ENGLISH LITERATURE (CBSE/UGC NET)

Detailed explanation-1: -Hamlet is often perceived as a philosophical character. Some of the most prominent philosophical theories in Hamlet are relativism, existentialism, and scepticism. Hamlet expresses a relativist idea when he says to Rosencrantz: “there is nothing either good or bad but thinking makes it so” (2.2.

Detailed explanation-2: -Hamlet can be viewed through a feminist lens by focusing on Ophelia and Gertrude and how various other male characters treat them. Ophelia and Gertrude are dismissed as characters through the entire play because they are women. Hamlet refers to women as “frailty, ” implying that they are weak and are dependent on men.

Detailed explanation-3: -Psychoanalytical literary criticism, on one level, concerns itself with dreams, for dreams are a reflection of the unconscious psychological states of dreamers. Freud, for example, contends that dreams are “the guardians of sleep” where they become “disguised fulfillments of repressed wishes.”Sigmund Freud.

Detailed explanation-4: -An example showing a psychoanalytic focus on literary characters is Frederick Crews’s reading in The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (1966). Frederick Crews, The Sins of the Fathers: Hawthorne’s Psychological Themes (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989).