Write a short note on ‘lyric’.

Lyric is a genre of poetry that expresses personal and emotional feelings. In the ancient
world, lyric poems were sung, accompanied by a lyre, a musical instrument. It often tends to
be relatively mellifluous in sound and rhythm and to have exclamatory expressions of intense
personal joy, sorrow or contemplation. Aristotle, in Poetics, mentions lyric poetry
(kitharistike played to the cithara, a type of lyre) along with drama, epic poetry, dancing,
painting and other forms of mimesis. The lyric poem, dating from the Romantic era, does
have some thematic antecedents in ancient Greek and Roman verse, but the ancient definition
was based on metrical criteria, and in archaic and classical Greek culture presupposed live
performance accompanied by a stringed instrument. Lyric in European literature of the
medieval or Renaissance period means a poem written so that it could be set to music—
whether or not it is. A poem's particular structure, function or theme is not specified by the
term. The lyric poetry of Europe in this period was created largely without reference to the
classical past, by the pioneers of courtly poetry and courtly love.

Write a short note on ‘ode’.

Ode (from the Ancient Greek is a type of lyrical verse. A classic ode is structured in three
major parts: the strophe, the antistrophe, and the epode. Different forms such as the
homostrophic ode and the irregular ode also exist. It is an elaborately structured poem
praising or glorifying an event or individual, describing nature intellectually as well as
emotionally. Greek odes were originally poetic pieces accompanied by symphonic orchestras.
There are three typical forms of odes: the Pindaric, Horatian, and irregular. In English an ode
is typically a lyrical verse written in praise of, or dedicated to someone or something which
captures the poet's interest or serves as an inspiration for the ode. The initial model for
English odes was Horace, who used the form to write meditative lyrics on various themes.
The earliest odes in the English language, using the word in its strict form, were the
Epithalamium and Prothalamium of Edmund Spenser. Among the notable practitioners of ode
the notable names are Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley who
wrote odes with regular stanza patterns. Shelley's Ode to the West Wind, written in fourteen
line terza rima stanzas, is a major poem in the form, but perhaps the greatest odes of the 19th
century were Keats's Five Great Odes of 1819 which included Ode to a Nightingale, Ode on
Melancholy, Ode on a Grecian Urn, Ode to Psyche, and To Autumn. The English ode's most
common rhyme scheme is ABABCDECDE.

Write a short note on ‘ballad’.

A ballad is a form of verse, often a narrative set to music. Ballads were particularly
characteristic of the popular poetry and song of the British Isles from the later medieval
period until the 19th century and used extensively across Europe and later the Americas,
Australia and North Africa. Many ballads were written and sold as single sheet broadsides.
The form was often used by poets and composers from the 18th century onwards to produce
lyrical ballads. In the later 19th century it took on the meaning of a slow form of popular love
song and the term is now often used as synonymous with any love song, particularly the pop
or rock power ballad. ballads are written in ballad stanzas or quatrains (four-line stanzas) of
alternating lines of iambic (an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable) tetrameter (eight
syllables) and iambic trimeter (six syllables), known as ballad meter. Usually, only the
second and fourth line of a quatrain are rhymed (in the scheme a, b, c, b), which has been
taken to suggest that, originally, ballads consisted of couplets (two lines) of rhymed verse,
each of 14 syllables. As can be seen in this stanza from ‘Lord Thomas and Fair Annet’:

The horse| fair Ann|et rode| upon

He amb|led like| the wind,

With sil|ver he| was shod| before,

With burn|ing gold| behind.

In all traditions most ballads are narrative in nature, with a self-contained story, often concise
and relying on imagery, rather than description, which can be tragic, historical, romantic or
comic. Another common feature of ballads is repetition, sometimes of fourth lines in
succeeding stanzas, as a refrain, sometimes of third and fourth lines of a stanza and
sometimes of entire stanzas.

Write a short note on ‘sonnet’.

