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(1) Savitri
Savitri a legend and a symbol by Sir Aurobindo Ghosh. Savitri
a legend and a symbol is an epic poem
which is written in blank verse. Savitri based upon the theology from the
Mahabharata. Its Central theme revolves around the transcendence of man and
Communication on evolution and emergence of an Immortal super mental race upon
Earth. The original poem was written into 24000 lines.
This Epic poem`s story revolves around a king
named as Aswapathy who is the king of Madra he was childless so he worshipped
many Gods and Goddesses as a result goddess Savitri pleased with him so she granted
beautiful girl, as she was given by goddess Savitri he gave her name after her.
After sometime sir her parents were anxious about her marriage so they asked
her to go around the country and find the partner. So she returns to a palace with
Satyavan, who was the prince of Dyumatsen.
However Narad
muni warned Savitri not to marry him because he knew that Satyavan will die in
one year. After marriage Savitri was very happy to live with Satyavan but as
the time passes she was preparing herself for the crisis.
One day Satyavan
wanted to go to forest to bring fuel for fire but Savitri insisted to go with
him as she told that she wanted to see the forest, as they reach the place
which is familiar to Satyavan they stops there to cut wood. After sometime
Satyavan felt pain in brain so Savitri offered him her lap to rest his head as
time passes Satyavan fall asleep and Savitri show the god of death near him to
take his life Savitri followed him to the heaven and Savitri and Yamraj had a
deep conversation and Yamaraj-the god of death who was pleased by her so he
granted some Blessings. Savitri wishes to get over death and returned to their
home with her husband.
(2) Gitanjali
Gitanjali or its English
translation song offerings or singing angels is a collection of 103 English
prose poems which are Tagore`s English translation of his Bengali poems and was
first published in November 19 12 by the Indian society in London. Tagore
received the Nobel Prize in literature for these poems largely for the English
translation, Song offerings. It contains 53 poems from the original Bengali
Gitanjali as well as the other poems from other works. The English version of
poems, Song offerings become very popular in the west and was widely translated.
Gitanjali
focuses on the presence of God everywhere it brings it readers in direct
contact with the infinite. Gitanjali proclaims that god is neither an abstraction
not enter incarnation but an ever presented force and its influence is
everywhere, it is to be seen in the various form of nature including humans.
According to
S Radhakrishnan the poems, Gitanjali are the offerings to The Infinite to. The
relation of between the two is conceived as the love between the lover and
beloved. The mystics all over the world use this methodology and it is
constantly used to express the relationship between human soul and God. The
central theme of Gitanjali is devotional. It is the great tradition of devotional
poetry as the love of Radha-Krishna. The human soul is spoken of Radha, who was
waiting for the arrival of the lover and Krishna is considered as the lover or
God. It is the drama of love which takes place between Radha and Krishna. As
Radha considers to Krishna as everything, symbolizes the union of human soul
and the Universal energy as the union with God.
(3) Anna Karenina
Anna Karenina is a novel by Russian author Leo Tolstoy
first published in 1878 widely considered to be one of the greatest works of
literature ever written, Tolstoy himself called this novel his true first novel
it was initially published in serial installment from 1875 to 1877 but the last
part appearing in the periodical called The Russian messenger.
This complex
novel is contains eight parts with more than a dozen characters typically
contained in two volumes. It deals with the faith, love, marriage, Imperial
Russian society, rural vs. city life. The story centers on an extra marital
affair between Anna and dashing cavalry officer Vronsky that doesn't fit in social
circles of Saint Petersburg and this forces the young couple to flee Italy in
the search of happiness. This novel consists of more than a story of Anna
Karenina a married woman who is having an affair though their relationship is
very strong. The story starts when she comes in the middle of broken family
situation as Her brother`s habit of womanizing however she experiences less of
tolerance by others.
