Companion to British and American Novels
The three scaffold scenes in The Scarlet Letter are integral to the structure and unity of the narrative. They are the most dramatic scenes at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the novel. Artistically and dramatically, these scenes are a ...More
Mary Shelley had many narrative conventions hitherto followed by earlier writers. Jane Austen had written many novels, but the area, she covered was restricted to one or two families. Her realistic mode did not suit Mary Shelly. More
Thomas Hardy is one of the greatest English novelists. With his fourteen novels, he has carved for himself a niche in the glorious mansion of the English novel. He is a great poet as well as a great novelist; but the success and popularity of his nov ...More
If the fundamental principles and assumptions about the nature of fiction is questioned and challenged, postmodernist elements are supposed to exist. In The French Lieutenant's Woman, John Fowles questioned the fundamental Victorian principles and as ...More
Cooper's style is a simple one. He makes a sparing use of the figurative language of simile and metaphor. He quickly intensifies the narrative moment, then describes it and having described he exposes it. But his method of exposition and description ...More
Internal versus External Beauty: George Eliot makes a contrastive study of Hetty Sorrel and Dinah Morris so as to depict the theme of the inner and outer beauty. Hetty represents the outer beauty, she is physically attractive and has a grace in her e ...More
Holden Caulfield is the representative American postwar hero cast in the image of a New York adolescent coming to terms with a world where everything is 'phony' that makes him 'puke'.More
Many readers subscribe to the conviction that Faulkner's As I Lay Dying is an excellent piece of art. It is the superb product of experimental modernism. Faulkner has used experimental narrative technique. There is no authorial intrusion. Characters ...More
At the beginning of the novella Heart of Darkness Marlow, a thoughtful mariner, sets off a journey up to the Congo River to meet Kurtz, a man known for his great abilities. Marlow is offered a job as a riverboat captain by a Belgian Company to trade ...More
The intention of Jane Austen, in Sense and Sensibility is satirical. It seems to represent the physical and psychological suffering resulting from the accident in love, is the primary intention of the novelist Jane Austen. But to represent the social ...More
Ulysses by James Joyce written in 1922 is a masterpiece which outstands many major works of modern literature in style, structure, theme and nearly all elements.More
Murphy is an absurdist hero. He marks a pivotal point in the narrative of 'Murphy'. Murphy was born in Irish capital Dublin. Fed up with the Irish lustiness and possessive love of Miss Counihan, Murphy made a dash to London. The crucial journey of th ...More
Samuel Beckett is an apostle of existentialism. As an existentialist author he views human life as a meaningless collection of facilities. Life is a jumble of facts devoid of any sense. In existential sense living a life is analogous to living a rout ...More
The novel opens with the letters written by Robert Walton to his sister in England explaining about his adventurous journey to the north pole. On the way he met another ambitious scientist Victor Frankenstein, who had been too weak to travel due to e ...More
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus is complete title of Mary Shelley’s novel. It takes us back to the mythical figure Prometheus, who is said to have formed a clay image of men and women and by stealing fire from the gods animated them. So did t ...More
Frankenstein is the story of an ambitious scientist who usurps the role of God and attempts pervert the natural laws that govern mankind. Mary Shelley deftly combines science with the common supernatural and ushers in which is called science fiction. ...More
Frankenstein was written in a story writing competition by Mary Shelley In 1818. This novel is regarded as one of the pioneering work of Mary and also a cornerstone in the literary development of science fiction. Except being first science fiction, i ...More
Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter is a good example of a tragic love story that includes the cause and effects of love relationship throughout the entire novel in different modes by depicting the different characters in different positions in ...More
Different themes have been treated in The Scarlet Letter. Among other things, the novel deals “with normal guilt, with genuine passion, with the operation of recognize mind." One obvious reason for The Scarlet Letter working on so many different le ...More
The Scarlet Letter is essentially a story of crime, sin and punishment. It tells of the ignominy or humiliation of a woman who has broken scriptural and statutory law in a community dedicated to the maintenance of the authority of the law. The magis ...More
Irony means the juxtaposition of two mutually incompatible views of a given situation; it is a “natural discoverer and explorer of incongruities” and consists in the perception of contradictions in human nature. Irony aroused from contrast - cont ...More
Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter has given a narrative form to the heart-rending problem of physical and psychological isolation. In this novel a puritan minister allowed himself to be corrupted by his over-valorized faith in the rigorous Puritan mor ...More
James Joyce and T. S. Eliot both are most prominent writers who tried to depict the complex reality of human life by capturing the complex formation into their writings. Both are taken as complex writers of English literature. T. S. Eliot in his poem ...More
James Joyce describes a modern journey in Ulysses by casting his modern Irish characters on mould of mythological character figures. Two characters the Stephen and Leopold Bloom in Joyce’s Ulysses are given mythological dimension. Like William Faul ...More
Together with the reference of ancient Greece depicted in Homer's Odyssey Joyce writes Ulysses to underscore the ironic contrast between the exhausted modern world and glories epoch of ancient Greece structuring his masterpiece by corresponding each ...More
The Scarlet Letter throws light upon the theme of isolation right from the beginning when Hester Prynne is ordered to wear the scarlet letter ‘A’ on her bosom for committing the inexcusable sin of infidelity in the Puritan society. This makes her ...More
