Satan in Paradise Lost: Milton

Satan, as portrayed by Milton, was a different kind of character in an epic. Accordingly to the strict rules of dramatist art Satan should be a piece of villain but he is the most important character of the poem. The narrative which Milton selected for Paradise Lost is depended for its action on a wicked character rather than hero; but “Paradise Lost exists for one figure that is Satan”, as Abercrombie remarks. Satan has all the heroic qualities, besides being nobility and dignity; he has valour and determination which goes to make him a great hero.

As the Paradise Lost opens we see Satan in a hopeless situation. He and his companion are hurled down to the bottomless pit of hell. Heaven is lost to Satan and his companion and they are doomed to live forever in the darkness of hell. The original sin of Satan is same as man’s--- disobedience to God. At the very outset of “Book I” we see him as a fallen creature: “Fallen cherub, to be weak is miserable, Doing or suffering”. Like a hero, Satan has the power of recovery in the face of defeat. It was Satan who first of all arouses himself out from the lake of fire. God banished Satan but at once his active mind begins to scheme and makes an effort to join his shattered forces.

The best poetry of Paradise Lost is found in the paragraphs where Satan appears or speaks. In his five speeches, he appears as a magnificent figure. “Satan’s speech is incessant autobiography”, as C.S. Lewis remarks. We first analyze Satan’s character through these speeches and than try to locate within overall Miltonic argument.

Satan’s first speech is one of the pure Miltonic lyricisms. He asks his followers not to lose heart and advices them “what though the field is lost? All is not lost”. These famous lines embody, not the spirit of puritan or armies, but the spirit of Hitler. In this speech he appears as a leader, accordingly, the leader of the angels go to the solid plane, where Satan exhorts Beelzebub to come over his disappointment and face the situation bravely in which they are: “Courage never to submit or yield What is else not to be overcome”.

The second speech shows Satan’s heroic power, but he has burning out audacity and superb self confidence in which he says “to be weak is miserable doing or suffering”. In this speech he says that if God attempts to turn all evil into good he must sacred the duty of fallen angels to foils his efforts and turns all the good into evil.

The line “Receive thy new possessor”, in the third speech shows satanic mind and its passion for over lordship. This speech shows his feelings of pride in which he says “It is better to reign in Hell, than serve in Heaven”. Satan says place is not important for him because he thinks mind is important and he claims to have a mind which “Can makes Heav’n of a Hell, Hell of a heav’n”.

In fourth speech, he addresses his followers like a politician and calls them “power matchless”; and later he addresses them “Princes, potentates, warriors and flower of heav’n”. In this speech, he says them “wake, arise or be forever fallen”. This speech is so commanding that they at once arouse out of their stupor. In fifth speech, Satan is determined to combat with God to save his pride. To his followers, he says, that they must not think of peace: “War, than war Open or understood, must be resolved”.

From Satan’s speech, it appears that Satan should be a heroic character but we cannot sustain this line argument when we read the text more deeply but one can says “Milton’s Devil as a moral being is far superior to his God”, remarks Shelly. In this poem, Satan turns from hero to general; from general to politician; from politician to secret agent; thence a tod; and finally to a snake--- such is the progress of Satan, as Gardner remarks: “ Satan’s carrier is a steady progress from bad to worse, and ends with complete deformity.” And Tillyard was right when he says: “Satan is not a hero, he is an arch angel ruined. God uses the evil design of Satan to assert his eternal providence”. 

One may put forward the point that Satan embodies Milton’s courage, love of freedom, republication and hatred of tyranny. Just as Milton opposed the autocracy of King Charles I and became a stern republican, so also Satan defied the authority of God and rebelled against Him. In his own way, Milton, was determined to rebel against constituted authority and this, unconsciously, he puts into the mouth of Satan

It is undoubtedly a matter of discussion whether Satan is really the hero of the epic or not. Satan is at the centre of Milton’s Paradise Lost who dominates especially in Book I and II and in IV. He is the heroic figure in the first two books. He is still an Archangel though he is rotting in the hell. His character, his power his evil capacity must be exalted to show the epic greatness of the coming conflict, in order to rouse the sympathy in the reader and for redemption.

