Dr.M.Mazumdar

Wilfred Owen, a renowned English poet wrote poetry out of the experiences of the warfare in France and the First World War. His poetry can be found in his 27 poems in Mind at War and 19 poems in Out in the Dark. This poem 'Strange Meeting' is highly dramatic, ironical and touching poem. The scene in the poem is hell. Two dead soldiers meet there by chance. It is a strange meeting at a stranger meeting place. However, this strange meeting refers to the stranger's fate for those who are the innocent victims of the war. The poem w as written in the spring or early summer of 1918 and stands in the forefront of Owen's achievements. Siegfried Sassoon called it Owen's passport to immortality. On the poet's memorial in the grounds of Shrewsbury Abbey is engraved the famous quotation from this poem: "I am the enemy you killed, my friend" the words which continue to re-echo down the years. "Strange Meeting” is a deeply poignant and powerful anti-war poem th...

Abin Chakraborty is Assistant Professor in the Department of English, Chandernagore College, West Bengal. He edits the international peer-reviewed journal, Postcolonial Interventions. This volume provides an overview of popular culture and examines in particular how it represents, influences and even reinvents Indian society. Each chapter outlines key theoretical insights from various fields of study—such as Marxism, gender, sexuality, postcolonialism, postmodernism—and demonstrates how they may be used to understand the ever-expanding domain of popular culture. Examples from global culture as well as contemporary India have been used to further enrich this survey. Popular Culture has thus been prepared to enable Indian students and scholars to comprehensively analyse diverse forms and representations of popular culture from varying theoretical perspectives. Contents: Introduction.1. Structuralist approaches to popular culture. 2. Marxist theories of popular culture. 3. Gender, sexuali...

Agatha Christie, born in 1890 in Torquay, England, became one of the most prolific and beloved mystery writers of all time. She began writing during World War I and went on to pen over 100 novels, plays and short story collections featuring iconic detectives like Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple. The Murder of Roger Ackroyd is a mystery novel by the British writer Agatha Christie, her third to feature Belgian Hercule Poirot as the lead detective. The novel was published in the UK in June 1926 by William Collins, Sons, having previously been serialised as Who Killed Ackroyd?  The novel was well received from its first publication, and has been called Christie's masterpiece. In 2013, the British Crime Writers' Association voted it the best crime novel ever. It is one of Christie's best-known and most controversial novels, its innovative twist ending having a significant impact on the genre. Howard Haycraft included it in his list of the most influential crime novels ever writte...

The Charge of the Light Brigade" is an 1854 narrative poem by the Victorian poet, Alfred, Lord Tennyson about the cavalry charge of the same name at the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War. He wrote the original version on 2 December 1854, and it was published on 9 December 1854 in The Examiner. He was the Poet Laureate of the United Kingdom at the time. The poem was subsequently revised and expanded for inclusion in Maud and Other Poems (1855). The 600 troops of the brigade followed ambiguous orders to charge a heavily defended position though they knew they had little chance of survival. In this battle, a British cavalry unit—the “Light Brigade”—was commanded to charge against a Russian artillery unit. The order was almost suicidal, and the brigade was decimated in the charge. “The Charge of the Light Brigade” celebrates the self-sacrifice and heroism of the cavalrymen, suggesting that bravery consists of doing one's duty even when it leads to almost certain death. Th...

Ben Jonson (1572- 1637, born in London) was an English Stuart dramatist, lyric poet, and literary critic. He is generally regarded as the second most important English dramatist, after William Shakespeare  and during the reign of James I . Among his major plays are the comedies Every Man in His Humour (1598), Volpone (1605), Epicoene; or, The Silent Woman (1609), The Alchemist (1610), and Bartholomew Fair (1614). Volpone, the Italian for "sly fox" is a comedy play, drawing on elements of city comedy and beast fable. A merciless satire of greed and lust, it remains Jonson's most-performed play, and it is ranked among the finest Jacobean-era comedies. The drama takes place in seventeenth-century Venice, over the course of one day. Volpone (The Fox) is without heirs, is a Venetian gentleman who pretends to be on his deathbed after a long illness in order to dupe Voltore (The Vulture), Corbaccio (The Raven) and Corvino (The Crow), three men who aspire to inherit his fo...