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Seagull as an image: Every character in the play identifies with the seagull in some way or the other. Seagull for Treplev signifies Nina’s cold and harsh treatment towards him; he tries to explain how and why he symbolizes himself with the Seagull while she tries to explain she doesn’t understand it. It foreshadows the end of the play by showing how Treplev will actually commit suicide. For Nina, it shows how she will always be in the future, when Trigorin discovers the gull he says: “A young girl… loves the lake the way a seagull does, and she's happy and free as a seagull. Then a man comes along, sees her, and ruins her life because he has nothing better to do. Destroys her like this seagull here.” It represents how she will be forgotten about in the future by him and how her life is ruined by the man she loved. Towards the end of the play she is completely forgotten about like the gull Trigorin asked to stuff. Lake as an image: The lake at the beginning of the play is ob...

The term New Criticism which arose from Eliot’s Theory of Impersonality in Art defines the critical theory that has dominated Anglo-American literary criticism for past fifty years. It is a ‘New’ approach because it completely ignored context and the author’s background. The critic doesn’t know anything about the writer and studies the work of art solely based on the merit of language. One is required to look at the text in isolation and reject authorial intent as well as biographical or sociological interpretations. In order to bring the focus back to analysis of the texts, New Critics aimed to exclude the reader’s response, the author’s intention, historical and cultural contexts and moralistic bias from their analysis. The New Critics called authorial intent as ‘intentional fallacy’ and a reader’s subjective response as ‘affective fallacy’ and thus were quick to eliminate these aspects while critically analyzing a text. The school of New Criticism and Russian...