There comes a time in the life and character of Satan getting distorted. There is an instance where little of heroism remains in him when he takes the shape of toad to whisper in Eve’s ear, he was stirred up by the Spear of Ithuriel. At the close of the poem, Satan’s degradation is complete.

Truly speaking, man is really the heroic figure of the poem. It is all the truth if we consider together Paradise Lost where Man, though conquered, wins the readers’ sympathies and the coming of the Greater Man is foretold. Paradise Regained where the Divine Man triumphs. In the later part of the poem, Satan is not only vanquished ignominiously, but also appear before the reader a mean, shifty, paltry creature as contrasted with the haughty, desperate impersonation of evil of the earlier work.

The Puritans were God-fearing. It was a protest and reaction against the decadent Spirit of the Renaissance. Puritanism is the potent force in Milton’s work. The makes use of the controversial topics such as the universality of Divine Providence, the reality of evil, the hope of redemption from evil, and the unity of human race.

Because of the influence of Renaissance, the character of Satan-like Faustus-was glorified by Milton which was done at the cost of God, the other character in the epic. Satan is the product of Milton’s love of enterprise and adventure. Whereas, Spenser’s Faerie Queene has Knight of the Red Cross, Satan is a Knight of Staygian Darkness who has all attributes of knightliness which gleamed in the romances and the epics of the Renaissance.

To conclude, if we are to understand Satan’s character we must stop him reading as a great unfortunate. This is of course, he is like Mecbeth, and like Mecbeth he is wicked and unrepentant till the end. Thus, knowingly or unknowingly Milton presents Satan in such a manner that he becomes to us, as Begehot remarks, “the hero of Paradise Lost”; but the evil degenerates him from the role of a great hero to a cunning villain. This makes him a tragic figure/hero but not an epic hero. If we go deep in Paradise Lost we find that without Satan it would be nothing more than a theological thesis composes in a verse.

The Renaissance of the Sultans

William Dalrymple

JUNE 25, 2015 ISSUE

Ashmolean Museum, Oxford, lent by Howard Hodgkin

Sultan Ibrahim ‘Adil Shah II in Procession; painting by the school of ‘Ali Riza, Bijapur, early seventeenth century

In 1610 an itinerant Dutch Mannerist painter named Cornelis Claesz Heda arrived at the court of an unlikely but most enthusiastic patron. Ibrahim Adil Shah II, who ruled the central Indian kingdom of Bijapur, was an erudite scholar, lute player, poet, singer, calligrapher, chess master, and aesthete. In many ways he was an Indian version of Duke Federico da Montefeltro of Urbino, and comparable to the Tuscan poet-princes who had filled their palaces with masterworks a century earlier

Poetic Justice

By BRENDA WINEAPPLE

Imagine Stephen Dedalus in a fiction workshop surrounded by 20-something neophytes. Better yet, picture Huck Finn, having lit out for the territory, handing sections of his new memoir to Tom and Aunt Sally. Though this may seem amusing, today thousands of hopeful authors distribute their self-portraits to other hopeful authors who sit around seminar tables in one of the hundreds of writing programs thriving nationwide.

Why students flock there and what they hope to learn are the subjects of Lan Samantha Chang’s new novel, “All Is Forgotten, Nothing Is Lost.” Chang, a writing-school success story, certainly knows the scene. A 1993 graduate of the renowned University of Iowa Writers’ Workshop and its director since 2006, Chang has also received fellowships from Stanford University, Princeton and Radcliffe. In 1998, she published a superb first book, “Hunger: A Novella and Stories,”

THE MIDDLE AGES

A CHRONOLOGY OF THE MIDDLE AGES (500-1500)


500 Clovis, founder of the Frankish state, conquers most of France and Belgium, converting his territories to Western Catholic Christianity. He founds the Merovingian dynasty and passes his kingdom on to his sons, who begin fighting one another for additional territory.


