Written Traces

Life is not easy.  Life is difficult. Life is challenging. Life is relentless. Life is a battlefield, and you are the crippled warrior.  You don't stand a chance.  The only thing you can do is either fight with your dignity intact or surrender, smothering your own self-respect. My bad luck is that I chose the former.  People are fake in brief encounters.  People are selfish in the long run.  Tonight, I struggle to find anything worthwhile in the people I have encountered throughout my life. I'm writing this in a moment of profound frustration. Perhaps time will soften these words, but tonight, this is what the world feels like. For years, I have been instrumental in the success and upliftment of those I considered my own. My assistance is genuine, without any expectation of personal gain, only because I believe that when my time of need arrives, they will remember me. Instead they remind me, in ways subtle and obvious, that I am not worthy of their kindness...

The Origin of American Short Story: Although, there are many discrepancy in posing short story with an exact definition but the most agreeable would be “a short story is something that unfolds some kind of idea through the action and interaction of the characters at some definite time and place.” The only difference lies in the disparity of is meaning by various writers is the positioning of its elements I e to which one they prioritize the most. Sir Hugh Warpole , for instance, gave the plot it’s supremacy by calling it the distinguishing feature of a short story. Turgenev , gave the characters the importance in addressing a definition to a short story. But Edgar Allan Poe , the master practitioner of modern short story, while defining short story gave the supreme importance to a “pre-conceived effect” which should be realized through the plot of a story. In his famous review of Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne, Poe mentioned that there should not be any word written which doe...

ABOUT THE WRITER Samuel Langhorne Clemens (1834-1910), popularly known as Mark Twain, was an American writer, humourist, publisher and lecturer. He was lauded as “the greatest humourist the United States has produced” and entitled with “the father of American Literature” by William Faulkner.  Before Twain, the language used in producing literature in America was that of the puritanical i.e polished and refined as in the case of Nathaniel Hawthorne. Thus, the language missed the mark of exploring the ruggedness of the country. He was the first person in the history of American literature to ever use the regional dialect in a work of fiction. Very appropriately remarked by Earnest Hemmingway, " there were nothing like Mark Twain and there will not be anything quite like him". Twain was born in Florida, Missouri to John Marshall Clemens and Jane Lampton. However, at the age of three the family moved to Hannibal where Twain was raised. Samuel Langhorne Clemens, assumed the name o...

THE GREAT MIGRATION (FIRST IN 1620 THEN A GREAT SCALE MIGRATION IN 1630) It has roots with the dethronment of the Roamn Catholic Church and the emergence of Church of England. Within the church of England began further division and with the division began puritanism  Before in America it already started in England In England, it was called protestantism and it produced the church of England or the Anglican Church. For many the reformation wasn't enough to end the corruption in church. THE DIVISION :  From the Church of England emerged two groups of believers Pilgrims and Puritans Pilgrims completely wanted to separate themselves from the church of England. Therefore, they also been referred to as separatist. Puritan wanted to reform the church of England by staying inside the church. Thus they are called the non-separtist. B RADFORD & THE PILGRIMS (1620) In 1620, the Mayflower set sail from Plymouth, England with Willam Bradford and 101 other pilgrims.  The original d...

  Introduction From 17th century to modern day drama of 20th century. Every national, cultural, artistic struggle that helped shaped the growth of 20th century modern American Drama. Mainstream by Eugene O’Neill in 1920s, established it as a powerful literary genre. But American drama was struggling to exist for more than 200 years by then. Began before the American independence. The puritan settlers brought their English love for theatre with them. Puritan opposition: Puritan had the belief in hard work, frugality and piety. For them theatrical activities was a curse. The first theatrical performance Ye Bare and Ye Cubb in 1665 said to have resulted in the trial of the actors. Furthermore, there were laws which prohibited theatrical activities in the continent. Theatre in 17th century Colleges: Theatrical activities were permitted in colleges after initial hesitation to promote intellectual and oratorical activities which, in turn , gave immense relief to te students after the ri...

  Tracing Back to the Ancient Times The Follow-Up The Grotesque Suggestion   Entering to the Human Psyche Results In Women and Their Cosmetics The valorization of the white standard of beauty or the color white apexed to anything that is desirable goes as far back as to the ancient times. In the 3 rd century BC, an Asiatic religion named Manicheism, founded by a Persian named Mani, was based on the struggle of the eternally conflicted principle of the Spiritual World of Light and the Evil World of Darkness. This is also known to be the Philosophical Dualism of Manicheism. Taking from there, the concept of blackness gained the unfavorable connotations best implicated in phrase like, ‘’black is evil’’, ‘’black as sin’’, ‘’black as a witch’’ so on and so forth. The ugliness of black was contrasted to the purity of white so much so as to make the color black not only a matter of pigmentation but also to acquire a moral connotation. With this began the dominance of white...

  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...

 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) ·...