Literature

Mahesh Dattani’s play Tara starts with a card game. A brother, Chandan, and sister, Tara, are playing cards, and Tara is winning. While things are going well for her in the card game, her life is...

Basti is an Urdu word that can be translated as a “common place” or “gathering place,” a shared space in which people from all walks of life can come together. This is the ideal that Husain,...

Dictionary.com defines myth this way: A traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation,...

Certainly, one theme of the story is that we must be wary of strangers. Little Red Riding Hood meets the wolf in the forest, "but as she did not know what a bad sort of animal she was, she did not...

The basic elements of prose are: character, setting, plot, point of view, and mood. Character refers to: biographical information; personality traits; social roles, and psychological factors such...

A summary is essentially a quick snapshot of a story's narrative. It gives a broad view of the story without going into depth, only bothering to cover the main points without providing much in the...

Padmini, the central female character in the play, is unconventional; she is of peerless beauty and is also a strong woman who is able to demand what she wants. When Devadatta, the intellectual who...

A novel is a book-length fictional prose narrative that contains six primary elements: character, plot, point of view, setting, style, and theme. Let's look at these six through a sample novel,...

Literature is one way for us to hear the voices of the past and work with the present. It is a way for the present to connect to the possible future. Story telling is one way for humans to reach...

“The Holy Panchayat,” by Panch Parmeshwar, refers to the court in an Indian village. At different times, two friends each serve on the panchayat and are required to judge a matter that concerns the...

The main theme of Coolie is the exploitation of the poor by the rich in early twentieth century India and the human suffering that this brings about. In his descriptions of Munoo’s experiences...

"The Story of Fidgety Philip" is a story within the German children's book Der Struwwelpeter. It was written by Heinrich Hoffmann and it was published in 1845. In this book, Hoffmann wrote short...

Bhisham Sahni’s 1974 novel Tamas (The Darkness) can be considered a Partition novel as it is recounts the immediate and later aftereffects of the 1947 Partition and the creation of India and...

Novels were a new literary form in the eighteenth century, and in many ways, they were a reaction against earlier tales called romances that featured grand adventures, noble characters, and...

The main difference between the different forms of literature is the purpose and the way words are arranged. The main difference between prose and poetry is how the words are used. In prose we...

Anansi is a play by Alistair Campbell in which a young girl is captured as a slave and taken aboard a slave ship. She lies in the dark, terrified and miserable; but then, a voice comes out of the...

The main difference between Victorian and Modernist literature is the shift towards questioning the omniscient narrator. There was a shift from an objective (all knowing) to a subjective...

Prose refers to written or spoken language that is not in poetic form, whether in rhythm, rhyme, or structure. Drama is a performing art in which actors use dialogue and actions to tell a story or...

In the science fiction short story "The Wretched and the Beautiful" by E. Lily Yu, an alien spaceship lands on a popular tourist beach. Inside are strangely shaped alien refugees (the wretched) who...

Drama is a broad category and includes plays as a macro category or can be a portion of a work in a sub heading. Whether discussed in the macro or micro realms, drama has some definite...

Early on, especially after the United States broke away from England, it began to self-consciously develop a literature different from the European tradition, one that emphasized American values to...

Figures of speech enhance the author's creation. This is true of any genre and any form of writing. The effective use of figures of speech brings to life what would have been mere words, phrases...

One of the critical issues that Karnad addresses in Tulghlaq is the striking gap between political aspirations and its reality. Karnad understands this about the historical conditions that...

Beauty and the Beast is a well-known fairytale written by French author and novelist Gabrielle-Suzanne Barbot de Villeneuve, originally published in 1740. Another equally as popular publication is...

A primary difference between academic and non-academic texts involves audience, which also speaks to purpose. An academic, nonfiction text will be based on research methods that can be replicated....

When linguists say that language is "rule-governed behavior," they mean it has a grammar, or a set of conventions that organizes its "proper" use. These rules set boundaries around the meaning of...

A critique of Bengali writer Subdahara Sengupta’s 1992 short story “The Fourth Daughter” requires an examination and indictment of Indian and Hindu cultures with respect to the treatment of...

Literary Criticism and Literary Theory are phrases that have been used interchangeably. But there is a technical difference between the two. Literary Criticism refers to the evaluation of a work....

In examining the terms "traditional" and "modern," literary scholars will differ on the defining time periods or characteristics which qualify those classifications. The following are provided as a...

The relationship between history and literature is complex and multifaceted. First, literature often presents historical people, places, and events in story form. Think, for instance, of the...

There are plenty of narrative techniques in this short story. For example, on the first page, Chellamma asks the narrator, Perumayee, "Do you want to take the first train back to Salem?" This is a...

Medieval literature extends over a wide geographic area and a long span of time, so it is difficult to identify characteristics that apply to all or even most literature of the Middle Ages. That...

Este cuento, "Los Bomberos" de Mario Benedetti, depende mucho de la ironía. El cuento se trata de un hombre llamado Olegario, quien tiene un don de premonición. Olegario ha ganado bastante fama y...

I think a useful point of comparison here would be to imagine an untouched snowy landscape. The landscape is clean, white, and unmarked by anybody's footsteps. When you set out on a journey across...

Poetry is a form of writing in verse, which usually has a musical quality obtained through the specific use of literary elements such as meter and rhyme, and literary devices such as alliteration,...

Through literature, we can see that the people are more alike than different through the ages. It gives us a way to experience other worlds, and other people's lives; whether we are doing that...

Indira Goswami's short story "The Empty Chest" is set in Assam, "on the fringes of the cremation ground under the shrine of Kamakhya." The protagonist is Toradoi, a woman who lives with her...

The idea of postmodernism is to distance oneself from preconceptions and take a critical eye at the nature of our world, to challenge ourselves and come to a deeper and truer understanding. In the...

As graphic novels are by their very definition a blend of writing and illustration, it goes without saying that they will achieve a level of descriptiveness that a traditional novel will fall short...

The Chosen One is a common trope in speculative fiction, though the roots of it as a concept are ancient in nature. The term refers to a character who is "chosen" by God, the gods, or fate itself...

In addition to all of the above, life is, among other things, a narrative. Every time we tell others about our past experiences, dreams, purposes, or mindset, we are telling a story, since we do...

The poem “Identity” by Julio Noboa Polanco is an unrepentant celebration of individuality. Asserting himself against other people, whom he contemptuously likens to well-fed, well-watered flowers,...

"Olden days" is a fairly relative phrase. Some younger students might consider olden days any time before Instagram existed. They can't fathom a world that existed before cell phones and texting,...

In his Biographia Literaria, Samuel Taylor Coleridge draws a contrast between primary and secondary imagination. A creative person needs both types, he says, as they are aspects of the same innate...

A literary convention is: A customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme...

Sometimes I think you can learn more from short stories than novels, simply because the author gets to his/her point much quicker and is more concise with descriptions. Authors don't write just to...