A sonnet is a form of poetry that originated in Europe, mainly Italy: the Sicilian poet
Giacomo da Lentini is credited with its invention. They commonly contain 14 lines. The term
"sonnet" derives only from the Occitan word sonet and the Italian word sonetto, both
meaning "little song" or "little sound". By the thirteenth century, it signified a poem of
fourteen lines that follows a strict rhyme scheme and specific structure. Conventions
associated with the sonnet have evolved over its history. Writers of sonnets are sometimes
called "sonneteers," although the term can be used derisively. One of the best-known sonnet
writers is William Shakespeare, who wrote 154 of them (not including those that appear in
his plays). A Shakespearean, or English, sonnet consists of 14 lines, each line containing ten
syllables and written in iambic pentameter, in which a pattern of an unstressed syllable
followed by a stressed syllable is repeated five times. The rhyme scheme in a Shakespearean
sonnet is a-b-a-b, c-d-c-d, e-f-e-f, g-g; the last two lines are a rhyming couplet. Traditionally,
English poets employ iambic pentameter when writing sonnets, but not all English sonnets
have the same metrical structure: the first sonnet in Sir Philip Sidney's sequence Astrophel
and Stella, for example, has 12 syllables: it is iambic hexameters, albeit with a turned first
foot in several lines. In the Romance languages, the hendecasyllable and Alexandrine are the
most widely used metres.

Write a short note on ‘elegy’.

. ‘Elegy’ illustrates a different type of genre-term: ultimately classical in origin, transplanted
into modern European terminology only as a word, without the classical formal basis,
unrestricted as to structure (except for the minimal requirement that it be a VERSE
composition), overlapping with a number of similarly inexplicit terms (complaint, dirge,
lament, monody, threnody), yet conventionally tied to a limited range of subject matters and
styles (death and plaintive musing), and readily comprehensible to educated readers. In these
respects, it is a typical genre-term. ‘Elegia’ in Greek and Latin was a type of metre, not a type
of poem – a couplet consisting of a dactylic hexameter followed by a pentameter. Since this
verse-form was used for all kinds of subjects, the classical ancestry is relevant to modern
elegy principally in an etymological way. From the English Renaissance, ‘elegy’ or ‘elegie’
referred to a poem mourning the death of a particular individual.

The language of funeral elegies provided opportunity for plaintive, melancholy

generalizations on death or on the state of the world: there are signs of this appropriation of
the mode for general complaint already in ‘Lycidas’, where the author ‘by occasion foretells
the ruin of our corrupted clergy’. Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’
(1750) is the archetypal general meditation on the passing of life, unconnected with any
particular death. Coleridge departicularized the definition still further when he stated that the
elegy ‘is the form of poetry natural to the reflective mind’ – so elegy came to be a mood, or a
style, as well as a poem for a specific dead person. This second, looser, definition of elegy is
invoked by literary historians to characterize assorted melancholy poems of any period, for
example, the so-called ‘Anglo-Saxon elegies’ including ‘The Wanderer’ and ‘The Seafarer’,
both tales of personal deprivation shading into regretful meditations on the mutability of the
world and seeking divine consolation.

Write a short note on ‘pastoral’.

The pastoral had been an important strand of poetry in classical times. It relied on a fantasy of
shepherds (originally goatherds) capable of expressing love and desire in fine poetry, usually
accompanied with flutes or pan pipes. Often a wise, older man was mentoring a younger man.
Two of its classical exponents were the Greek Theocritus and the Roman Virgil. Theocritus
wrote his “Idylls” set in Sicily and Virgil set his “Eclogues” in the wild region of Greece
called Arcadia. The popularity of the pastoral depended on the attraction of imagining an
escapist life without the “politics” and restrictive conventions of life in the city. Some
commentators have divided the pastoral genre into the “soft” (eg Theocritus) where it is an
escapist fantasy, and a “hard” form (eg Virgil and his imitators) where it was used a vehicle
to propagate ideas too dangerous to expound directly. George Puttenham in the Arte of
English Poesie (1589) wrote: “..the poet devised the Eclogue…not of purpose to counterfeit
or represent the rustical manner of loves and communication; but under the veil of homely
persons, and in rude speeches to insinuate and glance at greater matters, and such as
perchance had not been safe to have disclosed in any other sort.”

In English hands pastoral poetry explores the fantasy of withdrawing from modern life to
live in an idyllic rural setting. All pastoral poetry draws on the tradition of the ancient
Greek poet Theocritus, who wrote romanticized visions of shepherds living rich and
fulfilled lives. No matter the form or structure the poetry takes, this focus on idyllic country
life is what characterizes it as pastoral poetry.
Write a short note on Picaresque Novel.
Coined from Spanish ‘Picaro’ (A rogue or a trickster) the term ‘picaresque
novel’ designates a number of novels in the 18 th century which include vagabond – like and
adventurous fellow as the protagonist. It is often episodic in structure and moral in purpose.
A typical narrative had insouciant rascal as the hero who underwent changes of character by
the end of the novel. It was originated in Spain with the anonymous Lazarillo de Tonnes
(1554) and the more influential novel by Mateo Alemán, Guzmán de Alfarache. Picaresque is
a term that must refer to the nature of the subject matter as well as to the superficial
autobiographical and episodic features of the fiction. Unfortunately, in English it is the
accidental arrangements that are usually indicated by picaresque: a low-life narrator, a
rambling tale. There was plenty of rogue literature in England from Nashe’s Unfortunate
Traveller (1594) onwards. Obviously Defoe in Moll Flanders (1722) has some affinity with
the picaresque. The novel is episodic; it has an autobiographical narrator and it is realistic.
For example, Henry Fielding’s ‘The History of Tom Jones, A Founding’ is a splendid
example of English picaresque novel.

