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
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
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
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
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
(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