In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle analyses a poem that represents the meeting-point of ancient riddle and modern nonsense ‘I Saw a Peacock’ is an anonymous nonsense poem that is included in Quentin Blake’s The Puffin Book of Nonsense Verse (Puffin Poetry), a... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-07-03 14:00:44 UTC ]
‘Young Goodman Brown’ (1835) is one of the most famous stories by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired in part by the Salem witch craze of 1692, the story is a powerful exploration of the dark side of human nature. How Hawthorne loads his story with such power is worthy […] The post... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-06-24 14:00:49 UTC ]
Traditionally, a ballad was a song that was designed to be danced to, as the etymology of the word, Provençal balada meaning ‘dance, song to dance to’, ultimately from late Latin ballare. The great British ballads – and we say ‘British’ because many of them were Scottish rather than English... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-06-14 14:00:45 UTC ]
‘The Man of the Crowd’ is one of the shorter short stories written by Edgar Allan Poe (who pioneered the short story form when it was still an emerging force in nineteenth-century magazines and periodicals). Written in 1840, the story is deliciously enigmatic and, in some ways, prefigures later... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-06-02 14:00:22 UTC ]
How many times have you heard someone say, ‘I don’t read poetry. I just don’t get it.’ Or perhaps, ‘Why can’t poets just come out and say what they want to say? Why say something in such a way?’ For many people, poetry is ‘difficult’. But whilst it’s true that […] The post 10 of the Most... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-05-30 14:00:36 UTC ]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle examines a famous phrase derived from Shakespeare The old line about Hamlet, that it’s ‘too full of quotations’, wittily sums up the play’s influence on not just English literature but on the everyday language we use. Many of us... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-05-29 14:00:47 UTC ]
First published in 1819, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is one of the most famous pieces of writing by Washington Irving, whose contribution to American literature was considerable. ‘Rip Van Winkle’ has become a byword for the idea of falling asleep and waking up to find the familiar world around us has... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-05-28 14:00:18 UTC ]
Although it was the nineteenth century when the novel arguably came into its own, with novelists like Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, George Eliot, and the Brontë sisters writing novels that are still widely read and studied today, the eighteenth century was the age in which the novel emerged as a... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-05-23 14:00:38 UTC ]
Here are some of the finest poems of remembrance, or about remembrance, which can all be found in the wonderful anthology of remembrance poems, The Nation’s Favourite Poems of Remembrance. Remembrance – whether it’s recalling or remembering a past loved one, or commemorating someone who has... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-05-20 14:00:46 UTC ]
When we think of poems, these days most people probably automatically think of lyric poems: usually quite short poems which describe the poet’s (or an imagined speaker’s) thoughts and feelings. But from the epic poems of Homer to the Border Ballads of the Middle Ages to notable contemporary... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-04-29 14:00:40 UTC ]
Literary criticism (or even ‘literary theory’) goes back as far as ancient Greece, and Aristotle’s Poetics. But the rise of English Literature as a university subject, at the beginning of the twentieth century, led to literary criticism focusing on English literature – everything from... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-04-15 14:00:07 UTC ]
The sestina form is thought to have been created by Provencal troubadours – and possibly by one specific troubadour, Arnaut Daniel – in around 1200. However, it didn’t arrive in English literature until the late 1570s, when both Sir Philip Sidney and Edmund Spenser, poets at the court of Queen... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-03-04 15:00:47 UTC ]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews Stephen King’s early non-fiction book about horror In 1999, the prolific author Stephen King had his own dance with death. One afternoon, he was walking on the shoulder of a road near his home in the US state […] The... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-02-28 15:00:22 UTC ]
By Oliver Tearle Finding the time to relax with a good book can be difficult, but there are a few practical steps you can take which might help to increase your book-reading productivity in 2020. We’re sceptical of lists which promise ‘sure-fire ways to guarantee you’ll read more this year’,... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2020-01-11 15:00:55 UTC ]
The 1890s saw pioneering works of science fiction, detective fiction, and Gothic horror all published, by some of the greatest English, Scottish, and Irish writers of the age. In the United States, too, novelists addressed social issues, sometimes in comic ways, while social realism continued to... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2019-12-31 15:00:10 UTC ]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reads the first novel in Isaac Asimov’s juvenile science fiction series Science fiction set in our own solar system arguably began with Lucian, the classical author whose short satirical piece True History paved the way for... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2019-11-15 15:00:55 UTC ]
In this week’s Dispatches from The Secret Library, Dr Oliver Tearle reviews a new anthology of classic horror stories Shortly after receiving my review copies of Darryl Jones’s informative and engaging history of the horror genre, Sleeping with the Lights On, the publishers, Oxford University... Continue reading >> [ Source: Interesting Literature | 2019-10-25 14:00:45 UTC ]