Contemporary Literary Review India

A Clandestine Countess in a Sociable Setting

2024-04-28T09:26:34+00:00

Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence (1920) is an American novel of manners set in pre-war New York society. It explores the dichotomies present in old New York by comparing the new ways with the old in the form of characters representing contrasts between American and European ideals. This study aims at understanding the elements of modernism prevalent in the novel. Taking into account Madam Olenska’s clandestine nature with regard to the hieroglyphic world she enters, the contrasts and comparisons between America and Europe, the evolution of America and sense of innocence of the time, the analysis proves how Edith Wharton's The Age of Innocence is an escapist work that vouches for divorce from the old ways.

Reinstating the Literary Aesthetics of Telugu Folk Songs in G. Kalyana Rao’s Untouchable Spring

2024-04-28T09:26:35+00:00

The paper tries to focus on the natural, participatory, and linguistic elements of Telugu folk songs in particular, presented in the novel Untouchable Spring. Telugu folk songs, presented through the characters in the novel, correspond to Wordsworth’s propositions on the elements of poetry. Do the folk songs employ the spontaneous overflow of emotions, explained by Wordsworth? Does the novelist try to de construct the very understanding of art? In what way caste oppression influence the folk songs? Are the questions the paper tries to answer. The novel by creating the alternative aesthetics, focuses on the naturalness not only in language, but in the activities where people in the village are involved in. the novel also proposes that, the folk art shouldn’t be considered insignificant. Folk art gives a space where the villagers can find themselves. The novel also stresses on the sense of othering, experienced by the urban reader, but can relate with the aesthetically pleasing images. The paper tries to focus on these nuances of folk art, presented in the novel.

Erasure to Assertion: Dalit Women in Bama’s Sangati

2024-04-28T09:26:35+00:00

It’s a matter of great regret to note that women even in this century play second fiddle to men. The condition of marginalized women in this context is quite inexplicable. Many writers have tried to focus their attention on this unfortunate section of the society. A number of authors have emerged over the recent years to represent them as they are so as to elevate their condition and way of life but no such spectacular improvement is marked in the society so far.Bama through her novel Sangati has made her voice more articulate over the deplorable plight of the Dalits in general and the subjugated people of Tamil Nadu in particular. The paper will also try to show the three fold discriminations that these marginalized in their day to day life. Here, Bama has not just portrayed these characters as victims, rather, they have come forward to assert their existence and have put up strong protest whenever they are humiliated and discriminated. Their voice becomes more distinct, serious and acute when they raise concern over the unjust issues they face in life. The author has given a concrete picture of the life of these female characters who maintain their life as worse as their generations of ancestors put together.

Stephen Dedalus’s modernist journey in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man

2024-04-28T09:26:35+00:00

Dublin, 1904 Trieste, 1914. The time period during which James Joyce wrote the novel is the same period that produced revolutionary developments in science and arts. This revolutionized knowledge became the ultimate foundation for modern arts. The art forms had begun to show a progressive inclination towards a certain preciosity in ways of exhibition, representation and innovations. In Literature, the novel writings showed new ways of rendering how people experienced the world around them. The novelists inward turned to the everyday complexities of human lives, the self-conscious perseverance, the attempted efforts to capture the chaotic order and in such collective ways, authentically established the modernist intelligence and ways of writing the ‘modernist novel’.

Ginsberg’s Howl’s Influence on the Emergence of Hip-hop music

2024-04-28T09:26:35+00:00

Howl (1955) is regarded as one of the most influential and prophetic poems of Allen Ginsberg and the modern America. It’s a lamentation for the creative minds and a portrayal of oppressed American society which suppresses all the radical and rebellious artists. The establishment of this poem’s literary merit in the literary circle has always been under great scrutiny as it was charged for obscenity. Consequently, after a precarious journey and suffering criticism by several conservative literary critics and scholars, Ginsberg’s Howl sustained itself in America, and led to influence many radical writers and artists.

In the similar manner, later in 1970s, emerged a performing art called rap music, which is generally engulfed under the terminology of hip-hop (deejaying, rapping, graffiti painting, break dancing). Hip-hop began as an expression of rebellion against established system in black communities but eventually got celebrated through the entire America.

This paper tries to situate Howl and Ginsberg as revolutionary, self-reflexive and an influence which paved the way for the birth of counter-cultures. A parallel between the two movements (Beat movement and Hip-hop) is searched and contemplated by pointing out the similarities in the ethos of both of these movements.

The Biographical and Psycho-Social Underpinnings of Tennessee Williams’ Characterisation in A Streetcar Named Desire