish, and Irish people found themselves in the midst of an expanding economy, lowering barriers to education, and the stirrings of the Industrial Revolution.
The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope, but Pope's excellence is partially in his constant battle with other poets, and his serene, seemingly neo-Classical approach to poetry is in competition with highly idiosyncratic verse and strong competition from such poets as Ambrose Philips. It was during this time that James Thomson produced his melancholy The Seasons and Edward Young wrote Night Thoughts. It is also the era that saw a serious competition over the proper model for the pastoral. In criticism, poets struggled with a doctrine of decorum, of matching proper words with proper sense and of achieving a diction that matched the gravity of a subject. At the same time, the mock-heroic was at its zenith. Pope's Rape of the Lock and The Dunciad are still the greatest mock-heroic poems ever written.
In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele's The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major artform. Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. He also wrote a fictional treatment of the travels of Alexander Selkirk called Robinson Crusoe (1719). The novel would benefit indirectly from a tragedy of the stage, and in mid-century many more authors would begin to write novels.

Jonathan Swift
If Addison and Steele overawed one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift did another. Swift's prose style is unmannered and direct, with a clarity that few contemporaries matched. He was a profound skeptic about the modern world, but he was similarly profoundly distrustful of nostalgia. He saw in history a record of lies and vanity, and he saw in the present a madness of vanity and lies. Core Christian values were essential, but these values had to be muscular and assertive and developed by constant rejection of the games of confidence men and their gullies. Swift's A Tale of a Tub announced his skeptical analysis of the claims of the modern world, and his later prose works, such as his war with Patridge the astrologer, and most of all his derision of pride in Gulliver's Travels left only the individual in constant fear and humility safe. After his "exile" to Ireland, Swift reluctantly began defending the Irish people from the predations of colonialism. His A Modest Proposal and the Drapier Letters provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics, was outraged by the abuses and barbarity he saw around him.
Drama in the early part of the period featured the last plays of John Vanbrugh and William Congreve, both of whom carried on the Restoration comedy with some alterations. However, the majority of stagings were of lower farces and much more serious and domestic tragedies. George Lillo and Richard Steele both produced highly moral forms of tragedy, where the characters and the concerns of the characters were wholly middle class or working class. This reflected a marked change in the audience for plays, as royal patronage was no longer the important part of theatrical success. Additionally, Colley Cibber and John Rich began to battle each other for greater and greater spectacles to present on stage. The figure of Harlequin was introduced, and pantomime theatre began to be staged. This "low" comedy was quite popular, and the plays became tertiary to the staging. Opera also began to be popular in London, and there was significant literary resistance to this Italian incursion. This trend was broken only by a few attempts at a new type of comedy. Pope and John Arbuthnot and John Gay attempted a play entitled Three Hours After Marriage that failed. In 1728, however, John Gay returned to the playhouse with The Beggar's Opera. Gay's opera was in English and retold the story of Jack Sheppard and Jonathan Wild. However, it seemed to be an allegory for Robert Walpole and the directors of the South Sea Company, and so Gay's follow up opera was banned without performance. The Licensing Act 1737 brought an abrupt halt to much of the period's drama, as the theatres were once again brought under state control.
An effect of the Licensing Act was to cause more than one aspiring playwright to switch over to writing novels. Henry Fielding began to write prose satire and novels after his plays could not pass the censors. Henry Brooke also turned to novels. In the interim, Samuel Richardson had produced a novel intended to counter the deleterious effects of novels in Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded (1749). Henry Fielding attacked the absurdity of this novel with two of his own works, Joseph Andrews and Shamela, and then countered Richardson's Clarissa with Tom Jones. Henry Mackenzie wrote The Man of Feeling and indirectly began the sentimental novel. Laurence Sterne attempted a Swiftian novel with a unique perspective on the impossibility of biography (the model for most novels up to that point) and understanding with Tristram Shandy, even as his detractor Tobias Smollett elevated the picaresque novel with his works. Each of these novels represents a formal and thematic divergence from the others. Each novelist was in dialogue and competition with the others, and, in a sense, the novel established itself as a diverse and open-formed genre in this explosion of creativity. The most lasting effects of the experimentation would be the psychological realism of Richardson, the bemused narrative voice of Fielding, and the sentimentality of Brooke.

