History of English Literature

John Skelton is a central literary figure and the leading poet during the first thirty years of Tudor rule. Nevertheless, he remains challenging and even contradictory for modern audiences.

This book aims to provide an authoritative guide to this complex poet and his works, setting him in his historical, religious, and social contexts. Beginning with an exploration of his life and career, it goes on to cover all the major aspects of his poetry, from the literary traditions in which he wrote and the form of his compositions to the manuscript contexts and later reception. Contributors: Tom Betteridge, Julia Boffey, John Burrow, David Carlson, Helen Cooper, Elisabeth Dutton, A.S.G. Edwards, Jane Griffiths, Nadine Kuipers, Carol Meale, John Scattergood, Sebastian Sobecki, Greg Waite

Edited collection -- with chapters by Adam Smyth, Barry Windeatt, David Matthew, Molly Murray, Kathleen Lynch, Suzanne Trill, Tessa Whitehouse, Robert Folkenflik, Lynn Festa, John Richetti, David Vincent, Duncan Wu, Richard Hughes Gibson, Timothy Larsen, Carol Hanbery MacKay, Julie Codell, Stephen Colclough, Max Saunders, Georgia Johnston, Hope Wolf, Laura Marcus, Maud Ellman, Michael O'Neill, Nick Hubble, Bart Moore-Gilbert, Joseph Brooker, Neil Vickers, Roger Luckhurst, Andreas Kitzmann

Victorian Literature. The second part of the second volume offers a selection of the writing of authors starting with Tennyson and Browning and finishing with the light verse of Lear and Carroll. English Literature – An Anthology for Students. Volume 2 - From the Romanticism to the Twentieth Century. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2011, pp. 536.

These poems, composed in Somali and in English, provide a poetic reflection of the recently emerged debate on the theme of Caddaan Studies which means "White Studies". The criticism and counter-criticism contained in the debate dug so deep into life nerve of Somali Studies that over a thousand people participated. The poems, under the title "Inaugurating Caddaan Studies" were composed with a critical observation of the debate.

In the first five months of the Great War, one million men volunteered to fight. Yet by the end of 1915, the British government realized that conscription would be required. Why did so many enlist, and conversely, why so few? Focusing on analyses of widely felt emotions related to moral and domestic duty, Juvenile Nation broaches these questions in new ways.

Juvenile Nation examines how religious and secular youth groups, the juvenile periodical press, and a burgeoning new group of child psychologists, social workers and other ‘experts’ affected society’s perception of a new problem character, the ‘adolescent’. By what means should this character be turned into a ‘fit’ citizen? Considering qualities such as loyalty, character, temperance, manliness, fatherhood, and piety, Stephanie Olsen discusses the idea of an ‘informal education’, focused on building character through emotional control, and how this education was seen as key to shaping the future citizenry of Britain and the Empire.

Juvenile Nation recasts the militarism of the 1880s onwards as part of an emotional outpouring based on association to family, to community and to Christian cultural continuity. Significantly, the same emotional responses explain why so many men turned away from active militarism, with duty to family and community perhaps thought to have been best carried out at home. By linking the historical study of the emotions with an examination of the individual’s place in society, Olsen provides an important new insight on how a generation of young men was formed.

This article considers Jalal Al-Ahmad and Elizabeth Braddon as writers whose fictions voiced attitudes towards poverty and motherhood. Two women, to get rid of poverty, have to get rid of their children in order to remarry. These two women consider remarriage as their only way to happiness and each one deems her child as an obstacle and gives up her motherly affection for her child. The study of this common subject in two different cultures is justifiable from the theory of comparative literature. Thus, aim of this paper is to examine these two English and Persian works from the theory of confluence so as to show the differences and similarities. The method of this paper is based on comparative literature ofَ American School which regards confluence as point of investigation and does not deem direct influence of one author on another as a point of departure. That the two authors have used one similar subject is a condition for their study and comparison in this school.