This novel The Scarlet Letter is based on the context of Puritan society. The Puritans were most religious person. They believed that in Christian myth all mankind was depraved and sinful because of Adam and Eve's fall from the Garden of Eden. Becaus ...More
There are plenty of evidences in the text of The Scarlet Letter to advance the thesis that The Scarlet Letter is a tragic love story. It is a love story because its female protagonist Hester Prynne suffered a lot for preserving her love intact. She w ...More
The scarlet letter is a Romance which has constant interaction between the real and the imaginative. It is through symbolism and imagery that Hawthorne tells his tale of Hester Prynne’s sin and her punishment.More
'Murphy' is the presentation of the Beckettian notion of man without action. 'Murphy' has been claimed as a reader - participation novel. To understand significant thematic clue readers have to take part in the novel. Specific details can only be kno ...More
Samuel Beckett's Murphy is an absurdist novel, which depicts absurd, meaningless, nostalgic, ennui condition of its protagonist questioning of the truth, certainty and happiness of modern life. Absurdist views that the human condition is essentially ...More
Murphy is Beckett's most important novel that expresses the sense of alienation in different level. Murphy's mental alienation, social alienation, physical alienation and contextual alienation are some major aspects alienation in Murphy. Most strikin ...More
Tony Tanner, one of the critics, is of the view that Sense and Sensibility, is not only about sense and sensibility but also about secrecy and sickness which, according to him, are matters of some importance in the book. Of course, the major theme of ...More
Austen is more successful in her delineation of women than of men in her novel Sense and Sensibility. She is not only concerned with the outward consciousness of the character, but also with a psychological portrayal of the woman's character. One cri ...More
Irony is one of the major narrative devices of Jane Austen, the exponent of domestic realism. Irony arises from the contrast between appearance and reality or between what we expect and what actually happens, or between what is said and what is reall ...More
James Fenimore Cooper's The Last of the Mohicans dramatizes a process of an incomplete colonization. The process is described in an indirect and direct way by Cooper. In the eighteenth century the Europeans, particularly the French and the English ha ...More
The French Lieutenant's Woman by English writer John Fowles was published in 1969. It was an immediate success. The novel is set in the nineteenth Century romantic literary genre with the plot of 1867 seen through a twentieth century perspective. It ...More
Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness explores the intimate relation between colonizers and colonized. Marlow and Kurtz both are representative figures of colonizer who go on African land in the name of civilizing and educating the native people. All the ...More
Conrad's Heart of Darkness says that everybody has within oneself vulnerability, fragility, weakness and strong fear of being deviated from the essential norms and values. All of us possess within ourselves basic evils. In our day to day normal life ...More
Kurtz is one of the representatives of European values. He is a petty tyrant, a dying god, an embodiment of Europe. He has been presented as a funneling character Marlow. His ambition is also traveling Africa, but though Kurtz managed to reach his in ...More
The symbolic meaning of light and darkness play the central role in the novel Heart of Darkness. If we try to see the meaning of light it means bright, knowledge, capable in every field, life, perfection, etc. and Darkness, on the other hand, refers ...More
The novel The Catcher in the Rye is full of symbols. Actually symbol refers to the objects, characters, figures used to represent abstract ideas or concepts. The Symbol also carries the theme.More
No doubt the destructive consequences of single minded obsessions are the heart of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Because the whole novel is about the very state of the mind of Frankenstein, which is completely filled with the thoughts of only one part ...More
In sketching the character of Sethe, Toni Morrison has displayed a remarkable excellence. Sethe is one of the central characters of Morrison's novel Beloved. She is a black woman and previous slave, who was orphaned by the death of her slave parents. ...More
Toni Morrison's one of the central focuses in her novel is about the consciousness of African roots. The racial problem prevailed during the contemporary period includes the holistic formality in African society since long time. So her historical con ...More
Frankenstein by Mary Shelley deals with the varieties of themes, giving the novel a possibility of diverse interpretations. The major themes found in this novel are, theme of birth and creation, theme of fear of sexuality, theme of parental responsib ...More
The term ‘Gothic’ is highly amorphous and open to diverse interpretations; it is suggestive of an uncanny atmosphere of wilderness gloom and horror based on the supernatural. The weird and eerie atmosphere of the Gothic fiction was derived from t ...More
Mary Shelley's Frankenstein can be read from two main levels; as a science fiction and as human nature. The whole novel moves around the invention of a scientist and the result of it. Dangerous aspect of experience in the scientific field is the subj ...More
William Faulkner has presented himself as a modernist novelist in regard to the narrative technique used in his novel As I Lay Dying. The novelist presents his novel being conscious with modern techniques of narration and themes as well as the struct ...More
As I Lay Dying, a novel by William Faulkner, exploits a variety of distinct features typical of modernist text. Unlike the traditional trend of writing, it possesses different themes, techniques, subject matter and characters, on the foundation of wh ...More
Fiction Study Center
Jane Austen: Sense and Sensibility
Cooper: The Last of the Mohicans
Nathaniel Hawthorne: The Scarlet Letter
Harriet Beecher Stowe: Uncle Tom's Cabin
Thomas Hardy: The Mayor of Casterbridge
William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying
Fowles: The French Lieutenant Woman
Salinger: The Catcher in the Rye
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