590 Pope Gregory, originally a Benedictine, creates a religious policy for western Europe by fusing the Roman papacy with Benedictine monasticism. He creates the Latin church, which serves to counteract the subordination of the Roman popes to Eastern emperors. As the fourth great "church father," St. Gregory the Great draws his theology from Ambrose of Milan, Jerome and AUGUSTINE OF HIPPO. His concepts of purgatory and penance widen the gulf between the Eastern and Western Churches. He reigns until his death in 604.

Leo Tolstoy Life and Works

Tolstoi, Lev Nikolaevich (1828-1910), writer, was born 9 September 1828 at Yasnaya Polyana, his family’s estate, 200 km south of Moscow. He was the fourth of five children born to Count Nikolai Ilyich Tolstoi (died 1837) and Mariya Nikolaevna, née Princess Volkonskaya (died 1830). In 1847 Tolstoi received Yasnaya Polyana in the distribution of his parents’ property. Thereafter, although occasionally absent (especially in the 1850s) for extended periods, he maintained the estate as his home. In 1862 he married Sofiya Andreevna Bers (born 1844), the daughter of a Moscow physician. Thirteen children were born of the marriage, ten of whom survived infancy. Tolstoi left Yasnaya Polyana for the last time in November 1910. He contracted pneumonia on his journey and died of heart failure on 20 November, aged 82, in the stationmaster’s house at Astapovo (today called “Lev Tolstoi”).

Educated and cared for by tutors, Tolstoi’s early childhood was typical for his social class. He showed a gift for languages and a fondness for literature, including fairy tales, the poems of Pushkin, and the Bible, especially the Old Testament story of Joseph. After their father’s death the children passed through the hands of a number of female relatives, finally (1841) being sent to five with an aunt in the provincial city of Kazan. In 1844 Tolstoi enrolled in the local university and began a notably unsuccessful career as a student. He did, however, develop a keen interest in moral philosophy. He steeped himself in the writings of Rousseau. He later listed Dickens, Schiller, Pushkin, Lermontov, D. V. Grigorovich, Turgenev’s A Sportsman’s Sketches, and Laurence Sterne, especially A Sentimental Journey through France and Italy, as also having made a “great impression” on him as a young man.

Lenin

 “Socialist democracy is not something which begins only in the promised land after the foundations of socialist economy are created. It does not come as some sort of Christmas present for the worthy people who, in the interim, have loyally supported a handful of socialist dictators.” – Rosa Luxemburg

Leninism is, if we’re honest, never the most popular of political concepts at the best of times. Much of the wider left, from experience as much as anything, treats Leninist groups with at least suspicion and often hostility. So it’s not surprising that the crisis in the Socialist Workers Party – still ever-escalating, thanks to the leadership’s intransigence – has produced a new round of obituaries for Leninism, seeking once more to bury it.

Leight Hunt on Periodical Essay

I look upon a periodical essayist as a writer who claims a peculiar intimacy with the public. He does not come upon them at once in all the majesty of a quarto or all the gaiety of a beau duodecimo,’ smooth and well dressed: but his acquaintance is likely to be more lasting, because it is more gradual and because you see him in a greater variety of subject and opinion. If you do not like him at first you may give up his conversation; but the author of a book is fixed upon you forever, and if he cannot entertain you beyond the moment, you must even give him sleeping room in your library. But how many pleasant modes are there of getting rid of a periodical essay? It may assist your meditation by lighting your pipe, it may give steadiness to your candle, it may curl the tresses of your daughter or your sister, or lastly, if you are not rich enough to possess an urn or a cloth-holder, it may save you a world of opodeldoc* by wrapping the handle of your tea-kettle. These are advantages.

