Retaining the thrill and tone of oral storytelling as the written word became increasingly widespread was the charge of early English writing. Beginning in the Old English period and continuing through the Medieval and Renaissance periods, writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and William Shakespeare began to elevate the place of literature in society. This volume details the evolution of early English literature And The enduring works that have withstood centuries of linguistic and cultural change.
The miller's tale (Canterbuty tales)"The Miller's Tale" (Middle English: The Milleres Tale) is the second of Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales (1380s-1390s), told by a drunken miller to "quite" (requite) The Knight's Tale. Again we have a triangle relationship between Old John, his young wife, and the lodger, repeated many times in literature since. Even to this present day, much ridicule is made of old men who marry young girls, and who cannot satisfy their desires.
Literature and Medicine in Nineteenth-Century Britain: From Mary Shelley to George Eliot
Janis Caldwell investigates the links between the growing scientific materialism of the nineteenth century and the persistence of the Romantic literary imagination. Through closely analyzing literary texts from Frankenstein to Middlemarch, and examining fiction alongside biomedical lectures, textbooks and articles, Caldwell argues that the way "Romantic materialism" influenced these disciplines compels us to revise conventional ***s of the relationship between literature and medicine. ...
Spenser is..."Tougher, stronger, better educated, and far more amusing than Sam Spade, Phil Marlowe, or Lewis Archer...Spenser gives the connoisseur of that rare combination of good detective fiction and good literature a chance to indulge himself." -The Boston Globe
This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile moments, when literature was enmeshed with the extremes of social, political and sexual experience. Newly-commissioned essays make use of current critical perspectives in order to offer new insight into the literature of Restoration and early eighteenth-century England in all its variety, from vitriolic satire to heroic verse. The volume's chronologies and select bibliographies will guide the reader through texts and events, while the fourteen essays commissioned for this Companion will allow us to read the period anew.
