Suchergebnisse

The seventeenth century in England can be seen as the age which marked the beginning of modernity as well as the beginning of empirical thought. Rationalization of viewpoints combined with the political turmoil of the century, causing immense setbacks within the English literary traditions. One of these setbacks took place within the romance tradition which had been a major mode of writing during the earlier centuries. In this sense, this article analyses reasons of the decline of the romance tradition throughout seventeenth century English literature as well as examining how the genre managed to survive either implicitly or explicitly in several works like Oroonoko by Aphra Behn, pastoral poems by Andrew Marvel and Milton, and in some parts of Milton's Paradise Lost.

Calls upon those working in English literature to see the ongoing underpinning of the discipline by the eighteenth-century unification which was codified by the Burkean constitutional settlement, and to understand this settlement not only in terms of content or canonical line-up, but more fundamentally in terms of English literature's methodologies. It suggests replacing it with a more open-ended, inclusive and internationalist literature, free of the founding imperial assumptions which created a "shadow-constitution

This book is available as open access through the Bloomsbury Open Access programme and is available on www.bloomsburycollections.com. In this extended essay, Michael Gardiner examines the ideology of the discipline of English Literature in the light of the serious redefining work on England and Englishness that has been conducted in Political Studies in the last decade. He argues that English Literature emerges from the development of the state and that consequently it has suppressed the idea of the nation. His claim is that English Literature has lost its form since its methodology and canonicity depended so heavily on a constitutional form which can no longer be defended. He calls upon those working in English Literature to recognise that they are not really participating in the same discipline, defined by the Burkean constitutional settlement, even if they think of themselves as writing 'within the canon'. His view is that a lack of appreciation of 'hard-edged' political factors have led to a 'continuant' and regressive form of English Literature which tends to hang on to stifling methodologies. In its place, he appeals for the creation of a more open-ended, inclusive, internationalist, and comparative 'literature of England'.

Citation: Matherly, Ernest Wilson. Three Jews of English literature: Marlowe's Barabas, Shakespeare's Shylock, and Scott's Isaac. Senior thesis, Kansas State Agricultural College, 1906. ; Morse Department of Special Collections ; Introduction: Many years before Marlowe produced his first works, that is during the reign of "Richard the First or Lionhearted," the Jew played, perhaps, his greatest part in English history; and, though banished from England a little later than this, several historians say there were Jews in England at the time of Marlowe and of Shakespeare who played a great part in English history and from the daily lives or characters of whom both writers might have taken some thoughts upon which to found their productions. The fact is that at that time there was a Jewish Doctor, Lopez by name, who being of Spanish blood and able to speak several tongues, among them Portuguese, became interpreter for a Portuguese refugee who had fled from justice in Spain to England for protection and whom, through hatred for Spain, Elizabeth accepted and playfully termed "King Antonio." Lopez, owing to his position as interpreter and his relation to Elizabeth, to the refugee and to the Earl of Essex became a close friend of the queen and revealed to her one of the political intrigues which the earl was about to undertake.

The ancient works of Greek civilization had almost been wiped out of human consciousness until Renaissance revisited it. In early 1800s, when Greece was revolting against Turks after 400 years of slavery, Europe discovered the old Greek tragedies and works of Greek philosophers which had been oppressed by political power bearers. In the 19th century many free spirits like Lord Byron (who died in Greece during the war) were intrigued by these works and began to reinterpret and analyse them to locate universals truths relating to philosophy, ecology, psychology, natural sciences, etc in them.Ever since Renaissance (when Shakespeare made abundant use of Greek Myths in his plays) the craze and interest in Greek mythology has not slowed down. From Homer to John Milton to John Keats to Thomas Hardy, all old and contemporary writers have looked towards Greek Myths for substance for their writing and have used them in all possible genres of literature. This paper attempts to trace the influence of Greek Mythology on English literature and contemporary culture, to point towards the literary works of various centuries which intensively used Greek myths and those English films which depict the same. An effort has been made at finding out the reason behind this continuing popularity of ancient myths and to analyse such a tremendously powerful phenomenon.