18th century
During the Age of Sensibility, literature reflected the worldview of the Age of Enlightenment (or Age of Reason) – a rational and scientific approach to religious, social, political, and economic issues that promoted a secular view of the world and a general sense of progress and perfectibility. Led by the philosophers who were inspired by the discoveries of the previous century (Newton) and the writings of Descartes, Locke and Bacon.
They sought to discover and to act upon universally valid principles governing humanity, nature, and society. They variously attacked spiritual and scientific authority, dogmatism, intolerance, censorship, and economic and social restraints. They considered the state the proper and rational instrument of progress. The extreme rationalism and skepticism of the age led naturally to deism; the same qualities played a part in bringing the later reaction of romanticism. The Encyclopédie of Denis Diderot epitomized the spirit of the age.
During the end of the 18th century, Horace Walpole's 1764 novel The Castle of Otranto, created the Gothic fiction genre, that combines elements of horror and romance. The pioneering gothic novelist Ann Radcliffe introduced the brooding figure of the gothic villain which developed into the Byronic hero. Her most popular and influential work The Mysteries of Udolpho 1794, is frequently cited as the archetypal Gothic novel. Vathek 1786 by William Beckford, and The Monk 1796 by Matthew Lewis, were further notable early works in both the gothic and horror literary genres.
Romanticism

William Blake is considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age
The changing landscape of Britain brought about by the steam engine has two major outcomes: the boom of industrialism with the expansion of the city, and the consequent depopulation of the countryside as a result of the enclosures, or privatisation of pastures. Most peasants poured into the city to work in the new factories.
This abrupt change is revealed by the change of meaning in five key words: industry (once meaning "creativity"), democracy (once disparagingly used as "mob rule"), class (from now also used with a social connotation), art (once just meaning "craft"), culture (once only belonging to farming).
But the poor condition of workers, the new class-conflicts and the pollution of the environment causes a reaction to urbanism and industrialisation prompting poets to rediscover the beauty and value of nature. Mother earth is seen as the only source of wisdom, the only solution to the ugliness caused by machines.
The superiority of nature and instinct over civilisation had been preached by Jean Jacques Rousseau and his message was picked by almost all European poets. The first in England were the Lake Poets, a small group of friends including William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. These early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic Manifesto in English literature, the "Preface to the Lyrical Ballads". This collection was mostly contributed by Wordsworth, although Coleridge must be credited for his long and impressive Rime of the Ancient Mariner, a tragic ballad about the survival of one sailor through a series of supernatural events on his voyage through the south seas which involves the slaying of an albatross, the death of the rest of the crew, a visit from Death and his mate, Life-in-Death, and the eventual redemption of the Mariner.
Coleridge and Wordsworth, however, understood romanticism in two entirely different ways: while Coleridge sought to make the supernatural "real" (much like sci-fi movies use special effects to make unlikely plots believable), Wordsworth sought to stir the imagination of readers through his down-to-earth characters taken from real life (in "The Idiot Boy", for example), or the beauty of the Lake District that largely inspired his production (as in "Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey").

Lord Byron
The "Second generation" of Romantic poets includes Lord Byron, Percy Bysshe Shelley and John Keats. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps the least 'romantic' of the three. His amours with a number of prominent but married ladies was also a way to voice his dissent on the hypocrisy of a high society that was only apparently religious but in fact largely libertine, the same that had derided him for being physically impaired. His first trip to Europe resulted in the first two cantos of Childe Harold's Pilgrimage, a mock-heroic epic of a young man's adventures in Europe but also a sharp satire against London society. Despite Childe Harold's success on his return to England, accompanied by the publication of The Corsair his alleged incestuous affair with his half-sister Augusta Leigh in 1816 actually forced him to leave England for good and seek asylum on the continent. Here he joined Percy Bysshe Shelley, his wife Mary, with his secretary John William Polidori on the shores of Lake Geneva during the 'year without a summer' of 1816. Polidori's The Vampyre was published in 1819, creating the literary vampire genre. His short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour.
One of Percy Shelley's most prominent works is the Ode to the West Wind. Despite his apparent refusal to believe in God, this poem is considered a homage to pantheism, the recognition of a spiritual presence in nature. Shelley's groundbreaking poem The Masque of Anarchy calls for nonviolence in protest and political action. It is perhaps the first modern statement of the principle of nonviolent protest.[2] Mahatma Gandhi's passive resistance was influenced and inspired by Shelley's verse, and Gandhi would often quote the poem to vast audiences.[3]

