Tag Archives: English literature

The Heroic Couplet; Children’s Literature (originally aired as Kids and Couplets)

Paul Hunter [NHC Fellow 1985-86, 1995-96] describes the heroic couplet–“its rhyme, its reason, its artistic and ideological functions in English literature.” [Wayne Pond] Ulrich Knoepflmacher [NHC Fellow 1995-96] “talks about children’s literature and ‘cross-writing’ — a device by which authors … Continue reading

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Emblems of Marriage and Manners

Aubrey Williams describes Restoration-era drama as second in significance only to Shakespeare’s in English literature. At the time of this interview, Williams, a Fellow at the National Humanities Center (1986-87), was professor of English at the University of Florida. This … Continue reading

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The Tyranny of Sex

According to William Kerrigan, “men have trouble getting love and desire to mate in their souls.” Drawing insights from English Renaissance literature, he warns against self-congratulating modernity and argues for an integrated vision of woman. Kerrigan comments on men’s dual … Continue reading

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The Rise of the Novel

According to Paul Hunter and Patricia Meyer Spacks, English fiction rose to prominence in the eighteenth century at about the same time that autobiography became important in England’s cultural life, reflecting an interest on the part of the common reader … Continue reading

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Gossip as Cultural and Literary Discourse

Writing of Victorian manners, novelist George Eliot remarks that gossip is a sort of smoke that comes from the dirty tobacco-paper of those who diffuse it: it proves nothing but the bad taste of the smoker. But that characterization may … Continue reading

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(1) The State of the Language, Part 2 of 5; (2) Commentary on Sexuality, “Back to Nature”

Ronald Butters, Margreta de Grazia, Connie Eble, and Michael Montgomery mull over the richness and fluidity of written English in the age of Shakespeare and the King James Bible, before the  language moved toward standardization a century later with the … Continue reading

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