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2021-12-28T20:50:00.003+05:00

Moin Akhtar: A Pakistani Comedian

2021-12-24T16:15:00.003+05:00

Moin Akhtar was a Pakistani stage actor who later joined the television and film industry and enchanted millions of Pakistani and international viewers with his humorist style, comedy, and impersonations of famous and ordinary people. He was also gifted with a thick and charming voice which also led him to be a host and singer. Moin Akhtar had a way with words and combined with his vast experience he was also able to write, direct and produce numerous shows which rose to fame in the era of Radio Pakistan along with his co-actors Anwer Maqsood and Bushra Ansari. His world recognition, not only within the Pakistani viewers but in India and other parts of the subcontinent came from his performance in “Rosy”, in which he played the role of a peculiar woman and is considered one of the most important figures in history of the film industry of Sub Continent. His career spanned more than 45 years, from childhood in the Radio Pakistan era to modern filmmaking until a year before his death in 2011.

Moin Akhtar was known to provide humor to people of all ages, and with etiquette, that remains unmatched. His humor always attempted to avoid vulgar jokes and remarks which made him extremely popular among family audiences especially within the Subcontinent where the line between mild and vulgar jokes is very sensitive. Moin Akhtar not only spoke fluent English and Urdu but was also well versed in Bengali, Sindhi, Punjabi, Memoni, Pashto, and Gujrati. His performances were extremely famous in Pakistan but his fame was not limited to it. He was extremely popular in India as well and played in several stage shows across the border like Bakra Qiston Pe and Buddha Ghar Pe Hai with Umer Sharif.

Good-Bye, Mr. Chips By Romisha Adeeb, Mehwish Younas

2018-01-08T11:43:00.000+05:00

NOVEL: GOOD BYE, MR. CHIPS

(James Hilton)

Chapter No. 1

Question with short answers

Q.1. What was the effect of old age on Mr.Chips when he was living a retired life?

Ans: Old age affected Mr. Chips he usually got sleepy. For him hours passed like a lazy cattle moving across a landscape.

Q.2. How did Mr. Chips measured his time when he was living at Mrs. Wickett’s house?

Ans: When Mr. Chips was living at Mrs. Wickett’s house he usually measured his time by signals of past. He spent his life hearing the bells of the Brookfield school.

Q.3. What type of a voice did Mr. Chips have after his retirement?

Ans: After his retirement Mr. Chips voice becomes a bit jerky and a high-picked. But still he had a touch of his young lively voice.

Q.4. What did Mr. Chips like to do in his old age?

Ans: In his old age Mr. Chips like to sit by the fire. He used to take cup of tea and listening the bells of Brookfield school.

Q.5. What did Mr. Chips do after the last bell of the school?

Ans: After the last bell of the school Mr. Chips wind up his clock. Then he turned out the gas and put wire guard on it. Than he carry a detective novel and go to his bed.

Q.6. Did Mr. Chips enjoy his sleep?

Ans: Mr. Chips enjoyed his sleep very much. It came to him swiftly and peacefully. His days and nights are full of dreaming.

Q.7. What did Dr. Merivale say about Mr. Chips health?

Ans: Dr. Merivale said about Mr. Chips health that he was healthier and fitter. He would not have any fatal disease. He would die a natural death.

Q.8. How was the day when Mr. Chips came to Brookfield for interview?

Ans: When Mr. Chips came to Brookfield school it was a sunny day in July. The air was full of sweet smell of flowers. A cricket match being played between Brookfield and Barnhurst school.

Q.9. How did Mr. Wetherby advise Mr. Chips on the day of his interview?

Ans: Mr. Wetherby advised Mr. Chips to give his zeal of youth to the Brookfield and it would give him something in return. He also advised him do not allow anyone to play tricks with him. He asked him to take a firm attitude.

Q.10. How did the boys look like when Mr. Chips took his first class at Brookfield?

Ans: When Mr. Chips took his first class at Brookfield, there were five hundred students in his class. They looked like lusty Barbarians. They were also decent little boys separately but as a whole crowed they were also looked like lusty barbarians.

Choose the write meaning of underlined words:

1 Mr. Chips remained ragged at Melbury.

a) in bad condition

b) poorly dressed

c) simple

d) patient

2 The boys looked like Barbarians ready to pounce upon Mr. Chips.

a) Cover

b) Climb on

c) Jump on

d) Agree with

3 The boys of his first class looked like little ruffians.

a) Angles

b) Innocent children

c) Serious student

d) Unruly people

4 Mr. Chips used to sit by the fire when the autumn gales rattled the windows.

a) Clouds

b) Hard winds

c) Breeze

d) Fog

5 A cubby little boy made a brilliant century on that day.

a) Strong

b) Active

c) Smart

d) Fat

Correct Answers:

1-a

2-c

3-d

4-b

5-d

Chapter No. 2

Question with short answers

Q.1. What was situated beyond Brookfield?

Ans: Brookfield stood behind the line of old elm trees. There was a dependent village and open fen country beyond it.

Q.2. How was the reputation of Brookfield school after the Napoleonic Wars?

Ans: The reputation of Brookfield school reduced after the Napoleonic Wars. Mr. Wetherby tried his best to restore the fame and reputation of Brookfield school but it always remains on second rank.

Q.3. When was Brookfield school opened?

Ans: Brookfield school was opened during the region of Queen Elizabeth it was a public school opened in a small town of Brookfield.

Q.4. When was the school rebuilt?

Ans: The school was rebuilt in the region of George-1.

Q.5. What was the reputation of Brookfield School?

Ans: There had been a great rise and fall in the reputation of Brookfield school. At sometimes it was a famous public school and have a good reputation and at another time it was almost on zero and always remains on second rank.

Q.6. What type of people did Brookfield produce?

Ans: Brookfield produced Knights, Bishops, judges, Businessmen, Colonial Administrators, Members of Parliament and professional men.

Q.7. How did Brookfield serve military during World War-1?

Ans: Brookfield served military a lot during the World War-1. Their ground was used for military training. Its students and teachers also joined and fought for their country.

Q.8. How Brookfield serves during the general strike?

Ans: Brookfield served a lot during the general strike they maintained the supply line. They also protected the private and government properties.

Q.9. What did snobbish people say about Brookfield?

Ans: Some snobbish people say something strange about Brookfield school. They confessed that they already heard of it.

Q.10. Was Mr. Chips an institution at Brookfield?

Ans: Yes, Mr. Chips was himself an institution at Brookfield. He spent a long time there and this school was be-all and end-all to him.

Choose the write meaning of underlined words:

1 Some snobbish people said that they thought they had heard of Brookfield.

a) Simple

b) Serious

c) Rich

d) Proud

2 At the age of fifty Mr. chips was the doyen of the staff.

a) Dependent

b) Leader

c) Friend

d) Member

3 Mr. Chips was not conceited.

a) Proud

b) Lazy

c) Active

d) Serious

4 Mr. Chips was given an uproarious farewell.

a) Grand

b) Honorable

c) Noisy

d) Warm

5 After sometimes, Mr. Chips began to find a comfortable niche in his mind.

a) Seat

b) Recess

c) Thought

d) Dream

Correct Answer:

1-d

2-b

3-a

4-c

5-b

Chapter No. 3

Question with short answers

Q.1. Where did Mr. Chips live after his retirement?

Ans: After his retirement Mr. Chips lived at Mrs. Wickett’s house. He was retired in 1931 at the age of sixty-five.

Q.2. What was the condition of Mr. Chips room at Mrs. Wickett’s house?

Ans: Mr. Chips room was small, comfortable and sunny. Mrs. Wickett’s house was not so good but suitable to live in.

Q.3. How was Mr. Chips room decorated?

Ans: It was simply decorated. There were few book-shelves in which literature, history books and some novels are present. There was also an old carpet, a chair. some trophies and a picture in Mr. Chips room.

Q.4. How did Mr. Chips spend his days after his retirement?

Ans: Mr. Chips spend most of his time in taking tea, reading books and receiving the visitors. He walked in the playground and watched games and greeting with boys.

Q.5. What was Mr. Chips routine at night?

Ans: At night Mr. Chips wind up his clock after the last bell of the school. He turned out the gas and carries a detective novel to his bed without reading the single page sleep came to him swiftly.

Q.6. How was Mr. Chips life after his retirement?

Ans: After his retirement Mr. Chips lived a pleasant life. He had no cares and worried his pension was enough. He can afford anything what he wanted.

Q.7. Who was Major Collingwood?

Ans: Major Colling wood had been the student of Mr. Chips. Once Mr. Chips punished him for climbing on the gymnasiums roof. Later he was killed in Egypt.

Q.8. What did Mrs. Wickett tell about Major Collingwood?

Ans: Mrs. Wickett told that he was never had a little rude to her but they never had any angry talk between them.

Choose the correct underlined word:

1 After his retirement Mr. Chips lived a pleasant, placid life.

a) Peaceful

b) Cheerful

c) Wonderful

d) Active

2 Mr. Chips script was thin, spidery but very legible.

a) Fair

b) Readable

c) Fine

d) Sloping

3 Mr. Chips pension was adequate.

a) Less than enough

b) Enough

c) More than enough

d) Little

4 Mr. Chips strolled across the road to the playgrounds.

a) Crossed

b) Covered

c) Walked

d) Looked

5 Collingwood was a cheeky boy.

a) Proud

b) Prudish

c) Naughty

d) Sensible

Correct Answers:

1-a

2-d

3-b

4-c

5-d

Chapter No. 4

Question with short answers

Q.1. Where did Mr. Chips go to spend the summer vacation in 1896?

Ans: Mr. Chips went to Lake District to spend his summer vacation in 1896 along with his friend Rowden.

Q.2. What did Mr. Chips see while climbing on Great Gable?

Ans: When Mr. Chips climbing on the Great Gable he saw a young girl there. She was waving excitedly from a dangerous rock.

Q.3. What did Mr. Chips think?

Ans: Mr. Chips thought that the girl was in danger she needed help to come down from the mountain. So he ran toward her for helping her.

Q.4. What happened with Mr. Chips when he ran to help the young girl?

Ans: In hurry Mr. Chips could not run properly he slipped and injured his ankle.

Q.5. What was the young girl actually doing?

Ans: The young girl was not in any kind of difficulty. She was waving to her friend standing father down the mountain. In fact the young girl was an expert climber.

Q.6. How did Mr. Chips reach his house?

Ans: The young girl along with his friend helped Mr. Chips and took him to his house. The young girl thought that he was responsible for the whole incident.

Q.7. How did Mr. Chips and Katherine fall in love with each other?

Ans: Katherine came daily on her bicycle to meet and nurse Mr. Chips. He fell in love with Katherine because of his kind nature because Mr. Chips did not like modern woman.

Q.8. When did Mr. Chips marry Katherine?

Ans: Mr. Chips married Katherine in London a week before the beginning of autumn. They fell in love with each other within a week as Katherine has no parents so she married from the house of her aunt.

Choose the correct underlined words:

1 Brookfield was haven for Mr. Chips.

a) Shelter

b) Home

c) Satisfaction

d) Boon

2 Mr. Chips wrenched his ankle.

a) Broke

b) Injured

c) Strained

d) Cut

3 Mr. Chips hobbled with a stick to a Tiny Church.

a) Jumped

b) Walked

c) Strolled

d) Limped

4 Mr. Chips was not very articulate.

a) Active

b) Efficient

c) Expressive

d) Artilistic

5 Mr. Chips did not contradiet with Katherine.

a) Agree

b) Oppose

c) Cooperate

d) Disobey

Correct Answers:

1-a

2-c

3-d

4-c

5-b

Chapter No. 5

Question with short answers

Q.1. Did Mr. Chips tell Katherine all about his weakness before marriage?

Ans: Yes Mr. Chips told Katherine all about his weakness before marriage. He told her of his mediocre degree and his weak discipline. He said that he would never get promotion and marry a young and ambitious girl.

Q.2. What was Katherine response?

Ans: Katherine heard all this calmly her response was very interesting he just laughed in answer.

Q.3. What did Katherine say to Mr. Chips the night before his wedding?

Ans: Katherine said to Mr. Chips that he was felt a new boy beginning his first term with him. She asked Mr. Chips if she should call him sir or Mr. Chips. She said Mr. Chips would be right than she said Good-Bye Mr. Chips.

Q.4. What type of person was Mr. Chips before his marriage?

Ans: Before his marriage Mr. Chips was a dry person. He had confidence, satisfaction and everything except inspiration.

Q.5. What was the influence of this marriage on Mr. Chips?

Ans: Marriage influenced a positive effect on Mr. Chips. He began to take interest in life it made him a new man. His outlook on life broadened and become more popular at Brookfield school.

Choose the correct underlined words:

1 Mr. Chips had a mediocre degree.

a) Modern

b) Average

c) Good

d) Poor

2 Mr. Chips remembered the dizzy happiness.

a) Strange

b) Dim

c) Real

d) Puzzled

3 Katherine was immensely popular with the master and boys alike.

a) Really

b) Mildly

c) Simply

d) Greatly

4 Katherine said with mock gravity that she was little confused.

a) Seriousness

b) Grounds

c) Grotesque

d) Grumble

5 The accident had caused so momentous happening.

a) Serious

b) Sensible

c) Important

d) Moment

Correct Answers:

1-b

2-d

3-d

4-a

5-c

Chapter No. 6

Question with short answers

Q.1. What influence did Katherine exercise on Mr. Chips?

Ans: Katherine exercised influenced had a positive impact on Mr. Chips. She induced a new life in him and she made him a new man. She also sharpened his sense of humor and improved his discipline. He became more popular in Brookfield and people began to love him.

Q.2. What did Katherine do to make Mr. Chips to see beyond the roofs and torrents of Brookfield?

Ans: She broadened his outlook to made him to see beyond the roofs and torrents of Brookfield. Mr. Chips confined himself within the four walls of Brookfield so he understands there was life even the outside of Brookfield school.

Q.3. How did Mr. Chips remember Katherine after her death?

Ans: Mr. Chips remembered Katherine very much after her death. He saw her running along the corridors. She remained alive in his heart. He imagined Katherine giving him a good advised and taking part in concert.

Q.4. What were the political ideas of Mr. Chips and how they were different from Katherine’s views?

Ans: Mr. Chips was conservative while Katherine had radical socialist views according to political ideas. Her idealism worked upon his maturity to produce a mixture so gentle and wise.

Q.5. What happened when Katherine suggested a match between the Mission and Brookfield?

Ans: The whole staff became against this new idea when Katherine suggested a match between Mission and Brookfield because everyone believed that East End boys would be miscreants and would made every one upset.

Q.6. How did Katherine persuade Mr. Chips to consent to the match between the Mission and Brookfield?

Ans: Katherine succeeded to change the old idea of Mr. Chips she persuaded him by saying that England would not ever be divided into officers and ranks. Those boys were as important to England as Brookfield.

Q.7. Did the authorities consent to the match between the Mission and Brookfield?

Ans: Yes authorities gave consent to the match between Mission and Brookfield because Mr. Chips advocated Katherine proposal strongly and the change of attitude was very strong.

Q.8. Did the team from poplar come to play match with Brookfield?

Ans: Yes the team came from poplar and played soccer with the second team of Brookfield’s. It is defeated by seven goals after this they took tea, met the Headmaster and visited the school and left with sweet memories behind them.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 Mr. Chips was conservative in politics.

a) Active

b) Considerate

c) Traditional

d) Revolutionary

2 The authorities gave consent to the dangerous experiment.

a) Opinion

b) Permission

c) Facility

d) Convenience

3 Katherine was an astonishing girl wife.

a) Amazing

b) Astray

c) Atrocious

d) Avaricious

4 Mr. Chips could not refute Katherine’s idea.

a) Follow

b) Regain

c) Reform

d) Negate

5 Mr. Chips was conscientious.

a) Conscious

b) Conspicuous

c) Painstaking

d) Constituents

Correct Answers:

1-c

2-b

3-a

4-d

5-c

Chapter No. 7

Question with short answers

Q.1. How did Katherine urge Mr. Chips to ignore the mistake of his students?

Ans: Katherine urged Mr. Chips to give his students a chance. She asked him to talk them politely and they would be all right. She also asked him to give them a last warning that they would be punished if they repeated the mistake.

Q.2. What type of boys did Katherine want to be punished?

Ans: Katherine was not in favour of punishing the students. She advised Mr. Chips to give a chance to his students. She only wanted to punish the rude and arrogant boys.

Q.3. How many times did Mr. Chips not accepted Katherine’s opinion?

Ans: Once in a ten time he did not accept Katherine’s opinion. In many cases he rather wished he had accepted her advice.

Q.4. What happened to Mr. Chips when after Katherine’s death he wanted to punish a boy?

Ans: After Katherine’s death Mr. Chips wanted to punish a boy he felt a softening wave of memory. Then the brown eyes would twinkle into a shine that was message for the boy that all was well.

Q.5. What memories of Katherine used to come Mr. Chips mind again and again?

Ans: Mr. Chips saw Katherine running in the corridors or laughing at some of his mistake. He imagined her in giving good piece of advised or taking part in concert.

Choose the correct underlines word.

1 Mr. Chips remembered Katherine scampering along the stone corridors.

a) Running

b) Walking

c) Appearing

d) Sitting

2 Mr. Chips remembered funny anecdotes.

a) Jokes

b) Events

c) Short stories

d) Tit bit

3 Mr. Chips made desultory notes in an exercise-book.

a) Systematic

b) Unsystematic

c) Regular

d) Useful

4 About once in ten times, Mr. Chips was adamant and would not be persuade.

a) Adaptable

b) Genius

c) Serious

d) Inflexible

5 Katherine did not like the cocksure type of boys.

a) Arrogant

b) Simple

c) Mischievous

d) Idle

Correct Answers:

1-a

2-c

3-b

4-d

5-a

Chapter No. 8

Question with short answers

Q.1. When did Katherine Bridges die?

Ans: Katherine and her new born baby died on the same day 1st April, 1898. She died just two years after her marriage.

Q.2. Why did Mr. Chips not want to receive condolences on the death anniversary of his wife?

Ans: He was much grieved and condolences added to his grief that’s why MR. Chips did not wanted to receive the condolences on the death anniversary of his wife.

Q.3. What was the April foolery Mr. Chips faced?

Ans: Once on 1st April Mr. Chips received a number of letters. He opened them one by one but each letter contained a blank sheet than he realized that it had been a piece of April foolery.

Q.4. Did people want to make a fool of him on Ist April?

Ans: No people don’t want to make him a fool on Ist April because his wife had died on Ist April 1898. People wanted to send him message of condolence but they feared that their condolences added to his grief so they sent him blank letter.

Q.5. Why did Ist April foolery not leave any impact upon Mr. Chips mind?

Ans: His wife and new-born baby died on Ist April 1898 so he was lost in his thoughts that’s why Ist April foolery did not leave any impact on Mr. Chips.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 On the day of Katherine’s death, Mr. Chips paced through Brookfield village as in the same horrifying nightmare.

a) Dark horse

b) Bad dream

c) Black mare

d) Witch

2 Mr. Chips nodded and stumbled on.

a) Slipped

b) Stopped

c) Sat

d) Walked

3 Mr. Chips was standing in a trance.

a) Happy mood

b) Sadness

c) Lost in thoughts

d) Unconscious state

4 The letter did not leave any impact on Mr. Chips.

a) Effect

b) Sign

c) Symbol

d) Fact

5 A boy met Mr. Chips in the lane outside the school.

a) Lawn

b) Line

c) Street

d) Ground

Correct Answers:

1-b

2-a

3-d

4-a

5-c

Chapter No. 9

Question with short answers

Q.1. What change did the death of Katherine bring in Mr. Chips?

Ans: After the death of Katherine Mr. Chips became suddenly a kind of man whom boys classed as old.

Q.2. Why did the boys call Mr. Chips old after the death of Katherine?

Ans: The boys called Mr. Chips old because they suddenly notice his grey hairs. In fact he was fifty but still active and strong. He could still knock up half century in cricket field.

Q.3. What was about the verifying glance of Mr. Chips?

Ans: Mr. Chips wore glasses slipping down the nose. His eyebrows were usually shifted one a little higher than other. He used to cast a glance half pensive and half inspecting. This was the verifying glance of Mr. Chips become popular mimicry.

Q.4. What changes occurred in Mr. Chips with the start of new century after the death of his wife?

Ans: After the death of his wife Mr. Chips habits and jokes merged into a harmony. He began to felt disciplinary problems and also began to feel pride in himself and his position.

Q.5. How was Mr. Chips at fifty?

Ans: At fifty Mr. Chips had grey hairs he was still active and strong as before. He took knee interested in his work and played cricket regularly.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 Mr. Chips was orthodox about Lioyd George and Budget.

a) Strict

b) Lenient

c) Liberal

d) Traditional

2 Mr. Chips wore a tattered gown.

a) Loose

b) Costly

c) Torn

d) Simple

3 Mr. Chips gaze was half rapt and half quizzical.

a) Queer

b) Satisfying

c) Comical

d) Questioning

4 Just a marriage added something so did bereavement.

a) Sorrow

b) Separation

c) Happiness

d) Tension

5 With the new century there settled upon Mr. Chips mellowness.

a) Simplicity

b) Maturity

c) Seriousness

d) Strangeness

Correct Answers:

1-d

2-c

3-d

4-a

5-b

Chapter No. 10

Question with short answers

Q.1. When did and how Mr. Meldrum die?

Ans: Mr. Meldrum died in 1900 after serving Brookfield for thirty years. He died of Pneumonia.

Q.2. Who became the Acting Head after the death of Mr. Meldrum?

Ans: Mr. Chips was made Acting Head of Brookfield after the death of Mr. Meldrum.

Q.3. When was Mr. Ralston appointed as headmaster of Brookfield School?

Ans: After the death of Mr. Meldrum Mr. Ralston was appointed for the Headmaster of Brookfield because he was young, efficient, well-educated and a strict disciplinarian.

Q.4. What did Mr. Ralston announce on a May morning when all were summoned in the Big Hall?

Ans: Mr. Ralston announced that King Edward seventh died that morning. There would be no School that afternoon but a service would be held in church at four-thirty.

Q.5. What duty was assigned to the students of Brookfield when the railway men went on strike?

Ans: The students of Brookfield were assigned the duty to guard the railway line because the railway men went on strike the soldiers were driving trains and the strikers started thrown stones at trains.

Q.6. Who was Mr. Jones and what was his duty?

Ans: Mr. Jones was an employee of the Railway Department. He is one of the striker and incharge of signal-box.

Q.7. Who was Cricklade?

Ans: Cricklade was one of the students of Brookfield. He was also guarding the railway line. He asked Mr. Chips what should he do if any stricker meet him.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 Everyone was summoned to a Big Hall.

a) Asked

b) Allowed

c) Sent for

d) Permitted

2 Mr. Chips was a less ferocious animal.

a) Wild

b) Serious

c) Simple

d) Bold

3 Grayson was preoccupied.

a) Covered

b) Busy

c) Over burdened

d) Lost in thought

4 The legendary lady was sitting like a crumbling doll.

a) Old

b) Famous

c) Grand

d) Missionary

5 Was it only a century or was it an epoch.

a) Era

b) Year

c) Month

d) Days

Correct Answers:

1-c

2-a

3-d

4-b

5-a

Chapter No. 11

Question with short answers

Q.1. Why didn’t Mr. Chips like Mr. Ralston?

Ans: The temperaments of Mr. Chips and Mr. Ralston were quite different. Mr. Chips was soft and mild while Mr. Ralston was strict and severe. Mr. Chips was old and conservative while Mr. Ralston was modern and young that’s why Mr. Chips didn’t like him.

Q.2. Why did Mr. Ralston want to get rid of Mr. Chips?

Ans: Mr. Ralston wanted to get rid of Mr. Chips because he was an old fashion man. His method of teaching and pronunciation was also old. Mr. Ralston didn’t like these things.

Q.3. Who supported Mr. Chips in his quarrel with Mr. Ralston?

Ans: All the students, their parent and master supported Mr. Chips in his quarrel with Mr. Ralston. Everyone wished that Mr. Chips stay in Brookfield.

Q.4. What did Mr. Chips tell Mr. Ralston at the end of the quarrel?

Ans: At the end of the quarrel Mr. Chips took his gown and took a few step towards door then turned and told Mr. Ralston that he didn’t intend to resign and that Mr. Ralston could do what he like to do.

Q.5. What reason did Mr. Chips give for not giving up the old method of teaching?

Ans: Mr. Chips said that had been teaching those languages in the same way for the last thirty-eight years and nobody has objected it. Mr. Meldrum and Mr. Wetherby approved his method of teaching when he joined Brookfield.

Q.6. Was Mr. Ralston popular in Brookfield?

Ans: No, Mr. Ralston was not popular in Brookfield. He was feared and respected. After his quarreled with Mr. Chips the dislike increases and fear removed and respect was also destroyed.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 Mr. Ralston told Mr. Chips that his habit were slovenly.

a) simple

b) slow

c) unclean

d) serious

2 Mr. Ralston told Mr. Chips that it is the mixture of slackness and obstinacy.

a) Obedience

b) Laziness

c) Shyness

d) Willfulness

3 In a torrent of thoughts Mr. Chips made answers to himself.

a) Boiling

b) Gush

c) Tortuous

d) Recollecting

4 Mr. Chips thought that Mr. Ralston had brought vulgar, ostentatious and all the hectic rotten-ripeness of the age.

a) Showy

b) Poor

c) Rustic

d) Shrewd

5 Mr. Ralston told Mr. Chips that he stuck to his old methods resulted in chaos.

a) Hopelessness

b) Helplessness

c) Confusion

d) Misunderstanding

Correct Answers:

1-c

2-d

3-b

4-a

5-c

Chapter No. 12

Question with short answers

Q.1. When did Mr. Chips suffer from bronchitis?

