I would not have majored in English and gone on to teach literature had I not been able to construct a counterargument about the truthfulness of fiction; still, as writers turn away from the industrious villages of George Eliot and Thomas Hardy, I le...
After reading Edgar Allan Poe. Something the critics have not noticed: a new literary world pointing to the literature of the 20th Century. Scientific miracles, fables on the pattern A+ B, a clear-sighted, sickly literature. No more poetry but analyt...
Revolution was the great nightmare of eighteenth-century British society, and when first the American Revolution of 1776, then the French Revolution of 1789 overturned the accepted order, the United Kingdom exercised all its power so that revolution ...
As we have seen, French culture and language interacted with native English culture for several generations after the Norman Conquest. A common word such as 'castle' is a French loan word, for example; and the whole romance tradition comes from the F...
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...
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...
If you read a story that really involves you, your body will tell you that you are living through the experience. You will recognize feelings that have physical signs - increased heart rate, sweaty palms, or calm, relaxed breathing and so on, dependi...
Well, I wasn't going to abuse him. I was only going to ask: Is there any quality which distinguishes his work from that of twenty struggling writers one could name? Of course not. He's a clever, prolific man; so are they. But he began with money and ...
It has an unhappy effect upon the human understanding and temper, for a man to be compelled in his gravest investigation of an argument, to consider, not what is true, but what is convenient.
Critics and academics have been trying for forty years to bury the greatest work of imaginative fiction in English. They ignore it, they condescend to it, they stand in large groups with their backs to it - because they're afraid of it. They're afrai...
Literature is as old as speech. It grew out of human need for it and it has not changed except to become more needed. The skalds, the bards, the writers are not separate and exclusive. From the beginning, their functions, their duties, and their resp...
Only the very weak-minded refuse to be influenced by literature and poetry.
An age which is incapable of poetry is incapable of any kind of literature except the cleverness of a decadence.
The sole substitute for an experience which we have not ourselves lived through is art and literature.
In America, the only truly popular art form is the movies. Most people consider painting a hobby and literature, schoolwork.
It is unhappily true that much insincere Literature and Art, executed solely with a view to effect, does succeed by deceiving the public.
The narrative of serial art works more like music than like literature.
Reading is thinking with someone else's head instead of ones own.
Ahhh, teaching literature. A noble calling! For we are all stories.
the whole of Victorian literature done up in grey paper & neatly tied with string
It did occur to me that the effect of good literature may be as dizzying as that of alcohol.
