But when Leviathan is the text, the case is altered. Fain am I to stagger to this enterprise under the weightiest words of the dictionary. And here be it said, that whenever it has been convenient to consult one in the course of these dissertations, I have invariably used a huge quarto edition of Johnson, expressly purchased for that purpose; because that famous lexicographer's uncommon personal bulk more fitted him to compile a lexicon to be used by a whale author like me.
Brown how silly I was, to make me feel ashamed, that he said — "There are some tempers which, if they haven't enough people to love, will love things.
25 Famous Authors' Favorite Books
Margery says he did not say tempers but temperaments. I know it began with temper, because it reminded me of Jael, who said "them tears is all temper, Miss Grace," which was very hard, because she knew - she knew quite well - it was about my poodle; and although accidents will happen, she need not have swept up his tail. Margery is sure to be right.
Besides, we looked it out in Johnson's Dictionary which we are rather fond of, though it is very heavy to lift. We like the bits out of books, in small print; but I could not understand the bits to the word temperament , and I do not think Margery could either, though she can understand much more than I can.
There is a very odd bit to the word temperamental , and it is signed Brown ; but we do not know if that means our Dr. This is the bit: We could not understand it, so we lifted down the other volume one is just as heavy as the other , and looked out "Dignotion," and it means "distinction, distinguishing mark," and then there is the same bit over again, but at the end, is " Brown's Vulgar Errors.
Brown if they were his vulgar errors, for fear he should think us rude. Margery says she did not understand at the time what they were quarrelling about; and when, afterwards, she asked Grandmamma what a cesspool was, Grandmamma was cross with her too, and said it was a very coarse and vulgar word, and that Dr.
Brown was a very coarse and vulgar person. We've looked it out since in Johnson's Dictoinary, for we thought it might be one of Dr. Brown's vulgar errors, but it is not there. In Miss Jemima's eyes an autograph letter of her sister, Miss Pinkerton, was an object of as deep veneration as would have been a letter from a sovereign. The Expedition of Humphry Clinker brings together characters from the extremes of Britain to question how cultural and linguistic differences can be accommodated within the new British identity, and influenced Charles Dickens.
In prose, the earlier part of the period was overshadowed by the development of the English essay. Joseph Addison and Richard Steele 's The Spectator established the form of the British periodical essay, inventing the pose of the detached observer of human life who can meditate upon the world without advocating any specific changes in it. However, this was also the time when the English novel, first emerging in the Restoration, developed into a major art form.
Daniel Defoe turned from journalism and writing criminal lives for the press to writing fictional criminal lives with Roxana and Moll Flanders. If Addison and Steele were dominant in one type of prose, then Jonathan Swift author of the satire Gulliver's Travels was in another. This provoked riots and arrests, but Swift, who had no love of Irish Roman Catholics , was outraged by the abuses he saw.
The English pictorial satirist and editorial cartoonist William Hogarth — has been credited with pioneering Western sequential art. His work ranged from realistic portraiture to comic strip -like series of pictures called "modern moral subjects". Much of his work satirises contemporary politics and customs. Although documented history of Irish theatre began at least as early as , the earliest Irish dramatists of note were William Congreve — , one of the most interesting writers of Restoration comedies and author of The Way of the World and playwright, George Farquhar?
Comedy of manners is used as a synonym of Restoration comedy. Anglo-Irish drama in the 18th century also includes Charles Macklin? The age of Augustan drama was brought to an end by the censorship established by the Licensing Act After , authors with strong political or philosophical points to make would no longer turn to the stage as their first hope of making a living, and novels began to have dramatic structures involving only normal human beings, as the stage was closed off for serious authors. Prior to the Licensing Act , theatre was the first choice for most wits.
After it, the novel was [58]. The most outstanding poet of the age is Alexander Pope — , whose major works include: The Rape of the Lock ; enlarged in ; a translation of the Iliad —20 ; a translation of the Odyssey —26 ; The Dunciad ; Since his death, Pope has been in a constant state of re-evaluation. His high artifice, strict prosody, and, at times, the sheer cruelty of his satire were an object of derision for the Romantic poets , and it was not until the s that his reputation was revived.
Pope is now considered the dominant poetic voice of his century, a model of prosodic elegance, biting wit, and an enduring, demanding moral force. It was during this time that poet James Thomson —48 produced his melancholy The Seasons —30 and Edward Young — wrote his poem Night-Thoughts The second half of the 18th century is sometimes called the "Age of Johnson".
Samuel Johnson — , often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". This period of the 18th century saw the emergence of three major Irish authors Oliver Goldsmith — , Richard Brinsley Sheridan — , and Laurence Sterne — Sheridan was born in Dublin, but his family moved to England in the s.
His first play, The Rivals , was performed at Covent Garden and was an instant success. He went on to become the most significant London playwright of the late 18th century with plays like The School for Scandal and The Critic. Sterne published his famous novel Tristram Shandy in parts between and The sentimental novel or the novel of sensibility is a genre which developed during the second half of the 18th century. Another novel genre also developed in this period.
In , Frances Burney — wrote Evelina , one of the first novels of manners. The graveyard poets were a number of pre-Romantic English poets, writing in the s and later, whose works are characterised by their gloomy meditations on mortality, "skulls and coffins, epitaphs and worms" in the context of the graveyard. Other precursors of Romanticism are the poets James Thomson —48 and James Macpherson —96 , the Gothic novel and the novel of sensibility. The Gothic fiction genre combines elements of horror and romance.