Ans: Mr. Chips was suffered from bronchitis in 1913 then he thought that he could not do his duty well. So he resign from his service at the age of 65.

Q.2. What was presented to Mr. Chips at the time of retirement?

Ans: Mr. Chips was presented with a cheque, a clock and a writing desk at the time of his retirement.

Q.3. What did Mr. Chips say about the captain of the school?

Ans: Mr. Chips made humorous speech for the captain of the school. He said that they belonged to an exaggerating family. Once Mr. Chips gave one mark to his father and he changed it into seven.

Q.4. What are the important events of the Brookfield did Mr. Chips mention in his farewell party?

Ans: Mr. Chips mentioned the first bicycle, the seven week frost, bonfire, big hall of Brookfield school changed into a hospital and lamp-boy. Mr. Chips mentioned these important events in his farewell party.

Q.5. How much time did Mr. Chips spend in Brookfield?

Ans: He spent forty-two years in Brookfield school. He spent his time very happily.

Q.6. Who became the head of Brookfield after Mr. Ralston?

Ans: After Mr. Ralston Mr. Chatteris became the head of the Brookfield school. His age was 34 years. He was brilliant, young, modern and very friendly. All the students liked him.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 There was tumultuous cheers.

a) Uproarious

b) Melodious

c) Harmonious

d) Musical

2 The bonfire was lit near the pavilion.

a) Pavement

b) Big Hall

c) Theatre

d) Stage

3 Mr. Chips wrote his articles for the Brookfield terminal magazine.

a) Terminus

b) Final

c) Testimonial

d) Yearly

4 Mr. Chips thrashed captain’s father for exaggeration.

a) Praised

b) Flattered

c) Crushed

d) Punished

5 Mr. Chips thrashed captain’s father for exaggeration.

a) Examination

b) Simplification

c) Excess

d) Estimation

Correct Answers:

1-a

2-c

3-b

4-d

5-c

Chapter No. 13

Question with short answers

Q.1. What services did Brookfield School render during the World War-I?

Ans: Brookfield School serves a lot during the World War-I. The teachers and student took part in War. Many of them joined army. The ground of school was also used for training of the soldiers.

Q.2. Why did Chips join Brookfield again?

Ans: Mr. Chatteris requested Mr. Chips to joined the Brookfield School again because master had joined the army for World War-I. Due to over-worked he was ill. The new staff of the school not doing well. Mr. Chips accepted the offer and joined Brookfield again.

Q.3. What duties did Mr. Chips perform after rejoining the Brookfield?

Ans: Mr. Chips performed very light duties after rejoining the Brookfield School. He goes school at 10pm daily. He taught old lessons of Greek and Latin.

Q.4. What did Mr. Chatteris read out on every Sunday night during the war?

Ans: Mr. Chatteris read every Sunday names of those students killed in war. He also told their short biography and it used to be a very moving sight.

Q.5. What did Mr. Chips use to feel when Mr. Chatteris read out the names of the old students killed in the War?

Ans: When Mr. Chatteris read the names of the students killed in the War Mr. Chips feel that they were only names for him because he didn’t know them. But for Mr. Chips he could see their faces with inwards eyes.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 It was sensational when first Brookfieldian was killed in war.

a) Exciting

b) Serious

c) Upsetting

d) Matter of pride

2 Mr. Chatteris advised Mr. Chips not to take anything strenuously.

a) Seriously

b) Laboriously

c) Easily

d) Carelessly

3 They became hysterical.

a) Mad

b) Powerful

c) Hypo critic

d) Curious

4 Mr. Chips felt very fit, the actual work was not taxing.

a) Easy

b) Interesting

c) Tiring

d) Amusing

5 Mr. Chatteris said that the substitutes for those young masters who went in uniform were dreadful.

a) Substance

b) Subordinates

c) Subsistence

d) Replacement

Correct Answer:

1-c

2-b

3-a

4-c

Chapter No. 14

Question with short answers

Q.1. How did Mr. Chips feel when he joined Brookfield again?

Ans: Mr. Chips felt very fit after again joining The Brookfield School. He was very happy. His work was not tough.

Q.2. What did Mr. Chips teach when rejoining the Brookfield?

Ans: When Mr. Chips rejoined the Brookfield School he taught the same lessons Latin, Greek and Roman History. He taught them with same old pronunciation and method.

Q.3. When did Mr. Chips become the acting head of Brookfield?

Ans: In 1917 Mr. Chatteris fell ill in winter. He was ill second time in his life So, Mr. Chips became the acting head of the Brookfield School.

Q.4. How did Mr. Chips perform as the head of Brookfield?

Ans: Mr. Chips performed well after became the acting head of the Brookfield School. He handled different problems in a friendly and peaceable manner. With confidence he dealt with the requests and complaints.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 The actual work of Mr. Chips was not taxing.

a) Easy

b) Interesting

c) Tiring

d) Simple

2 Mr. Chips made new jokes about anti-air raid blinds.

a) Curtains

b) Refuges

c) Trenches

d) Blackout

3 Out of vast experience there emerged a kindly gentle confidence in himself.

a) Migrated

b) Celebrated

c) Came out

d) Uttered

4 They might have despised anyone else for weakness.

a) Destroyed

b) Detained

c) Detached

d) Dislike

5 The ideas of generosity were becoming rare in a frantic world.

a) Busy

b) Panic-stricken

c) Strange

d) Selfish

Correct Answers:

1-c

2-a

3-c

4-d

5-b

Chapter No. 15

Question with short answers

Q.1. How did Mr. Chips encourage his students during the air raids?

Ans: Mr. Chips encouraged his students during the air raids by telling them jokes and keeping them busy in their lessons. He did the same thing when five bombs fell around and in the Brookfield School. Nine persons were killed.

Q.2. What was happening to the building of the school during bombardment?

Ans: During the bombardment the whole building of the school shook violently. It was appeared like it was lifted of its foundation.

Q.3. How did Brookfield celebrated the end of World War I?

Ans: On 11 November 1918 World War I was ended. A special large meal provided to all. There was a lot of cheering, singing and a bread fight also. A whole holiday was announced in Brookfield School.

Q.4. What happened when Mr. Chips came in the hall during the celebration at the end of the war?

Ans: When Mr. Chips came in the hall there was a complete silence in the hall than suddenly there was a wave of cheering. He walked towards the dias as if he wanted to speak but he shook his head, smiled and walked away. He was the symbol of the victory.

Q.5. When did Mr. Chips resign his job for second time?

Ans: There was a foggy and cold day on 11 November 1918 So, Mr. Chips caught cold. He remained in the bed for several days than he couldn’t continue his job that why he gave resigned for the second time.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 There was the shrill whine of anti-aircraft shells.

a) Whim

b) Whiff

c) Scream

d) Whirl

2 There was the shrill whine of anti-aircraft shells.

a) Shriek

b) Sharp

c) Shy

d) Shining

3 Maynard was a chubby boy.

a) Stout

b) Weak

c) Active

d) Little

4 Mr. Chips was a legend.

a) An ideal teacher

b) A popular teacher

c) An old man

d) Renowned person

5 It was a damp shinning day.

a) Dammed

b) Clear

c) Misty

d) Cold

Correct Answers:

1-c

2-b

3-a

4-d

5-c

Chapter No. 16

Question with short answers

Q.1. What changes occurred in Brookfield during the post-War decade?

Ans: Some positive changes occurred in Brookfield after the War. Family relationships developed between students and teacher so there will be no punishment but this will have also negative effect dishonesty and cheating was encouraged among students.

Q.2. What event took place in 1926 in Brookfield?

Ans: During 1926 event took place in Brookfield that was a general strike. Brookfield students loaded vans with food stuffs. This strike had cost much to England.

Q.3. How did Mr. Chips earn the reputation of being a good jester?

Ans: Mr. Chips earn a great reputation of being good jester in Brookfield school. Wherever he went whatever he said there was a laughter. Whenever he stand up to speak the audience ready for a good joke.

Q.4. What joke did Mr. Chips say to Henderson?

Ans: Mr. Chips said the joke to Henderson when he was young a boy promised nine pens for four pens through nobody ever got it. But the present rulers seemed to give four pens for nine pens.

Q.5. When did Mr. Chips make his will?

Ans: In 1930 Mr. Chips made his will after giving some money to mission and Mrs. Wickett. He left all that had to found an open entrance scholarship to the Brookfield school.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 Mr. Chips said that he knew the dilatoriness of Gregson.

a) Laziness

b) Dilation

c) Dilemma

d) Quickness

2 In old age Mr. Chips realized that the teachers showed less pomposity and students less unctuousness.

a) Promptness

b) Honour

c) Interest

d) Self-importance

3 Mr. Chips looked upon his duration at Brookfield with deep and sumptuous tranquility.

a) Transportation

b) Transformation

c) Calmness

d) Satisfaction

4 Mr. Chips looked upon his duration at Brookfield with deep and sumptuous tranquility.

a) Sundary

b) Depressed

c) Superficial

d) Grand

5 Mr. Chips kept up hospitality in his room.

a) Hostility

b) Generosity

c) Host

d) Activities

Correct Answers:

1-a

2-d

3-c

4-d

5-b

Chapter No. 17

Question with short answers

Q.1. Where did Mrs. Wickett go a day before Mr. Chips death? What arrangements did she make for Mr. Chips before she went?

Ans: Mrs. Wickett went to see her relatives before the death of Mr. Chips. She left the tea things ready with bread and butter on the table. She also left extra cups for the guests.

Q.2. What was the name of the boy who was Mr. Chips last visitor?

Ans: A boy name Linford was the last visitor of last visitor. He was the first of his family at Brookfield.

Q.3. What did Mr. Chips tell Linford when he found him a little embarrassed?

Ans: When Mr. Chips found Linford a little embarrassed he told him that Brookfield was not an awful place. He told him arrival in the Brookfield and also the fear when he went into Hall to take his first class.

Q.4. What did Mr. Chips and Linford talk about?

Ans: Mr. Chips and Linford talked about Shorphire about Brookfield and the school life in general and about the news in the day’s paper. Mr. Chips also told him he was growing up in a very difficult world.

Q.5. What happened when the Linford said good-bye to Mr. Chips?

Ans: Mr. Chips spend some time with Linford. Then he said Good-bye to the boy. The answer came in shrill voice Good-bye Mr. Chips. Those words began to echo in his mind. The word Good-bye Mr. Chips was said him by Katherine a night before his wedding. Suddenly tears came into his eyes and he feel unconsciousness.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 It was cold and foggy and he dare not go out.

a) Dry

b) Mighty

c) Cloudy

d) Rough

2 Linford told that he had just come from the sanatorium.

a) Hospital

b) Hostel

c) Farm house

d) Hotel

3 Linford had an expression of anxious timidity.

a) Nervousness

b) Tiredness

c) Seriousness

d) Temperament

4 Linford said good-bye in a shrill voice.

a) Deep

b) Loud

c) Dim

d) Sharp

5 Mr. Chips meeting with Linford exhausted him.

a) Exaggerated

b) Exhorted

c) Tired

d) Excited

Correct Answers:

1-b

2-a

3-a

4-d

5-c

Chapter No. 18

Question with short answers

Q.1. Where did Mr. Chips find himself when he woke up?

Ans: Mr. Chips found himself lying in the bed when he woke up. Dr. Merivale was there stooping over him and smiling.

Q.2. What did Mr. Chips remember on the last day of his life?

Ans: On the last day of his life Mr. Chips began to see old faces and hearing old voices. He remembered his long stay at Brookfield school as a teacher. He also remembered his wife Katherine.

Q.3. Write about Mr. Chip’s generosity?

Ans: Mr. Chips was famous for his hospitability and generosity. He used to invite his students and colleagues to tea on week-ends. He mostly served them coffee and cake.

Q.4. Was Mr. Chips imaginative?

Ans: Yes Mr. Chips was highly imaginative. He used to live in the world of imagination. He remembered faces and voices of his old students. In his retired life he used to spend most of his time living in his sweet memories of past.

Q.5. What did Mr. Chips do when he heard Cartwright saying that it was pity that Mr. Chips never had any children?

Ans: Mr. Chips heard all their talk. He opened his eyes as wide as he could. Then he said that he had thousands and thousands of children. He remembered his students and died remembering them.

Choose the correct underlined word.

1 Mr. Chips saw Merivale stooping over him.

a) Standing

b) Learning

c) Covering

d) Thinking

2 Mr. Chips did not bother about the details.

a) Worry

b) Desire

c) Heed

d) Think

3 Actually Mr. Chips nodded and stumbled on.

a) Went

b) Thought

c) Fell

d) Walked

4 Mr. Chips began a faint and palpitating chuckle.

a) Disturbing

b) Activating

c) Stimulating

d) Shaking

5 Mr. Chips began a faint and palpitating chuckle.

a) Laugh

b) Noise

c) Voice

d) Toss

Correct Answers:

1-b

2-a

3-c

4-d

5-a

Critical Summary: Culture and Imperialism by Edward Said

2015-12-01T13:05:00.000+05:00

PROFESSOR SAID says that his aim is to set works of art of the imperialist and post-colonial eras into their historical context. "My method is to focus as much as possible on individual works, to read them first as great products of the creative and interpretive imagination, and then to show them as part of the relationship between culture and empire."He says he has not "completely worked out theory of the connection between literature and culture on the one hand, and imperialism on the other"; he just hopes to discover connections. He says it is useful to do this because "by looking at culture and imperialism carefully ... we shall see that we can profitably draw connections that enrich and sharpen our reading of major cultural texts." Indeed, it is more than useful; it must be obligatory if he is right in saying that the "major, I would say determining, political horizon of modern Western culture [is] imperialism," and that to ignore that fact, as critical theory, deconstruction and Marxism do, "is to disaffiliate modern culture from its engagements and attachments."

Having set himself this vast task, which would cover virtually all Western history for the past three centuries, Professor Said must cut it back to manageable size: he will deal with parts of the British and French empires only, and culture will be represented by a small number of novels and one opera. Thereby the proposed Herculean labors come down to looking for references to the colonies in some works of fiction.
That occupies only the first two of four chapters. He then turns to the question of how decolonization is reflected in the culture of newly independent nations. In turn, this large subject is cut down to "one fairly discrete aspect of this powerful impingement"--that is, the work of intellectuals from the colonial or peripheral regions who wrote in an "imperial language" and who reflected on western culture. So we pass from Jane Austen's mentions of Antigua to Caribbean, Bengali and Malaysian views of imperialist practices. It is an original idea to put them together, but already the reader feels that the book is beginning to sprawl. That feeling grows when this third chapter deviates into a theory about decolonization as a political process, and about the difference between independence and liberation. By the fourth and last chapter Professor Said has quite lost the thread and we are treated to a familiar denunciation of "American cultural imperialism." The only Western works of art mentioned here are "Dynasty," "Dallas," and "I Love Lucy" and there is no suggestion that they refer to empire in the way Kipling and Conrad did. There is much perfervid sweeping generalization about Western intellectuals' treatment of the Third World, notably of Islam during the Gulf War, balanced (if that is the word) by frank denunciations of the lack of liberty in that same Third World, notably again in Islam.

So what we have here is a book on literature plus two or three pamphlets that contain much ranting, all barely held together in a bad case of intellectual sprawl. For the casual reader, there is plenty of interesting erudition and some sensitive literary analysis too much heated political diatribe. For students--supposing this book attains the trendy academic status of Said's Orientalism--there is only confusion, engendered by shifting definitions of such key words as "imperialism" and by Said's propensity to extravagant generalization, of this sort: "Without empire, I would go so far as saying, there is no European novel..." These vast generalizations (which alternate with angry attacks on other people's unwarranted "totalizations") are followed by passages of hedging and qualification, where Said affects to be moderate and cautious, but he soon resumes his extreme claims as though he had conceded nothing. One gets the impression that he wants to occupy all possible positions on a subject, always readying himself to deal with criticism by retorting, "Oh, but I say that too!"

Perhaps the basic difficulty and source of confusion is that "and" in his title. The reality is that the spread of British people and their civilization to the American colonies, toCanada, Australia, New Zealand, and elsewhere was a cultural phenomenon or it was nothing. That we can also call it imperialism does not mean that we thereby get two distinct things, one called culture and the other called empire, so that we can now ask how one "intersects with" or determines or causes the other. This is what happens when, for example, people ask whether ideology is determined by the economy. In order to get two things so distinct that one could determine the other, we have to find a completely non-ideological economy, and since that is impossible the discussion becomes confused.

There is a perfectly logical way of fudging this sort of problem: give each term so narrow a definition that you do get two distinct things which might then interact. For instance, you decree that the economy is "money-grubbing" and ideology is "highfalutin' ideas." You then have a genuine question: how do high-falutin' ideas disguise or glorify money-grubbing. The trouble is, conceived so narrowly, the problem loses much of its interest and descends to petty "unmasking." This is the method Said adopts in the first part of his book. Imperialism is given the narrow definition of stealing territory: "The actual geographical possession of land is what empire in the final analysis is all about." Culture is given an even narrower definition: "a realm of unchanging intellectual monuments, free from worldly affiliations." So now the supposed problem is how the activity of stealing land from natives shows up in, is romanticized or excused in, apparently apolitical works of art. It should be clear in advance that, first, such a narrow matter could be described as "imperialism and culture" only in a fit of grandiloquence; second, it will dredge up a list of allusions, hints, and mere mentions so long as it deals with works of art and not political tracts; third, it will culminate in So What?

The narrow view of imperialism as naked territorial rapacity cannot, of course, be sustained for long. When Said wants to denounce U.S. foreign policy, he has to call it "imperialism without colonies" and "cultural colonialism," silently abandoning his own theory. Well before that he finds he cannot even account for classic imperialism, because he thinks there is a problem about how "Britain's great humanistic ideas, institutions, and monuments, which we still celebrate ... co-existed so comfortably with imperialism." He is genuinely puzzled that the land of Jane Austen, John Stuart Mill, and Keats could run an empire, which is why he goes looking for tell-tale signs of guilt about empire in the highest reaches of British culture. Blinded by his narrow view of it, he cannot see that imperialist culture included not only authoritarian, commercial, and supremacist strains, but also libertarian, reformist, and co-operative forces dedicated to ideals of trusteeship, devolution (after the shock of the loss of the American colonies) and eventual partnership. Even more important, it was these latter forces that in the end won out over the likes of Curzon and Churchill; without always actually meaning to decolonize, they made so many adjustments, concessions, and reforms that empire was eroded from within. As P.J. Marshall has said, "An imperial identity ebbed away over a long period without a sudden disorientating crisis of loss." That is how scores of nations were freed from European imperialism, whereas Said's narrow view could only explain (in part) exceptional cases like Algeria, where land was tenaciously clung to.

SAID DESCRIBES his aim thus: "my subject [is] how culture participates in imperialism yet is somehow excused for its role." Or again: "One of my reasons for writing this book is to show how far the quest for, concern about, and consciousness of overseas dominion extended not just in Conrad but in figures we practically never think of in that connection like Thackeray and Austen and how enriching and important for the critic is attention to this material..." Well, what does he deliver?

He takes Jane Austen's Mansfield Park and turns up six references to Antigua and one to slavery. Now, in fact that is extremely interesting, as long as you can resist (as, alas, Professor Said cannot resist) the temptation to jump to earth-shattering, world-historical conclusions. When Jane Austen tells us that Sir Thomas Bertram's business trips are to the Caribbean and that it is not done to mention slavery in his house, she is hinting that that marvelous world of decorum, comfort, and respectability to which Fanny Price aspired was financed in part by plantation slavery. I am ashamed that I missed that point when I read the novel and watched the television series, and I am grateful to Said for stressing it. But he only knows because jane Austen told him, so his airs of unmasking the imperialist villain, of smoking out perfidy from ethereal aesthetic creation are hardly warranted.

Thackeray is promised as another example, in the passage I have quoted. He goes on being promised and appearing in lists of imperial writers, but nothing ever comes of it but this: one character in Vanity Fair is described as a nabob and there are sundry other "mentions" (Said's word) of India in the novel. Said concludes, "All through Vanity Fair there are allusions to India but none is anything more than incidental ... Yet Thackeray and, I would argue, all the major English novelists of the mid-nineteenth century, accepted a globalized world-view and indeed could not (in most cases did not) ignore the vast overseas of British power."

The rest of his evidence for this large conclusion is equally slender: Rochester's deranged wife in Jane Eyre was a West Indian, and was not Abel Magwich in Great Expectations transported to Australia? A character in Henry James's Portrait of a Lady took a trip to Algeria and Egypt! The pickings are so slim that Said admits that through much of the nineteenth-century empire was "only [a] marginally visible presence in fiction." He even takes to complaining that it is not mentioned enough, because the wretched imperialists took it for granted, like their servants who feature only as props in novels. None of this deters him from his grand conclusion: there could be no novel without empire. Why not? Because of "the far from accidental convergence between the patterns of narrative authority constitutive of the novel on the one hand, and, on the other, a complex ideological configuration underlying the tendency of imperialism." This central mystery is never explained. One example is proffered (to Said's credit, diffidently): "Richardson's minute constructions of bourgeois seduction and rapacity" in Clarissa resemble "British military moves against the French in India occurring at the same time."

In one of those accesses of mock moderation, Said adds, "I am not trying to say that the novel--or the culture in the broad sense--|caused' imperialism, but that the novel, as a cultural artifact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other ... imperialism and the novel fortified each other to such a degree that it is impossible, I would argue, to read one without in some way dealing with the other." No such "moderate" conclusion has been established, but Said is soon back to claiming that "we can see it [the novel] as participating in England's overseas empire" and that British imperial "power was elaborated and articulated in the novel." Therefore, we are bidden to re-read "the entire archive of modern and pre-modern European and American culture," no less, in order to discover "the centrality of the imperial vision." It will be worth the effort because we shall be rewarded with such nuggets of knowledge as that the Wilcox family in Howard's End owned rubber plantations! And the plague in "Death in Venice" came from the East! So did the wandering Jew, Leopold Bloom! Thus and thus does fiction fortify imperialism.

Said then tries his hand at opera, choosing the easy target of Verdi's Aida. The Cairoopera house had opened in 1869 as part of the celebrations for the inauguration of theSuez Canal and although Verdi declined the invitation to write a hymn for that occasion, he soon after agreed to write an opera for the Khedive, one based on an Egyptian story. So Said is correct to see Aida as a quintessential imperialist party-piece, a slap-up night out for the Suez speculators in the phony European sector of Cairo. Aida, he says, is "not so much about but of imperial domination."

But Said cannot rest there. He soars aloft: "The cultural machinery [of spectacles like Aida] ... has had an aesthetic as well as informative effect on European audiences ... such distancing and aestheticizing cultural practices ... split and then anaesthetize the metropolitan consciousness. In 1865 the British governor of Jamaica, E.J. Eyre, ordered a retaliatory massacre of Blacks for the killing of a few whites..." Not everyone in Britain would condemn Eyre; Ruskin, Carlyle, and Arnold would not. Their attitude reminds Said of American popular approval of the Gulf War: "making America strong and enhancing President Bush's image as a leader took precedence over destroying a distant society," even so soon after "two million Vietnamese were killed" and while "Southeast Asia is still devastated."

At this point the bemused reader is apt to rub his eyes and run his finger along the text, for how did we get, literally from one page to the next, from Aida in Cairo in 1871, to a Jamaican massacre in 1865, to Vietnam and then to the Gulf War? We did it because Said reasons that Western art about an Oriental subject anaesthetizes Western consciousness to the point where at least some people are brought to excuse massacres of natives and foreign wars. And that is one way culture is connected to imperialism.

At least, it is one way Said slides from literary criticism to political tub-thumping. The whole book takes just such a slide partway through the third chapter. He has been discussing the interesting fiction and theory coming out of the new nations, and he notes that some of it is highly critical, not so much of the former imperialists as of the nationalist rulers who have succeeded them. He readily agrees that decolonization has, in many countries, led only to a change in the color of the oppressors, to "an appalling pathology of power," to dictatorships, oligarchies, and one-party systems. He lists Third World countries where human rights are denied and asks, is this the only alternative to imperialism? No, there is another answer to imperialism besides nationalism, "a deeper opposition" and "a radically new perspective."

Astonishingly, the radically new perspective turns out to be an idea that Frantz Fanon published over thirty years ago: true liberation, as distinct from mere national independence, can only be won in a war of cleansing violence that will set the peasants, the damned of the earth, against not only the imperialists but their own urban compatriots. In the course of this war of liberation, there will occur "an epistemological revolution," and "a transformation of social consciousness." Said has a long section on Fanon's Les Damnes de la Terre (1962) which consists of ecstatic paraphrase. The "shift from the terrain of nationalist independence to the theoretical domain of liberation," Said declares, requires "a fertile culture of resistance whose core is energetic insurgency, a |technique of trouble'" and sometimes armed insurrection.

