BOOK II

ANALYSIS OF LITERARY TEXTS

Revised Edition
 CONTENTS
Pages

Foreword i

Section One: British Poetry

1. Ballad 3

2. Epic 3

3. Free verse 3

4. Mock Epic 3

5. Ode 4

6. Pastoral poetry 4

7. Sonnet 4

8. Geoffrey Chaucer (i) The Canterbury Tales 5

9. Edmund Spenser (i) Prothalamion 9

(ii) The Faerie Queene 10

(iii) Epithalamion 11

10. William Shakespeare (i) Sonnets 1, 14, 18, 19, 29, 30, 33, 55, 129 11

11. John Donne (i) Hymn to God, the Father 18

(ii) The Canonization 19

(iii) The Flea 20

(iv) The Sun Rising 20

(v) A Valediction Forbidding Mourning 21

(vi) Batter My Heart 22

12. George Herbert (i) The Collar 22

13. Henry Vaughan (i) The Retreat 23

14. John Milton (i) Lycidas 23

(ii) On His Blindness 24

(iii) Paradise Lost 26

15. Andrew Marvell (i) To His Coy Mistress 30

(ii) The Garden 31

(iii) Bermudas 31

16. John Dryden (i) MacFlecknoe 32

(ii) Absalom and Achitophel 35

17. Alexander Pope (i) An Essay on Criticism 35

(ii) The Rape of the Lock 36

(iii) The Dunciad 37

(iv) Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot 38

18. Thomas Gray (i) Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard 38

19. William Blake (i) The Tyger 43

(ii) London 44

20. Robert Burns (i) A Red, Red Rose 45

21. William Wordsworth (i) Tintern Abbey Lines 47

(ii) Ode on the Intimations of Immortality 49

(iii) London, 1802 50

(iv) The Solitary Reaper 50

(v) Resolution and Independence 51

(vi) Upon Westminster Bridge 51

22. S. T. Coleridge (i) The Rime of the Ancient Mariner 52

(ii) Dejection: An Ode 55

(iii) Kubla Khan 56

23. Lord Byron (i) The Prisoner of Chillon 57

(ii) Don Juan 57

24. P. B. Shelley (i) Ozymandias 60

(ii) Ode to the West Wind 61

(iii) To a Skylark 62

25. John Keats (i) Ode to a Nightingale 63

(ii) Ode on a Grecian Urn 65

 (iii) To Autumn 66

26. Alfred Tennyson (i) Ulysses 67

(ii) In Memoriam 70

(iii) The Charge of the Light Brigade 72

27. Robert Browning (i) My Last Duchess 73

(ii) Fra Lippo Lippi 75

(iii) Andrea del Sarto 76

(iv) Rabbi Ben Ezra 77

28. Matthew Arnold (i) Dover Beach 78

(ii) The Scholar Gipsy 79

(iii) Thyrsis 80

29. W.B. Yeats (i) Among School Children 84

(ii) Easter, 1916 85

(iii) A Prayer for My Daughter 85

(iv) The Second Coming 86

(v) Sailing to Byzantium 87

(vi) Byzantium 87

30. G. M. Hopkins (i) The Windhover 90

31. Wilfred Owen (i) Strange Meeting 92

(ii) Anthemn for Doomed Youth 92

32. Ezra Pound (i) Hugh Selwyn Mauberley 93

33. T. S. Eliot (i) The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock 93

(ii) The Waste Land 95

34. W. H. Auden (i) Musée des Beaux Arts 101

(ii) The Unknown Citizen 102

(iii) In Memory of W. B. Yeats 102

35. Stephen Spender (i) An Elementary School Classroom 103

36. Dylan Thomas (i) Fern Hill 105

(ii) Poem in October 105

 37. Philip Larkin (i) Church Going 106

(ii) Whitsun Weddings 107

38. Thom Gunn (i) On the Move 108

39. Seamus Heaney (i) Digging 109

(ii) Bogland 109

(iii) Casualty 110

40. Ted Hughes (i) The Thought-Fox 111

(ii) Hawk Roosting 111

(iii) Pike 113

(iv) Thrushes 113

Section Two: British Prose and Fiction

1. Campus Novel 116

2. Epistolary Novel 116

3. Gothic Novel 116

4. Historical Novel 116

5. Magic Realism 117

6. Metafiction 117

7. Picaresque Novel 118

8. Psychological Novel 118

9. Realist Novel 118

10. Science Fiction 119

11. Sentimental Novel 119

12. Stream-of-Consciousness 119

13. Francis Bacon (i) Of Studies 120

(ii) Of Truth 120

14. Sir Thomas More (i) Utopia 120

15. Philip Sidney (i) The Arcadia 121

16. John Bunyan (i) The Pilgrim’s Progress 121

17. Jonathan Swift (i) A Tale of a Tub 125

(ii) The Battle of the Books 126

(iii) Gulliver’s Travels 127

18. Samuel Richardson (i) Pamela 128

19. Henry Fielding (i) Joseph Andrews 130

(ii) Tom Jones 132

20. Lawrence Sterne (i) Tristram Shandy 133

21. Oliver Goldsmith (i) The Vicar of Wakefield 134

22. Walter Scott (i) Kenilworth 135

23. Jane Austen (i) Sense and Sensibility 136

(ii) Pride and Prejudice 136

(iii) Mansfield Park 138

(iv) Emma 139

(v) Persuasion 141

24. Charles Lamb (i) Oxford in the Vacation 142

(ii) Dream Children 143

25. George Eliot (i) Adam Bede 144

(iii) The Mill on the Floss 146

(iii) Silas Marner 148

(iv) Middlemarch 149

26. John Ruskin (i) Unto This Last 150

27. Charles Dickens (i) The Pickwick Papers 151

(ii) Oliver Twist 151

(iii) Nicholas Nickleby 152

(iv) David Copperfield 152

(v) Great Expectations 153

(vi) Our Mutual Friend 155

28. Wilkie Collins (i) The Moonstone 156

29. Charlotte Bronte (i) Jane Eyre 158

