Popular Questions and Answers

Oxford Movement in English Literature

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Oxford Movement in English Literature

John Henry Newman, the most famous member of the Oxford Movement, and Edward Bouverie Pusey, who only later joined the movement and would supersede Newman as head after Newman’s 1845 conversion to Catholicism, both lectured at Oriel College in Oxford.

Feminism in Literature | Feminist Criticism

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Feminism in Literature

Feminism is a broad term that investigates women’s position in society and fights for their rights and opportunities. The study of how literary texts depict or disregard women, support or challenge prejudices, has been the core activity of feminist criticism. “Feminist Criticism is a political act whose aim is not simply to interpret the world but to change it, by changing the consciousness of those who read and their relation to what they read,” writes Judith Fetterley in her book “The Resisting Reader”. 

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John Donne as a Metaphysical poet

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John Donne as a Metaphysical Poet

Metaphysical poetry is an outpouring of dissatisfaction with Elizabethan poetry’s traditional structure and content. By metaphysical poetry, we mean a new school of poetry that includes elements such as a sudden and striking start, difficulty, dramatic quality, combining of desire and intelligence, reasoning and wit, conceits and illustrations, conceptual and descriptive tone, and the use of colloquial language, among others. In order to assess Donne as a metaphysical poet, we must engage in an analytical assessment of his main poems and their qualities.

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New Criticism in Literature

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New Criticism

New Criticism which influenced literature from the 1940s through the 1960s has left a permanent impact on the way we interpret literature. “New Criticism” to a great extent is the literary product of the frail human being who has been cut off from all the certainties of the world that he perceived earlier. Therefore, it is a literary criticism that aspires to interpret literature without the support of any context since all of these have been made absurd by the incidents of World War I. The term “New Criticism” originated from J.C Ransom’s book “The New Criticism” which was published in 1941. So the term New Criticism came after a while when writers like T.S Eliot and I.A Richard had become established within the Anglo-American academia.

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The intentional fallacy and affective fallacy

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Intentional Fallacy and Affective Fallacy

To fully appreciate the concept of intentional fallacy and affective fallacy, first of all we have to understand the concept of New Criticism and the form of criticism it substituted i.e. biographical-historical criticism.

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Lord of the Flies as a dystopian novel

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Lord of the Flies as a dystopian novel

Golding’s novel “Lord of the Flies” is a dystopian novel because its characters live in a horrific, and brutal society due to their inherent wickedness and evil. At first, the setting of the novel seems as an Edenic utopia, with plentiful fruit, water and pleasing seaside, but eventually it evolves into a dystopian island where the schoolboys are starving, unwashed, afraid of the unknown monster and dominated by a barbarous leader.

Lord of the Flies as an allegory

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Lord of the Flies as an allegorical novel

William Golding’s “Lord of the Flies” is considered as one of the greatest novels of all time in English literature. “Lord of the Flies” is best known as an allegorical novel because it describes the authentic conditions of a group of schoolboys stranded on a tropical island to personify symbolic ideas related to mankind’s innate viciousness and the risk of mob mentality and authoritarian leadership.