Said calmly says of this liberationist literature that "there is an understandable tendency ... to see in it a blueprint for the horrors of the Pol Pot regime." Indeed there is, and Said does nothing to counter that tendency except to assert that the violence invoked is only "tactical." That is one of those fine distinctions that gets overlooked in the killing fields. Moreover, as one might expect from a fine connoisseur of fiction who ventures into political theory, Said is vague about whether this miraculous cultural rebirth in violent war has actually occurred anywhere (apart from Cambodia, I suppose) or whether it could happen anywhere else. "Algeria was liberated, as were Kenya and the Sudan," he says but is careful not to hold them up as successful cases of rebirth. He finally concedes that Fanon's ideas failed because he had no answer to nationalism.

Why spend so much time on him then, trumpeting him as the inventor of the alternative to both imperialism and nationalism? Said's reply to that seems to be that liberationist ideas survive as "an imaginative, even utopian vision which reconceives emancipatory (as opposed to confining) theory and performance." Besides that, such ideas encourage "an investment neither in new authorities, doctrines, and encoded orthodoxies, nor in established institutions and causes, but in a particular sort of nomadic, migratory, and anti-narrative energy." It is not clear what that means but it does not sound like practical politics.

I suspect, basing myself on passages scattered throughout this book, that Said is being coy here, even evasive. I believe he has in mind a specific case where Fanon's ideas about cleansing violence and cultural rebirth still have a chance. That case is the Palestinian intifada in the occupied territories of Israel.

He has spoken of the imperialist West's "regional surrogates" in the Middle East in a context that makes plain he has Israel in view. The Israeli occupation of Palestinian lands thereby becomes a case of imperialism, and anyhow it answers to his definition of imperialism as stealing land from natives. Consequently, the Palestinian intifada becomes "one of the great anti-colonial uprisings of our times." It ranks with such vast causes as the ecological and women's movements as an example of a worldwide "elusive oppositional mood and its emerging strategies," a mood that must "hearten even the most intransigent pessimist." It is one of those mass uprisings such as occurred in thePhilippines and South Africa, which feature "impressive crowd-activated sites, each of them crammed with largely unarmed civilian populations, well past the point of enduring the imposed deprivations, tyranny and inflexibility of governments that had ruled them for too long." Those stone-throwing Palestinian youths are memorable for the "resourcefulness and the startling symbolism of the protests," just like the heroic mobs of South Africa and communist Eastern Europe.

This comes to rating the intifada pretty highly, but there is nothing absurd in that, nor anything ignoble. If Said does not say outright that the Palestinian cause is the last hope of Fanon's liberationist ideals, it might be because he is not sure. When he wrote this book, he had not visited the land of his birth since 1947 (although he was a member of the Palestine National Council, the parliament-in-exile, from 1977 to 1991), but since then he has gone back for a visit. He is now composing a memoir about it. It might tell us something interesting, particularly if it relies on what he sees rather than on the theories proposed in Culture and Imperialism.
The Source of Culture and Imperialism
Edward W. Said's latest work, Culture and Imperialism is indebted to Gramsci in several respects, even if less obviously than The World, the Text and the Critic. Gramsci unfinished essay on the southern question is one of Said's points of reference as a work that sets the stage for the critical attention given in the Prison Notebooks to the "territorial, spatial and geographical foundations of life." Said's analyses of a wide range of literary texts, which he uses as sources for understanding the dynamics of politics and culture in their connections with the whole imperialist enterprise, can be read as fulfillments of the historical materialist premises outlined in fragmentary form in both the Prison Notebooks and the Letters From Prison.
Unlike Gramsci, Said does not adhere explicitly to Marxism, nor does he identify himself with any one political current of movement. Nevertheless, underlying his work is a set of theoretical principles and practical stances that are certainly in harmony with a Gramscian world view. Certain tensions in Said's relationship to Marxism have been noted by the Indian Marxist Aijaz Ahmad, who argues in his book In Theory that Said has not really assimilated the materialist and revolutionary principles undergirding Gramsci's work. Ahmad frames his critique of Said within the boundaries of a rather strict interpretation of Marxism in his commitment to socialism as the foundation on which to build a genuinely oppositional culture. He is skeptical of Said's foregrounding of anti-imperialism and the principle of "liberatory" politics that avoids explicitly socialist partisanship.

Literary Allusions in Cutlure and Imperialism
Said's message is that imperialism is not about a moment in history; it is about a continuing interdependent discourse between subject peoples and the dominant discourse of the empire. Despite the apparent and much-vaunted end of colonialism, the unstated assumptions on which empire was based linger on, snuffing out visions of an "Other" world without domination, constraining the imaginary of equality and justice. Said sees bringing these unstated assumptions to awareness as a first step in transforming the old tentacles of empire. To this end he wrote Culture AND Imperialism.
Let’ have a sense of Edward Said's view of empire and colonialism in the cultural and literary context. The first passage I want to share with you is on pp. 88-89, in which he describes Fanny and Sir Thomas from Jane Austen's Mansfield Park. I'm going to assume that you are not familiar with the novel, which is the story of Fanny's being taken into Sir Thomas' life at Mansfield Park, where she eventually adjusts into the role of mistress of the estate.
Fanny was from a poor line of the family, and her parents are not scrupulous and capable and good and sensible managers of wealth. These are skills which Fanny acquires when she goes, at 10, to live at Mansfield Park. Edward Said notes that Jane Austen devotes little time to the colonies or the management thereof. But he identifies throughout the novel, her proclivity to accept the colonies as a proper means of maintaining the wealth of England. Said also notes that England, unlike the Spanish and to some extent the French, was more focussed on long-term subjugation of the colonies, on managing the colonized peoples to cultivate sugar and other commodities for the English. Said uses the literature of that period to illustrate the extent to which acceptance that subjugated peoples should in fact engage in such labor, and that the proceeds from that labor should support the English.
Said quotes the following passage describing Fanny's visit to the home she left at 10:
"Fanny was almost stunned. The smallness of the house, and thinness of the walls, brought every thing so close to her, that, added to the fatigue of her journey, and all her recent agitation, she hardly knew how to bear it. Within the rom all was tranquil enough, for Susan (Fanny's younger sister) having disappeared with the others, there were soon only her father and herself remaining; and he taking out a newspaper---the accustomary loan of a neighbour, applied himself to studying it, without seeming to recollect her existence. The solitary candle was held between himself and the paper, without any reference to her possible convenience, but she had nothing to do, and was glad to have the light screened from her aching head, as she sat in bewildered, broken, sorrowful contemplation.
"She was at home. But alas! it was not such a home, she had not such a welcome, as---she checked herself; she was unreasonable. . . . A day or two might shew the difference. Sheonly was to blame. Yes, she thought it would not have been so at Mansfield. No, in her uncle's house there would have been a consideration of times and seasons, a regulation of subject, a propritey, an attention towards every body which there was not here." [Footnote omitted.]
Quoted at p. 88 of Culture AND Imperialism.
Said's comment on this passage highlights the extent to which he sees in Austen's writing the reflection of empire:
"In too small a space, you cannot see clearly, you cannot think clearly, you cannot have regulation or attention of the proper sort. The fineness of Austen's detail ("the solitary candle was held between himself and the paper, without any reference to her possible convenience") renders very precisely the dangers of unsociability, of lonely insularity, of diminished awareness that are rectivied in larger and better administered spaces."
As I contemplate Said's description, I am confounded once again by Spivak's insistence that suffering from racism is not the same as suffering colonialism. I do understand her insistence that the colonized are objectified as inevitably unworthy of enjoying the product of their own labor, and that the colonized have essentially nothing to gain. But when she suggests that those suffering from racism, or any form of ethnocentrism or sexism, I suppose, should rely on the access they have to the presentation of validity claims in the dominant discourse, I become skeptical. Throughout Said's analysis, I am constantly reminded that the mere illusion of access to "the goodies" simply distracts us from an understanding that there are very real ceilings to our aspirations. (Robert K. Merton spoke of these "three myths" of American society already in 1935, in Social Theory and Social Structure.
To describe workers under racism and other ism's as having real stakes that the colonized do not have, I think is to delude ourselves. If awareness is, in fact, the first, best step we can find towards peace and understanding, then I find such delusions dangerous. jeanne
A few pages later in Culture AND Imperialism, Said points out the importance of this deeper and more complex criticism he has offered us of Austen's Mansfield Park. Most criticism, from whatever it's theoretical perspective, does not go into what Said calls "the structure of attitude and reference." [At p. 95.] And Said does not intend this postcolonial perspective to replace other perspectives. He expects such criticism to be used in addition to traditional literary criticism. His emphasis is on how much more there is of importance to the slight references to the colonial world made in great literature. He suggests that it is precisely in great literature that we are able to see the internal structure of conflict over a morality that, though not acceptable in the polite society of the empire, has permeated the thinking of those for whom the great literature was written. Jane Austen's sensibility could not deal with the issue of the "slave trade," which, in Mansfield Park, was met with "dead silence." Edward Said's comment: "In time there would no longer be a dead silence when slavery was spoken of, and the subject became central in a new understanding of what Europe was." [At p. 96.]

Jane Austen and Conrad
The cherished axiom of [Jane] Austen's unwordliness is closely tied to a sense of her polite remove from the contingencies of history. It was Q. D. Leavis (1942) who first pointed out the tendency of scholars to lift Austen out of her social millieu, gallantly allowing her gorgeous sentences to float free, untainted by the routines of labor that produced them and deaf to the tumult of current events. Since Leavis, numerous efforts have been made to counter the patronizing view that Austen, in her fidelity to the local, the surface, the detail, was oblivious to large-scale struggles, to wars and mass movements of all kinds. Claudia Johnson(1988), for example, has challenged R. W. Chapman's long-standing edition of Austen for its readiness to illustrate her ballrooms and refusal to gloss her allusions to riots or slaves and has linked this writer to a tradition of frankly political novels by women. It is in keeping with such historicizing gestures that [Edward] Said's Culture and Imperialism insists on Mansfield Park's participation in its moment, pursuing the references to Caribbean slavery that Chapmen pointedly ignored. Yet while arguing vigorously for the novel's active role in producing imperialist plots, Said also in effect replays the story of its author's passivity regarding issues in the public sphere. Unconcerned about Sir Thomas Bertram's colonial holdings in slaves as well as land and taking for granted their necessity to the good life at home, Said's Austen is a veritable Aunt Jane - naive, complacent, and demurely without overt political opinion.
I will grant that Said's depiction of Austen as unthinking in her references to Antigua fits logically with his overall contention that nineteenth-century European culture, and especially the English novel, unwittingly but systematically helped to gain consent for imperialist policies (see C, p. 75). [The novel] was, Said asserts, one of the primary discourses contributing to a 'consolidated vision,' virtually uncontested, of England's righteous imperial prerogative (C, p. 75). Austen is no different from Thackeray or Dickens, then, in her implicit loyalty to official Eurocentrism. At the same time, Said's version of Austen in particular is given a boost by the readily available myth of her 'feminine' nearsightedness... This rendering of Austen is further enabled, I would argue, by Said's highly selective materialization of her... [Mansfield Park] is, in fact, almost completely isolated from the rest of Austen's work. If the truth be told, Said's attention even to his chosen text is cursory: Austen's references to Antigua (and India) are mentioned without actually being read...
But this picture of Austen is disembodied in not only a textual but also a larger social sense. Though recontextualized as an Eglish national in the period preceding colonial expansion, Austen's more precise status as an unmarried, middle-class, scribbling woman remains wholly unspecified. The failure to consider Austen's gender and the significance of this omision is pointed up by Said's more nuanced treatment of Conrad. According to Said, Conrad stands out from other colonial writers because, as a Polish expatriate, he possessed 'an extraordinarily persistent residual sense of his own exilic marginality' (C, p. 24). The result is a double view of imperialism that at once refutes and reinforces the West's right to dominate the globe. As Said explains, 'Never the wholly incorporated and fully acculturated Englishman, Conrad therefore preserved an ironic distance [from imperial conquest] in each of his works' (C, p. 25). Of course Austen was not, any more than Conrad, 'the wholly incorporated and fully acculturated Englishman.' Lacking the franchise, enjoying few property rights (and these because she was single), living as a dependent at the edge of her brother's estate, and publishing her work anonymously, Austen was arguably a kind of exile in her own country. If we follow out the logic of Said's own identity politics, Austen, too, might therefore be suspected of irony toward reigning constructions of citizenship, however much, like Conrad, she may also in many respects have upheld them. The goal of this essay is to indicate where and, finally, to suggest why Said so entirely misses this irony. My point, I should stress, is not to exonerate Austen of imperialist crimes. Surely Said is right to include her among those who made colonialism thinkable by constructing the West as center, home, and norm, while pushing everything else to the margins. The question I would raise is not whether Austen contributed to English domination abroad but how her doing so was necessarily inflected and partly disrupted by her position as a bourgeois woman.

What is Culture and what is Imperialism

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Edward Said, a brilliant and unique amalgam of scholar, literary critic and political activist, examines the roots of imperialism in the Western culture and traces the relationship between culture and imperialism. Imperialism has always fascinated the literary writers and political thinkers as a subject. It was a major theme of nineteenth and twentieth century native and non-native novelists and poets. Different writers have different perception about the phenomenon. A lot has been written on the subject in the past but Edward’s book Culture and Imperialism attracted everybody’s attention. This book was read and discussed in all parts of the world and was hailed by reviewers and critics as a monumental work.

In the Introduction to Culture and Imperialism, Edward states that his previous work Orientalism was limited to Middle East, and in the present book he wanted to describe a more general pattern of relationship between the modern West and its overseas territories. This book, he says, is not a sequel of Orientalism, as it aims at something different.
According to Edward there are two types of attitudes towards culture. One that considers culture as a concept that includes refining and elevating element, each society’s reservoir of best that has been known and thought. The other is the aggressive, protectionist attitude viewing culture as a source of identity that differentiates between ‘us and ‘them’, and power with which we can combat the influences of the foreign cultures. Such an attitude is opposed to liberal philosophies, as multiculturalism and hybridism, and has often lead to religious and- nationalist fundamentalism. Culture conceived in this way becomes a protective enclosure that divorces us from the everyday world.
“I have found it a challenge not to see culture in this way- that is, antiseptically quarantined from worldly affiliations, but as an extraordinary field of endeavour.”
Edward Said sees the European writing on Africa, India, Ireland, Far Hast and other lands as part of European effort to rule distant lands. He says that Colonial and post-Colonial fiction is central to his argument. These writings present the colonised lands as ‘mysterious lands’ inhabited by uncivilized barbarians, who understood only the language of violence, and deserved to be ruled. This is a misrepresentation of the native people and their cultures, and needs to be redressed. Edward Said finds a connection between these narratives and the imperial process, of which they are a part. These writing ignore the important aspect of the reality- the native people and their culture.
Edward Said refers to two novels in order to explain what he had in mind: Dickens’ Great Expectations, and Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo. Dickens’ Great Expectations is a primarily a story about Pip’s vain attempt to become a gentleman. Early in life Pip helps a condemned convict, Abel Magwitch, who after being transported to Australia, pays back Pip with huge
sums of money through his lawyer. Magwitch reappears illegally in Londonafter sometime. Pip does not welcome him and rejects him as an unpleasant criminal. Magwitch is unacceptable being from Australia, a penal colony designed for rehabilitation of English criminals. This is a remarkable novel,
according to Said, but the focus of the narrative is London, not Australia. Dickens did not bother to discuss the plight of the convicts in Australia, from where they could never return. In Said’s judgment the prohibition placed on Magwitch’s return is not only penal but also imperial. These ugly criminals could not by allowed to return to England-the land of decent people.
Conrad’s Nostromo, the second example picked up by Said, is set in aCentral American Republic, independent, but dominated by outside interests because of its immense silver mines. In this novel Holroyd, the American financer tells Charles Gould, the British owner of a mine:
‘We shall run the world’s business whether the world likes it or not.
The world can’t help it- and neither we can, I guess.’
This is the general thinking of the imperialists. Much of the rhetoric of ‘The New World Order’ with its self-assumed responsibility of civilizing the world, seems to be originated from this thinking, says Edward Said,
The problem with Conrad is that he writes as a man whose Western view of Non-Western world is so ingrained in as to blind him to other histories, other cultures and other aspirations. He could never understand that India,Africa and South Africa had lives and cultures of their own, not totally controlled by the imperialists. Conrad allows the readers to see that imperialism is a system and it should work in a proper fashion. There are certain obvious limitations of Conrad’s vision. Conrad was both imperialist and anti-imperialist, progressive in rendering the corruption of overseas domination, deeply reactionary in ignoring the fact that Africa and South America had independent history and culture, which the imperialist violently disturbed but by which they were ultimately defeated.
All such works, says Edward Said, seem to argue that source of world’s significant action and life was the West, and rest of the world was mind-deadened, having no life, history or integrity of its own. It is not that these westerners had no sympathy for the foreign cultures; their real drawback was their inability to take seriously the alternatives to imperialism. The world has changed since Conrad and Dickens due to imperialistic globalisation. Now various cultures have a closer interaction and have become interdependent. The colonisers and the colonized do not exist in separate worlds. So, one-sided versions cannot hold for long. Even those who are on the side of those fighting; for freedom from imperialists need to avoid narrow-mindedness and chauvinistic trends. One has to listen to what people are saying on other side of the fence. (This is what Seamus Heaney says in Redress Of the Poetry.)This, says, Said, is a positive development. One should always suspect the impressions of an exclusive consciousness. Most of the Western writers, for example, could never imagine that those ‘natives’ who appeared either subservient, or uncooperative were one day going to be capable of revolt.
In the last part of the Introduction to ‘Culture and Imperialism’ Said makes some other points about the book. The purpose of his book, he says, is so trace the relationship between culture, aesthetic forms and historical experience. His aim is not to give a catalogue of books and authors, “Instead, I have tried to look at what I consider to be important and essential things.” My hope is that readers and critics of this book will use it to further the lines of enquiry and arguments about the historical experience of imperialism put forward in it.” Moreover, he has not discussed all the empires. He has focused on three imperial powers: British, French, and American. This book is about past and present, about ‘us’ and ‘them’, he says.
Said says that the origin of current American policies can be seen in the past. All powers aspiring for global domination have done .the same things. There is always the appeal to power and national interest in running the affairs of ‘lesser peoples’, and the same destructive zeal when the going goes rough. America made the same mistake in Vietnam and Middle East.
The worst part of the whole exercise has been the collaboration of intellectuals, artists and journalists with these practices. Said hopes that a history of imperial adventure rendered in cultural terms might serve some deterrent purpose.
Said makes it clear that the criticism on imperialism does exempt the aggrieved colonized people from criticism. The fortunes and misfortunes of nationalism, of what can be called separatism and nativism, do not always make a flattering story. Narrow and dogmatic approach to culture can be as dangerous to culture as is imperialism. Secondly, culture is not the property of the East or the West.
Edward Said, by necessity, was in a position to be objective in his approach, as he lived most part of his life in exile and had the personal experience of both the cultures. He was born in Middle East and lived as an exile inAmerica, where he wrote this book. He sums up his position in following works.
“The last point I want to make is that this is an exile’s book. Ever since I remember, I have felt that I belonged to both the Worlds, without being completely of either one or the other”, He says.

The style of Charles Lamb’s Essays

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The style of Charles Lamb’s Essays is Gently, Old-fashioned and Irresistibly Attractive

The style of Charles Lamb’s essays is gently, old-fashioned and irresistibly attractive specially found of old writers. He borrowed unconsciously from the early English dramatists. Burton’s ‘Anatomy of Melancholy’ and Browne’s ‘Religio Medici’ helped him too much to from this style. Montague’s writings impressed him the most. Moreover, Lamb liked to read Greek art and literature. The Essays of Elia are of various kinds. They include literary appreciation, character-sketches, fantasies, personal experiences, reminiscences etc. But they all had the similarity regarding the author’s personal reaction. A very significant question appears whether Essays of Elia project a portrait of Charles Lamb or not. Lamb himself said:“Let no one receive these narrations of Elia for true turn records. They are in true but shadows of fact-verisimilitudes not verities – or sitting but upon the remote edges and out skirts of history.”Lamb loved to mystify his readers. This mystification made his language subtle and complicated. By this mystification, Lamb introduced his elder brother john Lamb and his sister Mary Lamb as sins namely –James and Bridget Elia.

Lamb’s style consists of many styles-it is a chemical, not a mechanical mixture. It is his own style. He frequently imitates the Elizabethan writers. He uses Latin words in his essays regularly He use words which are now obsolete. Lamb’s style has ‘humour’ ‘wit’ and ‘fun’. Wit is based on intellect, humour on insight and sympathy, and fun on is our and freshness of body and mind. Humour is very nearly related to pathos which is beautifully expressed in ‘Dream children’. Hugh Walker gives a striking commentary on Lamb’s style:“Lamb’s style is inseparable from his homour His “whim-whams”, as he called them best expression in the quaint words and antique and multiplied and sometimes far fetched never forested comparisons in which headwalls. Strip Elia of these and he nothing ….of no one else is saying that the style is the man more true than of Lamb. In the deepest sense his style is natural and all his own”.

From personal mood of experience Lamb leads his reader to see life and literature as he saw it the wonderful Combination of personal and universal interests makes Lamb’s essays remarkable. They continue the best tradition of Addison and Steele. Emphasizing the quaintly of self –dramatization in Lamb’s works Craig aptly observes:“The secret of Lamb’s style is that he was himself an actor forever assuming some role at Oxford, ‘I can here play the gentleman, enact the student’. He was forever pretending to be scholastics philosopher or a seventeenth century preacher dividing the human species in to great new categories …”

Denis Thompson calls Lamb’s style ‘an assumed and easily assumable bag of tricks’, ‘embarrassing confectionary manner’; and he blames Lamb for the degeneration of the essay which lent itself to ‘feak personality’, ‘studied irresponsibility’, and a cultivation of literary mannerisms to hide emptiness of matter. Walter Pater says about Lamb’s essays:“WE know that beneath this blithe surface there is something of the domestic horror, of the beautiful heroism, and devotedness too, of old Greek Tragedy”. Though his essays are brilliant, Lamb’s popularity in the twentieth century has diminished a lot.

Charles Lamb as an Essayist

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Introduction:
Montaigne, a French writer, was the father of the essay, and it was Francis Bacon who naturalised the new form in English. However, there is much difference between his essays and the essays of his model. Montaigne’s essays are marked by his tendency towards self-revelation, a light-hearted sense of humour, and tolerance. But Bacon in his essay is more an adviser than a companion: he is serious, objective, and didactic.

