ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -His most popular work is Will in the World, a biography of Shakespeare that was on The New York Times Best Seller list for nine weeks. He won the Pulitzer Prize for General Non-Fiction in 2012 and the National Book Award for Nonfiction in 2011 for The Swerve: How the World Became Modern.

Detailed explanation-2: -Seventeenth century John Dryden, in his essay “Of Dramatick Poesie” (1668) and other essays, condemned the improbabilities of Shakespeare’s late romances. Shakespeare lacked decorum, in Dryden’s view, largely because he had written for an ignorant age and poorly educated audiences.

Detailed explanation-3: -Stephen Greenblatt stated that Literature is not isolated from social and cultural themes. He also believes that a text is shaped by the external agents around itself. It means that an author’s mindset is shaped by social and cultural responses between author and engagements with the world.

Detailed explanation-4: -He is many times flat, insipid; his comic wit degenerating into clenches; his serious swelling into Bombast. But he is always great, when some great occasion is presented to him: no man can say he ever had a fit subject for his wit, and did not then raise himself as high above the rest of the poets.