Dr.M.Mazumdar

  The Oxford movement stimulated religious feelings. It was strong protest against the materialism and utilitarianism of the Victorian age. Oxford movement was basically a movement for religious reform, also known as Tractarian movement or Anglo Catholic Revival. It is called Oxford because some Oxford professors and scholars were the force at the back of it. The Oxford movement sprang mainly from the conditions that arose in England as a result of the demand of equal treatment by the non-conformists on the one hand and by the Roman Catholics on the other. This movement had nothing to do with politics. The aim of the Oxford movement was to restore the dignity, purity and zeal of church. It also aimed to protect the church from the encroachment of the state as threatened by the Whig reform Bill of 1832. Gates writes that Oxford movement was in its essence an attempt to reconstruct the English Church in harmony with the romantic (mediaeval) ideal. The Oxford movement stressed the abs...

Cardinal Newman was the pioneer of the Oxford or Tractarian movement. He was born in 1801 in city of London. He was educated at Trinity College, Oxford where he studied widely. Newman was deeply committed to education to the spiritual as well as academic excellence. He described education as his time and he referred to education in a large sense of the world. He believed in liberal education which developed a whole human personality with intellectual excellence. Such human beings shine in every walk of life under all possible circumstances. The Idea of a University: Newman’s “The Idea of a university” is like most of his books, an occasional work. Actually it consists of two books, the discourses on the “Scope and Nature of University Education” (1852), and “Lecture and Essay on University subjects” (1859), a collection of lectures and articles written by Newman as the founding president of the university. “The Idea of a University” deals with the aim of university education. It also d...

The "Spectator Club" by Richard Steele and Joseph Addison is a fictional club of seven members, each representing different facets of English society. The document summarizes the characters that were part of the fictional "Spectator Club" created by Richard Steele in his magazine The Spectator. The essay begins by introducing the club members. The club included six main members that represented different parts of 18th century English society and served as mouthpieces for Steele's commentary: Sir Roger de Coverley is a Baronet, fifty six year old and represented the country gentry. He was known for his good sense, good nature, and a cheerful disposition. He is from Worcestershire and is a baronet (A type of hereditary British honorary title). Sir Roger is liked by everyone. He once loved a widow but was rejected. This changed him and made him dress simply. Sir Roger is friendly and fair to his tenants and servants. He is a justice and is respected by all.  The ne...

John Lyly (born 1554?, Kent, Eng.—died November 1606, London) was an author considered to be the first English prose stylist to leave an enduring impression upon the language. As a playwright, he also contributed to the development of prose dialogue in English comedy. Lyly was one of the University Wits (group of dramatists who graduated from the Cambridge or the Oxford) who was educated at Magdalen College, Oxford, and went to London about 1576. There he gained fame with the publication of two prose romances, Euphues: The Anatomy of Wit (1578), a didactic romance, fashionable prose comedy and Euphues and His England (1580), which together made him the most fashionable English writer of the 1580s.  The character of Euphues through his  popularized a highly stylized prose style known as euphuism, characterized by elaborate rhetoric, similes,   antithesis, puns, elaborate natural-history similes, classical allusions, series of parallel clauses, balanced sentence struct...

Leslie A. Fiedler (born March 8, 1917, Newark, New Jersey, U.S.—died January 29, 2003, Buffalo, New York) was an American literary critic who applied psychological (chiefly Freudian) and social theories to American literature. Fiedler attended the University of Wisconsin (M.A., 1939; Ph.D., 1941), and, after service in the U.S. Naval Reserve from 1942 to 1946, he did further research at Harvard University. Thereafter he taught at many universities both in the United States and abroad, chiefly at the State University of New York at Buffalo. Over the years, Fiedler propounded many ingenious but controversial theories. He gained considerable notoriety with his 1948 essay “Come Back to the Raft Ag’in, Huck Honey!,” later republished in An End to Innocence (1955), which raised issues of race and sexuality. His major work, Love and Death in the American Novel (1960), argues that much of American literature—those works, for example, that discuss life on the high seas or in the wilderness—embo...

Internal Examination, 2025 FYUG 1st Semester  Subject - DSC 102 (English) Full Marks - 20 1. Attempt any 5 of the following questions - 5×2= 10 a) What is an Absurd play ? Give one example? b) What are the prophecies given by the witches in Act -1 of the play _Macbeth_? c) Write 2 examples of Pre-shakespearean drama? d) Who is Macduff? e) "Fair is Foul and Foul is Fair" - explain? f) Mention 4  comedies of William Shakespeare? g) Who are the 2 friends of Doctor Faustus?  2. Attempt any one of the following questions - 10 a) Discuss the character of Lady Macbeth? b) Discuss the major types and features of Mediaeval English Drama? e) Critically examine the character of Doctor Faustus as a tragic hero?