It has well been said that the essay took a wrong turn in the hands of Bacon. For two centuries after Bacon the essay in England went on gravitating towards the original conception held by Montaigne, but it was only in the hands of the romantic essayists of the early nineteenth century that it became wholly personal, light, and lyrical in nature. From then onwards it has seen no essential change. The position of Lamb among these romantic essayists is the most eminent. In fact, he has often been called the prince of all the essayists England has so far produced. Hugh Walker calls him the essayist par excellence who should be taken as a model. It is from the essays of Lamb that we often derive our very definition of the essay, and it is with reference to his essays as a criterion of excellence that we evaluate the achievement and merit of a given essayist. Familiarity with Lamb as a man enhances for a reader the charm of his essays. And he is certainly the most charming of all English essay. We may not find in him the massive genius of Bacon, or the ethereal flights (O altitude) of Thomas Browne, or the brilliant lucidity of Addison, or the ponderous energy of Dr. Johnson, but none excels him in the ability tocharm the reader or to catch him in the plexus of his own personality.
His Self-revelation:
What strikes one particularly about Lamb as an essayist is his persistent readiness to reveal his everything to the reader. The evolution of the essay from Bacon to Lamb lies primarily in its shift from
(i) objectivity to subjectivity, and
(ii) (ii) from formality to familiarity.
Of all the essayists it is perhaps Lamb who is the most autobiographic. His own life is for him “such stuff as essays are made on.” He could easily say what Montaigne had said before him-“I myself am the subject of my book.” The change from objectivity to subjectivity in the English essay was, by and large, initiated by Abraham Cowley who wrote such essays as the one entitled. “Of Myself.” Lamb with other romantic essayists completed this change. Walter Pater observes in Appreciations; “With him, as with Montaigne, the desire of self-portraiture is below all mere superficial tendencies, the real motive in ‘writing at all, desire closely connected with intimacy, that modern subjectivity which may be called the Montaignesque element in literature. In his each and every essay we feel the vein of his subjectivity.” His essays are, as it were, so many bits of autobiography by piecing which together we can arrive at a pretty authentic picture of his life, both external and internal. It is really impossible to think of an essayist who is more personal than Lamb. His essays reveal him fully-in all his whims, prejudices, past associations, and experiences. “Night Fears” shows us Lamb as a timid, superstitious boy. “Christ’s Hospital” reveals his unpalatable experiences as a schoolboy. We are introduced to the various members of his family in numerous essays like “My Relations’ “The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple,” and “Poor Relations.” We read of the days of his adolescence in “Mackery End in Hertfordshire.” His tenderness towards his sister Mary is revealed by “Mrs. Battle’s Opinions on Whist.” His professional life is recalled in “The South-Sea House” and “The, Superannuated Man.” His sentimental memories full of pathos find expression in “Dream Children.” His prejudices come to the fore in “Imperfect Sympathies” and “The Confessions of a Drunkard.” His gourmandise finds a humours utterence in “A Dissertation upon Roast Pig,” “Grace before Meat,” and elsewhere. What else is left then? Very little, except an indulgence in self-pity at the stark tragedy of his life. Nowhere does he seem to be shedding tears at the fits of madness to which his siter Mary Bridget of the essays) was often subject and in one of which she knifed his mother to death. The frustration of his erotic career (Lamb remained in a state of lifelong bachelorhood imposed by himself.to enable him to nurse his demented sister), however, is touched upon here and there. In “Dream Children,” for instance, his unfruitful attachment with Ann Simmons is referred to. She got married and her children had to “call Bartrum father.” Lamb is engaged in a reverie about “his children” who would have possibly been born had he been married to Alice W-n (Ann Simmons). When the reverie is gone this is what he finds: “…and immediately awaking, I found myself quietly seated in my bachelor arm-chair where I had fallen asleep, with the faithful Bridget [his sister Mary] unchanged by my side…but John L (his brother John Lamb) was gone for ever.” How touching!
Lamb’s excessive occupation with himself may lead one to assume that he is too selfish or. egocentric, or that he is vulgar or inartistic. Far from that, Egotism with Lamb sheds its usual offensive accoutrements. The following specific points may be noted in this connexion:
(i) His egotism is free from vulgarity. Well does Compton-Rickett observe: “There is no touch of vulgarity in these intimacies; for all their frank unreserve we feel the delicate refinement of the man’s spiritual nature. Lamb omits no essential, he does not sentimentalise, and does not brutalise his memories. He poetises them, preserving them for us in art that can differentiate between genuine reality and crude realism.”
(ii) His artistic sense of discrimination-selection and rejection-has also to be taken into account.David Daiches maintains: “The writer’s own character is always there, flaunted before the reader, but it is carefully prepared and controlled before it is exhibited.”
(iii) Though Lamb is an egotist yet he is not self-assertive. He talks about himself not because he thinks himself to be important but because he thinks himself to be the only object he knows intimately. Thus his egotism is born of a sense of humility rather than hauteur. Samuel C. Chew observes: “Like all the romantics he is self-revelatory, but there is nothing in him of the ‘egotistical-sublime.’ Experience had made him too clear-sighted to take any individual, least of all himself, too seriously. The admissions of his own weaknesses, follies, and prejudices are so many humorous warnings to his readers.”
The Note of Familiarity:
Lamb’s contribution to the English essay also lies in his changing the general tone from formality to familiarity. This change was to be accepted by all the essayists to follow. “Never”, says Compton-Rickett, “was any man more intimate in print than he. He has made of chatter a fine art.” Lamb disarms the reader at once with his buttonholding familiarity. He plays with him in a puckish manner, no doubt, but he is always ready to take him into confidence and to exchange heart-beats with him. In the essays of the writers before him we are aware of a well-marked distance between the writer and ourselves. Bacon and Addison perch themselves, as it were, on a pedestal, and cast pearls before the readers standing below. In Cowley, the distance between the reader and writer narrows down-but it is there still. It was left for Lamb to abolish this distance altogether. He often addresses the reader (“dear reader”) as if he were addressing a bosom friend. He makes nonsense of the proverbial English insularity and “talks” to the readers as “a friend and man” (as Thackeray said he did in his novels). This note of intimacy is quite pleasing, for Lamb is the best of friends.
No Didacticism:
He is a friend, and not a teacher. Lamb shed once and for all the didactic approach which characterises the work of most essayists before him. Bacon called his essays “counsels civil and moral.” His didacticism is too palpable to need a comment. Cowley was somewhat less didactic, but early in the eighteenth century Steele and Addison-the founders of the periodical essay-set in their papers the moralistic, mentor-like tone for all the periodical essayists to come. Even such “a rake among scholars and a scholar among rakes” as Steele arrogated to himself the air of a teacher and reformer. This didactic tendency reached almost its culmination in Dr. Johnson who in theIdler and Rambler papers gave ponderous sermons rather than what may be called essays. Lamb is too modest to pretend to proffer moral counsels. He never argues, dictates, or coerces. We do not find any “philosophy of life” in his essays, though there are some personal views and opinions flung about here and there not for examination and adoption, but just to serve as so many ventilators to let us have a peep into his mind. “Lamb”, says Cazamian, “is not a moralist nor a psychologist, his object is not research, analysis, or confession; he is, above all, an artist. He has no aim save the reader’s pleasure, and his own.” But though Lamb is not a downright pedagogue, he is yet full of sound wisdom which he hides under a cloak of frivolity and tolerant good nature. He sometimes looks like the Fool in King Lear whose weird and funny words are impregnated with a hard core of surprising sanity. As a critic avers, “though Lamb frequently donned the cap and bells, he was more than ajester; even his jokes had kernels of wisdom.” In his “Character of the Late Elia” in which he himself gives a character-sketch of the supposedly dead Elia, he truly observes : “He would interrupt the gravest discussion with some light jest; and yet, perhaps not quite irrelevant in ears that could understand it.”
The Rambling Nature of His Essays and His Lightness of Touch:
The rambling nature of his essays and his lightness of touch are some other distinguishing features of Lamb as an essayist. He never bothers about keeping to the point. Too often do we find him flying off at a tangent and ending at a point which we could never have foreseen. Every road with him seems to lead to the world’s end. We often reproach Bacon for the “dispersed” nature of his “meditations”, but Lamb beats everybody in his monstrous discursiveness. To consider some examples, first take up his essay “The Old and the New School-master.” In this essay which apparently is written for comparing the old and new schoolmaster, the first two pages or thereabouts contain a very humorous and exaggerated description of the author’s own ignorance. Now, we may ask, what has Lamb’s ignorance to do with the subject in hand? Then, the greater part of the essay “Oxford in the Vacation” is devoted to the description of his friend Dyer. Lamb’s essays are seldom artistic, well-patterned wholes. They have no beginning, middle and end. Lamb himself described his essays as “a sort of unlicked incondite things.” However, what these essays lose in artistic design they gain in the touch of spontaneity. This is what lends them what is called “the lyrical quality.”
Lamb’s Humour, Pathos, and Humanity:
Lamb’s humour, humanity, and the sense of pathos are all his own; and it is mainly these qualities which differentiate his essays from those of his contemporaries. His essays are rich alike in wit, humour, and fun. Hallward and Hill observe in the Introduction to their edition of the Essavs of Elia :“The terms Wit. Humour and Fun are often confused but they are really different in meaning. The first is based on intellect, the second on insight and sympathy, the third on vigour and freshness of mind and body. Lamb’s writings show all the three qualities, but what most distinguishes him is Humour, for his sympathy is ever strong and active.” Humour in Lamb’s essays constitutes very like an atmosphere “with linked sweetness long drawn out.” Its Protean shapes range from frivolous puns, impish attempts at mystification, grotesque buffoonery, and Rabelaisian verbosity (see, for example, the description of a “poor relation”) to the subtlest ironical stroke which pierces down to the very heart of life. J. B. Priestley observes in English Humour: “English humour at its deepest and tenderest seems in him [Lamb] incarnate. He did not merely create it, he lived in it. His humour is not an idle thing, but the white flower, plucked from a most dangerous nettle.” What particularly distinguishes Lamb’s humour is its close alliance with pathos. While laughing he is always aware of the tragedy of life-not only his life, but life in general. That is why he often laughs through his tears. Witness his treatment of the hard life of chimney sweepers and Christ’s Hospital boys. The descriptions are touching enough, but Lamb’s treatment provides us with a humorous medium of perception rich in prismatic effects, which bathes the tragedy of actual life in the iridescence of mellow comedy. The total effect is very complex, and strikes our sensibility in a bizarre way, puzzling us as to what is comic and what is tragic.
Style:
A word, lastly, about Lamb’s peculiar style which is all his own and yet not his, as he is a tremendous borrower. He was extremely influenced by some “old-world” writers like Fuller and Sir Thomas Browne. It is natural, then, that his style is archaic. His sentences are long and rambling, after the seventeenth-century fashion. He uses words many of which are obsolescent, if not obsolete. But though he “struts in borrowed plumes”, these “borrowed plumes” seem to be all his own. Well does a critic say: “The blossoms are culled from other men’s gardens, but their blending is all Lamb’s own.” Passing through Lamb’s imagination they become something fresh and individual. His style is a mixture certainly of many styles, but a chemical not a mechanical mixture.” His inspiration from old writers gives his style a romantic colouring which is certainly intensified by his vigorous imagination. Very like Wordsworth he throws a fanciful veil on the common objects of life and converts them into interesting and “romantic” shapes. His peculiar style is thus an asset in the process of “romanticising” everyday affairs and objects which otherwise would strike one with a strong feeling of ennui. He is certainly a romantic essayist. What is more, he is a poet.

HISTORY OF ENGLISH LITERATURE (14)

2015-05-19T11:06:00.002+05:00

1.The earliest surviving work in English Literature is

Ans: Caedmon's Hymn

2. The epic poem Beowulf consists

Ans: 3182 alliterative lines

3. Which epic poem from old English Literature has been declared the national epic poem of England?

Ans: Beowulf Epic Poem

4. The epic poem Beowulf is written in

Ans: Scandinavian Script

5. Who wrote the epic poem Beowulf?

Ans: Anonymous

6. The Old English "Martyrology" is a Merican collection of

Ans: Hagiographies

7. Eynsham was a prolific 10th-century writer of

Ans: Hagiographies and Homilies

8. The earliest English poet whose name is known is;

Ans: Caedmon

9. King Alfred's reign ended in

Ans: 9th century

10. In the battle of Maldon in 991, The Anglo-Saxons failed to prevent

Ans: Vikings' Invasion

11. "The Wanderer" is an old English poem that consists

Ans: 115 Lines of alliterative verse

12. A poem that mourns a loss, or has the more general meaning of a simply sorrowful piece of writing is called;

Ans: Elegy

13. The English Literature is generally seen as beginning with the;

Ans: Epic Poem Beowulf

14. Normans conquered the England in

Ans: 1066

15. Which language became the standard language of courts, parliament and polite society during the reign of Normans?

Ans: Law French

16. Who translated the Bible in the Middle English Period?

Ans: Wycliffe

17. Which pre-Reformation movement rejected many of the distinctive teachings of the Roman Catholic Church?

Ans: The Lollard Movement

18. The term "Lollard" refers to whom?

Ans: The followers of John Wycliffe

19. A prominent theologian who was dismissed from the University of Oxfard in 1381 for criticism of the Church was;

Ans: John Wycliffe

20. Middle English Period lasts up till the;

Ans: 1470

21. Patience and Purity are alliterative poems written by;

Ans: Sir Gawain

22. What is the term "Chancery Standard" meant in English Literature?

Ans: A form of London-based English

23. Where is the Geoffrey Chaucer buried in?

Ans: Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey

24. Geoffrey Chaucer is best known for his;

Ans: Canterbury Tales

25. The first recorded association of Valentine's Day is in Chaucer's;

Ans: Parliament of Fouls

26. Who was the personal friend of Geoffrey Chaucer?

Ans: John Gower

27. Which book is believed to be the first published book written by a woman in the English language?

Ans: Revelation of Divine Love

28. William Caxton invented the printing press in

Ans: 1476

29. Pilgrim's progress is a famous allegory of medieval period written by;

Ans: John Bunyan

30. Renaissance is usually regarded as beginning in 14th-century in;

Ans: Italy

31. The term Renaissance in English Literature means

Ans: Re-birth

32. The English Renaissance was actually the;

Ans: Cultural and Artistic Movement

33. John Florio was an excellent;

Ans: Linguist and Lexicographer

34. Sonnet was introduced into English Literature from

Ans: Italian Literature

35. The Faerie Queene, an epic poem was written by

Ans: Edmund Spencer

36. The defense of the poetry is the work of

Ans: Sir Philip Sidney

37. What is significant about "Gorboduc" the first verse drama in English Literature?

Ans: Blank Verse was used in it for the first time ever

38. Reign of the Elizabeth-I started in

Ans: 1558

39. Reign of the James-I started in

Ans: 1603

40. Thomas Wyatt is one of the earliest English poet of

Ans: Renaissance Age

41. Who is known as the poets' poet in English Literature?

Ans: Edmund Spencer

42. Sonnet is a

Ans: 14-lines poem

43. What is called the first eight lines of Sonnet?

Ans: Octave

44. What is called the last six lines of Sonnet?

Ans: Sestet
45. What is the rhyming scheme of Octave in sonnet?

Ans: a-b-b-a-a-b-b-a

46. What is the rhyming scheme of sestet in sonnet?

Ans: : c-d-e-c-d-e or c-d-c-c-d-c.

47.William Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, and Christopher Marlowe were

Ans:Elizabethan age playwrights.

48. Dr. Faustus is the very famous play, written by

Ans: Christopher Marlowe

49. The Alchemist, comedy was written by

Ans: Ben Johnson

50. The 'Table Alphabeticall' is believed to be first ever dictionary in English language was written in 1604 by;

Ans; Robert Cawdrey

ENGLISH LITERATURE QUIZ (13)

2015-05-19T10:07:00.001+05:00

1- Which novel is not written by Jane Austen?

A- Emma b- the chimes c- Persuation d- Mansfield Park e- none these

2- Shaw wrote more than:

a- 30 plays b- 40 plays c- 50 plays d- 60 plays e- none of these

3- Shaw died at the age of:

a- 75 b- 85 c- 95 d- 105 e- none of these

4- Jack Worthing is a character created by:

a- Shaw b- Dickens c- Browning d- Hardy e- none of these

5- Adam Bede is a:

a- Play b- Novel c- short storey d- Poem e- none of these

6- Dickens sprang to fame with a publication of:

a- Hard Times b- David Copperfield c- pickwick papers d- Great Expectations e- none of these

7- Who served as an Irish senator for two terms?

A- Wilde b- Shaw c- Ibsen d- Yeats e- none of these

8- John Bull’s Other Island is written by:

a- Shaw b- Wilde c- Hemingway d- Beckett e- none of these

9- Lilliputians symbolize excessive human:

a- Jealousy b- confidence c- pride d- Ego e- none of these

10- Houyhnhnms represent life governed by sense and:

a- moderation b- patience c- understanding d- compromise e-none of these

11- Cordelia’s chief characteristic is her:

a- beauty b- devotion c- sympathy d- kindness e- none of these

12- Henry Higgins is a character in:

a- Pygmalian b- saint joan c- major Barbara d- candida e-none of these

13- Eliot worked for Faber and Faber as a/an:

a- assistant b- director c- writer d- editor e- none of these

14- Wordsworth was appointed as poet Laureate in:

a- 1843 b-1844 c-1845 d-1846 e- none of these

15- Hemingway was a great fan of:

a- Cricket b- baseball c- softball d- football e- none of these

16- Jude the Obscure is a:

a- comedy b- tragedy c- tragic-comedy d- black comedy e- none of these

17- Eliot was influenced by:

a- Ezra Pound b- shaw c- Hardy d- Wilde e- none of these

18- Who became the poet Laureate of England and Ireland during the reign of Queen Victoria?

A- Tennyson b- Browning c- Hardy d- Lawrence e- none of these

19- Hemingway also worked as a:

a- Carpenter b- Painter c- surgeon d- Driver e- none of these

20- “Tales from Shakespeare” is written by:

a- Shakespeare b- Lamb c- Lawrence d- Mary anne evans e- none of these

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (12)

2015-05-16T19:33:00.002+05:00

1- Lyrical Ballads opens with;

a- Tintern Abbey
b- Michael
c- Dejection: an Ode
d- Rime of Ancient Mariner e- Immortality Ode.

2- Besides the French Revolution the effect on Romantic Revolution:

a- American Revolution
b- Napoleonic wars
c- Industrial Revolution
d- Peasant’s Revolt
e- The defeat of the Spanish armada.

3- William Blake’s /Song’s of ----------‘ counterbalance his ‘Songs of Experience’.

A- Love
b- childhood
c- past
d- Inexperience
e- Innocence

4- Geraldine is a character of the poem;

a- Lucy Grey
b- The Thorn
c- Christabel
d- Frost at midnight
e- the last of the flock

5- ‘kubla khan’ is a poem which reflects a---------strain in Choleridge’s poetry.

A- Intellectual
b- magical
c- melancholic
d- pessimistic
e- philosophical

6- Keats’ poem Endymion is based on ------ mythology.

A- Greek
b- Roman
c- celtic
d- Scandanavian
e- Indian

7- Byron’s journey to Spain, Malta, Albania and Greece resulted in the production of the first two cantos of his poem:

a- cain
b- childe Herald’s Pilgrimage
c- Don Juan
d- the prisoner of Chillon
e- The Seige of Corinth

8- In Don Juan Byron used:

a- blank verse
b- couplets
c- ottava rima
d- refrain
e- terza rima

9- Shelley was expelled from the Oxford University on the charge of being a(n):

a- anarchist
b-aetheist
c- commonist
d- nazi
e- traitor

10- Adonais was an elegy Shelley wrote in 1821 on the death of:

a- Keats
b- Byron
c- Arthur Hugh Clough
d- Thomas Love Peacock
e- William Hazlit

11- Confessions of an English Opium Eater was written by:

a- Charles Lamb
b- John Ruskin
c- Maria Edgeworth
d- Thomas Carlyle
e- Thomas
e Quencey

12- Elia was the pseudonym used by Charles Lamb for getting his works published in:

a- London magazine
b- The New York Times
c- The Mirror
d- The spectator
e- the Sun

13- Tennyson created a medieval world in his poem:

a- in memoriam
b- the lady of Shalott
c- the lotus eaters
d- tithonus
e- Ulyssess

14- Arthur Hugh Clough became an inspiration for Mathew Arnold’s work:

a- the buried life
b- dover beach
c- culture and anarchy
d- the scholor gypsy
e- essays on criticism

15- ------------- is an attack by Ruskin on the Philistines.

A- modern painters
b- stones of Venice
c- seven lamps of architecture
e- praeterita

16- Dickens’ first novel which focused on the specific social ills was:

a- the Christmas carol
b- david copperfield
c- great expectatios
d-oliver twist
e- a tale of two cities

17- G Eliot’s novels show her concern for the character’s----------- problems.

A- economic
b- moral
c-religious
d- spiritual e social

18- Dickens’ novels combine--------- and melodrama.

A- journalism
b-philosophy

c- satire
d- science
e- religion

19- The first which Charlotte Bronte wrote was:

a- Emily
b- jane eyre
c- Shirley
d- the professor
e- villette

20- Oscar Wilde’s novel published in 1891 was entitled as:

a- the picture of dorian grey
b- the importance of being earnest
c- lady windermere’s fan
d- a woman of no importance
e- salome

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (11)

2015-05-16T19:17:00.001+05:00

1. Carl Sandburg 'Planked whitefish' contains what kind of imagery?

a. Sea scenes
b. Rural Idyll
c. War
d. Innocent childhood

2. Which influential American poet was born in Long Island in 1819?

a. Emily Dickinson
b. Paul Dunbar
c. John Greenleaf Whittier
d. Walt Whitman

3. In 1960 'The Colossus' was the first book of poems published by which poetess?

a. Elizabeth Bishop
b. Sylvia Plath
c. Marianne Moore
d. Laura Jackson

4. In his poem Kipling said 'If you can meet with triumph and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . '?

a. Glory
b. Ruin
c. Disaster
d. victory

5. Which of the following is not a literary device used for aesthetic effect in poetry?

a. Assonance
b. Onomatopaea
c. Rhyme
d. Grammar

6. True or false: Writing predates poetry.

a. True
b. False

7. What is the earliest surviving European poem?

a. The Homeric epic
b. The Gilgamesh epic
c. The Deluge epic
d. The Hesiodic ode

8. Which of the following is not a poetic tradition?

a. The Epic
b. The Comic
c. The Occult
d. The Tragic

9. What is the study of poetry's meter and form called?

a. Prosody
b. Potology
c. Rheumatology
d. Scansion

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (10)

2015-05-16T11:35:00.001+05:00

1. Why did the rebels of 1381 target the church, beheading the archbishop of Canterbury?

a) Their leaders were Lollards, advocating radical religious reform.
b) The common people were still essentially pagan.
c) They believed that writing, a skill largely confined to the clergy, was a form of black magic.
d) The church was among the greatest of oppressive landowners.
e) a and c only

2. Which influential medieval text purported to reveal the secrets of the afterlife?

a) Dante's Divine Comedy
b) Boccaccio's Decameron
c) The Dream of the Rood
d) Chaucer's Legend of Good Women
e) Gower's Confessio Amantis

3. Who is the author of Piers Plowman?

a) Sir Thomas Malory
b) Margery Kempe
c) Geoffrey Chaucer
d) William Langland
e) Geoffrey of Monmouth

4. What event resulted from the premature death of Henry V?
a) the Battle of Agincourt
b) the Battle of Hastings
c) the Norman Conquest
d) the Black Death
e) the War of the Roses

5. Which literary form, developed in the fifteenth century, personified vices and virtues?

a) the short story
b) the heroic epic
c) the morality play
d) the romance
e) the limerick

6. Which of the following statements about Julian of Norwich is true?

a) She sought unsuccessfully to restore classical paganism.
b) She was a virgin martyr.
c) She is the first known woman writer in the English vernacular.
d) She made pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, and Santiago.
e) She probably never met Margery Kempe.

7. Which of the following authors is considered a devotee to chivalry, as it is personified in Sir Lancelot?

a) Julian of Norwich
b) Margery Kempe
c) William Langland
d) Sir Thomas Malory
e) Geoffrey Chaucer

8.what was the occupation of Chaucer's father?
a. leather merchant
b.civil servant
c. a vintner

9. Chaucer became a page to which king's daughter-in-law?

a. Edward III
b. Richard II
c. Henry IV

10. which of these is not certain about Chaucer?

a. his birth date
b. his death year
c. his father's name

11. which of these kings was not served by Chaucer?

a. Edward III
b. Henry II
c. Richard II

12.what was the duration of hundred year's war?

a.1300 to 1350
b.1337 to 1453
c. 1302 to 1343

13.what did Chaucer's wife use to do?

a. lady-in-waiting to Queen Philip pa of Hainaut
b. nurse of royal court
c. governess to Henry IV

14.one of Chaucer's daughter was............?

a. a musician
b. an astronomer
c. a nun

15. in which year Chaucer was imprisoned by the French?

a. 1360
b. 1357
c. 1378

16. Chaucer was fined in 1367 or 1366 for..............?

a. beating a friar in a London street
b. for writing poetry against the church
c. for crossing the border of Great Britain

17. Chaucer was made in-charge of many palaces,which of these was not in his charge?

a. Westminster Palace
b. Tower of London
c. St. George's chapel at Windsor
d. Buckingham Palace

18. Chaucer acted as a controller of custom during.............?
a. 1374 to 1385
b. 1350 to 1360
c. 1360 to 1400

19. Chaucer was released from legal action by ........................ in a deed of May 1, 1380 from rape and abduction?

a. Miss Cecily Chaumpaigne
b. Philippa de Roet of Flanders
c. Agnes de Copton

20. Chaucer became a member of Parliament in...........?

a. 1386
b. 1300
c. 1343

21. Chaucer buried in a corner of Westminster, which came to know as.........?

a. Chaucer's corner
b. poet's corner
c. legend's corner

22. what was chaucer's profession?
a. a poet
b. a merchant
c. a civil servant

23) One of Marlowe's earliest published works was his translation of the epic poem 'Pharsalia', written by which Roman poet?

a)Ovid
b)Lucan
c)Virgil
d)Horace

24) Marlowe's poem 'The Passionate Shepherd to His Love' begins with the line "Come live with me and be my love"; which other English author wrote a famous poem beginning with this line?

a)William Shakespeare
b)Thomas Kyd
c)John Dryden
d)John Donne

25)In Marlowe's play, what was the name of the Jew of Malta?

a)Lazarus
b)Solomon
c)Barabas
d)Shylock

26 How many years of happiness was Dr Faustus promised by the Devil?

a)16
b)20
c)24
d)28

27) Which of these Kings was the subject of a play by Marlowe?

a)Henry V
b)Richard III
c)Edward II
d)John

28)One of Marlowe's most famous poems was an account of which lovers?

a)Anthony and Cleopatra
b)Hero and Leander
c)Troilus and Cressida
d)Apollo and Hyacinth

29) Marlowe's play 'Tamburlaine the Great' was based loosely on the life of which Asian ruler?

a)Zhu Yuanzhang
b)Genghis Khan
c)Timur
d)Kublai Khan

30)What was the title of the play by Marlowe that portrayed the events surrounding the Saint Bartholomew's Day Massacre in 1572?
a)The Massacre at Berlin
b)The Massacre at Rome
c)The Massacre at Copenhagen
d)The Massacre at Paris

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (9)

2015-05-16T10:31:00.003+05:00

1. Which people began their invasion and conquest of south western Britain around 450?

a) the Normans
b) the Geats
c) the Celts
d) the Anglo-Saxons
e) the Danes

2. Words from which language began to enter English vocabulary around the time of the Norman Conquest in 1066?

a) French
b) Norwegian
c) Spanish
d) Hungarian
e) Danish

3. Which hero made his earliest appearance in Celtic literature before becoming a staple subject in French, English, and German literature?

a) Beowulf
b) Arthur
c) Caedmon
d) Augustine of Canterbury
e) Alfred

4. Toward the close of which century did English replace French as the language of conducting business in Parliament and in court of law?

a) tenth
b) eleventh
c) twelfth
d) thirteenth
e) fourteenth

5. Which king began a war to enforce his claims to the throne of France in 1336?

a) Henry II
b) Henry III
c) Henry V
d) Louis XIV
e) Edward III

6. Who would be called the English Homer and father of English poetry?

a) Bede
b) Sir Thomas Malory
c) Geoffrey Chaucer
d) Caedmon
e) John Gower

7. What was vellum?

a) parchment made of animal skin
b) the service owed to a lord by his peasants ("villeins")
c) unrhymed iambic pentameter
d) an unbreakable oath of fealty
e) a prized ink used in the illumination of prestigious manuscripts

8. Only a small proportion of medieval books survive, large numbers having been destroyed in:

a) the Anglo-Saxon Conquest beginning in the 1450s.
b) the Norman Conquest of 1066.
c) the Peasant Uprising of 1381.
d) the Dissolution of the Monasteries in the 1530s.
e) the wave of contempt for manuscripts that followed the beginning of printing in 1476.

