Literature and Life

Literature is composed of those books which by their subject matter and mode of treating it are of general human interest and in which the element of form and the pleasure which form gives are essenti...

Flat and Round Characters

Characters are a vital component of any literary work. Characters can be sorted into different types according to their creation and development. Flat and round characters are one such classification....

Dramatic Monologue

Monologue refers to a speech or a verbal presentation that a character gives to exhibit his ideas and thoughts in a loud manner. Through monologue, the character shares his thoughts with the audience ...

Ballads

A ballad is a popular narrative song passed down orally. Folk (or traditional) ballads are anonymous and recount tragic, comic, or heroic stories emphasising a central dramatic event; examples include...

Aesthetic Distance

Aesthetics is a word that comes from the ancient Greeks. It is used to describe the relationship between art and one's perceptions of beauty. The word is also used to summarize the style of one artist...

Imagery

Imagery is a very common term in Modern criticism. It stands for all the objects and qualities of sense perceptions referred to in a poem or any other literary writing. It is thus the conveying of sen...

Levels of Aesthetic Distance

Aesthetic distance, the frame of reference that an artist creates by the use of technical devices in and around the work of art is to differentiate it psychologically from reality. German playwright B...

Homer’s Epics

Homer, the earliest poet in Western culture, composed two major works Iliad and Odyssey. In conjunction with Hesiod, Homer acts as a great pool of information for the Greeks about their gods. The Gree...

Homer

T S Eliot said that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. Homer is perhaps the greatest of all epic poets and his legendary status was well established by the time of Classical Athen...

Irony 

Irony is a literary and rhetorical device where there is a contrast between expectations and reality. It's when the intended meaning of words is different from the actual meaning or a situation turns ...