Bachelor
Vronsky is eager to marry Anna if she will agree to leave her husband who is a
senior government official but she is afraid of the pressure of Russian society
and the moral laws of Russian orthodox society, her own insecurities and love
for her son. Although Vronsky and Anna Karenina went to Italy where they can be
together however they have trouble making friends there while Vronsky pursue
his social life but Anna losing her own loss of control.
The novel
explore a diverse range of topics throughout the story some of the topics that
include the feudal system that existed in Russia at the time which not only in
Russian government but also at the level of individual characters, families, in
religion, Gender and social class.
(4)Nineteen Eighty-Four
Dystopian science fiction
novel and tale written by English writer George Orwell. It was published on 8 June 1949 by Secker &
Warburg as Orwell's ninth and final book completed
in his lifetime. Technically it centers on the consequences of totalitarianism, mass surveillance and
repressive regimentation of people and behaviors
within society. Orwell a democratic socialist modeled the totalitarian government in the novel after Stalinist
Russia and Nazi Germany. More broadly, the novel examines
the role of truth and facts within politics and the
ways in which they are manipulated.
The story
takes place in an imagined future, the year 1984, when much of the world`s victim
to perpetual war, government surveillance, historical negations, and propaganda. Great Britain, known as Airstrip One,
has become a province of the
totalitarian super state Oceania, ruled by the Party, who employ the Thought Police to persecute individuality
and independent thinking. Big
Brother, the dictatorial leader of
Oceania, enjoys an intense cult of personality, manufactured by the party's excessive brainwashing
techniques. The protagonist, Winston Smith, is a diligent and skillful rank-and-file worker at the
Ministry of Truth and Outer Party member who
secretly hates the Party
and dreams of rebellion. He expresses his dissent by writing in a diary and later enters into a forbidden
relationship with his colleague Julia and starts to remember what life was
like before the Party came to power.
Nineteen Eighty-Four has become a
classic literary example of political and dystopian fiction. It also popularized the term "Orwellian" as an adjective, with many terms used in the
novel entering common usage, including "Big Brother",
"doublethink", "Thought Police",
"thought crime", "Newspeak", and Parallels have been drawn between the novel's subject matter and
real life instances of totalitarianism, mass
surveillance, and violations
of freedom of expression among other themes.
Time included the novel on its
list of the 100 best English-language novels.
(5)Great Expectations
Novel by Charles Dickens and his penultimate completed novel. It depicts
the education of an orphan nicknamed Pip (the
book is a bildungsroman, a coming-of-age story). It is Dickens's second novel, after
David Copperfield, to be
fully narrated in the first person.[N 1] The novel was first published as a serial in Dickens's weekly periodical All
the Year Round, from 1 December 1860 to August 1861. In October
1861, Chapman and Hall published the novel in three volumes.
The novel is set in Kent and London
in the early to mid-19th century and
contains some of Dickens's most
celebrated scenes, starting in a graveyard, where the young Pip is accosted by the escaped convict Abel
Magwitch. Great Expectations is full of extreme imagery – poverty,
prison ships and chains, and fights to the death – and has a colourful cast of characters who have entered
popular culture. These include the eccentric Miss Havisham, the beautiful but cold Estella, and Joe, the
unsophisticated and kind blacksmith.
Dickens's themes include wealth and poverty, love and rejection, and the eventual triumph of good over evil. Great
Expectations, which is popular both with readers
and literary critics, has been translated into many languages and adapted numerous
times into various media.
Upon its release, the novel received
near universal acclaim. Although Dickens's contemporary
Thomas Carlyle referred to it disparagingly as "that Pip nonsense,"
he nevertheless reacted to each fresh
installment with "roars of laughter." Later, George Bernard Shaw praised the novel, as
"All of one piece and consistently truthful." During the serial publication, Dickens was pleased
with public response
to Great Expectations and its sales; when the plot first formed in his mind, he
called it "a very fine, new and grotesque idea."