Language of Paradox: Brooks

In The Language of Paradox Cleanth Brooks takes on the language of poetry, stating that at its core poetry is the language of paradox. Brooks bases his position on the contradictions that are inherent in poetry and his feelings that if those contradictions didn't exist then neither would some of the best poetry we have today Using works from Wordsworth to Shakespeare Brooks shows how the only way some ideas can be expressed is through paradox. His best example of this idea is from Coleridge’s description of imagination: “Reveals itself in the balance or reconcilement of opposite discordant qualities: of sameness, with difference; of the general, with the concrete;”

In The Language of Paradox Brooks maintains that the true function of literary criticism is first to understand and then to analyse “the organic nature of poetry.”

Langston Hughes

 Biography

1920s

First published in The Crisis in 1921, the verse that would become Hughes’s signature poem, “The Negro Speaks of Rivers”, appeared in his first book of poetry The Weary Blues in 1926

The Negro Speaks of Rivers

I’ve known rivers:

I’ve known rivers ancient as the world and older than the

flow of human blood in human veins.

My soul has grown deep like the rivers.

I bathed in the Euphrates when dawns were young.

I built my hut near the Congo and it lulled me to sleep.

I looked upon the Nile and raised the pyramids above it.

I heard the singing of the Mississippi when Abe Lincoln

went down to New Orleans, and I’ve seen its muddy

Kurt Vonnegut

This interview with Kurt Vonnegut was originally a composite of four interviews done with the author over the past decade. The composite has gone through an extensive working over by the subject himself, who looks upon his own spoken words on the page with considerable misgivings . . . indeed, what follows can be considered an interview conducted with himself, by himself.

The introduction to the first of the incorporated interviews

Kingsley Amis

Kingsley Amis, the former Angry Young Man, lives in a large, early-nineteenth-century house beside a wooded common. To reach it, one makes a journey similar to that described by the narrator of Girl, 20 when he visits Sir Roy Vandervane: first by tube to the end of the Northern Line at Barnet; then, following a phone call from the station to say where one is, on foot up a stiff slope; and finally down a suburban road. But instead of being picked up en route by Sir Roy’s black chum, Gilbert, I was intercepted by Amis’s tall and imposing blond wife, the novelist Elizabeth Jane Howard. Amis’s study was a picture of bohemian disorder. Scattered across the floor were several teetering piles of poetry books and a mass of old 78 r.p.m. jazz records, while the big Adler typewriter on his desk wa

Kidnapped: Robert Louis Stevenson

There is a very good reason why Robert Louis Stevenson's books are still made into movies. Take, for example, the Disney animated hit Treasure Planet, which was based on Stevenson's Treasure Island. The book is just as rousing an adventure now as it was more than a hundred years ago, and has therefore been the subject of many movie adaptations and the inspiration for countless other children's novels since then.

Although somewhat lesser known, Stevenson's Kidnapped is no less timeless. Following the death of his father, David Balfour finds that he has wealthy kinsmen in a nearby town, and that his father's wish was that he would seek them out. Upon his arrival at his uncle's house, David discovers that he is unwelcome, and slowly the truth of his identity begins to unravel.

Keats: A Sensuous Mystic

Sensuousness is such a prominent feature of Keats’ poetry. Most readers tend to overlook his intends love towards suffering humanity. When Keats asserts “Beauty is truth, truth beauty” he does not mean by beauty, he means something which pleases the eyes and other sense organs, rather, then goodness.

