Written Traces

NOSTALGIA by Anwesha Dash People love the nostalgia, love to live in the nostalgia, enthralled to reminiscence at any given instances that would be enough for evoking the feeling. I was no different. I used to spend a considerable amount of time in finding anything that would flash my glorious past in front of mine eyes. Valued things have been discovered from that corner of the brain which is off limits any seldom can be accessible, in a fit of sheer motivation. Now, I am greatly revulsive to that. And I, at the third decade of my life, have realised that nostalgia not just brings out the good but also all the hurts and losses that followed through the life. Not only reminds me of that incident which was so meaningful to me but also the ones with whom I have shared those moments which were so dear to me. In fact, it is not moment but the people who gives it meaning. The people, the milieu, the period is what I care and value. Not a single instance of nostalgia that I have where I c...

  AMERICAN RENAISSANCE The phrase was first used by F.O Mattheiesn in his book American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). This period was represented by a spirit of National consciousness in the works of authors like the writers of New Englanders The humorists Herman Melville Walt Whitman and so on The newly found democratic forces and the romantic period of Europe was the influencing factor of this phase of literary activities which emphasized on producing literature which depicts native scenes and characters so as to create a new identity of America. The romantic spirit of this phase valued upon the spirit of individualism, common person and inspired imagination. The chief proponents of this period were Ralph Waldo Emerson (The Father of Transcendentalism), Henry David Thoreau and many of their associates who were driven by a new optimistic affirmation by the Romantic movement. TRANSCENDENTALISM It is a movement which was a ...

ABOUT THE NOVELIST Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804-1864) was an American novelist, dark romantic and a short story writer whose works predominantly focused on history, morality and religion.  Hawthorne was born in 1804 at Salem, Massachusetts, in a Puritan family that had migrated to New England in the early seventeenth century. His father was a sea-captain and his mother belonged to an ancient family called the Mannings. He lost his father at a tender age of four and at the age of nine became lame for a while during which he spent most of his time studying books, particularly those of Shakespeare, Spenser and Bunyan. He was very much interested in studying religion and Christian symbolism is also pronounced in most of his works. He also massively read the annals and old records of New England in order to come to terms with the past. Hawthorne attended Bowdoin College in Maine at which he befriended many friends most notably Horatio Bridge who helped him in publishing his firs...