(6) Godaan
A famous Hindi novel by Munshi Premchand. It was first
published in 1936 and is considered one of the
greatest Hindi novels
of modern Indian
literature. Themed around the socio-economic deprivation as well as the exploitation of the poor village, the novel was the last complete novel of Premchand. It has
been translated into English in 1957 by Jai Ratan and Purushottama Lal as The Gift of a Cow. A 1968 translation by Gordon C. Roadarmel is now considered "a classic in itself".
The story
revolves around many characters representing the various sections of Indian community. The peasant and rural society
is represented by the family of Hori Mahanto
and his family includes his wife Dhania, daughters Rupa and Sona, son
Gobar, daughter- in-law Jhunia.
The story begins
with Hori wanting
to have a cow as other millions
of poor peasants. He purchased, on debt of Rs. 80, a cow from Bhola, a
cowherd. Hori tried to cheat his
brothers for 10 rupees. This in turn led to a fight between his wife and his younger brother, Heera's wife. Jealous of
Hori, his younger brother Heera poisoned the
cow and ran away because of the fear of police action. When the police
came inquiring the death of the cow,
Hori took a loan and paid the bribe to the police and was able to clear off his younger brother's name.
Jhunia, the daughter of Bhola, was a widow and
eloped with Gabbar after she got pregnant by him. Because of the fear of
the action from villagers Gabbar
also ran away to the town. Hori and Dhania were unable to throw a girl carrying their son's child and gave her
protection and accepted her as their daughter-in- law. The village Panchayat fines Hori as his wife tackles the
personal attack of the Pandit on
them for sheltering Jhunia. Hori again is compelled to take a loan and pay the penalty.
The narrative represents the average
Indian farmer's existence
under colonial rule, with the protagonist facing cultural and
feudal exploitation. It shows how the life of these characters takes shape.
(7) Crime and
Punishment
A novel by the Russian
author Fyodor Dostoevsky. It was
first published in the literary journal The Russian Messenger in twelve monthly installments during 1866. It was later
published in a single volume. It is the second novel of Dostoevsky's full-length novels following his return from ten
years of exile in Siberia. Crime and Punishment is considered the first great novel of his mature
period of writing.
The novel is often cited as one of the supreme achievements in world
literature.
Crime and Punishment follows the mental anguish
and moral dilemmas of Rodion Raskolnikov, an
impoverished ex-student in Saint Petersburg who plans to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker, an old woman who stores money
and valuable objects in her flat. He theorizes
that with the money he could liberate himself from poverty and go on to perform great deeds, and seeks to convince
himself that certain crimes are justifiable if
they are committed in order to remove obstacles to the higher goals of
'extraordinary' men. Once the deed is
done, however, he finds himself racked with confusion, paranoia, and disgust. His theoretical
justifications lose all their power as he struggles with guilt and horror and confronts both the internal
and external consequences of his deed.
Alienation is the primary theme of
Crime and Punishment. At first, Raskolnikov’s pride separates him from
society. He sees himself as superior to all other people and so cannot relate to anyone. Within
his personal philosophy, he sees other people as tools and uses them for his own ends. After
committing the murders, his isolation grows because
of his intense guilt and the half-delirium into which his guilt throws him.
Over and over again, Raskolnikov
pushes away the people who are trying to help him, including Sonya, Dunya, Pulcheria Alexandrovna, Razumikhin, and
even Porfiry Petrovich, and then suffers
the consequences. In the end, he finds the total alienation
that he has brought upon himself intolerable. Only in the Epilogue, when he
finally realizes that he loves Sonya,
does Raskolnikov break through the wall of pride.
(8) The Stranger
Also published in English as The Outsider,
is a 1942 novella
by French author Albert Camus. Its theme and
outlook are often cited as examples of Camus'
philosophy and connected with existentialism; though Camus personally
rejected the latter label.