The poem of Beowulf is unique in being composed in a period of history roughly placed between paganism and Christianity. As a logical reflection of this context, the content of the poem contains elements of both creeds. However, it is obscure in both content and context where the essence of the poem can be placed between these two seemingly incompatible beliefs systems. In this essay, I will address this obscurity, where it is found in content by forming an argument from allegorical evidence, namely Grendel’s origin and Beowulf’s death. And on the other in regard to the context as justified by Christian scholastic tradition. By both of these points, I will argue the poem is a fundamentally Christian text, or at the very least, that a purely pagan reading of the poem is not valid.

The Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature addresses the need for an authoritative guide  through the bewildering maze of medieval law as well as the need for concise examples of how the law infiltrated literary texts. The Companion combines accessible essays written by leading specialists in legal history with essays exploring literary conversations with the law in the works of later medieval authors
from Chaucer to Malory. The first half of this book contains detailed introductions to legal concepts, practices, and institutions in medieval England. In the second half, experts cover a number of texts and authors from across the later medieval period whose verse and prose can be understood as engaging with the law. In this way, the Cambridge Companion to Medieval Law and Literature forms the basis for students wishing to explore this rich area or for scholars to familiarise themselves with literary uses of the law.

ISBN: 9781316632345

Poor Poet’s Complaint: The Place and Role of the Moneybag in English Literature
The article presents four British poems from four different literary periods sharing a common theme: complaint about the poet’s poverty. Each of the poems – “Deor”, “Complaint of Chaucer to His Purse”, Barnfield’s “The Complaint of Poetrie, for the Death of Liberalitie” (his “The Encomion of Lady Pecunia: Or The Praise of Money” is also mentioned) and Burns’ „Lines Written on a Banknote” – is presented within the context of the contemporary economic situations of English poets in general, and the specific biographical circumstances in which they were written. In a broader sense the article presents in a brief and light way the economic reality of literary creativity in Great Britain from the early Middle Ages to our times. In Polish.

Objective fluency judgment has always been a formidable task in language testing. Nonetheless, temporal fluency is the type of fluency which can be measured and quantified. Given that, temporal fluency is also known as temporal measures of fluency (Luoma, 2004). Furthermore, it has aroused considerable interest in analyzing speech of language learners in terms of quantitative measures (Kormos & Denes, 2004; Freed, 1995; Riggenbach, 1991; Lennon, 1990). They suggested that certain measures of fluency can more objectively specify fluency level and that perceptual understanding of fluency to a high extent correlate with these measures. Following these studies, the present study was an endeavor to relate quantitative measures of fluency and assessment of fluency in oral speech of L2 learners. To do so 30 advanced EFL learners whose speaking score on TOEFL iBT scale was between 19 to 22, i.e. B2 on CEFR scale, were selected. Then, they were given a picture strip as the elicitation task and asked to make up a story based on that. Their voice was recorded, transcribed and further analyzed by voice analysis software called PRAAT to calculate seven measures of fluency. Meanwhile, two trained listeners were required to rate the recordings, scoring them from 1 to 9. Finally, the relationship between these variables was calculated. The results showed that judge listeners' ratings of fluency were highly correlated with speech rate, phonation time ratio, and mean length of runs. Moreover, among the measures of temporal fluency speech rate proved significantly correlated with articulation rate, phonation time ratio, and mean length of runs.

English Literature – An Anthology for Students. Volume 1. From the Middle Ages to the Eighteenth Century.

The contents of the anthology are available as individual chapters on Academia. Go to the author's profile, select section "Anthology of English Literature" from the bar below intro and choose the chapter you want to read.

An excellent source for all courses in history of English literature, 'English Literature. An Anthology for Students' offers a new and comprehensive collection of the most important English literary texts from Beowulf to essays of Virginia Woolf and beyond. The two-volume selection was based on reading lists and curricula of Polish departments of English studies. The original idea was to offer a selection of texts as close as possible to actual expectations of teachers and students of departments of English studies, teacher training colleges, departments of applied linguistics, and any other schools where history of English literature is taught.

