Related Research Articles
Eric Arthur Blair, known by his pen name George Orwell, was an English novelist, essayist, journalist and critic. His work is characterised by lucid prose, social criticism, opposition to totalitarianism, and support of democratic socialism.
Sir William Empson was an English literary critic and poet, widely influential for his practice of closely reading literary works, a practice fundamental to New Criticism. His best-known work is his first, Seven Types of Ambiguity, published in 1930.
Brave New World is a dystopian social science fiction novel by English author Aldous Huxley, written in 1931 and published in 1932. Largely set in a futuristic World State, whose citizens are environmentally engineered into an intelligence-based social hierarchy, the novel anticipates huge scientific advancements in reproductive technology, sleep-learning, psychological manipulation and classical conditioning that are combined to make a dystopian society which is challenged by only a single individual: the story's protagonist. Huxley followed this book with a reassessment in essay form, Brave New World Revisited (1958), and with his final novel, Island (1962), the utopian counterpart. The novel is often compared to George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is based on the mythological Leir of Britain. King Lear relinquishes his power and land to two of his daughters. He becomes destitute and insane and a proscribed crux of political machinations. The first known performance of any version of Shakespeare's play was on St. Stephen's Day in 1606. The three extant publications from which modern editors derive their texts are the 1608 quarto (Q1) and the 1619 quarto and the 1623 First Folio. The quarto versions differ significantly from the folio version.
"Politics and the English Language" (1946) is an essay by George Orwell that criticised the "ugly and inaccurate" written English of his time and examines the connection between political orthodoxies and the debasement of language.
Robert Armin was an English actor, and member of the Lord Chamberlain's Men. He became the leading comedy actor with the troupe associated with William Shakespeare following the departure of Will Kempe around 1600. Also a popular comic author, he wrote a comedy, The History of the Two Maids of More-clacke, as well as Foole upon Foole, A Nest of Ninnies (1608) and The Italian Taylor and his Boy.
Burmese Days is the first novel by English writer George Orwell, published in 1934. Set in British Burma during the waning days of empire, when Burma was ruled from Delhi as part of British India, the novel serves as "a portrait of the dark side of the British Raj." At the centre of the novel is John Flory, "the lone and lacking individual trapped within a bigger system that is undermining the better side of human nature." The novel describes "both indigenous corruption and imperial bigotry" in a society where, "after all, natives were natives—interesting, no doubt, but finally...an inferior people".
This article is a collection of quotations and other comments on English playwright William Shakespeare and his works.
Afanasy Afanasyevich Fet, later known as Shenshin, was a renowned Russian poet regarded as the finest master of lyric verse in Russian literature.
Bardolatry is excessive admiration of William Shakespeare. Shakespeare has been known as "the Bard" since the eighteenth century. One who idolizes Shakespeare is known as a bardolator. The term bardolatry, derived from Shakespeare's sobriquet "the Bard of Avon" and the Greek word latria "worship", was coined by George Bernard Shaw in the preface to his collection Three Plays for Puritans published in 1901. Shaw professed to dislike Shakespeare as a thinker and philosopher because Shaw believed that Shakespeare did not engage with social problems as Shaw did in his own plays.
In 1671 an argument broke out in the French Royal Academy of Painting and Sculpture in Paris about whether drawing or color was more important in painting. On one side stood the Poussinists who were a group of French artists, named after the painter Nicolas Poussin, who believed that drawing was the most important thing. On the other side were the Rubenists, named after Peter Paul Rubens, who prioritized color. There was a strong nationalistic flavour to the debate as Poussin was French but Rubens was Flemish, though neither was alive at the time. After over forty years the final resolution of the matter in favor of the Rubenists was signalled when Antoine Watteau's The Embarkation for Cythera was accepted as his reception piece by the French Academy in 1717. By that time the French Rococo was in full swing.
The wise fool, or thewisdom of the fool, is a form of literary paradox in which through a narrative a character recognized as a fool comes to be seen as a beholder of wisdom. A recognizable trope found in stories and artworks from antiquity to the twenty-first century, the wisdom of the fool often captures what Intellectualism fails to illuminate of a thing's meaning or significance; thus, the wise fool is often associated with the wisdom found through blind faith, reckless desire, hopeless romance, and wild abandon, but also tradition without understanding, and folk wisdom.
Polemic was a British "Magazine of Philosophy, Psychology, and Aesthetics" published between 1945 and 1947, which aimed to be a general or non-specialist intellectual periodical.
Hamlet and His Problems is an essay written by T.S. Eliot in 1919 that offers a critical reading of Hamlet. The essay first appeared in Eliot's The Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism in 1920. It was later reprinted by Faber & Faber in 1932 in Selected Essays, 1917-1932. Eliot's critique gained attention partly due to his claim that Hamlet is "most certainly an artistic failure." Eliot also popularised the concept of the objective correlative—a mechanism used to evoke emotion in an audience—in the essay. The essay is also an example of Eliot's use of what became known as new criticism.
The Shakespearean fool is a recurring character type in the works of William Shakespeare.
The History of King Lear is an adaptation by Nahum Tate of William Shakespeare's King Lear. It first appeared in 1681, some seventy-five years after Shakespeare's version, and is believed to have replaced Shakespeare's version on the English stage in whole or in part until 1838.
"Politics vs. Literature: An Examination of Gulliver's Travels" is a critical essay published in 1946 by the English author George Orwell. The essay is a review of Gulliver's Travels with a discussion of its author Jonathan Swift. The essay first appeared in Polemic No 5 in September 1946.
"The Prevention of Literature" is an essay published in 1946 by the English author George Orwell. The essay is concerned with freedom of thought and expression, particularly in an environment where the prevailing orthodoxy in left-wing intellectual circles is in favour of the communism of the Soviet Union.
L. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky was a literary essay written by Dmitry Merezhkovsky and published between 1900 and 1901 in Mir Iskusstva magazine. The essay explored a comparison between the creativity and worldview of Leo Tolstoy and that of Fyodor Dostoevsky. The author worked on his research from 1898 to 1902 and its publication coincided with Leo Tolstoy's excommunication by Most Holy Synod and drew wide public response. L. Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky is considered the most significant work of Merezhkovsky in the genre of literary research and was subsequently recognized as the most detailed and accurate study of Leo Tolstoy's work.
"Reflections on Gandhi" is an essay by George Orwell, first published in 1949, which responds to Mahatma Gandhi's autobiography The Story of My Experiments with Truth. The essay, which appeared in the American magazine Partisan Review, discusses the autobiography and offers both praise and criticism to Gandhi, focusing in particular on the effectiveness of Gandhian nonviolence and the tension between Gandhi's spiritual worldview and his political activities. One of a number of essays written by Orwell and published between Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), "Reflections on Gandhi" was the last of Orwell's essays to be published in his lifetime and was not republished until after his death.
References
- ↑ Orwell, Sonia and Angus, Ian (eds.). The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George Orwell Volume 4: In Front of Your Nose (1945–1950) (Penguin)