The word “Sensuousness”, according to Coleridge means “which belongs to five senses”

Kay Ryan

Kay Ryan: 16th Poet Laureate USA

Kay Ryan, who was named the sixteenth poet laureate of the United States in July, lives in Fairfax, California, where for more than thirty years she has taught remedial English part-time at the College of Marin at Kentfield. She is often referred to as a poetry “outsider” and underdog. She resists writing in the first person, preferring to write personal poems “in such a way that nobody has to know it.” In lieu of narrative and biography, she uses irony and humor to unravel the idiosyncrasies of language and the haplessness of human existence. She is fond of malapropisms and clichés, two linguistic devices that many poets consider taboo. She employs what she calls “recombinant rhyme”—hidden rhymes that appear

Karnad’s Hayavadana

Karnad’s Hayavadana

Bharathi Chinnasami – 

Themes of Incompleteness and Search for identity

Girish Karnad is regarded as one of the three great writers of contemporary Indian drama, along with Badal Sircar and Vijay Tendulkar. His work takes off from Indian myths and legends and makes them a vehicle of a new vision, while Badal Sircar and Vijay Tendulkar deal with the problems of the middle-class. Karnad’s significant plays include Yayati, Tughlaq, Hayavadana, Naga-Mandala, Tale-Danda and The Fire and the Rain.

Karanams of the Ancient Tamils

Karanams of the Ancient Tamils

K. V. Ramakrishna Rao

K. V. Ramakrishna Rao is an Independent / private Researcher. Prersented more than 200 papers in national and international conferences and seminars of which 139 have been published in the proceedings, journals, books and websites. Life member of Indian History Congress, South Indian History Congress, Tamilnadu History Congress, Andhrapradesh History Congress, Mythic Society, All India Oriental Conference etc. Associate member of Institution of Engineers (India).

Kamala Das: Confessional Poet

“Call her Kamala Das, Madhavikutti or Surayya, but the woman by any name” whose introduction is given by herself in the poem “An Introduction”:

“I am Indian, very brown, born in

Malabar, I speak three languages, write in

two, dream in one”.

Kamala Surayya (the name means Saptarishi or the Ursa Major, in Persian) took the literary world by storm in the mid-sixties, has created a permanent place for herself in the contemporary Indo-Anglian poetry; who was awarded P.E.N.’S Asian Poetry Prize (1963); Kerala’s Sahitya Akadami Award (1969)

Kamala Das: Life

Kamala Das, also known as Kamala Suraiya, the sophisticated Indian poetess was born on March 31, 1934. She is a distinguished Indian writer who composes in English as well as Malayalam, her native language. Kamala Das is looked at as one of the exceptional Indian poets writing in English, even though her reputation and esteem in Kerala is based primarily on her short stories and autobiography. Much of Kamala Das`s writing in Malayalam is published in the pen name `Madhavikkutty`. Kamala Das was born in Malabar in the maritime state of Kerala. She was born to V. M. Nair, an ex- managing editor of the widely-distributed Malayalam daily Mathrubhumi and Nalappatt Balamani Amma, a renowned Malayali poetess

Jurgen Habermas

Source: Knowledge & Human Interest, 1968, publ. Polity Press, 1987. Chapter Three: The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory reproduced here.

---

The interpretive scheme set forth by Marx for the Phenomenology of Mind contains the program for an instrumentalist translation of Hegel’s philosophy of absolute reflection:

The greatness of Hegel’s phenomenology and its end result-the dialectic of negativity as motive and productive principle-is thus ... that Hegel grasps the self-generation of man as a process, objectification as de-objectification, as alienation and the overcoming of this alienation; in other words, that he grasps the essence of labour and comprehends objective man, who is true man because of his reality, as the result of his

CBSE-NET

June 2010

1. The epithet “a comic epic in prose” is best applied to

(A) Richardson’s Pamela

(B) Sterne’s A Sentimental Journey

(C) Fielding’s Tom Jones

(D) Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe

("Comic prose epics" is a type of epic derived from the serious epic that satirizes contemporary ideas or conditions in a form and style burlesquing the serious epic. It is also noted  as mock epics Exm: The Rape of the Lock (1712) by the English poet Alexander Pope. Several novels also fall into this category. Fielding himself refers to his two novels, Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, as "comic prose epics". In the preface Joseph Andrews, Fielding described his own fictional form as "a comic romance" or a "comic epic poem in prose," and in Tom Jonesas a "heroical, historical prosaic poem" ; a form of "prosai-comi-epic writing" . In defining the novel as an epic genre, Fielding emphasized its function in presenting a broad picture of an era, but one, unlike verse epic, in which primarily the weaknesses of humanity are put on display. So the critics do vary on the genre of these novels. Nonetheless from the given options as Joseph Andrews is not there,Tom Jones is right option. )