9. What is the first extended written specimen of Old English?

a) Boethius's Consolidation of Philosophy
b) Saint Jerome's translation of the Bible
c) Malory's Morte Darthur
d) Bede's Ecclesiastical History of the English People
e) a code of laws promulgated by King Ethelbert

10. Who was the first English Christian king?

a) Alfred
b) Richard III
c) Richard II
d) Henry II
e) Ethelbert

11. In Anglo-Saxon heroic poetry, what is the fate of those who fail to observe the sacred duty of blood vengeance?

a) banishment to Asia
b) everlasting shame
c) conversion to Christianity
d) mild melancholia
e) being buried alive

12. Christian writers like the Beowulf poet looked back on their pagan ancestors with:

a) nostalgia and ill-concealed envy.
b) bewilderment and visceral loathing.
c) admiration and elegiac sympathy.
d) bigotry and shallow triumphalism.
e) the deepest reluctance.

13. The use of "whale-road"for sea and "life-house"for body are examples of what literary technique, popular in Old English poetry?

a) symbolism
b) simile
c) metonymy
d) kenning
e) appositive expression

14. Which of the following statements is not an accurate description of Old English poetry?

a) Romantic love is a guiding principle of moral conduct.
b) Its formal and dignified use of speech was distant from everyday use of language.
c) Irony is a mode of perception, as much as it was a figure of speech.
d) Christian and pagan ideals are sometimes mixed.
e) Its idiom remained remarkably uniform for nearly three centuries.

15. Which of the following best describes litote, a favorite rhetorical device in Old English poetry?

a) embellishment at the service of Christian doctrine
b) repetition of parallel syntactic structures
c) ironic understatement
d) stress on every third diphthong
e) a compound of two words in place of a single word

16. How did Henry II, the first of England's Plantagenet kings, acquire vast provinces in southern France?

a) the Battle of Hastings
b) Saint Patrick's mission
c) the Fourth Lateran Council
d) the execution of William Sawtre
e) his marriage to Eleanor of Aquitaine

17. Which of the following languages did not coexist in Anglo-Norman England?

a) Latin
b) Dutch
c) French
d) Celtic
e) English

18. Which twelfth-century poet or poets were indebted to Breton storytellers for their narratives?

a) Geoffrey Chaucer
b) Marie de France
c) Chrétien de Troyes
d) a and c only
e) b and c only

19. To what did the word the roman, from which the genre of "romance"emerged, initially apply?

a) a work derived from a Latin text of the Roman Empire
b) a story about love and adventure
c) a Roman official
d) a work written in the French vernacular
e) a series of short stories

20. Popular English adaptations of romances appealed primarily to

a) the royal family and upper orders of the nobility
b) the lower orders of the nobility
c) agricultural laborers
d) the clergy
e) the Welsh

21. What is the climax of Geoffrey of Monmouth's The History of the Kings of Britain?

a) the reign of King Arthur
b) the coronation of Henry II
c) King John's seal of the Magna Carta
d) the marriage of Henry II to Eleanor of Aquitaine
e) the defeat of the French by Henry V

22. Ancrene Riwle is a manual of instruction for

a) courtiers entering the service of Richard II
b) translators of French romances
c) women who have chosen to live as religious recluses
d) knights preparing for their first tournament
e) witch-hunters and exorcists

23 The styles of The Owl and the Nightingale and Ancrene Riwle show what about the poetry and prose written around the year 1200?

a) They were written for sophisticated and well-educated readers.
b) Writing continued to benefit only readers fluent in Latin and French.
c) Their readers' primary language was English.
d) a and c only
e) a and b only

24. In addition to Geoffrey Chaucer and William Langland, the "flowering"of Middle English literature is evident in the works of which of the following writers?

a) Geoffrey of Monmouth
b) the Gawain poet
c) the Beowulf poet
d) Chrétien de Troyes
e) Marie de France

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (8)

2015-05-15T11:17:00.001+05:00

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (7)

2015-05-15T11:00:00.001+05:00

1. There was aware of her true love, at length come riding by - This is a couplet from the Bailiff's Daughter of Islington. What figure of speech is used by the poet?

a. Metaphor
b. Synecdoche
c. Euphemism
d. Irony

2. Which culture is known for their long, rhymic poetic verses known as Qasidas?

a. Hindu
b. Celtic
c. Arabic
d. Arameic

3. Complete this Shakespearan line - Let me not to the marriage of true minds bring:

a. Impediments
b. Inconveniences
c. Worries
d. Troubles

4. Which of the following is a Japanese poetic form?

a. Jintishi
b. Villanelle
c. Ode
d. Tanka

5. What is the title of the poem that begins thus - 'What is this life, if full of care, we have no time to stand and stare'?

a. Comfort
b. Leisure
c. Relaxation
d. Tranquility

6. Which of the following is not an English poet (i. e. from England)?

a. Victor Hugo
b. Alexander Pope
c. John Milton
d. Samuel Taylor Coleridge

7. Who was often called as the Romantic Poet as most of his poems revolved around nature?

a. William Blake
b. William Shakespeare
c. William Morris
d. William Wordsworth

8. What is a funny poem of five lines called?

a. Quartet
b. Limerick
c. Sextet
d. Palindrome

9. How did W. H. Auden describe poetry?

a. An awful way to earn a living
b. A game of knowledge
c. The soul exposed
d. An explosion of language

10. Sassoon and Brooke wrote what kind of poetry?

a. Light verse
b. Romantic
c. Political satire
d. War poems

11. Where did T. S. Eliot spend most of his childhood?

a. Denver
b. St Louis
c. Cuba
d. Toronto

12. Ted Hughes was married to which American poetess?

a. Carolyn Kizer
b. Mary Oliver
c. Sylvia Plath
d. Marianne Moore

13. How old was Rupert Brooke at the time of his death?

a. 24
b. 31
c. 21
d. 28

14. In what form did Dylan Thomas's 'Under Milk Wood' first become known?

a. Book of poetry
b. A radio play
c. A stage play
d. a short film

15. The magazine 'Contemporary Poetry and Prose' was inspired by which exhibition?

a. The Festival of Britain
b. The Surrealist Exhibition
c. People of the 20th Century
d. Drawing the 20th CEntury

16. Why did 'Poetry Quarterly' cease publication in 1953?

a. Owner convicted of fraud
b. Fall in Sales
c. Rise in taxation on magazines
d. Shortage of paper

17. Aldous Huxley was a poet, but was better known as what?

a. Politician
b. Dramatist
c. Novelist
d. Architect

18. Of which poet was it said 'Even if he's not a great poet, he's certainly a great something'?

a. Elliot
b. Kipling
c. Cummings
d. Brooke

19.which of these is magnum opus of chaucer?

A. Troilus and criseyde
b. House of fame
c. The canterbury tales
d. Parliament of fowls.

20. Where were the pilgrims going in the canterbury tales?

A. To the shrine of st. Peter at canterbury cathedral
b. To the shrine of saint thomas becket at canterbury cathedral

21.in which language the stories of canterbury tale are written?

A. French
b. Latin
c. Middle english
d. English

22.chaucer's franklin was guilty of which sin?

A. Lust
b. Corruption
c. Theft
d. Gluttony

23. How many languages did chaucer know?

A.2
b.4
c.1
d.5

24.from which language the name ''chaucer'' has been driven?

A.french
b.latin
c.italian
d.english

25. Where did chaucer bury?

A.westminster abbey
b.kent church
c.chapel at windsor

26.chaucer was imprisoned during----------------------?

A.hundred years' war
b. Black death
c. Peasant revolt

27 .how many children chaucer had?

A.4
b.1
c.0
d.2

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (6)

2015-05-15T10:33:00.000+05:00

1. Which of the following is not a work of John Keats?

a.Endymion
b.To some ladies
c.To hope
d.None of above

2. Who wrote the poems, "On death" and "Women, Wine, and Snuff?"

a.John Milton
b.John Keats
c.P.B. Shelley
d.William Wordsworth

3. "Of Man's first disobedience, and the fruit Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste Brought death into the world, and all our woe, With loss of Eden."

This is an extract from:
a.Paradise Lost
b.Paradise Regained
c.Samson Agonistes
d.Divorce Tracts

4. William Shakespeare was born in the year:

a.1564
b.1544
c.1578
d.1582

5. Which of the following is not a Shakespeare tragedy?

a.Titus Andronicus
b.Othello
c.Macbeth
d.Hamlet
e.None of the above

6. Who wrote 'The Winter's Tale?'

a.George Bernard Shaw
b.John Dryden
c.Christopher Marlowe
d.William Shakespeare

7. What is the difference between a simile and a metaphor?

a) No difference. Simply two different ways in referring to the same thing.
b) A simile is more descriptive.
c) A simile uses as or like to make a comparison and a metaphor doesn't.
d) A simile must use animals in the comparison.

8. What is the word for a "play on words"?

a) pun
b) simile
c) haiku
d) metaphor

9. Which represents an example of alliteration?

a) Language Arts
b) Peter Piper Picked Peppers
c) I like music.
d) A beautiful scenery with music

10. What is the imitation of natural sounds in word form?

a) Personification
b) Hyperboles
c) Alliteration
d) Onomatopoeia

11. The theme is ...?
a) a plot.
b) an character
c) an address
d) the point a writer is trying to make about a subject.

12. Concentrate on these elements when writing a good poem.

a) characters, main idea, and theme
b) purpose and audience
c) theme, purpose, form, and mood.
d) rhyme and reason

13. Which is not a poetry form?

a) epic
b) tale
c) ballad
d) sonnet

14. Which is an example of a proverb?

a) Get a "stake" in our business.
b) You can't have your cake and eat it, too
c) The snow was white as cotton.
d) You're driving me crazy.

15. Which is an exaggeration?

a) Alliteration
b) Haiku
c) Hyperbole
d) Prose

16. Which of the following is not a poet?

a) William Shakespeare
b) Terry Saylor
c) Elizabeth B. Browning
d) Emily Dickinson

17. Who has defined 'poetry' as a fundamental creative act using languages?

a. H. W. Longfellow
b. Ralph Waldo Emerson
c. Dylan Thomas
d. William Wordsworth

18. What is a sonnet?

a. A poem of six lines
b. A poem of eight lines
c. A poem of twelve lines
d. A poem of fourteen lines

19. What is study of meter, rhythm and intonation of a poem called as?

a. Prosody
b. Allegory
c. Scansion
d. Assonance

20. Which figure of speech is it when a statement is exaggerated in a poem?

a. Onomatopeia
b. Metonymy
c. Alliteration
d. Hyperbole

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS (5)

2015-05-15T10:20:00.001+05:00

1. Margaret Atwood was born in which Canadian city?

a. Vancouver
b. Toronto
c. Ottowa
d. Montreal

2. Which of the following words describe the prevailing attitude of High-Modern Literature?

a.Skeptical
b.Authoritative
c.Impressionistic
d.Confident
e.Both a & c

3. Which Welsh poet wrote "Under Milk Wood?"

a.Anthony Hopkins
b.Richard Burton
c.Tom Jones
d.Dylan Thomas

4. Who wrote Canterbury Tales?

a.Geoffrey Chaucer
b.Dick Whittington
c.Thomas Lancaster
d.King Richard II

5. Who wrote "The Hound of the Baskervilles?"

a.Agatha Christie
b.H Ryder-Haggard
c.P D James
d.Arthur Conan Doyle

6. Wlliam Shakespeare is not the author of:

a.Titus Andronicus
b.Taming of the Shrew
c.White Devil
d.Hamlet

7. ___________is a late 20th century play written by a woman?

a.Queen Cristina
b.Top Girls
c.Camille
d.The Homecoimg

8. Which of the following writers wrote historical novels?

a.Jane Austen and Charlotte Bronte
b.Sir Walter Scott and Maria Edgeworth
c.William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge
d.Mary Shelley and Percy Bysshe Shelley

9. Who wrote "Ten Little Niggers?"

a.Sir Arthur Conan Doyle
b.Irvine Welsh
c.Agatha Christie
d.None of above

10. Which of the following are Thomas Hardy books?

a.The Poor Man and the Lady
b.The Return of Native
c.Chollttee
d.None of the above

PPSC ENGLISH LECTURER- MULTIPLE QUESTIONS (4)

2015-05-14T10:00:00.001+05:00

1. A poem that generally has meter and rhyme

lyric
free verse
narrative

2. Sylvia Plath married which English poet?

a. Masefield
b. Causley
c. Hughes
d. Larkin

3. Carl Sandburg 'Planked whitefish' contains what kind of imagery?

a. Sea scenes
b. Rural Idyll
c. War
d. Innocent childhood

4. Which influential American poet was born in Long Island in 1819?

a. Emily Dickinson
b. Paul Dunbar
c. John Greenleaf Whittier
d. Walt Whitman

5. In 1960 'The Colossus' was the first book of poems published by which poetess?

a. Elizabeth Bishop
b. Sylvia Plath
c. Marianne Moore
d. Laura Jackson

6. In his poem Kipling said 'If you can meet with triumph and . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . '?
a. Glory
b. Ruin
c. Disaster
d. victory

7. Which of the following is not a literary device used for aesthetic effect in poetry?

a. Assonance
b. Onomatopaea
c. Rhyme
d. Grammar

8. True or false: Writing predates poetry.
a. True
b. False

9. What is the earliest surviving European poem?

a. The Homeric epic
b. The Gilgamesh epic
c. The Deluge epic
d. The Hesiodic ode

10. Which of the following is not a poetic tradition?
a. The Epic
b. The Comic
c. The Occult
d. The Tragic

11. What is the study of poetry's meter and form called?

a. Prosody
b. Potology
c. Rheumatology
d. Scansion

12. Shakespeare composed much of his plays in what sort of verse?

a. Alliterative verse
b. Sonnet form
c. Iambic pentameter
d. Dactylic hexameter

13. Which poet invented the concept of the variable foot in poetry?

a. William Carlos Williams
b. Emily Dickinson
c. Gerard Manly Hopkins
d. Robert Frost

14. Who wrote this famous line: 'Shall I compare thee to a summer's day/ Thou art more lovely and more temperate…'

a. TS Eliot
b. Lord Tennyson
c. Charlotte Bronte
d. Shakespeare

15. From what century does the poetic form the folk ballad date?

a. The 12th
b. The 14th
c. The 17th
d. The 19th

16. From which of Shakespeare's plays is this famous line: 'Did my heart love til now?/ Forswear it, sight/ For I never saw a true beauty until this night'

a. A Midsummer Night's Dream
b. Hamlet
c. Othello
d. Romeo and Juliet

17. What is a poem called whose first letters of each line spell out a word?

a. Alliterative
b. Epic
c. Acrostic
d. Haiku

18. Auld Lang Syne is a famous poem by whom?

a. Sir Walter Scott
b. William Butler Yeats
c. Henry Longfellow
d. Robert Burns

19. How has Stephen Dunn been described in 'the Oxford Companion to 20th Century Poetry?

a. A poet of middleness
b. Capturing a sense of spiritual marooness
c. One of the leading prairie poets
d. Has some distinction as a critic

20. 'The Cambridge school' refers to a group who emerged when?

a. The 1900's
b. The 1960's
c. The 1920's
d. The 1930's

PPSC MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS FOR LECTURER IN ENGLISH (3)

2015-05-12T12:08:00.003+05:00

1. A pattern of accented and unaccented syllables in lines of poetry

rhyme scheme
meter
alliteration

2. The repetition of similar ending sounds

alliteration
onomatopoiea
rhyme

3. Applying human qualities to non-human things

personification
onomatopoeia
alliteration

4. The repetition of beginning consonant sounds

rhyme
onomatopoeia
alliteration

5. A comparison of unlike things without using a word of comparison such as like or as

metaphor
simile
personification

6. The comparison of unlike things using the words like or as

metaphor
simile
personification

7. Using words or letters to imitate sounds

alliteration
simile
onomatopoeia

8. a description that appeals to one of the five senses

imagery
personification
metaphor

9. A poem that tells a story with plot, setting, and characters

lyric
free verse
narrative

10. A poem with no meter or rhyme

lyric
free verse
narrative

PPSC MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS FOR LECTURER IN ENGLISH (2)

2015-05-12T11:52:00.001+05:00

1. Which poem ends 'I shall but love thee better after death'?
a. How do I love thee
b. Ode to a Grecian urn
c. In faith I do not love thee with mine eyes
d. Let me not to the marriage of true minds

2. Which poet is considered a national hero in Greece?
a. John keats
b. Lord Byron
c. Solan
d. Sappho

3. Which kind of poem is Edward Lear associated with?
a. Nature
b. Epics
c. Sonnets
d. Nonsense

4. In coleridge's poem 'The rime of the Ancient Mariner'where were the three gallants going?
a. A funeral
b. A wedding
c. Market
d. To the races

5. Harold Nicholson described which poet as 'Very yellow and glum. Perfect manners'?
a. e. e. Cummings
b. T. S. Elliot
c. John Greenleaf Whittier
d. Walt Whitman

6. What was strange about Emily Dickinson?
a. She rarely left home
b. She wrote in code
c. She never attempted to publish her poetry
d. She wrote her poems in invisible ink

7. Rupert Brooke wrote his poetry during which conflict?
a. Boer War
b. Second World War
c. Korean War
d. First World War

8. Which Poet Laureate wrote about a church mouse?
a. Betjeman
b. Hughes
c. Marvel
d. Larkin

9. Which American writer published 'A brave and startling truth' in 1996
a. Robert Hass
b. Jessica Hagdorn
c. Maya Angelou
d. Micheal Palmer

10. Who wrote about the idyllic 'Isle of Innisfree'?
a. Dylan Thomas
b. Ezra Pound
c. W. B. Yeats
d. e. e. cummings

PPSC MULTIPLE CHOICE QUESTIONS FOR LECTURER IN ENGLISH (1)

2015-05-12T11:09:00.000+05:00

1-The Novelist Rudyard Kipling spent some years at Lahore.
2-Caesura in Poetry is a pause indicated by a comma.
3-Mathew Arnold called the Eighteen century as the age of prose and reason.
4-I.A.Richards used the term 'New Critics' for the first time.
5-H.G.Wells is the author of 'The Time Machine'.
6-Oscar Wilde Wrote that' A cynic is a man who knows the piece of everything and the value of nothing'.
7-Comedy of manners got three things such as courtship, satire, wit, while comedy of humours lack them.
8-Fileding's Joseph Andrews parodies Richardson's Pamela.
9-Blake printed his own works by a mehtod devised by himself.
10-Alice in Wonderland is written by Lewis Carroll.

Lectures day two at Chisti College Faisalabad

2014-10-21T11:22:00.000+05:00

Lecture No.1

MODERN DRAMA
This is the material for students for second lecture in Chisti College Faisalabd.The materail has been taken randomly from internet.I am not the writer of that material.I thank all who wrote this material and am thankful to all websites owners who published it.
Hedda Gabler

Characters in Hedda Gabler

Jörgen Tesman, the holder of a University Fellowship in cultural history
Mrs. Hedda Tesman, his wife
Miss Juliane Tesman, his aunt
Mrs. Elvsted
Mr. Brack, a judge
Ejlert Lövborg
Berte, the Tesmans' maid

Source: The Oxford Ibsen, Volume VII, Oxford University Press 1966
Summary of the play:

Hedda Tesman is the daughter of the late General Gabler, who died without leaving her anything, She is approaching thirty, and after some years of an active social life she has married Jørgen Tesman, who has a fellowship in the history of art. He has been brought up by his two aunts, Julle and Rina, and is now hoping for a chair at the University. At the opening of the play Hedda and Jørgen have just returned from a six-month-long honeymoon. Jørgen has spent his time studying and working on records, while Hedda, as she confides to their friend Judge Brack, has been bored on her honeymoon. Although clearly feeling distaste towards her husband, she has become pregnant, a fact she has so far concealed from her surroundings. Jørgen is met on arrival by the bad news that he is going to have to compete for the chair with one of Hedda's former admirers, Eilert Løvborg. The latter is known to be a bohemian, gifted but prone to drinking too much. In recent years, however, he has lived quietly and soberly, and written two theses inspired by and in collaboration with Thea Elvsted. At the beginning of the play he has arrived in the city, bringing one of the manuscripts with him. Thea, who is deeply in love with him, has left her husband and followed him. In the course of barely two days Hedda stages a number of happenings with dramatic consequences. She gets Løvborg to go to a "stag party" at Judge Brack's and get drunk. During the festivities he loses the manuscript of his new book. Jørgen Tesman finds it and gives to Hedda to look after, but Hedda does not tell Løvborg this. Instead, she burns the manuscript and gives him one of her father's pistols, telling him to shoot himself "beautifully". Far from this, Løvborg is accidentally shot at a brothel, and Brack, who knows where the pistol came from, uses this knowledge to try to blackmail Hedda into becoming his mistress. Thea and Tesman find close companionship in the work of reconstructing Løvborg's manuscript on the basis of notes Thea has kept. When Hedda realizes that she is in Brack's power and has nothing more to live for, she shoots herself with the second of the General's pistols.

Source: Merete Morken Andersen, Ibsenhåndboken, Gyldendal Norsk Forlag, 1995

Hedda Tesman

Character Analysis

Hedda Gabler is not a nice person. She taunts a recovering alcoholic about his masculinity and goads him into drinking again. She takes advantage of her husband’s dying aunt to steal an irreplaceable document. She tries to trick a man into committing suicide and takes pleasure in the romance of his death. And she totally channels Glenn Close à la Fatal Attraction in that crazy scene by the stove. (Glenn boils a rabbit, Hedda burns a manuscript – same thing.) If that doesn’t entice you to join us on this tour of Hedda’s character, we don’t know what will.

Why is Hedda So Mean and Manipulative?

Before we write Hedda off as totally evil, let’s think about WHY she is the way that she is. The short answer is: because she’s female and it’s 1890 (or maybe 1860 – see "Setting" for a full discussion). The point is, it’s the Victorian era. And for those of you who weren’t around to experience it personally, you should know that it was not a fun time to be a woman. Just look at your text for examples: Hedda isn’t allowed to hang out with a man unless a chaperone is present. She isn’t allowed to go to the Judge’s party. She has to be careful not to use the word "night" when referring to the time she spends with her husband, because that might imply sex. It’s clear that, in this world, women aren’t supposed to do or say much of anything. It’s basically their job to sit around all day looking pretty and complimenting their husbands.

This is, as you might expect, incredibly boring. Or, in Hedda’s own words: "How mortally bored I’ve been," "How horribly I shall bore myself here," and even more explicitly, "I am bored, I tell you!" Right. So Hedda faces a problem that, as you’ll see in the rest of our Character Analyses, all three women in the play deal with in their own separate way: what the hell is she supposed to do with herself? Hedda actually asks this question, explicitly and more than once. (The men, of course, don’t have to worry about this issue – they are in fact defined by their professions. Brack is a judge. Tesman is a soon-to-be professor. Eilert is a scholar and author.)There are any number of ways to think about Hedda’s solution to this female problem. We’ll talk about three of them.

Hedda Gets Her Kicks… By Screwing With Other People

Hedda’s boredom is a likely culprit for her ever-worsening machinations throughout the course of the play. Little girls play with dolls; Hedda plays with people. Why? Because it’s entertaining. And man oh man is Hedda good at what she does. She can fake friendship (check out her Act I conversation with Mrs. Elvsted), fabricate motives (with regards to burning the manuscript), and conceal emotions (the suppressed rage in Act I). But her greatest asset is definitely her ability to extract the information she needs from others. Hedda’s like a walking confessional – others tell her all their secrets. She’s very skilled at asking questions without ever answering any herself. Eilert says it best: "I used to make [confessions] – telling you things about myself that no one else knew." When he asks her what "power" in her made him do so, she replies: "You think it was some kind of power in me?" Notice how she counters his question with another? The girl knows what she’s doing. In fact, the only character who seems to get any truth out of her whatsoever is Brack, which we talk all about in his Character Analysis.

What appeals to Hedda here is the idea of power. When Mrs. Elvsted wants to know why she’s manipulating Eilert like this, her answer is: "For once in my life, I want to have power over a human being." She considers Thea "rich" for her influence and herself "poor" for the lack of it. If Hedda, being a woman, can’t have power that’s political, monetary, academic, authoritative, or professional, then she’ll take the only option left to her.

The Vicarious Solution

Hedda doesn’t like her life – so she tries to live through other people instead. Now, by "other people" we of course mean "men," because there’s no point in living through an equally stifled female. Where in the world did we get this crazy notion? From….this little line right here: "Do you find it so very surprising that a young girl [would] like some glimpse of a world that […] she’s forbidden to know anything about?" This is Hedda’s explanation for her friendship with Eilert in the past. She couldn’t go out in the world, become an alcoholic, and sever ties with her aristocratic family. But that’s what Eilert was doing. Hedda got as close to the renegade lifestyle as she could by listening to him talk about it. When she devises the perfect suicide for Eilert, she’s continuing in this vein – orchestrating the life that she can’t experience herself.

