READING MARY SHELLEY'S FRANKENSTEIN

Mary Shelley's famous Gothic novel is considered a landmark work and every decade brings a new interpretation. Here is a selection - some include plot details,

Read here.

https://student.iedl.ir/Four_Corners/Four_Corners_2nd/FC3C/Frankenstein.pdf

WILLIAM WORDSWORTH - 5^D LINGUISTICO

Here you can explore the Wordsworth Museum which is next door to Dove Cottage  - it was in this little cottage, at times "crammed edge full" with people, in the heart of the remote Lake District, that William Wordsworth wrote some of the greatest poetry in the English language.

THE MODERN NOVEL

Here you can find a PDF presentation of the Modern novel.

REVISING WILFRED OWEN

Here you can find my previous post on Wilfred Owen, an English poet whose work was characterised by his anger at the cruelty and waste of war, which he experienced during service on the Western Front.

MODERNISM

The Modernist Period in English literature occupied the years from shortly after the beginning of the 20th century through roughly 1965. In broad terms, the period was marked by sudden and unexpected breaks with traditional ways of viewing and interacting with the world.

Continue reading here. 

Click here to read about Modernism.

THE VICTORIAN AGE - 5^C AND 5^D LINGUISTICO

The Reform Bill of 1832 gave the middle class the political power it needed to strengthen the economic position it had already achieved. Industry and commerce flourished. While the wealth of the middle class increased, the lower classes, thrown off their land and into the cities to form the great urban working class, lived ever more miserably. The social changes were so fast and brutal that intellectuals rapidly gave way to attempts either to justify the new economic and urban conditions, or to change them. The artists of the age had to deal in some way with the upheavals (=disorders) in society, the evident injustice of affluence (=wealth) for a few and squalor for many, and, emanating from the throne of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), an emphasis on public rectitude and moral propriety.

Here you can find a mind map of the Victorian Age.

https://www.history.com/topics/19th-century/victorian-era-timeline

http://backinthedayof.co.uk/an-introduction-to-the-victorian-era

REVISING ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

On 3 December 1894  Robert Louis Stevenson  died very suddenly. He had defied his weak lungs for over 40 years, but in the end it was a brain haemorrhage which killed him. He was buried on the summit of Mount Vaea, Vailima, on a small Samoan island in the Pacific,  with his “Requiem”. 

Fourteen years earlier, when he was very ill in California, he had composed his own epitaph:

"Under the wide and starry sky,
Dig the grave and let me lie.
Glad did I live and gladly die,
And I laid me down with a will.

This be the verse you grave for me:
Here he lies where he longed to be;
Home is the sailor, home from sea,
And the hunter home from the hill."

Here you can find a study guide on Robert Louis Stevenson's most captivating novel, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde.

“All human beings, as we meet them, are commingled out of good and evil: and Edward Hyde, alone, in the ranks of mankind, was pure evil.” 

WHY IS JANE AUSTEN STILL IMPORTANT?

Here you can find a significant article about Jane Austen's longevity. 

“Anyone who has the temerity to write about Jane Austen is aware of [two] facts: first, that of all great writers she is the most difficult to catch in the act of greatness; second, that there are twenty-five elderly gentlemen living in the neighbourhood of London who resent any slight upon her genius as if it were an insult to the chastity of their aunts.” 
Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own

FICTION DURING THE ROMANTIC AGE - MARY SHELLEY

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, née Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, was the only daughter of William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft. Their high expectations of her future are, perhaps, indicated by their blessing her upon her birth with both their names. She was born on 30 August 1797 in London. The labor was not difficult, but complications developed with the afterbirth. Despite expert attention, her mother sickened from placental infection and died eleven days after her birth, on 10 September. Continue reading here.

Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" 

Revising Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" 

JOHN KEATS, THE POET OF BEAUTY

John Keats was born on 31 October 1795 in Moorgate, London, England, the first child born to Frances Jennings and Thomas Keats. After leaving school in Enfield, Keats went on to apprentice with Dr. Hammond, a surgeon in Edmonton. After his father died in a riding accident, and his mother died of tuberculosis, John and his brothers moved to Hampstead. It was here that Keats met Charles Armitage Brown (1787-1842) who would become a great friend. Remembering his first meeting with him, Brown writes "His full fine eyes were lustrously intellectual, and beaming (at that time!)". Much grieved by his death, Brown worked for many years on his biography, Life of John Keats (1841). In it Brown claims that it was not until Keats read Edmund Spencer's Faery Queen that he realised his own gift for the poetic. Keats was an avid student in the fields of medicine and natural history, but he then turned his attentions to the literary works of such authors as William Shakespeare and Geoffrey Chaucer. Continue reading here.

Here you can find a summary and an analysis of John Keats's "Ode to a Nightingale". 

THE BEAUTIFUL AND THE SUBLIME

ENGLISH ROMANTICISM

The historical and literary background

Thomas Gray

William Blake

The First Generation of Romantic Poets

The Second Generation of Romantic Poets

Here you can find a PDF presentation too.