The term English literature means literature written in the English language, that is also literature in English by writers that did not come from England. Beowulf is one of the first books in English. Geoffrey Chaucer, Shakespeare, John Milton, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen, George Eliot, Thomas Hardy, D.H. Lawrence, Virginia Woolf and Ted Hughes are all important English writers.
Joseph Conrad was Polish, Robert Burns was Scottish, James Joyce was Irish, Dylan Thomas was Welsh, Edgar Allan Poewas American, Salman Rushdie is Indian, V. S. Naipaul is Trinidadian, Vladimir Nabokov was Russian. In other words, English literature includes the varieties and dialects of English spoken around the world.
Joseph Conrad (3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) (real name: Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski) was a Polish writer, regarded as one of the greatest English-language novelists. This is very remarkable, because he did not learn to speak English well until he was in his 20s and therefore always had a Polish accent.
People think Conrad's prose style is one of the best of all English novelists. He also is seen as important for paving the way to modernist literature. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters have influenced many modern writers and inspired such films as Apocalypse Now (after Conrad's Heart of Darkness).
Conrad lived in the time of the British Empire and worked in the Merchant Navy. So he had experience enough to write novels and short stories about empire and navy.
James Augustine Aloysius Joyce (Irish: Séamus Seoighe) (2 February 1882 - 13 January 1941) was an Irish writer and poet of the modernist movement. He was from Dublin, Ireland. He wore an eyepatch, because of eye damage. He could not see well.
His books are written in a special style. At first he wrote in a way which describes very accurately how life is, in the short story collection called Dubliners. In his next book, called A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, he started a new style. It is called stream of consciousness, and influenced many other writers in the 20th century.
Some books that Joyce wrote are:
- Dubliners (1914)
- A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
- Ulysses (1922)
- Finnegans Wake (1939).
Joyce met Nora Barnacle in 1904 and they began to have a long relationship until his death in 1941. The couple moved out of Dublin to Zürich in 1904, then to Trieste, Paris then back to Zürich. They married in 1931. They had a son and a daughter. Their daughter had a mental illness later in her life.
Joyce became a very famous writer after he published Ulysses. He also began to have a lot of problems with his eyes and his family. But he still completed his last book, Finnegans Wake by 1939.
A monument of James Joyce next to O'Connell Street, Dublin
Salman Rushdie, (Devanagari : अहमद सलमान रश्दी Nastaliq:سلمان رشدی; born 19 June1947) known as Mallun Rushdie in Islamic world, is a novelist and essayist andauthor of Midnight's Children (1981), which won the Booker Prize, and this later won the "Booker of Bookers". Rushdie was born in India, but lives in England.
Salman Rushdie is well-known for writing stories which use "magic realism", which is similar to surrealism. This means that things in his stories happen which may be magic or impossible, such as falling from an aeroplane and floating down as gently as paper[1]. He often writes about India, and his stories often are set in different parts of the world[2].
In 1988, Rushdie wrote a book called The Satanic Verses. The book included a fictional story about some characters with a made-up religion. Some people have said that it insults Muhammad, but others disagree. Rushdie said about the story: "his Prophet was not called Muhammad, lived in a city not called Mecca, and created a religion not (or not quite) called Islam. And he appeared only in the dream sequences of a man being driven insane by his loss of faith."[3]. Because of this book, a fatwawas issued by Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini of Iran. It called for Rushdie's execution.[4]
The leader of the country of Iran talked on the radio about Rushdie. He said that Rushdie did not believe in Islam and that Rushdie should be executed because he thought the book was bad. This is called a fatwa. In the year 1989, the British government began protecting Rushdie. He says he has always been an atheist, but is still interested in religion[3].
Rushdie was knighted for services to literature in the Queen's Birthday Honours on 16 June 2007. Many nations with Muslim majorities were not happy with this. Pakistan's Religious Affairs Minister Muhammad Ijaz-ul-Haq said the knighthood was wrong. Then the Prime Minister of Pakistan Benazir Bhutto said this was not the way Pakistan thought. Their fathers Zia-ul-Haq and Zulfikar Ali Bhutto were in Rushdie's novel Shame.
The BBC said that "In 1998, the Iranian Government gave a public commitment it would not carry out the death sentence against Mr Rushdie."[5], but some people such as "Iranian hardliners" don't agree.[5]
.
.
.
No comments:
Post a Comment