Write a short note on Epistolary Novel.

Coined from ‘epistle’ which is the Latin for letter, Epistolary Novel gained widespread
popularity in the 18th century England. Unlike other main stream fiction, the plot of
Epistolary Novel is constituted by the exchange of letters among the major characters instead
of directly communicating and interacting with one another. Emotions and other feelings of
the characters are greatly expressed through the letters. Often the plot is brought to an end
with the sudden revelation of the letter. The letter’s attraction for expressions of desire,
whether in the form of personal confession, scandalous gossip, or political challenge, has also
imbued the epistolary novel with a heightened sentimentality. The letter supposedly grounded
the novel in empirical reality. For this purpose, 18th-century novels, circumspect for their
fictionality and their portrayal of bourgeois interiors that revealed the previously hidden lives
of women, often include editorial prefaces that base the novel’s existence on the
circumstantial discovery of a “bag of mail”. The first novel in English to be composed
entirely of letters is usually considered to be Love Letters between a Nobleman and His
Sister, published in 1684 and attributed to the versatile playwright and author Aphra Behn.
Although Behn's characters are fictional, they were modelled on real-life likenesses. Putting
their narrative into the form of letters increased the realism of Behn's account, making readers
feel as though they were privy to a secret and private correspondence. Samuel Richardson’s
Pamela and Henry Fielding’s Clarissa Harlowe and Joseph Andrew are some instances.

Write a short note on Character.

A character is any animate figure within a plot that represents human agency. A character’s
development speaks of the depth and complexity of a character. It’s possible that a character
starts out thoroughly developed, or it may be that the author chooses to slowly develop that
character as the plot unfolds. A character can be roughly of two types. Stock character is a
type that occurs repeatedly in a particular literary genre and so are recognizable as part of the
convention such type of characters does not generally change, what were in beginning of a
work remain nearly the same by the end of it. Life and its experience do not generally have a
great shadow or influences or their lifestyle and character. For example, Mr. Collins in Jane
Austen’s ‘Pride of Prejudice’ is the stock character that is equally dull-headed and comic all
through. E.M. Forster in his ‘Aspects of Novel’ introduces the distinction between flat and
round characters. A flat character also called a type, is built around a single idea or quality
and presented without much individualizing detail. On the other hand a round character is
complex in temperament and motivation and is represented with subtitle particularity; such a
character therefore is as difficult to describe with any adequacy as person in real life, and like
real person is capable of surprising the readers.
For example, Ben Johnson’s Epicure Mammon and Shakespeare’s John Falstaff are such
character.

Write a short note on Aside.

As propounded by Aristotle in his Poetics, the term ‘aside’ refers to the self-speaking or
talking to oneself by a character on stage even in the presence of other characters.
Technically it provides the audience with access to the inner thought, feeling and future plan,
running in the mind of the particular character. In the Elizabethan time, a character used to
utter his or her thought in the aside by coming exactly to the front port of the stage so as to
share the thoughts with the audience. A comment made by a character that is heard by the
audience or another character but is not heard by other characters on stage. The speaker turns
to one side, or “aside,” away from the main action on stage. Asides, which are rare in modern
drama, reveal what a character is thinking or feeling. Unlike a soliloquy, an aside is usually a
brief remark. Indeed, it is a short comment by a character towards the audience, often for
another character, but usually without his knowledge.
For example the famous aside in Macbeth occurred when Macbeth uttered, “Had I
died an hour ago, I would have lived a blessed life.” The word uttered in an aside is not heard
by others present on stage.

Write a short note on Conflict.