Mary Shelley
The plot for Mary Shelley's Frankenstein is said to have come from a nightmare she had during stormy nights on Lake Geneva in the company of Percy Shelley, Lord Byron, and John Polidori. Her idea of making a body with human parts stolen from different corpses and then animating it with electricity was perhaps influenced by Alessandro Volta's invention and Luigi Galvani's experiments with dead frogs. Frankenstein's chilling tale also suggests modern organ transplants, tissue regeneration, reminding us of the moral issues raised by today's medicine. But the creature of Frankenstein is incredibly romantic as well. Although "the monster" is intelligent, good and loving, he is shunned by everyone because of his ugliness and deformity, and the desperation and envy that result from social exclusion turn him against the very man who created him.
John Keats did not share Byron's and Shelley's extremely revolutionary ideals, but his cult of pantheism is as important as Shelley's. Keats was in love with the ancient stones of the Parthenon that Lord Elgin had brought to England from Greece, also known as the Elgin Marbles). He celebrates ancient Greece: the beauty of free, youthful love couples here with that of classical art. Keats's great attention to art, especially in his Ode on a Grecian Urn is quite new in romanticism, and it inspired Walter Pater's and then Oscar Wilde's belief in the absolute value of art as independent from aesthetics.
Some rightly think that the most popular novelist of the era was Sir Walter Scott, whose grand historical romances inspired a generation of painters, composers, and writers throughout Europe. Scott's novel-writing career was launched in 1814 with Waverley, often called the first historical novel, and was followed by Ivanhoe. His popularity in England and further abroad did much to form the modern stereotype of Scottish culture. Other novels by Scott which contributed to the image of him as a Scottish patriot include Rob Roy.
In retrospect, we now look back to Jane Austen, who wrote novels about the life of the landed gentry, seen from a woman's point of view, and wryly focused on practical social issues, especially marriage and choosing the right partner in life, with love being above all else. Austen's Pride and Prejudice would set the model for all Romance Novels to follow. Jane Austen created the ultimate hero and heroine in Darcy and Elizabeth, who must overcome their own stubborn pride and the prejudices they have toward each other, in order to come to a middle ground, where they finally realize their love for one another. Austen's other most notable works include; Sense and Sensibility, Mansfield Park, Persuasion and Emma. In her novels, Austen brings to light the hardships women faced, who usually did not inherit money, could not work and where their only chance in life depended on the man they married. She brought to light not only the difficulties women faced in her day, but also what was expected of men and of the careers they had to follow. This she does with wit and humour and with endings where all characters, good or bad, receive exactly what they deserve. Poet, painter and printmaker William Blake is usually included among the English Romanticists, though his visionary work is much different from that of the others discussed in this section.
Victorian literature

Charles Dickens
It was in the Victorian era (1837–1901) that the novel became the leading form of literature in English. Most writers were now more concerned to meet the tastes of a large middle class reading public than to please aristocratic patrons. The best known works of the era include the emotionally powerful works of the Brontë sisters; the satire Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray; the realist novels of George Eliot; and Anthony Trollope's insightful portrayals of the lives of the landowning and professional classes.
Charles Dickens emerged on the literary scene in the 1830s, confirming the trend for serial publication. Dickens wrote vividly about London life and the struggles of the poor, but in a good-humoured fashion which was acceptable to readers of all classes. His early works such as the Pickwick Papers are masterpieces of comedy. Later his works became darker, without losing his genius for caricature.
The Bronte sisters were English writers of the 1840s and 1850s. Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature. They had written compulsively from early childhood and were first published, at their own expense, in 1846 as poets under the pseudonyms Currer, Ellis and Acton Bell. The book attracted little attention, selling only two copies. The sisters returned to prose, producing a novel each in the following year. Charlotte's Jane Eyre, Emily's Wuthering Heights and Anne's Agnes Grey were released in 1847.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside may be seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy, Elizabeth Cleghorn Gaskell, and others. Leading poetic figures included Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Matthew Arnold, Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and Christina Rossetti.
The novels of George Eliot, such as Middlemarch, were a milestone of literary realism, and combine high Victorian literary detail with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow confines they often depict. Novels of Thomas Hardy and others, dealt with the changing social and economic situation of the countryside. Wilkie Collins epistolary novel The Moonstone 1868, has been acclaimed as the first detective novel in the English language.[4]
The premier ghost story writer of the 19th century was Sheridan Le Fanu. His works include the macabre mystery novel Uncle Silas 1865, and his Gothic novella Carmilla 1872, tells the story of a young woman's susceptibility to the attentions of a female vampire. Bram Stoker's seminal horror Dracula, has been attributed to a number of literary genres including vampire literature, horror fiction, gothic novel and invasion literature.

