Quotes of: English-literature Keyword

Old English poetry also contained a wide range of conventional poetic diction, many of the words being created to allow alliterative patterns to be made. There are therefore numerous alternatives for key words like battle, warrior, horse, ship, the s...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

The range and variety of Chaucer's English did much to establish English as a national language. Chaucer also contributed much to the formation of a standard English based on the dialect of the East Midlands region which was basically the dialect of ...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

Richardson, however, remains a vital figure in the history of the novel, and of ideology. He initiates a discourse on sexual roles which, in all its ambiguities, is as relevant to today's society as it was in the mid-eighteenth century and which fill...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

In reality the puritans and the humanists were quite often the same people.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

For this reason, to study English literature without some general knowledge of the relation of the Bible to that literature would be to leave one's literary education very incomplete.

Lafcadio Hearn

My mother was a children's librarian, and I was raised on lots of English children's literature. It gave me this weird idea that I was English.

Jefferson Mays

In a sense, the first (if not necessarily the prime) function of a novelist, of ANY artist, is to entertain. If the poem, painting, play or novel does not immediately engage one's surface interest then it has failed. Whatever else it may or may not b...

Fifty Works of English Literature We Could Do Without

As a novelist, Scott's influence was immense: his creation of a wide range of characters from all levels of society was immediately likened to Shakespeare's; the use of historical settings became a mainstay of Victorian and later fiction; his short s...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

The concept of an author, the single creative person who gives the text 'authority', only comes later in this period. Most Old English poetry is anonymous, even though names which are in no way comparable, such as Caedmon and Deor, are used to identi...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

Beowulf stands out as a poem which makes extensive use of this kind of figurative language. There are over one thousand compounds in the poem, totalling one-third of all the words in the text. Many of these compounds are kennings. The word 'to ken' i...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

Chaucer's world in The Canterbury Tales brings together, for the first time, a diversity of characters, social levels, attitudes, and ways of life. The tales themselves make use of a similarly wide range of forms and styles, which show the diversity ...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

I studied English literature in the honors program, which means that you had to take courses in various centuries. You had to start with Old English, Middle English, and work your way toward the modern. I figured if I did that it would force me to re...

Jeffrey Eugenides

Periods' are largely an invention of the historians. The poets themselves are not conscious of living in any period and refuse to conform to the scheme.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

Attempts to connect men's circumstances too closely with their literary productions are usually, I believe, unsuccessful.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century: Excluding Drama

Man with his new powers became rich like Midas but all that he touched had gone dead and cold.

English Literature in the Sixteenth Century excluding Drama

I had not particularly liked the way in which he wrote about literature in , and I was always on my guard if not outright hostile when any tincture of 'deconstruction' or 'postmodernism' was applied to my beloved canon of English writing, but when Ed...

Hitch-22: A Memoir

Few poets better convey the uneasy transition from Victorianism to Modernism than Thomas Hardy. His novels, written between 1870 and 1895, made him not only the recorder of his distinctive region of 'Wessex', but the explorer of the transition of liv...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

Later, Hobbes will stress the notion central to Augustan thinking, the binary of passion and reason: The Passions that encline men to Peace, are Fear of Death; Desire of such things as are necessary to commodious living; and a Hope by their Industry ...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

I was an English-literature major, and that's all about stories and narratives.

Rachel Weisz

There is a remarkable degree of consistency in the way mediaeval literature affirms humanity. With all its faults, humanity emerges as more realistic than heavenly ideals. ...... Because the mediaeval period is seen from our own times as historically...

The Routledge History of Literature in English: Britain and Ireland

There are long stretches of the work [Paradise Lost] that are for anyone not theologically minded sheer howling boredom from the point of view of the content.

A History of English Literature