Before this poem was a poem, it was something older. That is not quite a figure of speech. When Mamang Dai writes about a mountain speaking, about a shaman laying […]
Nature poems are supposed to be peaceful. That is part of their appeal — you enter them the way you enter a garden, leaving the noise of the world behind. […]
Here is the first puzzle Mamang Dai sets for her reader: who, exactly, is talking? The title says the mountain. But read a few lines further and the speaker is […]
A Reader’s Guide to Narayan’s Style, Technique, and the Craft of Waiting for the Mahatma When students first read R.K. Narayan, they sometimes mistake his style for simplicity. His sentences […]
From Private Desire to Public Commitment — Narayan’s Most Complex Novel One of the first things readers notice about Waiting for the Mahatma is that Sriram is not a typical […]
How Narayan Brings India’s Independence Struggle into the World of Malgudi Waiting for the Mahatma is unusual in R.K. Narayan’s career. His other Malgudi novels are largely self-contained: a small […]
Understanding the Novel’s Protagonist and the Comedy of Good Intentions At the start of R.K. Narayan’s Waiting for the Mahatma (1955), we meet Sriram: twenty years old, financially comfortable, and […]
Every author makes choices about how to tell a story — choices about voice, structure, language, and form that are as significant as the story’s content. In Hard Times, Dickens […]
Victorian England had a very clear idea of what women were for. They were to be wives, mothers, and domestic managers — the ‘angel in the house,’ as the poet […]
Hard Times is set in a fictional industrial town called Coketown — a name that is itself a declaration. ‘Coke’ refers to the processed coal fuel that powered Victorian factories, […]