30. Emily Bronte (i) Wuthering Heights 160

31. William Makepeace Thackeray (i) Vanity Fair 162

32. Thomas Hardy (i) The Mayor of Casterbridge 163

(ii) Tess of the D’Urbervilles 164

(iii) Jude the Obscure 166

33. Joseph Conrad (i) Heart of Darkness 166

(ii) Nostromo 169

34. E. M. Forster (i) Howards End 170

(ii) A Passage to India 171

35. Rudyard Kipling (i) Kim 174

36. James Joyce (i) A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man 175

(ii) Ulysses 177

37. D.H. Lawrence (i) Sons and Lovers 180

(ii) Women in Love 181

38. Virginia Woolf (i) To the Lighthouse 182

(ii) A Room of One’s Own 183

39. Aldous Huxley (i) Crome Yellow 185

(ii) Brave New World 185

40. Graham Greene (i) The Power and the Glory 186

(ii) The End of the Affair 187

41. George Orwell (i) Animal Farm 187

(ii) Nineteen Eighty Four 189

42. William Golding (i) Lord of the Flies 191

(ii) The Inheritors 192

43. Iris Murdoch (i) Under the Net 192

(ii) The Bell 194

(iii) The Unicorn 194

44. Muriel Spark (i) The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie 195

45. John Fowles (i) The French Lieutenant’s Woman 196

 46. Margaret Drabble (i) The Waterfall 197

(ii) The Middle Ground 198

47. Doris Lessing (i) The Grass is Singing 198

(ii) The Golden Notebook 199

48. Anita Brookner (i) Hotel du Lac 200

49. Angela Carter (i) Nights at the Circus 200

(ii) Black Venus 202

50. A.S. Byatt (i) Possession 202

51. Zadie Smith (i) White Teeth 203

52. Ian McEwan (i) Amsterdam 205

(ii) Atonement 206

(iii) Saturday 206

Section Three: British Drama

1. Alienation Effect 208

2. Angry Young Man 208

3. Comedy of Humours 208

4. Comedy of Manners and Restoration Comedy 208

5. Kitchen Sink Drama 209

6. Mysteries, Miracle and Morality Plays 209

7. Problem Play 209

8. Senecan Tragedy 210

9. Sentimental Comedy 210

10. Shakespearean Stage 210

11. Theatre of the Absurd 211

12. Theatre of Cruelty 212

13. University Wits 212

14. Thomas Kyd (i) The Spanish Tragedy 213

15. Christopher Marlowe (i) Doctor Faustus 214

 (ii) Edward II 221

16. William Shakespeare: Comedies (i) The Comedy of Errors 223

(ii) A Midsummer Night’s Dream 224

(iii) The Merchant of Venice 226

(iv) As You Like It 226

(v) Twelfth Night 226

Problem Plays (vi) Troilus and Cressida 227

(vii) All’s Well That Ends Well 228

(viii) Measure for Measure 228

Tragedies (ix) Titus Andronicus 228

(x) Hamlet 229

(xi) Othello 230

(xii) King Lear 231

(xiii) Macbeth 231

Roman Tragedies (xiv) Julius Caesar 231

(xv) Antony and Cleopatra 234

(xvi) Coriolanus 235

Romance (xvii) The Tempest 236

17. Ben Jonson (i) Volpone 239

(ii) Epicoene 240

18. William Congreve (i) The Way of the World 240

19. Oliver Goldsmith (i) The Good Natur’d Man 241

(ii) She Stoops to Conquer 241

20. Richard Sheridan (i) The School for Scandal 242

21. Oscar Wilde (i) The Importance of Being Earnest 244

22. J.M. Synge (i) Riders to the Sea 246

(ii) The Playboy of the Western World 246

23. George Bernard Shaw (i) Arms and the Man 247

(ii) Pygmalion 248

 (iii) The Apple Cart 252

24. T.S. Eliot (i) Murder in the Cathedral 252

25. Samuel Beckett (i) Waiting for Godot 254

(ii) Endgame 255

26. John Osborne (i) Look Back in Anger 256

27. Harold Pinter (i) The Birthday Party 259

(ii) The Caretaker 261

(iii) The Homecoming 262

28. Tom Stoppard (i) Rosencrantz and Guildenstern 263

(ii) Travesties 264

(iii) Arcadia 264

29. Edward Bond (i) Lear 264

(ii) The Bundle 269

30. Caryl Churchill (i) Top Girls 270

(ii) Cloud Nine 271

(iii) Serious Money 272

 Foreword to Revised Edition

This compilation of analytical summaries covers the canonical texts in

British literature from the beginnings to early 21 st century. This book is
a useful introduction to any study on English literature, provides the
reader an overview of the discipline, and is an essential handbook for
any competitive exam on the subject.

Students will get a thorough and comprehensive view of English

literature if they read this book along with other TES publications, such
as The Contemporary Student’s Encyclopedia of English Literature,
Book I: Literary History and Literary Theory, Book III: Literary
Criticism, Book IV: Am erican and Commonwealth Literatures, as well
as the Easy Handbooks which enables quick revision.

These and other upcoming books are part of our dedicated endeavour to
produce a set of all-inclusive and user-friendly study materials for the
English literature student that will help her to tackle any examination.

Kalyani Vallath
2014