The "Fine! I’m Just Going to Live in My Own Little Ideal World!" Attempt

Or, as scholars would say, Hedda is less concerned with the practicalities of the real world and more concerned with maintaining an aesthetic standard. What does this mean? She pays attention to how things look. She wants the world to be attractive, romantic, even poetic. She retreats into this aesthetic world to avoid dealing with the harsh realities of her crappy life. She even tells George: "I don’t want to look on sickness and death. I want to be free of everything ugly."

Hedda places Eilert in the center of this world as her imaginary romantic hero. She imagines him with vine leaves in his hair, reading his book aloud, throwing restraint and order to the wind. It’s like something out of a novel – and she designs his death to be just as romanticized. Shooting yourself through the temple, in Hedda’s eyes, is the noble way to go. That’s why she declares over and over that "there is beauty" in his death, that it is "liberating" for her to witness an act like this one. When we look at her actions and her words, we realize that Hedda values aesthetics over human life. That’s a pretty scary thought.

So Why Didn’t Any of These Work?

But for all her solutions – retreating to an ideal fantasy, living through others, manipulating those around her – Hedda is still just a woman trapped in 1890 Norway. She may seem like a rebel, or at least eons ahead of her time, but she’s actually very much restricted by the social standards she despises. We see this best through Hedda’s "deathly" fear of "scandal." The threat of scandal is the reason she broke things off with Eilert in the first place. She married George because, according to society, she had to marry someone. She doesn’t love her husband, but she "doesn’t expect to be unfaithful, either" because she can’t run the risk of a scandal. Most importantly, Hedda has to keep up appearances. She might be seething with rage inside, but she has to keep her cool on the outside. We know this is taking a toll on her, because we see that inner rage bubble up every now and then. When she’s finally left alone in Act I, Hedda "moves about the room, raising her arms and clenching her fists as if in a frenzy." In Act IV she again "clench[es] her fists in despair" and declares that she’ll "die" from all these "absurdities." Still, Hedda manages to restrain herself after every outburst – she remains a prisoner to Victorian values.

What’s more distressing is that Hedda recognizes her situation, and even hates herself for her conformist actions. Just look at all those times Hedda calls herself a "coward" – this is exactly what she’s talking about. She’s a coward because she isn’t willing to break the rules. She’s a coward because, at the end of the day, she’s still trapped inside that parlor room. Doesn’t it seem fitting that she dies in the inner room, behind a closed curtain? That leads nicely into our Big Question: Why does Hedda commit suicide?

Why Does Hedda Commit Suicide?

Argh. We were hoping you weren’t going to ask us that. Hedda kills herself for any number of reasons. As we all know, she’s been unhappy for quite some time now. We know she’s bored, trapped in a loveless marriage, completely stifled, living below her standards, married to a buffoon, and about to have a baby she in no way wants. But while she’s not exactly tripping the light fantastic to begin with, Hedda’s been getting by. So which is the straw that breaks the camel’s back? Here are a few possibilities.

1) She can’t stand the thought of the judge having power over her. Or, in Hedda’s own words, "No—I can’t bear the thought of it! Never!" If she’s been getting her kicks thus far by having power and manipulating others…she just lost her hobby.

2) She has nothing to live for. Remember what we were saying about women in this play needing a purpose in their lives? Well, check out the exchange between Hedda and George right before her suicide. She asks if there’s anything he needs her for, and he replies, "No, nothing in the world." A few lines later, Hedda asks, "What will I do evenings?" Like Mrs. Elvsted, she’s facing the bleak prospect of nothingness that is par for the Victorian course.

3) She finally faces her pregnancy. Yes, Hedda has been pregnant for all of the play, but she’s been in denial for the first three acts. Did you notice that one of Hedda’s big outbursts comes when she finally reveals to George (and admits to herself) that she’s going to have a baby? Or her words to Judge Brack: "I have no talent for such things! I won’t have responsibilities!" The fact that she takes the gun from the writing table BEFORE she comes under the Judge’s thumb and BEFORE she declares there’s nothing left to live for is a great piece of evidence for this theory.

4) She’s lost her aesthetic ideal. Hedda declares that she "doesn’t believe in vine leaves anymore" and is disgusted to hear the truth about Eilert’s death. "Does everything I touch turn ridiculous and vile?" she asks. And the events around her answer "yes." So much for being "free of everything ugly."

5) Hedda is afraid of breaking the rules. Because she’s being blackmailed, Hedda has to decide whether to face the public scandal of an investigation regarding the pistol, or the private shame of an affair with Judge Brack. She’s horrified of scandal, so she kills herself to escape it. If this one is true, it means that Hedda is still a coward when she dies.

6) She’s proving her own courage, maintaining her aesthetic ideal, freeing herself from Victorian values, and sticking it to the Judge and her husband. This is certainly the most optimistic interpretation. In this theory, Hedda’s suicide is victorious. She proves that a noble death (i.e., a gunshot to the temple) is possible, and she finally faces her fear of scandal (what’s more of a scandal than spontaneous suicide?). She stops living vicariously and takes strong action herself. George loses the one thing he prizes most – his trophy wife – and Brack never gets to have sex with the woman he’s been lusting after. Hedda wins.

So that’s that. But before we send you on your way, check out these two interesting critical theories.

The "Insane" Theory

Okay, here’s the question: if Hedda were on trial for her series of cruel machinations, could she plead mental incapacity? Answer: maybe. Depends on which critic you talk to. She might be insane; she might be bipolar; she might just be neurotic. But let’s look at the text. The much-discussed fist-clenching, silent-raging of Act I doesn’t exactly seem like the actions of a sane woman, right? Neither does the fact that she SHOOTS AT THE JUDGE for her own amusement and asks jokingly if she's hit him. After two people have died and her friends and family are grieving, she retreats to the inner room to play a "wild dance melody" on her piano. She seems to be incapable of love (and calls the word itself "syrupy"). Hedda even admits to Brack that she has no control over her own actions: "Well, it’s—these things come over me, just like that, suddenly," she says. "And I can’t hold back." She even says that "thoughts" are "not […] easy to control." Of course, the biggest moment of madness comes at the climax of the play – when she maniacally mutters the same words over and over while burning Eilert’s irreplaceable manuscript. As long as you’re going down this path, you might as well tally up a reason #7 for Hedda’s suicide: she’s insane.

The Penis Envy Theory

We’re not kidding. Freudians have a field day with Hedda Gabler. The basic argument is that Hedda wants to be a man and resents her sex. That’s why she tries to live vicariously through men in particular. That’s why she plays with pistols, a clearly masculine prop in her day and, oh, right, a phallic symbol. She has no maternal instinct whatsoever. But at the same time, Hedda is ashamed of her own failings as a woman. That’s why she hates Thea so much – because Thea is the epitome of femininity (see her Character Analysis for more, especially the bit about the hair).

And Just For Fun, Watch Us Argue That Hedda is a Sympathetic, Victimized Character

Before we get too caught up in hating this woman, let’s consider the one moment when we see a very human side of Hedda – her explanation of why she married George. Check it out:

HEDDA
Well, we happened to pass here one evening; Tesman, poor fellow, was writhing in the agony of having to find conversation; so I took pity on the learned man—
BRACK
[Smiles doubtfully.] You took pity? H'm—
HEDDA
Yes, I really did. And so—to help him out of his torment—I happened to say, in pure thoughtlessness, that I should like to live in this villa.
[…]
HEDDA
So you see it was this enthusiasm for Secretary Falk's villa that first constituted a bond of sympathy between George Tesman and me. From that came our engagement and our marriage, and our wedding journey, and all the rest of it.

"Bond of sympathy?" "Feeling sorry?" This doesn’t sound at all like the Hedda we know and hate. Once we get into the sympathetic mood, we can really start to feel for poor Mrs. Tesman. Put yourself in her shoes for a second. You’re Hedda Gabler. You’re hot stuff. In fact, you’re the best catch around town. You come from a powerful, wealthy, aristocratic family. EVERYONE wants you. You’re going to marry someone equally powerful, wealthy, and aristocratic, and live a life of privilege and wealth. Then, the next thing you know, you’re married to an academic bore, living in what to you feels like poverty, and oh, right, you’ve been knocked up by this husband of yours and a smarmy Judge has just tried blackmailing you into sleeping with him…repeatedly.

See? We can’t just write Hedda off as evil. It’s complications like these that warrant this character’s label: "the female Hamlet."

Lecture 2:

Classic Poetry

Prologue to Canterbury Tales.
General Prologue

"When April comes with his sweet, fragrant showers, which pierce the dry ground of March, and bathe every root of every plant in sweet liquid, then people desire to go on pilgrimages." Thus begins the famous opening to The Canterbury Tales. The narrator (a constructed version of Chaucer himself) is first discovered staying at the Tabard Inn in Southwark (in London), when a company of twenty-nine people descend on the inn, preparing to go on a pilgrimage to Canterbury. After talking to them, he agrees to join them on their pilgrimage.

Yet before the narrator goes any further in the tale, he describes the circumstances and the social rank of each pilgrim. He describes each one in turn, starting with the highest status individuals.

The Knight is described first, as befits a 'worthy man' of high status. The Knight has fought in the Crusades in numerous countries, and always been honored for his worthiness and courtesy. Everywhere he went, the narrator tells us, he had a 'sovereyn prys' (which could mean either an 'outstanding reputation', or a price on his head for the fighting he has done). The Knight is dressed in a 'fustian' tunic, made of coarse cloth, which is stained by the rust from his coat of chainmail.

The Knight brings with him his son, The Squire, a lover and a lusty bachelor, only twenty years old. The Squire cuts a rather effeminate figure, his clothes embroidered with red and white flowers, and he is constantly singing or playing the flute. He is the only pilgrim (other than, of course, Chaucer himself) who explicitly has literary ambitions: he 'koude songes make and wel endite' (line 95).

The Yeoman (a freeborn servant) also travels along with the Knight's entourage, and is clad in coat and hood of green. The Yeoman is excellent at caring for arrows, and travels armed with a huge amount of weaponry: arrows, a bracer (arm guard), a sword, a buckler, and a dagger as sharp as a spear. He wears an image of St. Christopher on his breast.

Having now introduced the Knight (the highest ranking pilgrim socially), the narrator now moves on to the clergy, beginning with The Prioress, called 'Madame Eglantine' (or, in modern parlance, Mrs. Sweetbriar). She could sweetly sing religious services, speaks fluent French and has excellent table manners. She is so charitable and piteous, that she would weep if she saw a mouse caught in a trap, and she has two small dogs with her. She wears a brooch with the inscription 'Amor vincit omnia' ('Love conquers all'). The Prioress brings with her her 'chapeleyne' (secretary), the Second Nun.

The Monk is next, an extremely fine and handsome man who loves to hunt, and who follows modern customs rather than old traditions. This is no bookish monk, studying in a cloister, but a man who keeps greyhounds to hunt the hare. The Monk is well-fed, fat, and his eyes are bright, gleaming like a furnace in his head.

The Friar who follows him is also wanton and merry, and he is a 'lymytour' by trade (a friar licensed to beg in certain districts). He is extremely well beloved of franklins (landowners) and worthy woman all over the town. He hears confession and gives absolution, and is an excellent beggar, able to earn himself a farthing wherever he went. His name is Huberd.

The Merchant wears a forked beard, motley clothes and sat high upon his horse. He gives his opinion very solemnly, and does excellent business as a merchant, never being in any debt. But, the narrator ominously remarks, 'I noot how men hym calle' (I don't know how men call him, or think of him).

The Clerk follows the Merchant. A student of Oxford university, he would rather have twenty books by Aristotle than rich clothes or musical instruments, and thus is dressed in a threadbare short coat. He only has a little gold, which he tends to spend on books and learning, and takes huge care and attention of his studies. He never speaks a word more than is needed, and that is short, quick and full of sentence (the Middle-English word for 'meaningfulness' is a close relation of 'sententiousness').

The Man of Law (referred to here as 'A Sergeant of the Lawe') is a judicious and dignified man, or, at least, he seems so because of his wise words. He is a judge in the court of assizes, by letter of appointment from the king, and because of his high standing receives many grants. He can draw up a legal document, the narrator tells us, and no-one can find a flaw in his legal writings. Yet, despite all this money and social worth, the Man of Law rides only in a homely, multi-coloured coat.

A Franklin travels with the Man of Law. He has a beard as white as a daisy, and of the sanguine humour (dominated by his blood). The Franklin is a big eater, loving a piece of bread dipped in wine, and is described (though not literally!) as Epicurus' son: the Franklin lives for culinary delight. His house is always full of meat pie, fish and meat, so much so that it 'snewed in his hous of mete and drynke'. He changes his meats and drinks according to what foods are in season.

A Haberdasher and a Carpenter, a Weaver, a Dyer and a Tapycer (weaver of tapestries) are next described, all of them clothed in the same distinctive guildsman's dress. Note that none of these pilgrims, in the end, actually tell a tale.

A Cook had been brought along to boil the chicken up with marrow bones and spices, but this particular Cook knows a draught of ale very well indeed, according to the narrator. The Cook could roast and simmer and boil and fry, make stews and hashes and bake a pie well, but it was a great pity that, on his shin, he has an ulcer.

A Shipman from Dartmouth is next - tanned brown from the hot summer sun, riding upon a carthorse, and wearing a gown of coarse woolen cloth which reaches to his knees. The Shipman had, many times, drawn a secret draught of wine on board ship, while the merchant was asleep. The Shipman has weathered many storms, and knows his trade: he knows the locations of all the harbors from Gotland to Cape Finistere. His shape is called 'the Maudelayne'.

A Doctor of Medicine is the next pilgrim described, clad in red and blue, and no-one in the world can match him in speaking about medicine and surgery. He knows the cause of every illness, what humor engenders them, and how to cure them. He is a perfect practitioner of medicine, and he has apothecaries ready to send him drugs and mixtures. He is well-read in the standard medical authorities, from the Greeks right through to Chaucer's contemporary Gilbertus Anglicus. The Doctor, however, has not studied the Bible.

The Wife of Bath was 'somdel deef' (a little deaf, as her tale will later expand upon) and that was a shame. The Wife of Bath is so adept at making cloth that she surpasses even the cloth-making capitals of Chaucer's world, Ypres and Ghent, and she wears coverchiefs (linen coverings for the head) which must (the narrator assumes) have 'weyeden ten pound'. She had had five husbands through the church door, and had been at Jerusalem, Rome and Boulogne on pilgrimage. She is also described as 'Gat-tothed' (traditionally denoting lasciviousness), and as keeping good company, she knows all the answers about love: 'for she koude of that art the olde daunce' (she knew the whole dance as far as love is concerned!).

A good religious man, A Parson of a Town, is next described, who, although poor in goods, is rich in holy thought and work. He's a learned man, who truly preaches Christ's gospel, and devoutly teaches his parishioners. He travels across his big parish to visit all of his parishioners, on his feet, carrying a staff in his hand. He is a noble example to his parishioners ('his sheep', as they are described) because he acts first, and preaches second (or, in Chaucer's phrase, 'first he wroghte, and afterward he taughte'). The narrator believes that there is no better priest to be found anywhere.

With the Parson travels a Plowman (who does not tell a tale), who has hauled many cartloads of dung in his time. He is a good, hard-working man, who lives in peace and charity, and treats his neighbor as he would be treated. He rides on a mare, and wears a tabard (a workman's loose garment).

A Miller comes next, in this final group of pilgrims (now at the bottom of the class scale!). He is big-boned and has big muscles, and always wins the prize in wrestling matches. There's not a door that he couldn't lift off its hinges, or break it by running at it head-first. He has black, wide nostrils, carries a sword and a buckler (shield) by his side, and has a mouth like a great furnace. He's good at stealing corn and taking payment for it three times. But then, Chaucer implies, there are no honest millers.

A noble Manciple (a business agent, purchaser of religious provisions) is the next pilgrim to be described, and a savvy financial operator. Though a common man, the Manciple can run rings round even a 'heep of lerned men'. The Manciple, his description ominously ends, 'sette hir aller cappe': deceived them all.

The Reeve, a slender, choleric man, long-legged and lean ("ylyk a staf"). He knows exactly how much grain he has, and is excellent at keeping his granary and his grain bin. There is no bailiff, herdsman or servant about whom the Reeve does not know something secret or treacherous; as a result, they are afraid of him 'as of the deeth'.

The Summoner is next, his face fire-red and pimpled, with narrow eyes. He has a skin disease across his black brows, and his beard (which has hair falling out of it) and he is extremely lecherous. There is, the narrator tells us, no ointment or cure, or help him to remove his pimples. He loves drinking wine which is as 'reed as blood', and eating leeks, onions and garlic. He knows how to trick someone.

Travelling with the Summoner is a noble Pardoner, his friend and his companion (in what sense Chaucer intends the word 'compeer', meaning companion, nobody knows) and the last pilgrim-teller to be described. He sings loudly 'Come hither, love to me', and has hair as yellow as wax, which hangs like flaxen from his head. He carries a wallet full of pardons in his lap, brimful of pardons come from Rome. The Pardoner is sexually ambiguous - he has a thin, boyish voice, and the narrator wonders whether he is a 'geldyng or a mare' (a eunuch or a homosexual).

The narrator writes that he has told us now of the estate (the class), the array (the clothing), and the number of pilgrims assembled in this company. He then makes an important statement of intent for what is to come: he who repeats a tale told by another man, the narrator says, must repeat it as closely as he possibly can to the original teller - and thus, if the tellers use obscene language, it is not our narrator's fault.

The Host is the last member of the company described, a large man with bright, large eyes - and an extremely fair man. The Host welcomes everyone to the inn, and announces the pilgrimage to Canterbury, and decides that, on the way there, the company shall 'talen and pleye' (to tell stories and amuse themselves). Everyone consents to the Host's plan for the game, and he then goes on to set it out.

What the Host describes is a tale-telling game, in which each pilgrim shall tell two tales on the way to Canterbury, and two more on the way home; whoever tells the tale 'of best sentence and moost solas' shall have supper at the cost of all of the other pilgrims, back at the Inn, once the pilgrimage returns from Canterbury. The pilgrims agree to the Host's suggestion, and agree to accord to the Host's judgment as master of the tale-telling game. Everyone then goes to bed.

The next morning, the Host awakes, raises everyone up, and 'in a flok' the pilgrimage rides towards 'the Wateryng of Seint Thomas', a brook about two miles from London. The Host asks the pilgrims to draw lots to see who shall tell the first tale, the Knight being asked to 'draw cut' first and, whether by 'aventure, or sort, or cas', the Knight draws the straw to tell the first tale. The pilgrims ride forward, and the Knight begins to tell his tale.

Analysis

The General Prologue was probably written early in the composition of the Canterbury Tales, and offers an interesting comparison point to many of the individual tales itself. Of course, it does not match up to the tales as we have them in a number of ways: the Nun's Priest and the Second Nun are not described, and, most significantly, the work as we have it does not reflect the Host's plan. For starters, the pilgrimage only seems to go as far as Canterbury (for the Parson's Tale) and only the narrator tells two tales on the way there, with all the other pilgrims telling only a single tale (and some who are described in the General Prologue not telling a tale at all).

We must, therefore, view the General Prologue with some hesitation as a comparison point to the tales themselves: it offers useful or enlightening suggestions, but they are no means a complete, reliable guide to the tales and what they mean. What the General Prologue offers is a brief, often very visual description of each pilgrim, focusing on details of their background, as well as key details of their clothing, their food likes and dislikes, and their physical features. These descriptions fall within a common medieval tradition of portraits in words (which can be considered under the technical termekphrasis), Chaucer's influence in this case most likely coming from The Romaunt de la Rose.

Immediately, our narrator insists that his pilgrims are to be described by 'degree'. By the fact that the Knight, the highest-ranking of the pilgrims, is selected as the first teller, we see the obvious social considerations of the tale. Still, all human life is here: characters of both sexes, and from walks of life from lordly knight, or godly parson down to oft-divorced wife or grimy cook.

Each pilgrim portrait within the prologue might be considered as an archetypal description. Many of the 'types' of characters featured would have been familiar stock characters to a medieval audience: the hypocritical friar, the rotund, food-loving monk, the rapacious miller are all familiar types from medieval estates satire (see Jill Mann's excellent book for more information). Larry D. Benson has pointed out the way in which the characters are paragons of their respective crafts or types - noting the number of times the words 'wel koude' and 'verray parfit' occur in describing characters.

Yet what is key about the information provided in the General Prologue about these characters, many of whom do appear to be archetypes, is that it is among the few pieces of objective information - that is, information spoken by our narrator that we are given throughout the Tales. The tales themselves (except for large passages of the prologues and epilogues) are largely told in the words of the tellers: as our narrator himself insists in the passage. The words stand for themselves: and we interpret them as if they come from the pilgrims' mouths. What this does - and this is a key thought for interpreting the tales as a whole - is to apparently strip them of writerly license, blurring the line between Chaucer and his characters.

Thus all of the information might be seen to operate on various levels. When, for example, we find out that the Prioress has excellent table manners, never allowing a morsel to fall on her breast, how are we to read it? Is this Geoffrey Chaucer 'the author of The Canterbury Tales' making a conscious literary comparison to The Romaunt de la Rose, which features a similar character description (as it happens, of a courtesan)? Is this 'Chaucer' our narrator, a character within the Tales providing observation entirely without subtext or writerly intention? Or are these observations - supposedly innocent within the Prologue - to be noted down so as to be compared later to the Prioress' Tale?

Chaucer's voice, in re-telling the tales as accurately as he can, entirely disappears into that of his characters, and thus the Tales operates almost like a drama. Where do Chaucer's writerly and narratorial voices end, and his characters' voices begin? This self-vanishing quality is key to the Tales, and perhaps explains why there is one pilgrim who is not described at all so far, but who is certainly on the pilgrimage - and he is the most fascinating, and the most important by far: a poet and statesman by the name of Geoffrey Chaucer.
About The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales is at once one of the most famous and most frustrating works of literature ever written. Since its composition in late 1300s, critics have continued to mine new riches from its complex ground, and started new arguments about the text and its interpretation. Chaucer’s richly detailed text, so Dryden said, was “God’s plenty”, and the rich variety of the Tales is partly perhaps the reason for its success. It is both one long narrative (of the pilgrims and their pilgrimage) and an encyclopedia of shorter narratives; it is both one large drama, and a compilation of most literary forms known to medieval literature: romance, fabliau, Breton lay, moral fable, verse romance, beast fable, prayer to the Virgin… and so the list goes on. No single literary genre dominates the Tales. The tales include romantic adventures, fabliaux, saint's biographies, animal fables, religious allegories and even a sermon, and range in tone from pious, moralistic tales to lewd and vulgar sexual farces. More often than not, moreover, the specific tone of the tale is extremely difficult to firmly pin down.

This, indeed, is down to one of the key problems of interpreting the Tales themselves - voice: how do we ever know who is speaking? Because Chaucer, early in the Tales, promises to repeat the exact words and style of each speaker as best he can remember it, there is always a tension between Chaucer and the pilgrim's voice he ventriloquises as he re-tells his tale: even the "Chaucer" who is a character on the pilgrim has a distinct and deliberately unChaucerian voice. Is it the Merchant’s voice – and the Merchant’s opinion – or Chaucer’s? Is it Chaucer the character or Chaucer the writer? If it is Chaucer’s, are we supposed to take it at face value, or view it ironically? It is for this reason that, throughout this ClassicNote, a conscious effort has been made to refer to the speaker of each tale (the Merchant, in the Merchant’s Tale, for example) as the “narrator”, a catch-all term which represents both of, or either one of, Chaucer and the speaker in question.

No-one knows for certain when Chaucer began to write the Tales – the pilgrimage is usually dated 1387, but that date is subject to much scholarly argument – but it is certain that Chaucer wrote some parts of the Tales at different times, and went back and added Tales to the melting pot. The Knight’s Tale, for example, was almost certainly written earlier than the Canterbury project as a separate work, and then adapted into the voice of the Knight; and the Second Nun’s Tale, as well as probably the Monk’s, probably have a similar compositional history.

Chaucer drew from a rich variety of literary sources to create the Tales, though his principal debt is likely to Boccaccio’s Decameron, in which ten nobles from Florence, to escape the plague, stay in a country villa and amuse each other by each telling tales. Boccaccio likely had a significant influence on Chaucer. The Knight's Tale was an English version of a tale by Boccaccio, while six of Chaucer's tales have possible sources in the Decameron: the Miller's Tale, the Reeve's, the Clerk's, the Merchant's, the Franklin's, and the Shipman's. However, Chaucer's pilgrims to Canterbury form a wider range of society compared to Boccaccio's elite storytellers, allowing for greater differences in tone and substance.

The text of the Tales itself does not survive complete, but in ten fragments (see ‘The texts of the Tales’ for further information and specific orders). Due to the fact that there are no links made between these ten fragments in most cases, it is extremely difficult to ascertain precisely in which order Chaucer wanted the tales to be read. This ClassicNote corresponds to the order followed in Larry D. Benson’s “Riverside Chaucer”, which is undoubtedly the best edition of Chaucer currently available.

Lecture No.3

Modern Poetry(Romantic)

Auguries of Innocence
Summary

The poet proffers the argument that the natural world can be regenerated in time and that nature itself can be an augury to the lost vision of innocence. The phrasing of the title is the strongest example of this theme, for here, the word “innocence” signifies man in the unfallen state.

