1.

JANE AUSTEN(1775-1817)

Jane Austen’s brief life and writing career overlapped with one of the most transformative
eras in British history, marked by revolution abroad and unrest at home. However, her
novels reveal little awareness of these events.

Pride and Prejudice, just like all Austen’s novels, depicts a social milieu which was
particularly stratified, and class divisions were rooted in family connections and wealth.
Austen is often critical of the assumptions and prejudices of both upper-class and lower-
class England. Making distinctions between internal merit and external merit
.Nevertheless, Austen was in many ways a realist, and the England she depicts is one in
which social mobility is limited and class-consciousness is strong.

Socially regimented ideas of appropriate behavior for each gender factored into Austen’s
work as well. While social advancement for young men lay in the military, church, or law,
the chief method of self-improvement for women was the acquisition of wealth. Women
could only accomplish this goal through successful marriage, which explains the ubiquity
of matrimony as a goal and topic of conversation in Austen’s writing..

In general, Austen occupies a curious position between the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries.. Her plots bear similarities to the ones employed in sentimental novels, while
the ambiguity in rendering emotion, the appreciation for intelligence and natural beauty
are romantic elements. In their awareness of the conditions of modernity and city life and
the consequences for family structure and individual characters, Austen ‘s novels also
displays elements of Victorian literature.

Pride and Prejudice continues to be popular today not only because of its memorable
characters and the general appeal of the story, but also because of the skill with which it is
told. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen displays a masterful use of irony, dialogue in her well-
built plots as well as a psychological realism that support the character development and
heighten the experience of reading the novel. Austen's works possess a timeless quality,
which makes her stories and themes as relevant today as they were two hundred years
ago.

2. LEWIS CARROLL

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is an 1865 novel written by English author Charles

Lutwidge Dodgson under the pseudonym Lewis Carroll.It tells of a girl named Alice who
falls down a rabbit hole into a fantasy world populated by peculiar, anthropomorphic
creatures. The tale plays with logic, giving the story lasting popularity with adults as well
as with children. It is considered to be one of the best examples of the literary nonsense
genre. Its narrative course and structure, characters and imagery have been enormously
influentialin both popular culture and literature, especially in the fantasy genre.

An historical approach to Alice encourages us to rely on a close examination of the trends,

culture, and philosophy of the Victorian period for our interpretation of Alice’s encounters
in Wonderland . Although there aren't many historical references in Alice in Wonderland ,
the very texture of the book -- full of events like tea parties, croquet games, and awkward
encounters with royalty -- are so rooted in Victorian English culture that they can seem
very foreign to a modern reader. The book is full of nineteenth-century words, and many
characters are based on common sayings or ideas of Carroll's day. Moreover, Alice's
running conversation with herself tells us about certain aspects of Victorian childhood
education: we notice her study of Latin, her knowledge of geography, and the moral
poems which she had to memorize .

But although the flavor of Carroll's culture permeates Alice in Wonderland, the events
which framed Lewis Carroll's England in a larger historical context - the long rule of Queen
Victoria, the American Civil War, fail to show up inside Alice's fantasy world.

3. JOSPH CONRAD(1857-1924)

Joseph Conrad is regarded as one of the greatest novelists in English. Conrad’s works,
Heart of Darkness in particular, provide a bridge between Victorian values and the ideals
of modernism. Like their Victorian predecessors, Conrad’s novels rely on traditional ideas
of heroism, which are nevertheless under constant attack in a changing world and in
places far from England

Imperialism is nevertheless at the center of Heart of Darkness. By the 1890s, most of the
world’s “dark places” had been placed at least nominally under European control, and the
major European powers were stretched thin, trying to administer and protect massive, far-
flung empires. Cracks were beginning to appear in the system: riots, wars, and the
wholesale abandonment of commercial enterprises all threatened the white men living in
the distant corners of empires. Things were clearly falling apart.

Heart of Darkness suggests that this is the natural result when men are allowed to operate
outside a social system of checks and balances: power, especially power over other human
beings, inevitably corrupts. At the same time, this begs the question of whether it is
possible to call an individual insane or wrong when he is part of a system that is so
thoroughly corrupted and corrupting. Heart of Darkness, thus, at its most abstract level, is
a narrative about the difficulty of understanding the world beyond the self, about the
ability of one man to judge another.

While the threats that Conrad’s characters face are concrete ones—illness, violence,
conspiracy—they nevertheless acquire a philosophical character. Heart of Darkness is as
much about alienation, confusion, and profound doubt as it is about imperialism.
 4. DANIEL DEFOE(1660-1731)

Daniel Defoe, English writer and journalist is most famous for his novel Robinson
Crusoe. Defoe is considered to be, together with other writers of his generation, among
the founders of the English novel. The book has been variously read as an allegory for
the development of civilisation, as a manifesto of economic individualism and as an
expression of European colonial desires.

Robinson Crusoe was published in 1719, at the beginning of a century that witnessed
increased industrialization and a shift from focus on community to an emphasis on
autonomous individualism. The rise of capitalism brought about great changes in the
economic order and exposed individuals to a system of evaluation that differed from
aristocratic tradition. Instead of an individual's place in society being determined at
birth, people entered professions and new social arrangements based on their work.

Defoe is one of the first writers to represent this kind of economic individualism, and
Robinson Crusoe, the protagonist of his novel, is a living proof of what was called Homo
Economicus. Indeed, Robinson, spends the opening sections of the novel in heavy
pursuit of money. He readily admits to the reader his reasons for travel: it is more
profitable to trade with indigenous peoples of non-Western cultures, since they value
goods differently than Europeans do.

In addition , Defoe's "Robinson Crusoe" began the literary genre of realistic fiction. The
aspects of his writing that define "realism" would be the immense detail he uses;
descriptive language; and the flow of his narrative (dialect included). Defoe concentrates
on the qualities of different objects, which provide us with a picture to accompany the
words. Defoe expresses his work in realism via : first person narrator, using specific
dates, real places, lots of details and personal diaries.