LITERATURE
The word literature is something that we have all heard, but what exactly constitutes literature? In this unit we will try and understand the basic features of literature and its various aspects. The term 'literature' covers poetry, novel, drama, the short story and the literary essay. Poetry's appeal is mainly to emotions and it depends for its effect on rhythm and other sound effects. The novel is a socially-oriented form of writing and is more recent in origin than poetry and drama. Drama is meant for the stage. It has acts. Some dramas have a single act and are called one-act plays. The short story is fiction which is much shorter in length than the novel. Let us first understand the term 'literature' and then move on to various other elements of literature like poetry, novel and the drama.
THE TERM 'LITERATURE'
'Literature' is an umbrella term for poetry, fiction, drama and criticism. All these emanate from and get sustenance from the imagination and also appeal to the imagination. Human emotions are mostly their subject matter and they mix pleasure with instruction or knowledge-giving. Such writings have an artistic aspect to them.
POETRY
Poetry is the oldest from of literature and has a rich written and oral tradition. In India's ancient poetic tradition, there are epics like Ramayana and Mahabharata. The great dramatist Kalidasa wrote both dramatic and non-dramatic poetry. Ancient Greece had Homer who was known for his work Odyssey. Italy had Dante, the author of the Divine Comedy. You must have heard of many English poets and may have even read them in your school textbook. Following are some of the eminent English poets: Geoffery Chaucer, Edmund Spenser, John Milton, Alexander Pope William Wordsworth, John Keats, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, T.S. Eliot, W.B. Yeats.
Chaucer was a fourteenth century poet who wrote satire and humorous poetry. Spenser (16th century) wrote about chivalry. Milton wrote Paradise Lost. Pope wrote Satire (18th Century) 'Satire' is writing which attacks or mocks someone through humour and wit.). Wordsworth, Shelley and Keats were Romantic poets of the nineteenth century. The period after the first three decades of the nineteenth century was called the Victorian period. Here Tennyson wrote elegiac poetry, which is essentially poetry which laments the loss of someone. Robert Browning wrote dramatic monologues. Yeats and Eliot were twentieth century modernists though early Yeats had romantic elements in his poetry. Now let us look at some of the varieties of poetry.
Short poems capable of being sung are lyrics. A 'sonnet' is a 14-line poem following a metrical scheme. Epics are very long poems that talk about heroes. An 'ode' is an address to someone. A poem mourning somebody is an 'elegy'.
Let us have a quick look at Hindi poetry and poetry in some other Indian languages. Tulsidas and Kabir are household names. Surdas was another Bhakti poet. Jayashankar Prased was a great poet from the pre-modernist period. More recently we have had Agyeya, Harivanshrai Bachhan, Dinkar, Nirala and Muktibodh. Recent Punjabi poetry has a great poet in Amrita Pritam. Urdu has had Firaq Gorakhpuri whose illustrious predecessors were Ghalib and Meer. 'Ghazals' reach out to common people. Bangla poetry has given us the only Indian to win the Nobel Prize for Literature i.e. Rabindranath Tagore.
Appreciating poetry well involves awareness of rhythm, of figurative language (this includes similes and metaphors) and a good ear for music. Poetry gives organization to sounds and ideas both. It delights as it instructs. Simile is a direct comparison. Metaphor is indirect.
Among Indian poets in English, better known names in recent times have been Derek Walcott from the Caribbean and Seamus Heaney from Ireland.
THE NOVEL
Like poetry, a very popular form of literature is the novel. The novel, as we know it today, is an 18th century development. In England the pioneers were samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding.
The novel has a story, a plot and a number of characters. It has a setting, a theme and a point of view. The story can be told in the first person or the third person. Mostly the telling is done in the third person. The 'story' is the sequence of events. Plot is the arrangement of story parts and management of character, especially in terms of how they act out the story line. The way a novelist portrays his characters is called characteriztion.
In England the big names among novelists (apart from Richardson and Fielding named above) have been Jane Austen, George Eliot (both women novelists), Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, E.M. Forster etc. Virginia Woolf is a leading name among 20th century women novelists.
Richardson's Clarissa, Fielding's Tom Jones, Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, George Eliot's Middlemarch, Dicken's David Copperfield, Hardy's Mayor of Casterbridge, Joyce's Ulysses, Lawrence's Sons and Lovers, Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Forster's A passage to India have been extremely famous novels. Outside this, we have Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Thackeray's Vanity Fair, Golding's Lord of the Files etc. All these are big names.
Among Indian writers in English we have had Mulk Raj Anand, R.K. Narayan, Khushwant Singh, Raja Rao, Anita Desai etc. From other Commonwealth countries we have V.S. Naipaul (Trinidad), Patrick White (Australia) Margaret Atwood, and Michael Ondaatje (Caanada).
India's Salman Rushdie is a famous expatriate writer like Naipaul, So is Rohinton Mistry. The work of these commonwealth writers is seen as forming a part of post-colonial literature.
Among Indian languages a very famous name in Hindi is Prem Chand, author of Godan. After him there have been Agyeya, Mohan Rakesh, Shrilal Shukla etc.
Bengali, Malayalam, Gujarati, Punjabi, Marathi, Assamese etc all have two-three or more great novelists. Such writers have mostly been honoured with the Gyanpith award, one of India's biggest literary honours.
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