H. G. Wells
H. G. Wells invented a number of themes that are now classic in the science fiction genre. The War of the Worlds 1898, describing an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians using tripod fighting machines equipped with advanced weaponry, is a seminal depiction of an alien invasion of Earth. The Time Machine is generally credited with the popularization of the concept of time travel using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term "time machine" coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle was born in Scotland of Irish parents but his Sherlock Holmes stories have typified a fog-filled London for readers worldwide
Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes is a brilliant London-based "consulting detective", famous for his intellectual prowess. Conan Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, from 1880 up to 1907, with a final case in 1914. All but four Conan Doyle stories are narrated by Holmes' friend, assistant, and biographer, Dr. John H. Watson.
Literature for children developed as a separate genre. Some works become globally well-known, such as those of Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, both of whom used nonsense verse. Adventure novels, such as those of Robert Louis Stevenson, are generally classified as for children. Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, depicts the dual personality of a kind and intelligent physician who turns into a psychopathic monster after imbibing a drug intended to separate good from evil in a personality. His Kidnapped is a fast-paced historical novel set in the aftermath of the '45 Jacobite Rising, and Treasure Island 1883, is the classic pirate adventure. At the end of the Victorian Era and leading into the Edwardian Era, Beatrix Potter was an author and illustrator, best known for her children’s books, which featured animal characters. In her thirties, Potter published the highly successful children's book The Tale of Peter Rabbit in 1902. Potter eventually went on to published 23 children's books and become a wealthly woman. Her books along with Lewis Carroll’s are read and published to this day.
The Lost World literary genre was inspired by real stories of archaeological discoveries by imperial adventurers. H. Rider Haggard wrote one of the earliest examples, King Solomon's Mines in 1885. Contemporary European politics and diplomatic manoeuvrings informed Anthony Hope's swashbuckling Ruritanian adventure novels The Prisoner of Zenda. An important forerunner of modernist literature, Joseph Conrad wrote the novel Heart of Darkness in 1899. A symbolic story within a story or frame narrative about an Englishman Marlow's foreign assignment, it is widely regarded as a significant work of English literature and part of the Western canon.
English literature since 1900

Rudyard Kipling
The major lyric poet of the first decades of the 20th century was Thomas Hardy. Following the classic novels Tess of the d'Urbervilles and Far from the Madding Crowd, Hardy then concentrated on poetry after the harsh response to his last novel, Jude the Obscure. The most widely popular writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling, a highly versatile writer of novels, short stories and poems. To date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature, Kipling's novels include The Jungle Book, The Man Who Would Be King and Kim, while his inspirational poem If— is a national favourite. Like William Ernest Henley's poem Invictus that has inspired such people as Nelson Mandela when he was incarcerated,[5] If— is a memorable evocation of Victorian stoicism, regarded as a traditional British virtue. Erskine Childers' The Riddle of the Sands 1903, defined the spy novel. The Kailyard school of Scottish writers presented an idealised version of society and brought elements of fantasy and folklore back into fashion, notably J. M. Barrie, creator of Peter Pan. The 1905 novel The Scarlet Pimpernel by Emma Orczy, is a precursor to the "disguised superhero". In 1908, Kenneth Grahame wrote the children's classic The Wind in the Willows, while the Scouts founder Robert Baden Powell's first book Scouting for Boys was published. John Buchan penned the adventure novel The Thirty-Nine Steps in 1915. Strongly influenced by his Christian faith, G. K. Chesterton was a prolific and hugely influential writer with a diverse output. Aldous Huxley's futuristic novel Brave New World, anticipates developments in reproductive technology and sleep-learning that combine to change society. The future society is an embodiment of the ideals that form the basis of futurism.
Modernism
Main article: Modernist literature
The movement known as English literary modernism grew out of a general sense of disillusionment with Victorian era attitudes of certainty, conservatism, and objective truth. The movement was greatly influenced by the ideas of Romanticism, Karl Marx's political writings, and the psychoanalytic theories of subconscious - Sigmund Freud. The continental art movements of Impressionism, and later Cubism, were also important inspirations for modernist writers.

James Joyce, 1918
Although literary modernism reached its peak between the First and Second World Wars, the earliest examples of the movement's attitudes appeared in the mid to late 19th century. Gerard Manley Hopkins, A. E. Housman, and the poet and novelist Thomas Hardy represented a few of the major early modernists writing in England during the Victorian period.
The first decades of the 20th century saw several major works of modernism published, including the seminal short story collection Dubliners by James Joyce, Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness, and the poetry and drama of William Butler Yeats. Joyce's magnum opus Ulysses, is arguably the most important work of Modernist literature, and has been referred to as "a demonstration and summation of the entire movement".[6] It is an interpretation of the Odyssey set in Dublin, and culminates in Finnegans Wake.