The first quatrain is where this theme of seeing the world through different means is set forth. The infinite (“Heaven”) can be seen through something that is not human, but still life (“through a Wildflower”). This “wildflower” is a symbol for free love. Heaven is seen though love, the world is seen through the intellect, and the imagination is that which bridges the two. In the same sense, that which is not life nor human, the dehumanized world, is capable of revealing “infinity.” It may be worth noting the famous Blake line from The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: "If the doors of perception were cleansed every thing would appear to man as it is, infinite. For man has closed himself up, till he sees all things through narrow chinks of his cavern."

The remainder of the poem is basic imagery, each animal representing a different part of the humanized world. Below is a list of a few of the key associations:

Dog – the beggar

Horse – the slave

Cock – the soldier

Singing – an inward, spiritual possession

Lamb’s submission – Jesus’ sacrifice for mankind

Bat – human spectre

Owl – humankind lost in the darkness, fearing an unknown God

Caterpillar – humankind emerging from nature’s womb, the exit from Eden

Pass the polar bar – enter a new world

Waves – the sea of time and space

Emmet and Eagle – perception from close and afar; physical and imaginative perception
Analysis

“The Auguries of Innocence” is a series of couplets that most Blake scholars and biographers agree were written in no particular order, but just gathered as such for printing in about 1803, a decade after “Songs of Innocence and Experience.” The interconnecting theme between the collection of couplets is universal interdependence, the principle idea that there exist a correspondence between equivalent entities that lie on completely different planes. Scandinavian mystic and poet Swedenborg was the major influence to this philosophical belief. In other words, there is a wisdom, or vision (“augury”) in seeing the world through two eyes instead of with one eye.

Major Themes

Opposition

In the “Marriage of Heaven and Hell,” Blake wrote: “Opposition is true friendship.” Even the title of that poem points to his theory of a “marriage” between opposites. So much of Blake’s work revolves around the theme that opposition represents balance in this world, and a focus on one side over its counter leads to oppression and ignorance. Many people who study Blake argue that he is an extreme radical who was out to abolish any form of order that existed during his lifetime. A close reading of his work dealing with this theme will prove this is not the case. William Blake was intelligent enough, and courageous enough, to recognize the Age of Reason’s over-governing intentions and set out to challenge the notion that sensibility and order are exclusive partners. But Blake did not seek complete anarchy in the world contrary to a lot of interpretation of his work. What the poet did was illustrate that governing does not have to equal a loss of liberty, and he did so by presenting the opposition to the demanding institutions—church, state, law, monarchy—of his time. By examining ideas and objects in terms of opposites and allowing access to both sides of the scale, man will reach a true state of enlightenment rather than a repressed state where few benefit and most are held in bondage.

The cycle

Cycle is very similar to the theme of opposition. Where Blake argues each object or abstract idea has an equal and valid opposite form, he also contends that nature of these objects and abstractions pass back and forth through one another. Most obvious in “The Season” poems studied here, but also in many other works of Blake, the reader learns of his static belief that nature operates in cyclical terms. William Blake would use this theory as evidential support for the changes of his time, especially the Revolutions that were happening in America and France. Frustrated with a long period of repression in Europe, Blake felt it was time for the people to rise and fight back, and that a political and philosophical cleansing was not only a positive part to the progression of mankind and evolution of societies, but that it was as natural as the rotation of the earth, the changing of the seasons, and the maturity of humans.

Oppression / Repression

Blake lived in a period of aggressive British colonialism, slavery, social casting, Revolutionary change in America and Europe, as well as the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Being a member of the lower class, an uneducated artist (in the formal sense of the term, although Blake was clearly quite intelligent), and considered by many to be an inferior poet bordering madness, Blake experienced firsthand the struggles of oppression. Using words and illustrations, Blake fought back against his countrymen, political leaders, and religious principals(ples). The theme of the repressed is the easiest to identify and extract from Blake’s poetry. Most all of his work will feature a wearisome protagonist who is attempting to revolt against some greater being, whether it be politically, religious, or even the shackles of love and marriage. Many times, this theme is represented in the form of mythology, literary allusion, and the personification of natural objects.

Sexuality

There has been a lot written on the hidden sexual references that are laden in Blake’s poetry. While some of the examples put forward by Blake scholars who seek sexual innuendo in all of Blake’s writings is debatable, there are some instances where sexual reference is prevalent without doubt. There has been some work on homosexuality and homoeroticism appearing in the poems as well, and this is a harder case to prove. Regardless of the directed gender of the metaphor, sexuality does play an important role in Blake’s canon. Due to Blake’s feeling that the human imagination and desire is oppressed in all forms, it makes complete sense that he would also draw upon the supposed dishonor and immoral act of copulation as just one more facet of persecution against nature’s intent. The most repeated reference made to this is the literary allusion repeatedly made to Milton and the fall of man from the Garden of Eden as a result of his sin for love.

Innocence and Experience

Similar to Blake’s focus on man’s fall from grace, Blake was constantly exploring the moment of lost innocence. This repeated theme in Blake’s poetry is almost like a paragon for a combination of all the other themes so far discussed. The theme of the separation, transition, and difference between innocence and experience is highlights the theory of opposition, cycling, repression, and sexuality. Songs of Innocence and Experience aside (which can be found in a separate Grade Saver Note), Blake continues to explore and personify this transient moment and investigate its consequences. Recognizing that in a world of “reason” or “sensibility” we risk forgetting all of our primitive desires and suppressing all of our natural intuitions. Blake attempt to invoke recognition for the imaginative spirit that lies in all of us, but since our moment of experience, has been subjugated to the areas of our mind we are called upon to ignore.

Religion

It is unclear exactly where Blake stood in terms of his beliefs in God. Some contend that through his works it is clear he was an atheist; others argue he was more agnostic. While it is impossible to say for sure, it is not the opinion of this author that Blake had no belief in a super-being, God-like, creator. Blake makes many references to God and a supernatural, omniscient, and omnipresent being. That being said, it is very valid to assume Blake had a distinct disdain for religion as an institution. The theme of religion appears in a lot of Blake’s work, and in his “opposition is friendship” manner, he usually counterbalances this theme with references to nature, showing his belief in a natural superpower rather than mythological creator. Blake views religion as one of the paragons of tyranny. Inventing a mythology full of angels, demons, and Gods that mirror a lot of Milton’s writings, it becomes obvious that William Blake was fascinated with religion as literary allusion and infuriated with it as a means to suppress man’s natural desires.

Poetry/Imagination
By the time William Blake began writing poetry at the very young age of twelve, he was already frustrated with the stale situation English poetry was in at that time. Blake felt poets needed to seek new ways to express their words and ideas and sought to step away from the Classic traditions of English poetry that had not really changed since Spenser (so Blake thought anyhow). As readers, we witness Blake play around with no forms and seek new methods to get across his message. In some of the poems, literary reference becomes the theme itself (“Memory, hither come” and “To the Muses” for example). William Blake was continuously finding new ways to express his philosophical beliefs and articulate his extraordinary imagination.

About The Poems of William Blake

William Blake was a poet who was not very well recognized during his lifetime. It was not until his sixties when his work began to receive credit as leading a new literary movement in England at the time that was really triggered by William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge who were both much younger than Blake and of a superior social class. In his younger years, William Blake's poetry was written off as lunacy by most of his contemporaries, and although he is recognized now as the 'grandfather' or the Romantic period, he was in fact much older and far removed from that time.

That being said, the reason Blake is associated with Romanticism is because of his ardent support of the French Revolution and all forms of anti-establishment radicalism. Blake was an untiring rebel who verbally and poetically fought hard against all constrictions of his time--religious, social, sexual, and literary. His poems transmute clearly all the burring issues and events of his day and touch on issues such as the American War for Independence, the French Revolution, Colonialism and the expansion of Empire, Slavery, and finally the Industrial Revolution. Through Blake's work, the reader can deduce his passion and vision that social rebellion against these injustices would serve as an apocalyptic turning point in the history of humankind, destroying the old, decaying order of oppression and presaging the redemption of humanity.

The poems of William Blake reinterpret the spiritual history of the human race from the fall from Eden to the beginning of the French Revolution. Blake believed in the correspondence between the physical world and the spiritual world and used poetic metaphor to express these beliefs. In his poetry, we hear a man who look's for mankind to salvage his redemption from oppression through resurgence of imaginative life. The power of repression is a constant theme in Blake's poems and he articulates his belief in the titanic forces of revolt and the struggle for freedom against the guardians of tradition.

What is important to keep in mind when discussing or reading Blake's poetry is that a lot of his poems were accompanied with some sort of illustration, painting, or in the case of the prophecies and songs, copper plates. It is difficult to fully grasp the poet’s intentions without having access to the artwork married to the poem.

Additionally, his earliest work, "Poetical Sketches," which is a collection that a lot of the poems discussed here are taken from, shows dissatisfaction with the reigning poetic tradition and his restless quest for new literary forms and techniques. Eventually, Blake's genius would blossom and his thinking began to be articulated in giant forms, leading to the creation of complete mythology and extremely symbolic epics.

The sick rose by williams blaken 1789, the eccentric poet-printer William Blake published a small book of poems called Songs of Innocence. The poems are exactly that: short lyrics about children (innocence) that resemble songs and nursery rhymes. But Blake was no ordinary poet; he was also a painter, printer, and engraver, and each of the poems in theSongs of Innocence was accompanied by an illustration that framed the poem. Head over to "Best of the Web" to see what these poems looked like.

If Blake wasn't content with just writing poems with no illustrations, he also wasn't content with simply writing about innocence; something was missing. In 1794 he published a companion to the Songs of Innocence called the Songs of Experience, which contains "The Sick Rose." The Songs of Experience were never published without their counterpart, and the entire volume was called the Songs of Innocence and Experience: Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul. The title couldn't be more descriptive. In general, the Songs of Innocence tend to be, well, more innocent, benign, and childish, whereas the Songs of Experience explore darker, more sinister themes associated with the Industrial Revolution, religion, and education. "The Sick Rose," for example, isn't just about a rose that's losing its color. It's about a worm (sometimes read as a symbol of the devil) that (essentially) rapes the rose and destroys it with its "dark secret love."

Although Blake thought of innocence and experience as contraries, any attempts to classify innocence as good and experience as bad inevitably fail; sometimes theSongs of Innocence appear innocent and then end up being darker and more complicated upon closer examination. In fact, Blake sometimes moved poems back and forth between the two volumes, a fact which suggests that his vision was much more complicated than the simple word "contraries" implies. "The Sick Rose"

Summary

Critic Harold Bloom refers to this short poem as "one of Blake's gnomic triumphs." The speaker addresses a rose, which he claims is sick because an “invisible worm” has “found out thy bed/Of crimson joy.” The rose symbolizes earthly, as opposed to spiritual, love, which becomes ill when infected with the materialism of the world. The rose’s bed of “crimson joy” may also be a sexual image, with the admittedly phallic worm representing either lust or jealousy. The worm has a “dark secret love” that destroys the rose’s life, suggesting something sinful or unmentionable.

Analysis

Nature brings this sickness to the worm with “the howling storm.” Although the speaker decries the rose's sickness in the first line, the rest of the poem subtly suggests that the rose is not innocent of her own destruction. The worm has incidentally "found out" the rose's bed, which is "crimson joy" even prior to the worm's arrival. The red of passion and of the vaginal "crimson bed" image counterpart to the worm's phallic one suggests that the rose has already been experiencing some kind of lustful passion.

In keeping with much of the Songs of Experience, this poem is brief, with two stanzas, and deviates from the Innocence rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD. Here the rhyme scheme, ABCB DEFE, introduces a note of discord in keeping with the ill effects of the "secret love" which the rose hides, much to its detriment. "Worm" and "storm" are rhymed, connecting the agent of destruction with a force of nature. In the second stanza, "joy" and "destroy" are connected, linking what should be a positive experience to the decaying disease that the rose has contracted.

The Sick Rose

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

O Rose thou art sick.

The invisible worm,

That flies in the night

In the howling storm:

Has found out thy bed

Of crimson joy:

And his dark secret love

Does thy life destroy.

POETWilliam Blake 1757–1827

POET’S REGIONEngland

SCHOOL / PERIODRomantic

SUBJECTSDeath, Trees & Flowers, Relationships, Nature, Love, Living, Classic Love, Desire, Break-ups & Vexed Love, Heartache & Loss

POETIC TERMSRhymed Stanza

Auguries of Innocence

BY WILLIAM BLAKE

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour

A Robin Red breast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage

A Dove house filld with Doves & Pigeons

Shudders Hell thr' all its regions

A dog starvd at his Masters Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State

A Horse misusd upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human blood

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fibre from the Brain does tear

A Skylark wounded in the wing

A Cherubim does cease to sing

The Game Cock clipd & armd for fight

Does the Rising Sun affright

Every Wolfs & Lions howl

Raises from Hell a Human Soul

The wild deer, wandring here & there

Keeps the Human Soul from Care

The Lamb misusd breeds Public Strife

And yet forgives the Butchers knife

The Bat that flits at close of Eve

Has left the Brain that wont Believe

The Owl that calls upon the Night

Speaks the Unbelievers fright

He who shall hurt the little Wren

Shall never be belovd by Men

He who the Ox to wrath has movd

Shall never be by Woman lovd

The wanton Boy that kills the Fly

Shall feel the Spiders enmity

He who torments the Chafers Sprite

Weaves a Bower in endless Night

The Catterpiller on the Leaf

Repeats to thee thy Mothers grief

Kill not the Moth nor Butterfly

For the Last Judgment draweth nigh

He who shall train the Horse to War

Shall never pass the Polar Bar

The Beggars Dog & Widows Cat

Feed them & thou wilt grow fat

The Gnat that sings his Summers Song

Poison gets from Slanders tongue

The poison of the Snake & Newt

Is the sweat of Envys Foot

The poison of the Honey Bee

Is the Artists Jealousy

The Princes Robes & Beggars Rags

Are Toadstools on the Misers Bags

A Truth thats told with bad intent

Beats all the Lies you can invent

It is right it should be so

Man was made for Joy & Woe

And when this we rightly know

Thro the World we safely go

Joy & Woe are woven fine

A Clothing for the soul divine

Under every grief & pine

Runs a joy with silken twine

The Babe is more than swadling Bands

Throughout all these Human Lands

Tools were made & Born were hands

Every Farmer Understands

Every Tear from Every Eye

Becomes a Babe in Eternity

This is caught by Females bright

And returnd to its own delight

The Bleat the Bark Bellow & Roar

Are Waves that Beat on Heavens Shore

The Babe that weeps the Rod beneath

Writes Revenge in realms of Death

The Beggars Rags fluttering in Air

Does to Rags the Heavens tear

The Soldier armd with Sword & Gun

Palsied strikes the Summers Sun

The poor Mans Farthing is worth more

Than all the Gold on Africs Shore

One Mite wrung from the Labrers hands

Shall buy & sell the Misers Lands

Or if protected from on high

Does that whole Nation sell & buy

He who mocks the Infants Faith

Shall be mockd in Age & Death

He who shall teach the Child to Doubt

The rotting Grave shall neer get out

He who respects the Infants faith

Triumphs over Hell & Death

The Childs Toys & the Old Mans Reasons

Are the Fruits of the Two seasons

The Questioner who sits so sly

Shall never know how to Reply

He who replies to words of Doubt

Doth put the Light of Knowledge out

The Strongest Poison ever known

Came from Caesars Laurel Crown

Nought can Deform the Human Race

Like to the Armours iron brace

When Gold & Gems adorn the Plow

To peaceful Arts shall Envy Bow

A Riddle or the Crickets Cry

Is to Doubt a fit Reply

The Emmets Inch & Eagles Mile

Make Lame Philosophy to smile

He who Doubts from what he sees

Will neer Believe do what you Please

If the Sun & Moon should Doubt

Theyd immediately Go out

To be in a Passion you Good may Do

But no Good if a Passion is in you

The Whore & Gambler by the State

Licencd build that Nations Fate

The Harlots cry from Street to Street

Shall weave Old Englands winding Sheet

The Winners Shout the Losers Curse

Dance before dead Englands Hearse

Every Night & every Morn

Some to Misery are Born

Every Morn and every Night

Some are Born to sweet delight

Some are Born to sweet delight

Some are Born to Endless Night

We are led to Believe a Lie

When we see not Thro the Eye

Which was Born in a Night to perish in a Night

When the Soul Slept in Beams of Light

God Appears & God is Light

To those poor Souls who dwell in Night

But does a Human Form Display

To those who Dwell in Realms of day

POET

William Blake 1757–1827

POET’S REGIONEngland

SCHOOL / PERIODRomantic

SUBJECTSReligion, Pets, Living, Cities & Urban Life, Social Commentaries, Faith & Doubt,Relationships, Arts & Sciences, Class, Philosophy, Christianity, God & the Divine

POETIC TERMSRhymed Stanza, Aphorism

Hedda Gabler

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Meet Hedda Tesman. She’s kicking around in Norway in the 1890s, so she’s very repressed, both socially and sexually. She’s the daughter of the now-deceased General Gabler, which means she grew up rich and privileged. Now she’s married to George Tesman, a would-be professor and a bit of an academic bore. Hedda has just returned from her six-month honeymoon with George and is settling into married life in the house he has bought specifically to please her, though it meant stretching beyond his means financially. On top of the boredom and repression, Hedda is in all likelihood pregnant, though she won’t admit it despite several hints from George’s Aunt Julie, a kind older woman who takes care of her invalid sister Rina.

Conflict enters the scene when Mrs. Elvsted visits to the Tesmans on a trip to the city from her country home. She’s there looking out for a guy named Eilert Løvborg, a recovering alcoholic who tutors her children. Hedda, the master of manipulation, soon gets Mrs. Elvsted alone and coerces her into admitting the truth: she and Eilert are somehow involved, and she wants to leave her husband for him. Eilert has just published a book – he’s in the same field of history as Mr. Tesman – and Mrs. Elvsted has followed him to the city to make sure he doesn’t fall back on his old drinking ways. She begs the Tesmans to look out for him, since George is his colleague and friend.

Shortly after, Judge Brack, the big man around town, comes by and flirts with Hedda. It’s clear he’s interested in her. Everyone keeps asking Hedda the same question: why has she, the best catch in town, married a bore like George? Hedda admits that 1) she had to marry someone and 2) she thought George, through his scholarly pursuits, would be famous some day.

Eilert eventually stops by the Tesmans and we discover that Hedda has a history with him; they used to be intellectual buddies the way that Eilert now is with Mrs. Elvsted. When Hedda broke off their friendship/budding romance, she did so to avoid the scandal of hanging out with a questionable, renegade alcoholic like Eilert. She also threatened to shoot him with one of her father’s pistols. Now that he’s with Mrs. Elvsted, Hedda decides to entertain herself by causing some trouble. She tells Eilert that Mrs. Elvsted was afraid he would drink again – in other words, she doesn’t trust him. This angers Eilert, who promptly starts drinking again. He goes out to a party with the Judge and Hedda’s husband George, but not before revealing a tantalizing and plot-thickening tidbit: he’s written another book, this one using information from the past to predict the future. He’s written it with the help of his new muse, Mrs. Elvsted. He has the only copy, a hand-written manuscript, with him now and will read some aloud tonight.

Mrs. Elvsted stays with Hedda, worried sick that Eilert will drink himself silly at the party. Of course, Eilert drinks himself silly at the party. He never returns that night. While Mrs. Elvsted is sleeping, George comes back early the next morning, tells Hedda about the drunken debauchery, and shows her something: Eilert’s manuscript. It seems that Eilert dropped it while drunk and George recovered it, eager to keep it safe so he could return it to his friend once sober. When a letter comes regarding Aunt Rina’s fading health, George rushes out, leaving behind the manuscript.

Later that morning, Eilert comes running in. Mrs. Elvsted wakes up in time for him to break up with her, telling her that he tore up the manuscript and doesn’t want to see her any more. Mrs. Elvsted declares that he has destroyed their child (meaning the book) and leaves. Only then does Eilert admit, to Hedda, that he lost the manuscript. Hedda, being Hedda, says nothing about the recovered manuscript and instead gives him a pistol with which to shoot himself. She’s eager for Eilert to have a beautiful, poetic death – she wants him to shoot himself in the temple.

Finally alone again, Hedda burns the manuscript to ashes. When she confesses this to George later, he is overjoyed that his wife loves him enough to destroy the work of his professional rival. Mrs. Elvsted visits again the next morning to find out what’s going on with Eilert, and Judge Brack comes by to tell everyone that Eilert is dead by suicide. Mrs. Elvsted and George, feeling quite horrible, decide to re-write the manuscript using Mrs. Elvsted’s notes. While they start work, the Judge takes Hedda aside and tells her that Eilert didn’t commit suicide – rather he accidentally shot himself in the gut. Hedda is devastated that the great poetic death she imagined never came to pass. Brack also reveals that the pistol firing the fatal shot was Hedda’s –he recognizes it. He can keep this info quiet, but only if she does what he wants.

No one tells Hedda what to do. She shoots herself in the temple.

(Totally quoted from http://www.shmoop.com/)

Henrik Ibsen (1828-1906)

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Norwegian playwright, one of "the four great ones" with Alexander Kielland, Jonas Lie and Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson of the 19th-century Norwegian literature. Ibsen is generally acknowledged as the founder of modern prose drama. He moved away from the Romantic style, and brought the problems and ideas of the day onto the stage of his time. Ibsen's famous plays, Brand (1866 ) andPeer Gynt (1867), were originally not intended for the stage; they were "reading dramas".

"... And what does it mean, then to be a poet? It was a long time before I realized that to be a poet means essentially to see, but mark well, to see in such a way that whatever is seen is perceived by the audience just as the poet saw it. But only what has been lived through can be seen in that way and accepted in that way. And the secret of modern literature lies precisely in this matter of experiences that are lived through. All that I have written these last ten years, I have lived through spiritually." ('Speech to the Norwegian Students, September 10, 1874, from Speeches and New Letters, 1910)

