Why is English literature so important in schools? Read here.
Here you can find several useful videos dedicated to English literature.
Pride and Prejudice is one of the most popular novels in the English language. Over 200 years after its publication, it continues to win the hearts and minds of readers around the world, thanks to its delightful heroine, unforgettable cast of comic characters, witty dialogue, and satisfying romantic plot.
Read here.
Jane Austen, novelist, observer of human nature, and enduring voice of wit, romance, and social insight, was born in Steventon, Hampshire, England on 16 December 1775 and birthday celebrations have been taking place across the United Kingdom and the United States for months. Here are some ways to celebrate the birth of one of England's most beloved authors.
Jane Austen’s novels are unrivalled for their success in
combining two sorts of excellence that all too seldom coexist. Meticulously
conscious of her artistry, she is also constantly attentive to the realities of
ordinary human existence. From the
first, her works unite subtlety and common sense, good humour and acute moral
judgment, charm and conciseness, deftly marshalled incidents and carefully
rounded characters.
Jane Austen’s critics have spoken of her as a “limited” novelist, one who, writing in an age of great men and important events, portrays small towns and petty concerns, who knows (or reveals) nothing of masculine occupations and ideas, and who reduces the range of feminine thought and deed to matrimonial scheming and social pleasantry. Read here.
First published in 1911, after being serialised in The American Magazine, it was dismissed by one critic at the time as simple and lacking “plenty of excitement”. The novel is, in fact, a sensitive and complex story, which explores how a relationship with nature can foster our emotional and physical well-being. Read here.
You can read the book here.
https://www.gradesaver.com/the-secret-garden
https://api.macmillanenglish.com
https://fsharetv.cc/movie/the-secret-garden-episode-1-tt0108071
Virginia Woolf (1882-1941) was an English novelist, essayist, biographer, and feminist. She was a prolific writer, whose modernist style changed with each new novel. Her letters and memoirs reveal glimpses of Virginia Woolf at the center of English literary culture during the Bloomsbury era. She represents a historical moment when art was integrated into society, as T.S. Eliot describes in his obituary for Virginia. “Without Virginia Woolf at the center of it, it would have remained formless or marginal … With the death of Virginia Woolf, a whole pattern of culture is broken.” Read here.
The monster has always been the true subject of the Frankenstein story, and Kenneth Branagh’s retelling understands that. “Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein” has all of the usual props of the Frankenstein films, brought to a fever pitch: the dark and stormy nights, the lightning bolts, the charnel houses of spare body parts, the laboratory where Victor Frankenstein stirs his steaming cauldron of life. Read here.
https://fsharetv.co/movie/mary-shelley's-frankenstein-episode-1-tt0109836
The first Gothic fiction appeared with
works like Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto (1765), Ann
Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho (1794) and Matthew Gregory Lewis’ The Monk (1796),
which opposed 18th-century “rationalism” with scenes of mystery, horror, and
wonder. Gothic was a designation derived from architecture, and it carried connotations of rough and primitive grandeur.
The atmosphere of a Gothic novel was expected to be dark,
tempestuous, ghostly, full of madness, outrage, superstition, and the spirit of
revenge. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which maintains its original
popularity and even notoriety, has in overplus the traditional Gothic
ingredients, with its weird God-defying experiments and its monster.
Easy targets for satire, the early Gothic romances died
of their own extravagances of plot, but Gothic atmospheric devices continued to haunt the fiction of such major writers as the Brontë
sisters, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel
Hawthorne, and even Charles Dickens in Bleak House and Great
Expectations. In the second half of the 20th century, the term was applied
to paperback romances having the same kind of themes and trappings similar to
the originals.
Gothic fiction asks to be
considered as ingenious entertainment; the pity and terror are not aspects of
a cathartic process, but transient emotions to be enjoyed for their own sake.
Read here.
https://research.dom.edu/gothicliterature/historyandkeyelements
https://www.invaluable.com/blog/elements-of-gothic-literature/
The Beat movement was an American social and literary movement, originating in the 1950s, and centred in the bohemian artist communities of
San Francisco’s North Beach, Los Angeles’ Venice West, and New
York City’s Greenwich
Village. Its adherents, self-styled as “beat” (originally meaning
“weary” (= tired), but later also connoting a musical sense, a “beatific”
spirituality, and other meanings) and derisively called “beatniks,” expressed
their alienation from conventional, or “square,” society by adopting a style of
dress, manners, and “hip” vocabulary borrowed from jazz musicians. They
advocated personal release, purification, and illumination through the
heightened sensory awareness that might be induced by drugs, jazz, sex, or the disciplines of Zen
Buddhism. The Beats and their advocates found the joylessness and
purposelessness of modern society sufficient justification for both withdrawal
and protest. Read here.
“When you consider things like the stars, our affairs don’t seem to matter very much, do they?”
Virginia Woolf is recognised as one of the most innovative writers of the 20th century. Perhaps best known as the author of Mrs Dalloway (1925) and To the Lighthouse (1927), she was also a prolific writer of essays, diaries, letters and biographies. Both in style and subject matter, her work captures the fast-changing world in which she was working.
Widely known for his dystopian novel Fahrenheit 451 (1953), Ray Bradbury died on 5 June 2012. He was an American author best known for his highly
imaginative short stories and novels that blend a poetic style, nostalgia for childhood, social criticism, and an awareness of the hazards of runaway technology.
Read here.
https://literarydevices.net/ray-bradbury/
The iconic Jane Austen's stories of independent women in the Regency era have been enthralling audiences for centuries. It only makes sense that with the creation of the movies these stories quickly moved to the big screen. Movies allow Jane Austen's stories to be told in an entirely new way, bringing life to many beloved characters. Read here.