2. Muriel Spark has written a dystopian novel called

Julio Cortázar

When Julio Cortázar died of cancer in February 1984 at the age of sixty-nine, the Madrid newspaper El Pais hailed him as one of Latin America’s greatest writers and over two days carried eleven full pages of tributes, reminiscences, and farewells.

Though Cortázar had lived in Paris since 1951, he visited his native Argentina regularly until he was officially exiled in the early 1970s by the Argentine junta, who had taken exception to several of his short stories. With the victory, last fall, of the democratically elected Alfonsín government, Cortázar was able to make one last visit to his home country. Alfonsín’s cultural minister chose to give him no official

Joyce on The Extrinsic Approach to The Study Of Literature

This article is written by Leny Nuzuliyanti, a student of English Literature Department of Diponegoro University, Semarang, Central Java,Indonesia.

There are some external points are discussed in study of literature. But setting and environment are more often discussed. Sometimes, the extrinsic study only connects the literature to the social context and the previous growth. In most cases, it becomes a ‘causal’ explanation, professing to account for literature, to explain it, and finally to reduce it to its origins (the ‘fallacy of origins’) (Wellek and Warren, 1977: 73).

JOURNALISM AND THE ESSAY (18th Century)

Journalism & Essays (18th Century)

Source: http://www.trbforenglish.blogspot.in/2014/10/journalism-and-essay-18th-century.html

JOURNALISM AND THE ESSAY (18th Century)

The essay (meaning, according to Montaigne, 'an attempt') originated as a repository of casual ideas on men and matters. To Montaigne it was more a means of thinking aloud, than a literary type. In England it was cultivated by Bacon and the humanists. But as literature became more formalized and academic in the latter half of the 17^th century, its practice gradually passed out of fashion. Later, a combination of circumstances peculiar to England gave a group of humanists the "opportunity of creating it anew. Their work appeared in a detached, fragmentary form like the essays of Montaigne, Bacon or Cowley. But in method and scope it was an achievement of

Joseph Haller

This interview with Joe Heller took place during the week of the publication of Something Happened—a literary event of considerable significance, because the novel is only the second of the author’s career. The first, of course, was Catch-22. The fact that it has taken more than a decade to produce a second work of fiction seems of small concern to Heller, because he has evolved a definite and unique pattern of work that is not at all determined by deadlines and other arbitrary demands. He says he always wanted to be a writer. His earliest story was pecked out on a neighborhood boy’s typewriter and ultimately rejected by the Daily News short-short story editor. His career moved at its own pace. He did no writing during his war years in Italy. 

JOSEPH CONRAD: A LIFE

OUT OF THE FOG
JOSEPH CONRAD: A LIFE

By Zdzislaw Najder
(Translated by Halina Najder)
(Boydell & Brewer 745pp)
THE SEVERAL LIVES OF JOSEPH CONRAD
By John Stape
(William Heinemann 378pp)

IF EXILE AND alienation are the defining characteristics of twentieth-century literature, Joseph Conrad is the quintessential twentieth-century writer. From Roman poets to modern playwrights, many have written well in places and languages other than their own, but Conrad was more deracinated than most. The man who has been called the best French novelist in English (a  compliment also paid to Henry James and Ford Madox Ford) was a Pole from what is now the Ukraine, stripped by circumstance of his culture, his class, his family, his language, his country, and even his name. But against these blows of fate Conrad  fought back in original

