Structure 21.0 Objectives 21.1 Introduction 21.2 The Term 'Literature' 21.3 Poetry 21.4 The Novel 21.5 Drama 21.6 The Short Story 21.7 Literary Criticism 21.8 Let Us Sum Up 21.9 Key Words 21.10 Answers to Check Your Progress Exercises
21.0 OBJECTIVES In this unit we will be discussing various aspects of literature. After going through this unit, you will be able to: enumerate the different elements of literature; understand the basic features of literature; and appreciate the various styles and artists in the literary field.
The focus will be on general features and on common elements. Both English ' literature and Indian literature would be touched upon. Briefly we will not be discussing which includes however traditional topics like Mahabharata and Ramayana. iI 2 1.1 INTRODUCTION The word literature is something that we have all heard, but what exactly constitutes literature? In this unit we will try and understand the basic features of literature and its various aspects. The term 'literature' covers poetry, novel, &ama, the short story and the literary essay. Poetry's appeal is mainly to emotions and it depends for its effect on rhythm and other sound effects. The novel is a socially-oriented form of writing and is more recent in origin than poetry and drama. Drama is meant for the stage. It has acts. Some dramas have a single act and are called one-act plays. The short story is fiction which is much shorter in length than the novel. Let us first understand the term 'literature' and then move on to various other elements of literature like poetry, novel and the drama.
21.2 THE TERM 'LITERATURE' I I 'Literature' is an umbrella term for poetry, fiction, drama and criticism. All these I emanate from and get sustenance from the imagination and also appeal to the I imagination. Human emotions are mostly their subject matter and they mix pleasure 1 with instruction or knowledge-giving. Such writings have an artistic aspect to them. I - 21.3 POETRY Poetry is the oldest from of literature and has a rich written and oral tradition. In India's ancient poetic tradition, there are epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. The great dramatist Kalidasa wrote both dramatic and non-dramatic poetry. Ancient Arts and Aesthetics Greece had Homer who was lcnown for his work Odyssq. Italy had Dante, the author of the Divine Comedy. You must .have heard of many English poets and may have even read them in your school textbook. Following are some of the eminent English poets: Geoffery Chaucer, Edrnund Spenser, John Milton, Alexander Pope William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats.
Chaucer was a fourteenth century poet who wrote satire and humorous ~try. Spenser (lhh century) wrote about chivalry. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Pope wrote Satire (Ish Century) 'Satire' is writing which attacks or mocks someone throug'l humour and wit.). Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats were Romantic poets of the nineteenth century. The period after the first three decades of the nineteenth century was called the Victorian period. Here Tennyson wrote elegiac poetry, which is essentially poetry which laments the loss of someone. Robert Browning wrote dramatic monologues. Yeats and Eliot were twentieth century modernists though early Yeats had romantic elements in his poetry. Now let us look at some of the varieties of poetry.
Short poems capable of being sung are lyrics. A 'sonnet' is a 14-line poem following a metrical scheme. Epics are very long poems that talk about heroes. An 'ode' is an address to someone. A poem mourning somebody is an 'elegy'.
Let us have a quick look at Hindi poetry and poetry in some other Indian languages. Tulsidas and Kabir are household names. Surdas was another Bhakti poet. Jayashankar Prasad was a great poet from the pre-nlu~~tnistperiod. More recently we have had Agyeya, Harivanshrai Bachhan, Dinkar, Nirala and Muktibodh. Recent Punjabi poetry has a great poet in Amrita Pritam. Urdu has had Firaq Gorakhpuri whose illustrious predecessors were Ghalib and Meer. 'Ghazals' reach out to common people. Bangla poetry has given us the only Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature i.e. Rabindranath Tagore.
Appreciating poetry well involves awareness of rhythm, of figurative language (this includes similes and metaphors) and a good ear for music. Poetry gives organization to sounds and ideas both. It delights as it instructs. Simile is a direct comparison. Metaphor is indirect.
Among Indian poets in English, better lcnown names in recent times have been Nissim Ezekiel, A.K. Ramanujam, Jayanta Mahapatra and Kamala Das.'
Among Commonwealth poets big names in recent times have been Derek Walcott fiom the Caribbean and Seamus Heaney from Ireland. Q Check Your Progress 1 Note: i) Use the space given below for your answers. ii) Check your answers with those given at the end of the Unit.
1) In what respects do literature in general and poetry in particular appeal to the same area of human behaviour i.e. emotion?
2) Name a poet from English and a poem by him that has appealed to you. Literature 21.4 THE NOVEL Like poetry, a very popular form of literature is the novel. The novel, as we know it today, is an 18mcentury development. In England the pioneers were Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.
The novel has a story, a plot and a number of characters. It has a setting, a theme and a point of view. The story can be told in the first person or the third person. Mostly the telling is done in the third person. The 'story' is the sequence of events. Plot is the arrangement of story parts and management of character, especially in terms of how they act out the story line. The way a novelist portrays his characters is called characterization.