G. B. Shaw’s wise observation ‘no conflict no drama’ is justified when conflict refers to main
antagonism between the hero and the villain or between two factors of a single character,
which constitute the action of the play. Whereas in a drama conflict mostly arises between
two individuals or two nations or two external forces, in some play the conflict is internal or
psychological with one part of mind being at war with the other. Internal and external
conflicts may coexist in a play. The basic element in determining the action of a play is the
dramatic conflict which grows out of the interplay of opposing forces in a plot. The opposing
forces may be ideas, interests or wills. While presenting the conflict there must also be a
cause of opposition, or a goal within the dramatic action of the play. The real plot of tragedy
begins with the opening of a conflict and ends with its resolution. The middle of the tragedy
consists of the development and fluctuations of the conflict. The greatness of a tragedy
depends on the manner the dramatist initiates, develops and concludes the conflict, the way
how he handles it.
For example, Christopher Marlowe’s ‘Doctor Faustus’ the main conflict that makes up the
tragic plot is between the good and evil, soul and body, and God and Satan.

Write a short note on Masque.

Inaugurated in Renaissance Italy and flourished in England during the Elizabethan era, the
masque is as elaborate form of court entertainment which combines poetic drama, music,
song, dance, splendid costuming and stage spectacle. The plot-- mainly mythological or
allegorical-- served to hold together these diverse elements. The characters wore masks and
the play concluded with dance. In the beginning, it was merely a series of dances which also
illustrated some story, as if in dumb show, but gradually it came to be a play with a good deal
of music, dancing and scenic display. Ben Johnson was its chief exponent, and the masques
penned by him are still good entertainment. It often makes use of allegorical and mythical
subjects. The characters are usually gods and goddesses of classical mythology, or
personified qualities such as Delight, Grace, Love, Harmony, Revel, Sport, and Laughter.
The number of characters is usually small and often equally divided between males and
females. The entertainment is much shorter than the regular drama. The scenes are laid in
some ideal region, such as the Hill of Knowledge, the House of Chivalry, the House of
Oceanus, the Fountain of Light, or at least in some far off region, picturesque and romantic.
The rhymed verse is also found to be used profusely.
For example, Ben Johnson’s ‘The Masque of Blackness’ and ‘The Masque of Queen’
are two classic English masque.

Write a short note on Anti-hero.

Antihero is often a protagonist of a drama or narrative, who is notably lacking in heroic
qualities. This type of character has appeared in literature since the time of the Greek
dramatists and can be found in the literary works of all nations. When traditionally the hero is
generally admired for his bravery, strength, charm, or ingenuity, an anti-hero is typically
clumsy, unsolicited, unskilled, and has both good and bad qualities. Although antiheroes may
sometimes perform actions that are morally correct, it is not always for the right reasons,
often acting primarily out of self-interest or in ways that defy conventional ethical codes. An
antihero typically exhibits one of the "Dark Triad" personality traits, which include
narcissism, psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Many anti-heroes have disturbing
backgrounds that have resulted in their present state of being and go through mental and
spiritual conflicts within themselves, which have an impact on the decisions that they
make.  However, this also gives them plenty of room to grow both mentally and
spiritually.  Sometimes their motive for doing something right can be just for the sake of
doing what is right.  But their motive can also be getting something in return.  This anti-hero
does the right thing in order to get some sort of profit.  They treat it as a business
transaction.  Some do the right thing simply for revenge.  They are also portrayed as
vigilantes or criminals in the eyes of the established law. For example, Bluntchli in Bernard
Shaw’s Arms and the Man has an unconventional and unheroic approach to love and war but
he in the end impressively emerges as the central character.

Write a short note on Dramatic Irony.

Dramatic irony involves a discrepancy between a character's perception and what the reader
or audience knows to be true. Lacking in material information that the audience possesses,
the character creates discord by his or her responses to plot events. Thus, dramatic irony can
be revealed by inappropriate statements, expectations, or actions. It occurs when the meaning
intended by a character's words or actions is opposite of the true situation. The contrast is
between what the character says, thinks, or does and the true situation. So in it the reader
understands more about the events in a plot than a character. There are three stages of
dramatic irony: Installation – audience is informed of something the character does not know
about; Exploitation – using this information to develop curiosity among the audience;
Resolution – what happens when the character finally finds out what is going on. A special
category of dramatic irony is tragic irony, which was common in ancient Greek plays.
Dramatic irony is used to create several layers of perspective on a single set of events: some
characters know very little, some know quite a lot, and the audience in most cases knows the
fullest version of the story. This device allows the audience to perceive the events in many
different ways at once, and to appreciate the ways in which certain slight deficit of
information can create vastly different responses to the same set of events. Sometimes these
differences are comical, and sometimes they are painful and tragic.

Example: Sophocles’ Oedipus Rex is the most widely known example. Oedipus, King of
Thebes, vows to find the murderer of the previous king, only to find out what the audience
has known all along: he is the guilty party.

Write a short note on three Unities.

