English Literature Made Easy

             The 21 st  century has proved to the world that English literature is no longer the sole province of the imperial England. Although English literature started and flourished in England, it has gone on to sow the seeds of creativity in English in other parts of the world. Interestingly, the English people themselves paved the way for the unexpected developments that we witness today. When the English colonizers went to America, they began to write their own literature of the Americas. Similarly, those English men and women who went to Australia began the process of a new literature called Australian literature. And so is the case with Canada, India, and Africa. With colonization in some parts of the world, especially, Africa and Asia, there emerged a new literature which later came to be known as the Commonwealth literature, New Literature in English, postcolonial literature and so on. Not to be left out, even those countries which were not colonized by the English like Bh

  Thomas Stearns Eliot was born in St. Louis, Missouri (USA) on September 26, 1888. He attended Harvard, the Sorbonne, and Oxford, studying philosophy and writing a dissertation on the logician F. H. Bradley. While in college, Eliot began writing poetry, but in 1908 he discovered French symbolist poetry and his whole attitude toward literature changed. Ezra Pound read some of Eliot’s poetry in the 1910s and immediately decided that Eliot would be a member of his own literary circle. Pound advocated for Eliot with Harriet Monroe of Poetry magazine and got Eliot’s poem ‘‘ The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’’ published in that journal in 1915. Eliot had settled in London at the same time and married the emotionally unstable Vivian Haigh-Wood. Eliot struggled to make a living, working as a teacher and later at Lloyd’s Bank until 1925. In 1922 Eliot published his brilliant and successful poem ‘‘ The Waste Land ,’’. The manuscript of the poem demonstrates that Ezra Pound played a larg

       Stuart Hall: Brief Overview ü   Born on 3 Feb 1932 in Kingston,   Jamaica (then a colony of UK) into a middle class family of Indian, African & British descent- Caribbean ü   A Cultural Theorist/ Sociologist ü   Lived and worked in UK since 1951 ü   Studied at Merton College, University of Oxford ü   One of the founding figures of British Cultural Studies/ The Birmingham School of Cultural Studies ü   Served as the Director of CCCS (Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies) at Birmingham University   from 1968 to 1979 ü   Professor   of Sociology at the Open University (1979- 1997) ü   Now, a Professor Emeritus ü   Married to Catherine Hall, a Feminist Professor at University College, London ü   Founding   editor of NEW LEFT REVIEW ü   Major Works §   Situating Marx: Evaluations & Departures (1972) – article §   Encoding & Decoding in the Television Discourse (1973)- article §   The Hard Road to Renewal (1988) §   Formations of Mode

Origins of Cultural Studies The name “cultural studies” derives from the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies (CCCS) at the University of Birmingham, established in 1964. CCCS was founded as a postgraduate centre initially under the directorship of Richard Hoggart (1964–1968) and later Stuart Hall (1968–1979). It is during the period of Hall’s Directorship that one can first speak of the formation of an identifiable and distinct domain called cultural studies. The initial focus of CCCS was on ‘lived’ culture, with an emphasis on class cultures that chimed with the work of Hoggart and Raymond Williams . However, this moment of ‘culturalism’ – formed from an amalgam of sociology and literary criticism – was surpassed by the influence of structuralism, particularly as articulated with Marxism. Here the decisive intellectual resources were drawn from Barthes , Althusser and, most crucially, Gramsci . The key conceptual tools were those of text, ideology and hegemony as explored th

  1795–1830 Major contributions to literary theory by Romantic writers 1860s Matthew Arnold and John Ruskin flourish as cultural and literary critics 1890–1940 Modernist era; important theoretical works by W. B. Yeats, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, T. S. Eliot, Virginia Woolf and others; flourishing of “little magazines” 1891 Oscar Wilde publishes Intentions , essays on literature and literary theory 1903 W. E. B. Du Bois, The Souls of Black Folk 1914 Wyndham Lewis begins publishing Blast 1915–1930s Moscow Linguistic Circle and the Prague Linguistic Circle flourish 1916 Ferdinand de Saussure, Course in General Linguistics 1918–1929 Bakhtin Circle, St. Petersburg 1920 Georg Lukács, Theory of the Novel 1922 T. S. Eliot begins publishing Criterion 1923 Institute of Social Research, incorporated into University of Frankfurt 1924 Percy Lubbock, The Craft of Fiction I. A. Richards, Principles of Literary Criticism 1925 Viktor Shklovsky, Theory of Prose