M Ali's English Literature Notes

Nature possesses a great place in Frost’s poetry. Most of his poems use nature imagery and devices. Taking nature as a background, he usually begins a poem with an observation of something in nature and then moves toward a connection to some human situation or concern. His treatment of nature is different from other nature poets: he is neither a transcendentalist nor a pantheist. Therefore, his use of nature is the single most misunderstood element of his poetry. Frost himself said over and over, "I am not a nature poet. There is almost always a person in my poems." ( frostfriends.org) The elements and settings of Frost’s poetry are natural. Wikipedia comments on his setting, “His work frequently employed settings from rural life in New England in the early twentieth century.”(wikipedia). The rural scenes and landscapes, homely farmers, and the natural world are used to illustrate a psychological struggle with everyday experience in the context of  everyday

The Bluest Eye is the story of a young African American girl and her family who are affected in every direction by the dominant American culture that says to them, "You're not beautiful; you're not relevant; you're invisible; you don't even count." Here, Paul C. Taylor argues, “a whitedominated culture has racialised beauty, [in] that it has defined beauty per se in terms of white beauty,” (Taylor, 1999, 17) Morrison, an Afro-American woman writer, challenges in the novel the Western standards of beauty and demonstrates that the concept of beauty is socially constructed. Morrison shows that the value of blackness is diminished and this novel works to subvert that tendency. In the novel, there is an obvious hierarchy, distinction drawn among the rich white, poor white, (and) the rich black and poor black families. Morrison shows how the novel's black characters have been affected in some way by the white media, by the white standard of beau

D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers, besides having been analyzed for its complex psychological relationship and autobiographical elements, mainly stresses on a social aspect: class consciousness, social and monetary aspirations and the quest for upward mobility seemed to be very much on the minds of Lawrence and his fictional characters, much as these priorities dominate thinking in contemporary America . Lawrence ’s significant parallels between characters and narrative techniques, as Helen Baron in his introduction to Sons and Lovers states, “Powerfully intensify the characters’ consciousness of each other and of their surroundings.”(p.xv)         Gertrude bears a strong class-consciousness in her. She had a relationship with John, a man of her same class with much property, but he betrayed her by marrying a woman of forty for property. However, she finds in Walter Morel something different that she could not find in her previously known persons; and a strong possibility of

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is one of the most discussed and controversial texts in postcolonial study. It shows the nature and effect of European colonialism in Africa . At the same time, it attacks the colonizers as well, though Conrad can not escape the attack of some post colonial critics like Chinua Achebe for his “dehumanizing” the Africans. Almost all the characters in Marlow's tale take part in the colonialist enterprise for selfish purposes. The narrator expresses that the target of the colonial expedition in different times has been Congo , the heart of darkness which has been the mission for many Europeans “bearing the sword, and often the torch, messengers of the might within the land, bearers of a spark from the sacred fire” Here the symbols "the sword" and "the torch” refer to brutal forces colonial enterprise and to the negation of the native culture by the so called light of civilization.           Marlow's aunt is pleased wi

Time is an eternal phenomenon in The Waste Land. The Waste Land considers the relationship between life in time, a life of bondage and suffering, and life in eternity. Time is the expression of the timeless in the phenomenal world and eternity pervades every changing element of temporal existence. At the very opening, Eliot has used the epigraph of the poem from Petronius, "I saw with my own eyes the Sibyl at Cumae hanging in her cage, and when the boys said, Sibyl, what do you want? she replied I want to die." Sybil is a symbol of timeless time since she is suspended  in jar and she can not die, still she is ageing. On the other hand she is captured in human’s time trap showing how time decays youth. Sybil is associated with the eternal cycle of birth, death and re-birth. However, the Sibyl’s predicament mirrors what Eliot sees as his own: He lives in a culture that has decayed and withered but will not expire, and he is forced to live with reminders of its