The selection should be an appropriate basis for a variety of courses. In order to make it more flexible we decided to introduce several complete longer texts such as Beowulf, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight or The Rape of the Lock, leaving the choice of excerpts for critical analysis to the users according to the specific needs of their classes and students. The texts have been supplemented with extensive critical footnotes and explanations of the more rare and obscure vocabulary, there are also biographical notes introducing their authors.

We hope that our anthology will be an excellent source for all courses in history of English literature. However, it may also serve as an introduction to English literary texts to all non-academic readers who are ready to take the challenge of reading them in the original.

List of Contents in the attachment below!

Humanity has always wanted to find peace, order, and justice in a perfect world. Yet, this longing manifested in literary works, has been touched by the dark side of reality, transforming Utopia into Dystopia; a world of conflict and chaos. Sara Gruen (1969) captivates this undeniable reality in her novel Water for Elephants (2006) and shows that the so called ideal society can still have a tragic flaw. This study intends to prove the existence of a Dystopian world in Sara Gruen’s novel Water for Elephants, and how it is shaped within a miniature society of a circus. In the life of this circus, the elements of Dystopia come together to portray the degeneration of society during the Great Depression of (1929 – 1941) in the United States of America; creating a world everyone thought at the very beginning was Utopia. Therefore, this study unravels the layers of perfection and shows the flaws of this so called perfect man-made world (the circus) by using the theoretical approach of the term Dystopia and applying it to the novel, one finds that the events that lead to the hero’s abandonment of everything because of the Great Depression in America, ends with the hero’s triumph over shackled circumstances in which he is played as a pawn. This feature of ending oppression and fighting for his and his society’s freedom is a major quality of a Dystopian Hero; in contrast, a Utopian Protagonist stands aside, simply being objective in society as he studies the perfect laws and nature of such a perfect world.

Keywords: Utopia, Dystopia, Circus, Great Depression, Dystopian Hero

The present paper seeks to closely explore Kurt Vonnegut " s Slaughterhouse-Five in terms of Judith Herman " s surveys and categorization of post-traumatic stress disorder symptoms. It is an attempt to analyze the conflict between the will to deny horrible events experienced by the protagonists of the novel in World War II and the will to proclaim them aloud. The psychological distress symptoms including the inability to sleep, lack of concentration, flashbacks and state of surrender are thus investigated in the narrator and Billy Pilgrim as the two figures who are suffering from PTSD. These symptoms are analyzed in a way to call attention to the existence of unspeakable secret and simultaneously as means to deflect attention from it. The protagonists are both subjected to the dialectic of trauma in that they find it difficult to remain clearheaded, to see more than a few fragments of the picture at one time, and to retain all the pieces and to fit them together. It is even more difficult to find a language that conveys persuasively what they have seen.

British Library Harley MS 3954’s Book of Sir John Mandeville has ninety-nine images, and another thirty-five blanks, carefully framed in thin lines of ink as part of the ruling of the manuscript. As is so often the case, the blanks appear more frequently toward the end.  On the final folio (69v) there appears a neatly framed blank space (Figure 1).  The manuscript’s final text block appears just below this space and tells us of “a bok of Latyn that conteyned al that and myche more, aff wych bok the mappa mundi was mad.” As if to tantalize the reader, “mappa mundi” is rubricated and so stands out from the black ink in which the rest of the page (and the book) is written. While I sat there, staring at the blank space, and the red name for an absent image, I caught myself dreaming of finding a new mappa mundi hidden within that empty frame, the perfect place for a map of the world according to Mandeville. What would it look like, and what would imagining it tell us about the Book’s portrayal of Jews?

Ahmed Saadawi's Frankenstein in Baghdad, originally published in Arabic in 2013 and translated into English by Jonathan Wright in 2018, is set in the chaotic socio-political condition of post-invasion Iraq. The Nobel exacerbates the horror of sectarian violence by introducing a Frankensteinesque atmosphere of magical realism. However, this paper concentrates on the concept of monstrosity as presented in the novel. The paper shows how the concept of monstrosity, being a fluid one, problematizes the notion of identity. By carefully considering the multiple manifestations of 'monstrous identity', the paper demonstrates that 'monstrosity' is not an easily identifiable physical attribute found in conventional deformed-body 'monsters'; nor is it just a characteristic trait of an evil mind; rather, it is a highly nuanced term which complexly affects social identities.