Unities, in drama, the three principles derived by French classicists from Aristotle’s Poetics
are unity of time, place and of action. The unity of action demands that a play should have
one main action that it follows, with no or few subplots. The unity of place requires a play
should cover a single physical space and should not attempt to compress geography, nor
should the stage represent more than one place. The unity of time sticks to the rule that the
action in a play should take place over no more than 24 hours. The unity of time limits the
supposed action to the duration, roughly, of a single day; unity of place limits it to one
general locality; and the unity of action limits it to a single set of incidents which are related
as cause and effect, "having a beginning, a middle, and an end." Concerning the unity of time,
Aristotle noted that all the plays since Aeschylus, except two, did illustrate such unity, but he
did not lay down such a precept as obligatory. Aristotle assumed that the observance of the
unity of place would be the practice of good playwrights, since the chorus was present during
the whole performance, and it would indeed be awkward always to devise an excuse for
moving fifteen persons about from place to place. The third unity, that of action, is bound up
with the nature not only of Greek but of all drama.

In contrast to the classical standard, the unities were of much less concern in Renaissance
England. Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, and Ben Jonson often included two or
more plots in a play, mixed comedy and tragedy, and freely switched settings. Jonson,
unusually among these playwrights, referred to the unities in the prologue to his Volpone:
The laws of time, place, persons he observeth;
From no needful rule he swerveth.

Write a short note on Bildungsroman.

Bildungsroman is a type of novel which is a ‘novel of formation’ or a ‘novel of education’. It
focuses on the development of the mind and character of the young protagonist from
childhood to adulthood. The genre is first introduced by Karl Mongstern in the nineteenth
century and was popularized by Wilhelm Dilthey in the twentieth century. It is a German
term—‘bildung’ means ‘formation’ and ‘roman’ means ‘novel’. Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister
(1976) was first categorized under this genre. The genre focuses on the all-round
development of the protagonist. Many novelists of the Victorian period wrote under the traits
of this genre. Tom Sawyer, David Copperfield, Jane Eyre and Great Expectations are
classical examples of this genre. The main theme of this type of novel is the development of
the Protagonist’s mind and character from childhood to adulthood. The protagonist develops
through various experiences and gets matured and it is also a sort of search for identity. The
term Bildungsroman reached other nations only in the twentieth century even though it was in
usage by the German writers in the eighteenth century. The English bildungsroman traces the
development of the protagonist along with the new experiences of the hero in his society.
Bildungsroman has a deep tradition in English literature. The genre became famous as the
novel of youth in Victorian England. The main idea of these novels appears to be about the
early years of the protagonist’s life or about the psychological or moral growth of the main
character. A Portrait of the Artist as a Youngman (1916) by James Joyce is a classic example
as it talks about the growth of the protagonist, Stephen Dedalus, as a man and an artist.

Write a short note on Stream of Consciousness.

‘Stream of Consciousness’ was a phrase used by William James to characterize the unbroken
flow of thoughts. Today, it is used to describe a narrative method in modern fiction. This type
of narrative has its origin in English in the novels of Dorothy Richardson, James Joyce and
Virginia Woolf. The ‘stream of consciousness’ technique is a new and radical development
from the subjectivism of the well-made novel. Its defining feature, according to J.W. Beach,
is the ‘exploitation of the element of inherence in one’s conscious prose’. The term is most
useful when it is applied to the mental process. It indicates an approach to the presentation of
psychological aspects of the characters. Although the ‘stream of consciousness’ is often
defined as a technique, most of the stream of consciousness novels are rather identified by
their subject matters than by their style. Their essential subject-matter is the consciousness of
one or more characters. The consciousness that the novelist describes is not merely the
intelligence, will or memory of the character, but the entire area of mental attention. The
stream of consciousness novel differs from the psychological novels because it is more
concerned with the incoherent and inexplicable parts of the mind. The originator of the
stream of consciousness novel is the little known Dorothy Richardson. It was she who
invented the fictional depiction of the flow of consciousness. She is a writer characterized by
a great sensibility to the subtleties of mental functioning. Her aims as a novelist are recorded
in the brilliant Preface to ‘Pilgrimage’ where she declared that she wanted to use fictional
writing as ‘ a means to discovering the truth about one’s own thoughts and beliefs.

Virginia Woolf is another important writer of the stream of consciousness novel. She wanted
to show the process of inner relationship of truth, a truth which is mysterious and inexplicable
in normal language. She wrote three novels of this type – ‘Mrs. Dalloway’, ‘To the
Lighthouse’, and ‘The Waves’.