Henrik Ibsen was born in Skien, a tiny coastal town in the south of Norway. His father, Knud Ibsen, was a prosperous merchant, whose financial failure changed the family's social position. Later Ibsen bitterly recalled how his father's friends broke all connections with him and the "Altenburg Manor", earlier known for its dinners and festivities. In disgrace the family moved to Venstøp farmhouse, provided to them by the creditors.
As a child Ibsen dreamed of becoming an artist. His mother, Marichen Cornelia Martine Altenburg, was an avid painter, and she loved theatre. Ibsen's education was interrupted by poverty and at the age of 15 he was apprenticed to a pharmacist in Grimstad. In 1846 he was compelled to support an illegitimate child born to a servant girl. Ibsen moved in 1850 to Christiania (now Oslo), where he attended Heltberg's "student factory", an irregular school for university candidates, and occasionally earned from his journalistic writings. In the same year he wrote two plays, Catiline, a tragedy, which reflected the atmosphere of the revolutionary year of 1848, and The Burial Mound, written under the pseudonym of Brynjolf Bjarme. Ibsen hoped to become a physician, but failed university entrance examinations.
Cataline sold only a few copies but The Burial Mound was performed three times in 1850. The first performance of Cataline did not take place until 1881. After successfully performing a poem glorifying Norway's past, Ibsen was appointed in 1851 by Ole Bull as "stage poet" of Den Nationale Scene, a small theater in Bergen. During this period Ibsen staged more than 150 plays, becoming thoroughly acquainted with the techniques of professional theatrical performances. In addition to his managerial work he also wrote four plays based on Norwegian folklore and history, notably Lady Inger of Ostrat (1855), dealing with the liberation of medieval Norway. In 1852 his theater sent him on a study tour to Denmark and Germany.
Ibsen returned in 1857 to Christiania to continue as artistic director of the new Norwegian (Norske) Theatre. In 1858 he married Suzannah Thoresen, the stepchild of the novelist Magdalene Thoresen. Their only child, Sigurd, was born next year. After many productions, the theater went bankrupt, and Ibsen was appointed to the Christiania Theatre. To this period belong The Vikings of Helgoland (1858) and The Pretenders (1864), both historical sagas, and Love's Comedy (1862), a satire. Several of Ibsen's plays failed to attract audience. These drawbacks contributed to his decision to move abroad.
In 1864 Ibsen received an award for foreign travel from the government, and also had financial help from Bjørnstjerne Bjørnson. He left Norway for Italy in April, and traveled abroad for the next 27 years, returning to Norway only for brief visits. During this time, when he lived in Rome, Munich and Dresden, Ibsen wrote most of his best-known works, among others Brand, inspired by Kierkegaard's idea of subjectivity as truth. The symbolic tragedy tells about a priest, who follows his high principles at the cost of the lives of his child and his wife. Its theme, an individual with his God-given mission pitted against society, reflected Ibsen's disappointment in weak and spineless politicians.
Brand's firm belief is "No compromise!". At the end Brand admits his own weakness and is buried by an avalanche. Peer Gynt(1867), written mostly in Southern Italy, in Ischia and in Sorrento, was a satiric fantasy about a boastful egoist, irresponsible young man, an Ulyssean figure from Norwegian folklore. In both of these works the romantic hero is destroyed and their "ideal demands" are crushed. No doubt the themes also rose from Ibsen's disillusionment with his countrymen. In 1865 he wrote to Björnson: "If I were to tell at this moment what has been the chief result of my stay abroad, I should say that it consisted in my having driven out of myself the aestheticism which had a great power over me – an isolated aestheticism with a claim to independent existence. Aestheticism of this kind seems to me now as a great curse to poetry as theology is to religion."
Ibsen himself considered The Emperor and the Galilean (1873) his most important play. However, this heavy drama about Christianity and paganism in generally not included among his most important achievements. Pillars of Society (1877) dealt with a wealthy and hypocritical businessman, whose perilous course almost results in the death of his son. A Doll´s House (1879) was a social drama, which caused a sensation and toured Europe and America. In the play a woman refuses to obey her husband and walks out from her apparently perfect marriage, her life in the "doll's house". At the turn-of-the-century physicians used Nora, whose mood changes from joy to depression in short cycles of time, as an example of "female hysteria". Later Havelock Ellis, inspired by Nora's character, saw in her "the promise of a new social order."
In An Enemy of the People (1882) Ibsen attacked "the compact liberal majority" and the mass opinion. Arthur Miller's adaptation from 1950 was a clear statement of resistance to conformity. "The majority," says the honest and brave Dr. Stockmann, "is never right until it does right." Ghosts (1881) touched the forbidden subject of hereditary venereal disease. The London Daily Telegraphcalled the play "an open drain; a loathsome sore unbandaged; a dirty act done publicly; a lazar house with all its doors and windows open." Again a bourgeois façade hides moral decay and guilt. Mrs. Alving, the widow of the respected Captain Alving, has to reveal to her son Oswald the ugly truth about his disease. Eventually she has to decide whether or not to euthanize his son, whose mind has disintegrated.
Hedda Gabler (1890) was a study of a neurotic woman. Oscar Wilde, after attending the play, wrote: "I felt pity and terror, as though the play had been Greek." Hedda, twenty-nine years old, has married down, is pregnant with an unwanted child, and bored by her husband. Before marriage she has flirted with the drunken poet Loevborg, a portrait of the playwright Strindberg, who hated Ibsen. She plots to the ruin of Loevborg by burning his manuscript on the future of civilization. Judge Brack, who lusts after Hedda, discovers that Hedda has instigated Loevborg's accidental suicide - he has died in a bordello. Hedda cries: "Oh, why does everything I touch become mean and ludicrous? It's like a curse!" Brack gives her the choice either of public exposure or of becoming his mistress. But Hedda chooses suicide when she falls into his power.
In 1866 Ibsen received poet's annual stipend. He also had royalties from his dramatic poem Brand, his first financially successful drama. With the receipt of a new grant, he visited Stockholm, dined with the King, and later represented Norway at the opening of the Suez Canal. In the 1870s he worked with the composer Edward Grieg on the premiere of Peer Gynt. Grieg had met Ibsen in Rome in 1866; the play was written a year after their meeting. They never became close but Ibsen felt that the busy conductor and virtuoso pianist had a real understanding of his work. In January 1874 he commissioned Grieg to provide incidental music for the play, which he never intended to be staged. The assignment was completed in September of the following year and was premiered in Oslo, together with a revised stage version of the drama, on February 24, 1876. Both the author and the composer were surprised by its success.
When Ibsen spent a couple months in Norway during the summer of 1874, Norwegian students marched in procession to his home to greet him. In reply Ibsen said: "For a student has essentially the same task as the poet: to make clear to himself, and thereby to others, the temporal and eternal questions which are astir in the age and in the community to which he belongs." (from Speeches and New Letters)
Ibsen returned to Norway in 1891 and continued to write until a stroke in 1900. His marriage was joyless, but he had a few episodes of friendship with young women. In 1898 Ibsen received the world's homage on the occasion of his 70th birthday. George Bernard Shaw called him the greatest living dramatist in a lecture entitled 'The Quintessence of Ibsenism'. Ibsen's son married Bjørnson's daughter Bergliot. The marriage built a bridge of friendship between the two writers. Their relationship had broken after Ibsen's play The League of Youth (1869), where the central character resembled Bjørnson. Ibsen died in Christiania on May 23, 1906.
Ibsen's final years were clouded by mental illness. When We Dead Awaken (1899), his last dramatic effort, showed the influence of Strindberg. James Joyce, who was from his student days a great admirer of Ibsen's work, published a laudatory essay on the play in the 1 April 1900 issue of the Fortnightly Review. It was Joyce's first published piece. A supposedly unknown Ibsen play, entitled The Sun God, surfaced in 2006 and an antiquarian bookshop in Oslo was offered a chance to buy it. After police investigation, a Norwegian scriptwriter and actor was charged in 2011 for forging writings and documents that allegedly originated from Ibsen and Knut Hamsun.

"A woman cannot be herself in the society of the present day, which is an exclusively masculine society, with laws framed by men and with judicial system that judges feminine conduct from a masculine point of view." (from Ibsen's Workshop, 1912)

Ibsen wrote for and about the middle class and life in the suburbs and small towns. He focused on characters and psychological conflicts rather than dramatic situations. His central theme was the duty of the individual towards himself, not the out-of-date conventions of bourgeois society. "I have really never had a strong feeling for solidarity," Ibsen said to Brandes in 1871. Ibsen's anarchistic individualism made a deep impression on the younger generation outside Norway, where he was considered a progressive writer. In his home country, however, Ibsen was seen as a moral preacher and more conservative than Björnson. Ibsen's discipline or successor was George Bernard Shaw, who dramatized with flair and wit generally accepted ideas into uncompromising plays.

Peer Gynt (1867), a verse drama. The hero is the legendary Peer Gynt of Norwegian Folklore. Peer is a young peasant farmer, a liar and opportunist, the antithesis of Brand¾he has no calling. He attends the country wedding feast, where he meets Solveig, a girl who is deeply attracted to him. Peer kidnaps the bride and later abandons her in the wilderness. A fugitive now, Peer experiences, like Sinbad the sailor, amazing adventures in many lands. He courts and then abandons the daughter of the Troll King. Before fleeing the country, he visits Aase, his aged mother, whose death he softens by a fantasy of a sleigh ride into an imaginary heaven. In his middle life Peer ships missionaries and idols to China, and becomes a slave trader. "To be creator of the universe, / So I need gold if I'm to play / The emperor's part with any force." He makes and loses money, and saves his own life in a shipwreck by letting another drown. Eventually Peer returns to Norway, old and embittered by his fruitless odyssey. He comes up before the Button Molder, who tells that "Friend, it's melting time," and tries to melt him in his ladle. Peer asks what is "to be yourself" and the Button Molder answers: "To be yourself is to slay yourself." Peer is horrified at the idea of losing his precious identity. However, he is saved from oblivion by the redeeming love Solveig, who has waited for him faithfully and in whose mind he has existed as a real personality. Peer discovers his reason for being in her forgiving arms. Incidental music accompany the play was composed by Edward Grieg. - "Whatever his critics think, Ibsen does not regard Peer as a failure or a hollow man. Faust, Part Two is an even greater dramatic poem than Peer Gynt, but unlike Faust, Peer is the triumphant representation of a personality. What Ibsen values in Peer is what we should value: the idiosyncratic that refuses to be melted down into the reductive or the commonplace..." (Harold Bloom in The Western Canon, 1994)

Selected works:

Catilina, 1850 (prod. 1882)
- Catiline (translated by Anders Orbeck, in Early Plays, 1921; Thomas F. van Laan, 1992)
Kjæmpehøjen, 1850 (prod. 1850, publ. 1902)
- The Warrior's Barrow (translated by Anders Orbeck, in Early Plays, 1921) / The Burial Mound (translated by Thomas F. van Laan, 1992)
Sancthansnatten, 1852 (prod. 1852, publ. 1909)
- St. John's Night (translated by James and Kathleen McFarlane, in The Oxford Ibsen I, 1960)
Fru Inger til Østeraad, 1855 (prod., publ. 1857, rev. ed., 1874)
- Lady Inger of Østraat (translated by Charles Archer, in Prose Dramas, 1890) / Lady Inger ( translated by Graham Orton, in The Oxford Ibsen I, 1960)
- Inger, Östråtin rouva (suom. Joel Lehtonen, 1919)
Gildet paa Solhoug, 1856 (prod. 1856)
- The Feast at Solhaus (translated by William Archer and Mary Morison, in Collected Works, 1908)
- Päiväkummun pidot (suom. Aarni Kouta, 1923)
Olaf Liljekrans, 1857 (written, publ. 1898)
- Olaf Liljekrans (translated by Anders Orbeck, in Early Plays, 1921)
Hærmændene paa Helgeland, 1857 (prod. 1858)
- The Vikings at Helgeland (translated by William Archer, in Prose Dramas, 1890) / The Warriors at Helgeland (translated by R. Farquharson-Sharp, 1911; James McFarlane, in The Oxford Ibsen 2, 1962)
- Helgelannin sankarit (suom. C. Edv. Törmänen, 1878)
Kjærlighedens Komedie, 1862 (written, prod. 1873)
- Love's Comedy (translated by C.H. Herford, 1900; R. Farquharson-Sharp, 1915; Jens Arup, 1962)
- Rakkauden komedia (suom. Aarni Kouta, 1915)
Kongs-Emnerne, 1863 (prod., publ. 1864)
- The Pretenders ( translated by William Archer, in Prose Dramas, 1890; R. Farquharson-Sharp, 1913)
- Kuninkaan alut (suom. Ellei, 1884; K.S. Laurila, 1963)
Brand, 1866 (produced in part, 1866, complere version, 1885)
- Brand (translated by William Wilson, 1891; C.H. Herford; 1894; F.E. Garrett, 191?; J.M. Olberman, 1912; Miles Menander Dawson, 1916; Michael Meyer, 1960; Geoffrey Hill, 1978 )
- Brand (suom. Kasimir Leino, 1896; Aale Tynni, 1947; Lauri Sipari, 1986)
Peer Gynt, 1867 (prod. 1876)
- Peer Gynt (translated by William Archer and Charles Archer, 1892; R. Ellis Roberts; 1912; R. Farquharson Sharp, 1925; Norman Ginsbury, 1945; Paul Green, 1951; Michael Meyer, 1963; Rolf Fjelde, 1965; Peter Watts, 1966; Christopher Fry and Johan Fillinger, 1970; David Rudkin, 1983; Frank McGuinness and Anne Bamborough, 1990; John Northam, 1993)
- Peer Gynt (suom. Otto Manninen, 1911; Terttu Halla, 1972; Pentti Saarikoski, 1981)
- films: 1941, dir. by David Bradley, starring Charton Heston; television series 1971, dir. by Peter Stein, starring Bruno Ganz
De unges Forbund, 1869 (prod., publ.)
- The League of Youth (translated by S.H. Landes, in Prose Dramas, 1890; Peter Watts, 1965) / The League of theYouth (translated by Andy Barrett, 2011)
Kejser og Galilæer, 1864-1873 (prod. in part, 1896)
- The Emperor and the Galilean (translated by Catherine Ray, 1876; Graham Orton, 1963) / Emperor and Galilean: A World Historical Drama (translated by Brian Johnston, 1999) / Emperor and Galilean (translated by Ben Power, 211)
Digte, 1871 (augmented edition, 1875)
Samfundets støtter, 1871 (prod., publ.)
- Pillars of Society (translated by William Archer and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, in The Pillars of Society, and Other Plays, 1888; Norman Ginsbury, 1962) / The Pillars of the Community (translated by Una Ellis-Fermor, in Hedda Gabler, and Other Plays, 1950) / Pillars of the Community (translated by Samuel Adamson, 2005)
- Yhteiskunnan tukeet (suom. Pio Talmaa, 1884) / Yhteiskunnan pylväät (suom. Joel Lehtonen, 1916) / Yhteiskunnan tukipylväät (suom. Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 4, 1962; Lauri Sipari, 2001)
- film adaptations: 1916, dir. by Raoul Walsh; 1937: Stützen der Gesellschaft, dir. by Detlef Sierck/Douglas Sirk
Et dukkehjem, 1879 (prod., publ.)
- Nora (translated by T. Weber, 1880) / A Doll's House (translated by R. Farquharson Sharp and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, 1910; William Archer and others, in The Collected Works of Henrik Ibsen, 1906-12; Eva Le Gallienne, 1957; Nicholas Rudall, 1999; Michael Meyer, 2000)
- Nora (suom. Karl Alexander Slöör, 1880) / Nukkekoti (suom. Maila Talvio, 1913; Eino Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 4, 1962; Auli Viikari, 1979; Lauri Sipari, 2001)
- film adaptations: 1918, dir. by Maurice Tourneur; 1922, dir. by Charles Bryant, starring Alla Nazimova, Alan Hale; film Nora 1944, dir. by Harald Brown; television film 1959, dir. by George Schaefer, starring Christopher Plummer, Julie Harris, Jason Robards, Hume Cronyn; 1973, dir. by Joseph Losey, starring Jane Fonda; 1973, dir. by Patrick Garland, starring Claire Bloom; 1973, Nora Helmer, dir. by Rainer Werner Fassbinder, starring Margit Carstensen, Joachim Hansen
Gengangere, 1881 (prod., publ.)
- Ghosts (translated by William Archer and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, in The Pillars of Society, and Other Plays, 1888; R. Farquharson-Sharp, 1911; Eva Le Gallienne, 1957; Peter Watts, in Ghosts, and Other Plays, 1964; Christopher Hampton, 1983; Arthur Kopit, 1984; Lanford Wilson, 2004)
- Kummittelijoita (suom. Elias Erkko, 1886) / Kummittelijat (suom. Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 4, 1962) / Aaveita (suom. Arja Kantele, 2001)
- films: 1915, dir. by George Nicholls, prod. by D.W. Griffith; television film 1986, dir. by Elijah Moshinsky, starring Judi Dench, Michael Gambon, Kenneth Branagh, Natasha Richardson
En folkefiende, 1882 (prod. 1883)
- An Enemy of Society (translated by Eleanor Marx-Aveling, in The Pillars of Society and Other Plays, 1888) / An Enemy of the People (adaptation by Arthur Miller, 1951; translated Eva Le Gallienne, 1957; James Walter McFarlane, 1960; Max Faber, 1970; Michael Meyer, 1970; Nicholas Rudall, 1970; Stephen Mulrine, 2011) / A Public Enemy (translated by Peter Watts, in Ghosts, and Other Plays, 1964)
- Kansanvihollinen (suom. Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 5, 1962)
- films: 1937, Ein Volksfeind , dir. by Hans Steinhof; 1977, dir. by George Schaefer, Arthur Miller's version of the play, starring Steve McQueen and and Bibi Anderson; 1980, written and directed by Satyajit Ray, starring Soumitra Guhathakurta, Mamata Shankar, Dipanlar Dey; 2003, dir. by Erik Skjoldbjærg, starring Jørgen Langhelle, Trine Wiggen, Sven Nordin, Pia Tjelta, Per Jansen
Vildanden, 1884 (prod. 1885)
- The Wild Duck (translated by Frances E. Archer, in Prose Dramas, 1890; R. Farquharson Sharp and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, 1910; Una Ellis-Fermor, in Hedda Gabler, and Other Plays, 1950; Eva Le Gallienne, 1957; James Walter McFarlane, 1960; Michael Meyer, 1968; Christopher Hampton, 1980; Kai Jurgensen and Robert Schenkkan, 1987 )
- Villisorsa (suom. Eino Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 5, 1962; Auli Viikari, 1974; Lauri Sipari, 1994)
- films: 1976, dir. by Hans W. Geissendörfer, starring Peter Kern, Jean Seberg, Bruno Ganz, Anne Bennent; 1983, dir. by Henri Safran, starring Liv Ullmann, Jeremy Irons
Rosmersholm, 1886 (prod. 1887)
- Rosmersholm (translated by Eva Le Gallienne, 1957; Ann Jellicoe, 1961; Michael Meyer, 1966; D. Rudkin, 1990)
- Rosmersholma (suom. Hilda Asp, 1887) / Rosmersholm (suom. Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 5, 1962)
Fruen fra havet, 1888 (prod. 1889)
- The Lady from the Sea ( translated by Frances E. Archer, in Prose Dramas, 1890; R. Farquharson-Sharp and Eleanor Marx-Aveling, 1910; Michael Meyer, 1961; Aubrey Mellor and May-Brit Akerholt, 1984; Stephen Unwin, 2012)
- Merenneito (suom. Yrjö Koskelainen, 1910) / Meren tytär (suom. Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 6, 1962)
Hedda Gabler, 1890 (prod. 1891)
- Hedda Gabler (translated by Edmund Gosse and William Archer, 1890; Una Ellis-Fermor, in Hedda Gabler, and Other Plays, 1950; Eva Le Gallienne, 1957; Michael Meyer, 1961; Alan S. Downer, 1961; Christopher Hampton, 1972; Nicholas Rudall, 1992)
- Hedda Gabler (suom. Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 6, 1962; Lauri Sipari, 1998)
- films: 1924, dir. by Franz Eckstein, starring Asta Nielsen; television film 1954, starring Tallulah Bankhead; television film 1963, dir. by Lex Segal, starring Ingrid Bergman, Ralph Richardson, Trevor Howard, Michael Redgrave; television film 1971, dir. by Waris Hussein, starring Ian McKellen, Janet Suzman; 1975: Hedda, dir. by Trevor Nunn , starring Gleanda Jackson, Peter Eyre, Timothy West
The Prose Dramas of Henrik Ibsen, 1890 (3 vols., ed. by Edmund Gosse)
Ibsen's Prose Dramas, 1890-91 (5 vols., translations by William Archer, Charles Archer, and Mrs. F.E. Archer)
Bygmester Solness, 1892 (prod. 1893)
- The Master Builder (translated by J.W. Arctander, 1893; Edmund Gosse and William Archer, 1893; Eva Le Gallienne, 1957; Una Ellis-Fermor, 1958; Michael Meyer, 1968, James Walter McFarlane, 1981; Nicholas Rudall, 1994)
- Rakentaja Solness (suom. Joel Lehtonen; 1918; Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 6, 1962; Juhani Koskinen, 1979)
Lille Eyolf, 1894 (prod. 1893)
- Little Eyolf (translated by William Archer, in Collected Works, 1907; Henry L. Mencken, 1909;Una Ellis-Fermor, 1958;James W. McFarlane, 1977)
- Pikku Eyolf (suom. Teuvo Pakkala, 1895; Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 7, 1962)
- TV film 1982, dir. by Michael Darlow, starring Anthony Hopkins, Peggy Ashcroft, Diana Rigg
John Gabriel Borkman, 1896 (prod. 1897)
- Johan Gabriel Borkman (translated by William Archer, in Collected Works, 1907; Eva Le Gallienne and Norman Ginsbury, 1966; David Eldridge and Charlotte Barslund, 1996)
- Johan Gabriel Borkman (suom. Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 7, 1962)
- TV film 1958, in ITV Play of the Week, prod. Associated Television (ATV), H. M. Tennant, dir. by Christopher Morahan, starring Laurence Olivier as John Gabriel Borkman
Samlede verker, 1898-1902 (9 vols)
Når vi døde vågner, 1899 (prod. 1900)
- When We Dead Awaken (in Collected Works, 1907; D. Rudkin, 1990) / When We Dead Wake (translated by Peter Watts, in Ghosts, and Other Plays, 1964)
- Kun me kuolleet heräämme (suom. Eino ja Katri Palola, teoksessa Valitut draamat 7, 1962)
Lyrical Poems, 1902 (translated by R.A. Streatfeild)
Correspondence, 1905 (ed. by Mary Morrison)
Episke Brand, 1907 (fragment, ed. by Karl Larsen)
Collected Works, 1906-1912 (12 vols., translations by William Archer and others)
Letters of Henrik Ibsen, 1908 (translated by J Nilsen Laurvik; Mary Morison)
On the Heights, 1910
Speeches and New Letters, 1911 (ed. by Lee M. Hollander)
Lyrics and Poems, 1912 (translated by F.E. Garrett)
Early Plays: Catiline, The Warrior's Barrow, Olaf Liljekrans, 1921 (translated by Anders Orbeck)
Samlede verker: Hundreårsutgave, 1928-1957 (21 vols., ed. by Francis Bull, Halvdan Kogt, and Didrik Arup Seip)
Six Plays by Ibsen, 1957 (translated by Eva Le Gallienne)
Last Plays, 1959 (introduced and translated by William Archer)
The Plays of Ibsen, 1960- (translated by Michael Meyer)
Samlede verker i billigutgave, 1962 (3 vols.)
The Oxford Ibsen, 1960-1977 (8 vols., ed. by J.W. McFarlane)
Letters and Speeches, 1965 (ed. by Evert Sprinchorn)
The Complete Major Prose Plays, 1978 (translated and introduced by Rolf Fjelde)
Brev 1845-1905, 1979-1981 (ed. by Øyvind Anker)
The Sayings of Henrik Ibsen, 1996 (edited by Roland Huntford)
Henrik Ibsens skrifter, 2005-2010 (17 vols.)
Four Major Plays. Volume 1: A Doll's House; The Wild Duck; Hedda Gabler; The Master Builder, 2006 (rev. ed., in new translations with a foreword by Rolf Fjelde and a new afterword by Joan Templeton)

(Totally quoted from http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/)

Songs of Innocence and of Experience

2014-10-20T10:59:00.002+05:00

Songs of Innocence and of Experience is an illustrated collection of poems by William Blake. It appeared in two phases. A few first copies were printed and illuminated by William Blake himself in 1789; five years later he bound these poems with a set of new poems in a volume titled Songs of Innocence and of Experience Showing the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul.

"Innocence" and "Experience" are definitions of consciousness that rethink Milton's existential-mythic states of "Paradise" and the "Fall." Blake's categories are modes of perception that tend to coordinate with a chronology that would become standard in Romanticism: childhood is a state of protected innocence rather than original sin, but not immune to the fallen world and its institutions. This world sometimes impinges on childhood itself, and in any event becomes known through "experience," a state of being marked by the loss of childhood vitality, by fear and inhibition, by social and political corruption, and by the manifold oppression of Church, State, and the ruling classes. The volume's "Contrary States" are sometimes signalled by patently repeated or contrasted titles: in Innocence, Infant Joy, in Experience, Infant Sorrow; in Innocence, The Lamb, inExperience, The Fly and The Tyger. The stark simplicity of poems such as The Chimney Sweeper and The Little Black Boydisplay Blake's acute sensibility to the realities of poverty and exploitation that accompanied the "dark satanic mills" of theIndustrial Revolution.

Poems from both books have been set to music by many composers, including Ralph Vaughan Williams, Joseph Holbrooke, John Frandsen, Per Drud Nielsen, Sven-David Sandström, Benjamin Britten, and Jacob ter Veldhuis. Individual poems have also been set by, among others, John Tavener, Victoria Poleva, Jah Wobble,Tangerine Dream, Jeff Johnson, and Daniel Amos. A modified version of the poem "The Little Black Boy" was set to music in the song "My Mother Bore Me" from Maury Yeston's musical Phantom. The folk musician Greg Brown recorded sixteen of the poems on his 1987 album Songs of Innocence and of Experience^[2] and by Finn Coren in his Blake Project. In 2011 Victor Vertunni released a new music album on songs of Innocence and of Experience, another stepping stone in the long tradition.

The poet Allen Ginsberg believed the poems were originally intended to be sung, and that through study of the rhyme and metre of the works, a Blakean performance could be approximately replicated. In 1969, he conceived, arranged, directed, sang on, and played piano and harmonium for an album of songs entitledSongs of Innocence and Experience by William Blake, tuned by Allen Ginsberg (1970).^[3]

The composer William Bolcom completed a setting of the entire collection of poems in 1984. In 2005, a recording of Bolcom's work by Leonard Slatkin, the Michigan State Children's Choir, and the University of Michigan on the Naxos label won four Grammy Awards: Best Choral Performance, Best Classical Contemporary Composition, Best Classical Album, and Best Producer of the Year (classical).^[4]

The composer Victoria Poleva completed "Songs of Innocence and of Experience" in 2002, a chamber cycle on the verses by Blake for soprano, clarinet and accordion. It was first performed by the ensemble Accroche-Note of France.

The Swedish composer David Unger completed "Night songs op. 24", a setting of five poems from Songs of Innocence for solo voice and piano in 2013. It was first performed by baritone Anthony Schneider and pianist Rosemary Barnes in Vienna, Austria the same year.

Popular group Tangerine Dream, based their album 'Tyger' on lyrics by William Blake.

Songs of Innocence was originally a complete work first printed in 1789. It is a conceptual collection of 19 poems, engraved with artwork.

The poems are each listed below:

Introduction

The Shepherd

The Echoing Green

The Lamb

The Little Black Boy

The Blossom

The Chimney Sweeper

The Little Boy lost

The Little Boy found

Laughing Song

A Cradle Song

The Divine Image

Holy Thursday

Night

Spring

Nurse's Song

Infant Joy

A Dream

On Another's Sorrow

songs of experience

Introduction

Earth's Answer

The Clod and the Pebble

Holy Thursday

The Little Girl Lost

The Little Girl Found

The Chimney Sweeper

Nurse's Song

The Sick Rose

The Fly

The Angel

The Tyger

My Pretty Rose Tree

Ah! Sunflower

The Lily

The Garden of Love

The Little Vagabond

London

The Human Abstract

Infant Sorrow

A Poison Tree

A Little Boy Lost (at wikisource)

A Little Girl Lost

To Tirzah

The Schoolboy (at wikisource)

The Voice of the Ancient Bard

(Quoted from http://en.wikipedia.org/)