This book examines how sexological ideas about desire and the body made their way from German science into British literary culture at the turn of the last century. It shows that fiction not only influenced the vocabulary of European sexology, but that it allowed lay women and men to shape modern ideas about sex, gender and the body.

Main authors discussed include Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, Richard von Krafft-Ebing, Magnus Hirschfeld, Havelock Ellis, John Addington Symonds, Edward Carpenter, Olive Schreiner and Sarah Grand, Edith Ellis, and Radclyffe Hall.

Modernist Literature. The sixth part of the second volume offers a selection of the Modernist Literature from Joyce to Eliot. English Literature – An Anthology for Students. Volume 2 - From the Romanticism to the Twentieth Century. Poznań: Dom Wydawniczy Rebis, 2011, pp. 536.

The paper presents possible classical inspirations of John Braine’s novel Room at the Top (1957). It is an attempt to analyses the text of the novel belonging to the so called Angry Young Period as a tragic work which translated into the reality of the late 1940s Great Britain the myth of Jason and Medea, represented in the text of the paper by its most classic rendition, the ancient tragedy by Euripides entitled Medea. The article moves on to discuss the issue of to what extent it is possible to adapt classical material, and to what extent tragedy is impossible today while any attempt of recreating it must result in a parody of the classical form.

The publication of A.C. Swinburne’s collection Poems and Ballads in 1866 provoked a critical backlash aimed at condemning its author’s moral standing. This article takes the collection and its early reception as starting points for a reconsideration of Victorian critical attitudes to the issue of what it means for a poem to be ‘dramatic’. It is argued that the propensity to regard ambiguously dramatized poems as de facto lyrical, hence as direct expressions of the author’s personality, was an implicit underpinning of much moralizing criticism, whereas the opposite notion that a poem should be understood as dramatic unless otherwise specified served as a way for artists such as Swinburne to claim a safe space for their art, independent of moral considerations. A close reading of some of the poems in the collection reveals the extent to which Swinburne’s poetry cuts across the established distinction between lyric and drama, in a way that is reminiscent of Robert Browning’s dramatic monologues. There follows an analysis of early assessments of the collection and of Swinburne’s response to them, which serves as an illustration of the opposing positions, psychological/contextualist and formalist respectively, on the issue of what counts as dramatic poetry. Finally, it is argued that Swinburne’s positions paved the way for the shift in prevalent critical opinion from conceiving of literary works as expressive of writers’ personalities and opinions to considering them as linguistic objects from which author-related data cannot justly be inferred.

In literature, escapism might seem to take us to unconventional worlds, but again and again, it presents an inverted yet unveiled picture of this world. The word "Escape" was the idea that became a reality for escapist poets. Escapism is not one thing, but one movement. And it was not only the solution to the intermittent revolutions, personal or impersonal, that resisted man's quest and hunger for happiness. There were no doubt many other solutions and suggestions, but one of those which was most attractive of those poets who desired to find eternal beauty and truth and the one was 'Escapism'. Occurrences in politics, uncertainty in society, mental disturbances, insecurity of morality of character, confusions in religion, and philosophical ideologies of the day, all such things added to the element of escapism in writers' thoughts, personalities, and ultimately their works.

The aim of this article is to analyse the vision of science and scientists presented in His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman. In the first part of the text, the author focuses on the relations between science and the Church in the mentioned trilogy, especially on the difference in technological development between Lyra’s and Will’s worlds. The second part of the paper focuses on the scientists themselves and the explorers described in His Dark Materials: unethical characters represented by Marisa Coulter and Lord Asriel, who are portrayed in contrary to ‘noble scientists’– John Parry and Dr. Mary Malone. In the last part of the text the ideas of multiverse and Dust are analysed. The whole article focuses especially on the topic of how Pullman unites the typical scientific issues with the elements of philosophical and theological nature.