Written Traces

 ABOUT THE NOVELIST William Faulkner (1897-1962) was an American novelist , essayist , poet , short story writer and screen writer of great repute. He was born in a distinguished family in the southern state of Oxford, Mississippi and became the most distinguished novelist of American literature. Faulkner , like many great writers in literary history, never had a formal education. He never graduated from a high school and failed in the only English course that he took. But he worked hard at the craft of writing and won the prestigious Pulitzer Prize and Nobel Prize for fiction. Faulkner started his career as a poet but after his meeting with Sherwood Anderson, who was an already established writer, he started working on his first novel Soldier’s Pay (1926) which he later published with the help of Anderson. Three years later, he published his most famous novel , The Sound and the Fury (1929) and became a major writer. In 1931 , he published Sanctuary , mainly with a view of makin...

  1.                   ABOUT THE NOVELIST Theodore Dreiser, born on 27 August 1871 in Terre Haute, Indiana to John Paul Dreiser and Sarah Maria, was an American novelist and journalist of naturalist school. His novels often featured main characters who succeeded at their objectives despite lack of firm moral code and literary situations that more closely resembles studies of nature than tales of choice and agency. Dreiser attended Indiana University after graduating from high school in Warsaw, Indiana but he left the university without taking a degree. Within several years, Dreiser became a journalist writing exclusively for the Chicago Globe newspaper and then the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. IMPORTANT WORKS ·          Sister Carrie (1900) ·          Jennie Gerhardt (1911) ·          The Financier (1912) ·...

 THE BACKGROUND OF THE NOVEL   To understand the text of the novel Kanthapura it is important to have the knowledge about its background, the inspiration that the author took to write the novel.  The novel “Kanthapura” is a social document, written in 1929 and published in 1938,  about a village in turmoil due to the sources from which it has shaped it’s form. That source is the social and political upheaval of a dependent India. Whatever was happening on the political scene of India in the 1930s finds its due reflection in the novel.  GANDHI’S THOUGHT AND ITS IMPACT The novel is set in the 1930s in an archetypical South Indian village named “Kanthapura” and is inspired by Gandhi’s ideology of “Ahimsa” and  “Satyagraha”. Gandhi doesn't feature in the novel as a character but the presence of Gandhi can be felt in every part of the novel and his philosophy of life and political struggle is reflected by the thought and action of many characters in the novel , ...

 ABOUT NEHRU Nehru (1889-1964) was born into a rich Kashmiri Brahmin family and had a very good education, first at home through governesses and then at Harrow, Cambridge and the Inner Temple. After his education he got involved in India’s freedom fight and played a leading role in that matter by first becoming the President of the Indian National Congress and later becoming the first Prime Minister of free India from August 1947 till his death on 27 May 1964. THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY Nehru wrote his Autobiography during the time of his imprisonment in Dehra Gaol. It took him a period of less than 9 months, from June 1934 to 14 February 1935, to write a work which has the massive manuscript of 976 pages. He began writing his Autobiography in Dehra Gaol and completed in the District Gaol, Almora. The original title for Nehru’s Autobiography was “In and Out of Prison” with a subtitle “An Autobiographical Narrative with mushings on recent events in India.” But later, in 1936, it was publishe...

WHAT IS HIND SWARAJ It is one of the most important book that Gandhi wrote. It was originally written in Gujarati in 1909 on the deck of a ship named S.S Kildare which was bringing Gandhi back from South Africa to London in a period of 10 days. It was first published in Indian Opinion, a journal that Gandhi used to edit in South Africa. Later, it was translated into English and was published in a form of book in 1910. WHY WAS IT WRITTEN It was written after Gandhi’s meeting with the leading ideologue of the extremist group and later of the “Hindu Mahasabha”, Vinayak Damodar Savarkar, a brave and patriotic man, who wished to overthrow British rule from India through violent through his study of world history he was convinced that no country had won its freedom without an armed insurrection. Savarkar, thus, was working to train a band of Indian terrorist in London.  Gandhi although had the same intention to get India free from the British rule but his ideals and approach were differe...

 AN INTRODUCTION The word prose is derived from the Latin expression “Prosa oratio” which means straightforward or direct speech. The French poet Paul Valery compared prose with walking while verse with dancing.  Any kind of literary genre can be written in the form of prose thus it is not restricted to a particular genre. For instance , it is considered that epics are mainly written in verse but the qualities of epics can also be found in Leo Tolstoy's "War and Peace" which is written in prose. FORMS OF PROSE In so far as the forms of prose are concerned, these are of two kinds viz. • Fictional forms, under which falls the category of the short story and the novel. • Non-fictional forms, under which falls the category of essay, biography, autobiography and travelogue. Following are a brief explanation of non-fictional forms of prose. i. Essay The word is derived from French which means attempt. It has a moderate length and a particular topic. Essays are further cla...