Jorge Luis Borges

This interview was conducted in July 1966, in conversations I held with Borges at his office in the Biblioteca Nacional, of which he is the director. The room, recalling an older Buenos Aires, is not really an office at all but a large, ornate, high-ceilinged chamber in the newly renovated library. On the walls—but far too high to be easily read, as if hung with diffidence—are various academic certificates and literary citations. There are also several Piranesi etchings, bringing to mind the nightmarish Piranesi ruin in Borges's story, “The Immortal.” Over the fireplace is a large portrait; when I asked Borges's secretary, Miss Susana Quinteros, about the portrait, she responded in a fitting, if unintentional echo of a basic Borgesean theme: “No importa. It's a reproduction of another painting.”

Johnson's Preface to Shakespeare

“The Preface is the impartial estimate of Shakespeare’s virtues and defects by a powerful mind”. (Halliday). Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare is a classic of literary criticism in which he is above his political personal, religious and literary prejudices: mentions both the merits and demerits of Shakespeare like a true critic; and become very honest and sincere in his estimate of Shakespeare. Johnson tests Shakespeare by the fact and experience, by the test of time, nature and universality, his defense to tragicomedy is superb and still

Indian Masses

by Arthur Bonner

Copyright © 1959 by Arthur Bonner. All rights reserved.

The Atlantic Monthly; October, 1959; India's Masses: the Public That Can't Be Reached; Volume 204, No. 4; pages 48-51.

There have been many signs of progress in India since independence was gained in 1950, but a serious barrier to democracy in this country of 500,000 villages is the lack of effective means of communication between the government and the masses. As a correspondent for CBS, Arthur Bonner has lived in India for more than five years.

I FIRST began thinking about India's communication difficulties three years ago

Indian Epic Poetry

Indian epic poetry cannot be described in its fullest glory and enormity without comprehending the Epic Period and its political scenario and the entire royal households associated with it and their patronage of arts and literary pursuits. Epic India is that portrayal of Greater India in the Sanskrit epics, namely the Mahabharata and the Ramayana, as well as Puranic literature (the itihasa). The historical contexts of the Sanskrit epics comprise the late Vedic Mahajanapadas (from approximately 1500 B.C.) and the consequent formation of the legendary Mauryan Empire, the beginning of the "golden age" of Classical Sanskrit literature.

Indian English Literature

Indian English Literature pertains to that body of work by writers from India, who pen strictly in the English language and whose native or co-native language could be one of the numerous regional and indigenous languages of India. English literature in India is also intimately linked with the works of associates of the Indian diaspora, especially with people like Salman Rushdie who was born in Indian but presently resides elsewhere.

Indian English Drama: Translation

Indian Drama in English translation has made bold innovations and fruitful experiments in terms of both thematic concerns and technical virtuosities. It has been increasingly turning to history, legend, myth and folklore tapping their springs of vitality and vocal cords of popularity with splendid results. Plays written in various Indian languages are being translated into English and other languages as they are produced and appreciated in the various parts of the country. A closer contact is being established between the theatre workers from different regions and languages through these translations. Thus, regional drama in India is slowly paving a way for a ‘national theatre’ into which all streams of theatrical art seem to coverage. The major language theatres that are active all through the turbulent years of rejuvenation and consolidations are those of Hindi, Bengali, Marathi and Kannada.

"Incidents at the Shrine" by Ben Okri

Incidents at the Shrine is a collection of eight short stories by Ben Okri, the 1991 Booker Prize winner (with Famished Road). These eight short stories touch on different aspects of life within Nigeria and in the World at large. Though the stories are varied, a common theme threading through this novel is the magical reality that underlies Okri's writing.

In 'Laughter Beneath the Bridge', the Biafran war is told from the viewpoint of a ten year old boy. If it had never occurred to you that wars could also affect the emotional life of younger children then read this short piece. Children and women had most often being cited as the victims