English Literature

 Rasa Theory in Natyashastra   Bharatmuni was an ancient Indian theatrologist and musicologist. He is considered the father of Indian theatrical art forms. He wrote the Natyashastra during the period between 200 BCE and 200 CE in classical India. It is a Sanskrit treatise on the performing arts. The text of Natyashastra consists of 36 chapters or 6000 poetic verses (slokas) describing performance arts. The subjects covered by treatise include: the sentiments, the states, the histrionic representation (abhinaya), the practice (dharmi), the styles (vritti), the success (siddhi), the notes (svara), the instrumental music ( atodya), songs and the stage.  Natyashastra is also notable for its aesthetic sentiments ( Rasa ) theory. Rasa  literally means "taste" or "savor", and, as used to denote the essence of poetry. Bharatmuni wrote in Natyashastra: " no composition can be proceed without rasa" . Rasa is  an individual experience brought through the expres

 Research report writing Planning, Drafting, Revising, Editing, and Finalizing the draft of research report A reseach report is a well crafted document that outlines the processes data and findings of a systematic investigation. It is an important document that serves as a first hand account of the reseach process. It is considered as an objective and accurate source of information. In other words, it is a summary of the reseach process that clearly highlights finding recommendations and other important details. " Research report is a research document that contains basic aspects of the reseach project". The true value of the reseach may be assessed through a report since the written report may be the " only tangible product of hundereds of hours of work. Rightly or wrongly, the quality and worth of that work are judged by the quality of written report -- its clarity, organization and content" (BLAKE and BLY 1993: 119). The primary purpose of a written report is co

 An Essay on Imitation, Poetics by Aristotle Aristotle (384-322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath during the classical period in ancient Greece. He was a great genius who is supposed to have written about 400 books. He was the student Plato and teacher of Alexander. He was the founder of Lyceum,  the peripetetic school of philosophy. He made significant contribution in the form of  treatise. Some of his greatest treatise are: Politics, Metaphysics, On the Soul, The Alexander, Rhetoric, Dialogues, On Monarchy,  Education Ethics, Natural History, Physics and Poetics . Most of his works are not traceable. Even one of his greatest works 'Poetics' is not available in original form; only a translation of "Poetics" is available. The "Poetics" is a fragmentary and incomplete work of Literary criticism. It deals with the tragedy, comedy and epic. In spite of its fragmentary nature 'Poetics' has come down to us as an authoritative treatise of the art

Objective correlative Objective correlative, literary theory first set forth by T.S. Eliot in the essay “ Hamlet and His Problems ” and published in The Sacred Wood (1920). According to the theory, The only way of expressing emotion in the form of art is by finding an “objectivecorrelative”;  in other words, a set of objects, a situation, a chain of events which shall be the formula of that particular emotion; such that when the external facts,which must terminate in sensory experience, are given, the emotion is immediately evoked. The term was originally used in the 19th century by the painter Washington Allston in his lectures on art to suggest the relation between the mind and the external world. This notion was enlarged upon by George Santayana in Interpretations of Poetry and Religion (1900). Santayana suggested that correlative objects could not only express a poet’s feeling but also evoke it. Critics have argued that Eliot’s idea was influenced, as was much of Eliot’s work, by t

Sublime: A characteristic of nature and art that embodies grandeur and nobility  and evokes in its audience a sense of awe. In literature, the term derives from  the treatise On the Sublime (first century A.D.), traditionally attributed (almost  certainly erroneously) to Longinus, a Greek rhetorician and philosopher. For  “Longinus,” the sublime is the emotional response to a spoken or written utterance of great power, which at first overwhelms and later creates in the reader/ listener a feeling of transcendence . Interest in sublimity in art and literature re-emerged in late 18th-century  England with the publication of Edmund Burke’s Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of  Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful (1757). Burke’s distinction between the awesome  power of the sublime and the more constrained and decorous appeal of the beauti- ful played an infl uential role in the development of English ROMANTICISM. Many  Romantic poets strove to achieve the effects of sublimity by co

Among the most controversial books ever published,  The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn  first appeared in the United States in January 1885. Of all Mark Twain’s books,  Huckleberry Finn  had the largest success upon its initial release from a sales standpoint. It is frequently looked upon as a work of art and as a cultural artifact, not as simply a novel. It was also rejected as being base and racist, being banned from some libraries in 1885, and continuing to appear on lists of commonly banned books to this day. It was one of the earliest works of American literature to be written in the  vernacular  and was an early example of a text relaying heavily on regionalism. Huckleberry Finn, first introduced to readers as a character in Twain’s  The Adventures of Tom   Sawyer , is the first person narrator. The book contains vivid descriptions of life along the Mississippi River, as society existed several decades before the book’s publication. The adventures begin in St. Petersb

American author Harriet Beecher Stowe’s anti-slavery novel  Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or, Life Among the Lowly  was published in 1852 after having originally appeared as forty weekly installments in the abolitionist periodical  The National Era  beginning in June of 1851. It was not intended to become a full-length novel, but its huge popularity led a publisher to contact Stowe and convince her to expand it. Though already an active abolitionist, the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850 was the impetus for Stowe to write the novel, which became a symbol of the power of literature in social reform.  Uncle Tom’s Cabin  was the best-selling novel of the nineteenth century and was only outsold by the Bible. The novel became a cultural phenomenon, spawning “Uncle Tom Plays” and giving birth to character tropes “Uncle Tom,” “Topsy,” “Simon Legree,” and others. The novel was banned in many of the Southern states and later in the Confederacy. Its popularity helped spread and strengthen the abolitio