Virginia Woolf
Important novelists between the World Wars included Virginia Woolf, E. M. Forster, Evelyn Waugh, P.G. Wodehouse and D. H. Lawrence. Woolf was an influential feminist, and a major stylistic innovator associated with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Her 1929 novel A Room of One's Own contains her famous dictum; "A woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write fiction".[7] T. S. Eliot was the preeminent English poet of the period. Across the Atlantic writers like William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and the poets Wallace Stevens and Robert Frost developed a more American take on the modernist aesthetic in their work.
Important in the development of the modernist movement was the American poet Ezra Pound. Credited with "discovering" both T. S. Eliot and James Joyce, Pound also advanced the cause of imagism and free verse. Gertrude Stein, an American expat, was also an enormous literary force during this time period, famous for her line "Rose is a rose is a rose is a rose."
Other notable writers of this period included H.D., Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop, W. H. Auden, Vladimir Nabokov, William Carlos Williams, Ralph Ellison, Dylan Thomas, R.S. Thomas and Graham Greene. However, some of these writers are more closely associated with what has become known as post-modernism, a term often used to encompass the diverse range of writers who succeeded the modernists.
Post-modern literature
The term Postmodern literature is used to describe certain tendencies in post-World War II literature. It is both a continuation of the experimentation championed by writers of the modernist period (relying heavily, for example, on fragmentation, paradox, questionable narrators, etc.) and a reaction against Enlightenment ideas implicit in Modernist literature. Postmodern literature, like postmodernism as a whole, is difficult to define and there is little agreement on the exact characteristics, scope, and importance of postmodern literature. Henry Miller, William S. Burroughs, Joseph Heller, Kurt Vonnegut, Hunter S. Thompson, Truman Capote, Thomas Pynchon.
Post World War II

George Orwell
One of the most significant writers in this period was George Orwell. An essayist and novelist, Orwell's works are considered among the most important social and political commentaries of the 20th century. Dealing with issues such as poverty in The Road to Wigan Pier and Down and Out in Paris and London, totalitarianism in Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, and colonialism in Burmese Days. Orwell's works were often semi-autobiographical and in the case of Homage to Catalonia, wholly. Malcolm Lowry is best known for Under the Volcano
Agatha Christie was a crime writer of novels, short stories and plays, best remembered for her 80 detective novels and her successful West End theatre plays. Christie's works, particularly featuring the detectives Hercule Poirot or Miss Marple, have given her the title the 'Queen of Crime' and made her one of the most important and innovative writers in the development of the genre. Christie's novels include, Murder on the Orient Express, Death on the Nile and And Then There Were None. Another popular writer during the Golden Age of detective fiction was Dorothy L. Sayers. The novelist Georgette Heyer created the historical romance genre.

J. R. R. Tolkien
An informal literary discussion group associated with the English faculty at the University of Oxford, were the "Inklings". Its leading members were the major fantasy novelists; C. S. Lewis and J. R. R. Tolkien. Lewis is known for his fiction, especially The Chronicles of Narnia, while Tolkien is best known as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings.
In thriller writing, Ian Fleming created the character James Bond 007 in January 1952, while on holiday at his Jamaican estate, Goldeneye. Fleming chronicled Bond's adventures in twelve novels, including Casino Royale 1953, Live and Let Die 1954, Dr. No 1958, Goldfinger 1959, Thunderball 1961, and nine short story works. Anthony Burgess's dystopian novel A Clockwork Orange 1962, displays the prevention of the main character Alex's exercise of his free will through the use of a classical conditioning technique. Burgess creates a new speech in his novel that is the teenage slang of the not-too-distant future. Roald Dahl rose to prominence with his children's fantasy novels, often inspired from experiences from his childhood, that are notable for their often unexpected endings, and unsentimental, dark humour. Science fiction novelist Arthur C. Clarke's 2001: A Space Odyssey, is based on his various short stories, particularly The Sentinel. Some notable writers in the latter half of the 20th century include Ayn Rand, Terry Pratchett, Douglas Adams, J. G. Ballard, Philip Pullman, Neil Gaiman, Alan Moore, William Golding and Salman Rushdie. Ian McEwan's Atonement 2001, refers to the process of forgiving or pardoning a transgression, and alludes to the main characters' search for atonement in interwar England. His 2005 novel Saturday, follows an especially eventful day in the life of a successful neurosurgeon. J. K. Rowling's Harry Potter fantasy series, is a collection of seven fantasy novels that chronicle the adventures of the adolescent wizard.