The title character is Meursault, an indifferent
French settler in Algeria. Weeks after
his mother's funeral, he kills an Arab man in French Algiers, who was involved
in a conflict with one of Meursault's neighbors. Meursault is tried and sentenced to death. The
story is divided
into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative view before and after the murder,
respectively. In January 1955,
Camus wrote this:
Albert Camus
summarized The Stranger a long time ago, with a remark he admit the highly paradoxical: "In our society
any man who does not weep at his mother's
funeral runs the risk of being sentenced to
death." he only meant that the hero of my book is condemned because he does not play the ga me.
The Stranger's first edition consisted
of only 4,400 copies, which was so few that it could not
be a best-seller. Since the novella was published during the Nazi occupation of France, there was a possibility that the
Propaganda-Staffel would censor it, but a representative
of the Occupation authorities felt it contained nothing damaging to their cause, so it was published without
omissions. However, the novel was well received in anti-Nazi circles in addition
to Jean-Paul Sartre's article "Explication de L'Étranger"
Translated four times into English, and also into numerous other languages, the novel has long been considered a classic of
20th-century literature. Le Monde ranks it as
number one on its 100
Books of the Century.
(9) My Experiments with Truth
Its Gujarati translation Satya Na Prayogo athva Atmakatha,
'Experiments of Truth or Autobiography' is the autobiography of Mahatma Gandhi, covering his life from
early childhood through to 1921. It was written in weekly installments and published in his journal Navjivan from 1925 to 1929. Its English translation also appeared in
installments in his other journal Young
India. It was initiated at
the insistence of Swami Anand and other close co-workers of Gandhi, who encouraged him to explain the background
of his public campaigns. In 1998, the book was
designated as one of the "100 Best Spiritual Books of the 20th
Century" by a committee of global
spiritual and religious authorities.
Starting with his birth and parentage,
Gandhi has given overview of childhood, child
marriage, relation with his wife and parents, experiences at the school, his
study tour to London, efforts to be
like the English gentleman, experiments in dietetics, his going to South Africa, his experiences of color
discrimination. His quest for dharma, social
work in Africa, return to India, his slow and steady work for political
awakening and social activities. The book ends abruptly
after a discussion of the Nagpur session
of the Congress in 1915.
The autobiography is noted for its
lucid, simple and idiomatic language and its
transparently honest narration. The autobiography itself
has become a key document
for interpreting Gandhi's life and ideas.
(10) Ulysses
Ulysses is a modernist novel by Irish writer James Joyce. It
was first serialized in parts in the American journal The Little Review from
March 1918 to December 1920 and then published in its entirety in Paris
by Sylvia Beach on 2 February 1922.
It is considered one of the most important works of modernist
literature and has been called a demonstration and summation of the
entire movement According to Declan Kiberd, Before Joyce, no writer of fiction had so fore grounded
the process of thinking.
Ulysses chronicles the appointments and encounters of the
itinerant Leopold Bloom in Dublin in
the course of an ordinary day, 16 June 1904.Ulysses is the Latinized name of Odysseus, the hero of Homer's epic
poem the Odyssey, and the novel establishes a series of parallels
between the poem and the novel, with structural correspondences between the
characters and experiences of Bloom and Odysseus, Molly Bloom and Penelope,
and Stephen Dedalus and Telemachus, in addition to events and themes of the early
20th-century context of modernism, Dublin, and Ireland's relationship to
Britain. The novel is highly allusive and
also imitates the styles of different periods of English literature.
Joyce first encountered the figure
of Odysseus/Ulysses in Charles
Lamb's Adventures of Ulysses, an
adaptation of the Odyssey for children, which seems to have
established the Latin name in Joyce's mind. At school he wrote an essay on the
character, titled "My Favourite Hero". Joyce told Frank
Budgen that he considered Ulysses the only
all-round character in literature. He thought about calling his
short-story collection Dubliners Ulysses in Dublin, but
the idea grew from a story written in 1906, to a "short book" in
1907, to the vast novel he began in 1914.