In England the big names among novelists (apart from Richardson and Fielding named above) have been Jane Austen, George Eliot (both women novelists), Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster etc. Virginia Woolf is a leading name among 20"' century women novelists.
Richardson's Clarissa, Fielding's Tom Jones, Jane Austen 's Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dicken's David Copperfield, Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, Joyce's Ulysses, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Forster's A Passage to India have been extremely famous novels. Outside this, we have Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Golding's Lord of the Flies etc. All these are
Among Indian writers in English we have had Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Khushwant Singh, Raja Rao, Anita Desai etc. From other Commonwealth counties we have V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), Patrick White (Australia) Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje (Canada).
India's Salman Rushdie is a famous expatriate writer like Naipaul. So is Rohinton Mistry. The work of these commonwealth writers is seen as forming a part of post- colonial literature.
Among Indian languages a very famous name in Hindi is Prem Chand, author of Godan. After him there have been Agyeya, Mohan Rakesh, Shrilal Shukla etc.
Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, Assamese etc all have two-three or more great novelists. Such writers have mostly been honoured with the Gyanpith award, one of India's biggest literary honours.
21.5 DRAMA In this section we will talk about drama, in very broad term>.
Drama as literature is written to be staged and has to keep its stage-worthiness in mind. Almost everything happens through dialogue or stage directions. Here it differs from the novel where dialogue is an important part but other elements like descriptions are equally important. These events can be described at length by the
In world drama the greatest name is that of William Shakespeare (1564-1616). He wrote a number of tragedies, comedies and history plays. King I,ear, Hamlet, and Macbeth are his best known tragedies and Twelfth Night and As You Like It are his famous comedies. Richard 11 and Henry V are historical plays. Arts and Aesthetics In ancient Greece and Rome drama flourished as it did in ancient India. Classical Western drama (Greece and Rome) had both tragedies and comedies. Comedies give laughter and tragedies are serious.
In England two other great dramatists around the time of Shakespeare were Christopher Marlowe and Ben Jonson. In the 17" and 18" centuries mostly comedies were written and they had a lot of 'wit'. William Congreve and Richard Sheridan are famous eighteenth century writers of comedies.
The nineteenth century had little by way of drama. In the twentieth century the most fa-nous figure is George Bernard Shaw who wrote plays like Saint Joan and Arms and the Man. In Europe two very famous dramatists have been Ibsen and Brecht.
Plays can also be made of a single act. They are then called one-act plays. About Indian drama we offer some details in Unit 24.
21.6 THE SHORT STORY The short story is a popular literary form. In our times some of the best storywriters in English have been Americans. A very famous name is that of Ernest Hemingway who also wrote some famous novels including The Old Man and The Sea. In Britain one of the most famous names has been that of Somerset Maugham. Another very famous short story writer is 07Hcnry.
In Hindi the famous writers of the short story have been Kamleshwar, Mohan Rakesh, Rajendra Yadav etc. Manto wrote short stories in Urdu. There have been some good women writers also like Mannu Bhandari, Shivani and Mridula Garg.
21.7 LITERARY CRITICISM Talking about poems, plays and novels in an appreciative way and evaluating them falls in the domain of literary criticism. One of the greatest critics of our times has been T.S. Eliot. From ages before him a great name as critic is that of S.T. Coleridge who was Wordsworth's contemporary (19" century). The Eighteenth century had a great critic in Samuel Johnson and from ancient Greece one great critic was Aristotle. Literary criticism works in the domain of aesthetic judgment. Whether a poem a play, a short story or a drama is good or bad is indicated. That judgment is backed up by evidence from within the text. Sometimes seemingly extrinsic factors also come in.
Hindi has had some remarkable literary critics like Ramchandra Shukla and Hazari Prasad Dwivedi. More recently Namwar Singh is a notable name. Check Your Progress 2 1 Note: 3 Use the space given below for your answers. I n) Check your answers with those given at the end of the Unit. 1 1) Do both novels and dramas use dialogue? What differentiates them? ...... 2) Name a short story recently read by you. State its theme. I Llterrture
...... 3) Name one major English critic and one major Hindi critic.
21.8 LET US SUM UP In this unit we had a brief exposition on literature and its various elements.Literature is a wonderful domain and functions in the imaginative field. It gives us joy, laughter, sadness, wisdom, thought etc. It helps us to relax and it gives us a perspective on life. It also gives us a picture of life.
21.9 KEY WORDS
Tragedy : A play that ends sadly. Comedy : A play with a lot of laughter in it. Epic : A very long poem on a large scale touching upon a whole race's history some cosmic issue. Lyric : A poetic composition capable of being set to music. Rhythm : Regularbeat.
21.10 ANSWERS TO CHECK YOUR PROGRESS EXERCISES
Check Your Progress 1
1) See section 21.2 2) Your choice Check Your Progress 2
1) See section 21.4 ' 2) Your choice