Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Humors
Humoral theory in England in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries belonged both to the world of the practitioner and the academic. It originated in Aristotle’s idea of balance within the body and achieved its fullest articulation in the works of Galen (129–ca. 216), which became central to the curriculum of medical study in Europe. The enormous quantity of medical manuscripts in England (over 7,000 in English alone from the … Read the rest
Friars
The mendicant orders first arrived in England in the thirteenth century and the number of adherents rapidly grew. Two of the four principal orders – the Friars Preachers (Dominicans or Black Friars) and the Friars Minor (Franciscans or Grey Friars) – quickly became integral in the life of universities and commercial centers in the country, the Franciscans producing the remarkable theologians Roger Bacon, John Duns Scotus, William of Ockham, … Read the rest
Benedictine
Rule Monastic orders existed in Ireland and Wales in the fifth century, first arrived in England in the sixth and seventh centuries, and in the eighth century the Rule of St. Benedict (480–ca. 550), Benedict’s set of codes for behavior, also came to be known in the British Isles. Receiving additional impetus after 1066 and then again with the arrival of orders of canons and friars in the twelfth … Read the rest
As I Lay Dying
As I Lay Dying, one of the finest examples of William Faulkner’s distinctive writing style, was first published in 1930. The novel is the first to introduce Faulkner’s fictional Yoknapatawpha County, which serves as the setting for many of his novels and short stories. As in his other works, As I Lay Dying showcases Faulkner’s ability to reveal the intricacy of the human psyche. Told from … Read the rest
ARISTOPHANES Lysistrata
The masterpieces of comedy produced by Aristophanes, the sharp and lewd wit of fifth-century Athens, may forever play supporting roles to their tragic counterparts. However, Lysistrata, a fantasy in which Greek women stage a sit-in/sex strike to end the Peloponnesian War between Athens and Sparta, maintains a special place in dramatic and literary history. Featuring a title character whose name loosely translates as “she who disbands armies,” its … Read the rest
ANONYMOUS Beowulf (ca. 1000)
Beowulf is the longest and most complete surviving poem in Old English. The work probably circulated orally for centuries before being written down by scribes around the year 1000. It consists of 3,182 lines of alliterative verse. The poem’s plot, is straightforward and has the quality of a folktale, following recognizable patterns of myth: A young hero sets out on a sea journey to battle monsters. … Read the rest
Abandonment in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Maya Angelou’s autobiographical novel opens with three-year-old Maya and her four-year-old bother Bailey traveling alone across the United States wearing wrist tags that read “To Whom It May Concern.” The siblings are being sent away from their newly divorced parents to live with their paternal grandmother, and Maya reacts by pretending her parents are dead. “I couldn’t believe that our mother … Read the rest
ANDERSON, SHERWOOD Winesburg, Ohio (1919)
Winesburg, Ohio, is a cycle comprising 21 short stories plus one prefatory story, “The Book of the Grotesque.” That initial story introduces the concept that runs through the rest of the stories: People dominated by one idea become grotesque, even if that one idea is true. The stories, each focusing on a particular resident, comprise a mini-population or representation of the town itself. Because Winesburg, … Read the rest
The House of the Spirits (1982)
Isabel Allende’s The House of the Spirits, published in 1982, tells the history of several generations of the Trueba family against the backdrop of Chile’s socialist government and the 1973 military coup that gave rise to the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet. Clara, who regularly converses with the spirit world, marries Esteban Trueba, a wealthy landowner who regularly rapes peasant women working on his hacienda. … Read the rest
The American Dream in Little Women
The American dream has long symbolized a change of fortune and the hope that through hard work or luck, even the poorest person can prosper. Immigrants flooding into America in the 19th century came looking for new opportunities that would lift them out of the poverty they had experienced in their home countries; for them, the American dream was inseparably linked with material wealth. … Read the rest