The Monk , by Matthew Lewis , is another notable early work in both the Gothic and horror genres. James Macpherson —96 was the first Scottish poet to gain an international reputation. Claiming to have found poetry written by the ancient bard Ossian , he published translations that acquired international popularity, being proclaimed as a Celtic equivalent of the Classical epics.
Robert Burns — was a pioneer of the Romantic movement, and after his death he became a cultural icon in Scotland. Romanticism was an artistic, literary, and intellectual movement that originated in Europe toward the end of the 18th century. Various dates are given for the Romantic period in British literature, but here the publishing of Lyrical Ballads in is taken as the beginning, and the crowning of Queen Victoria in as its end, even though, for example, William Wordsworth lived until and William Blake published before The writers of this period, however, "did not think of themselves as 'Romantics'", and the term was first used by critics of the Victorian period.
The Romantic period was one of major social change in England, because of the depopulation of the countryside and the rapid development of overcrowded industrial cities, that took place in the period roughly between and The movement of so many people in England was the result of two forces: The landscape is often prominent in the poetry of this period, so that the Romantics, especially perhaps Wordsworth, are often described as 'nature poets'.
However, the longer Romantic 'nature poems' have a wider concern because they are usually meditations on "an emotional problem or personal crisis". The poet, painter, and printmaker William Blake — was one of the first of the English Romantic poets. Largely disconnected from the major streams of the literature of the time, Blake was generally unrecognised during his lifetime, but is now considered a seminal figure in the history of both the poetry and visual arts of the Romantic Age.
Among his most important works are Songs of Innocence and Songs of Experience "and profound and difficult 'prophecies' " such as Visions of the Daughters of Albion , The First Book of Urizen , and "Jerusalem: However, at the time, Walter Scott — was the most famous poet. Scott achieved immediate success with his long narrative poem The Lay of the Last Minstrel in , followed by the full epic poem Marmion in Both were set in the distant Scottish past. The early Romantic Poets brought a new emotionalism and introspection, and their emergence is marked by the first romantic manifesto in English literature, the "Preface" to Lyrical Ballads Robert Southey — was another of the so-called " Lake Poets ", and Poet Laureate for 30 years from to his death in Although his fame has been long eclipsed by that of his contemporaries and friends William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge.
Thomas De Quincey — was an English essayist, best known for his Confessions of an English Opium-Eater , [87] an autobiographical account of his laudanum and its effect on his life. Byron, however, was still influenced by 18th-century satirists and was, perhaps, the least "romantic" of the three, preferring "the brilliant wit of Pope to what he called the 'wrong poetical system' of his Romantic contemporaries".
Though John Keats shared Byron and Shelley's radical politics, "his best poetry is not political". Percy Shelley , known to contemporaries for his radical politics and association with figures such as Byron and Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley, daughter of radical thinkers William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, was the third major romantic poet of the second generation.
Another important poet in this period was John Clare — Clare was the son of a farm labourer, who came to be known for his celebratory representations of the English countryside and his lamentation for the changes taking place in rural England.
Free Audio Books: Download Great Books for Free | Open Culture
George Crabbe — was an English poet who, during the Romantic period, wrote "closely observed, realistic portraits of rural life [ Major novelists in this period were the Englishwoman Jane Austen — and the Scotsman Sir Walter Scott — , while Gothic fiction of various kinds also flourished. Austen's works satirise the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century realism.
The most important British novelist at the beginning of the early 19th century was Sir Walter Scott, who was not only a highly successful British novelist, but "the greatest single influence on fiction in the 19th century [ It was in the Victorian era — that the novel became the leading literary genre in English.
Charles Dickens —70 emerged on the literary scene in the late s and soon became probably the most famous novelist in the history of British literature. Dickens fiercely satirised various aspects of society, including the workhouse in Oliver Twist , the failures of the legal system in Bleak House. An early rival to Dickens was William Makepeace Thackeray —63 , who during the Victorian period ranked second only to him, but he is now much less read and is known almost exclusively for Vanity Fair Their novels caused a sensation when they were first published but were subsequently accepted as classics.
Elizabeth Gaskell —65 was also a successful writer and North and South contrasts the lifestyle in the industrial north of England with the wealthier south. Anthony Trollope 's —82 was one of the most successful, prolific and respected English novelists of the Victorian era. Some of his best-loved works are set in the imaginary west country county of Barsetshire , including The Warden and Barchester Towers Trollope's novels portray the lives of the landowning and professional classes of early Victorian England.
Her works, especially Middlemarch , are important examples of literary realism , and are admired for their combination of high Victorian literary detail, with an intellectual breadth that removes them from the narrow geographic confines they often depict, that has led to comparisons with Tolstoy.
An interest in rural matters and the changing social and economic situation of the countryside is seen in the novels of Thomas Hardy — A Victorian realist, in the tradition of George Eliot, he was also influenced both in his novels and poetry by Romanticism, especially by William Wordsworth. Another significant late 19th-century novelist is George Gissing — , who published 23 novels between and His best-known novel is New Grub Street Also in the late s, the first novel of Polish-born immigrant Joseph Conrad — , an important forerunner of modernist literature , was published.
Conrad's Heart of Darkness was published in There are early European examples of short stories published separately between and , but the first true collections of short stories appeared between and in several countries around the same period. Important developments occurred in genre fiction in this era.
Adventure novels were popular, including Sir John Barrow 's descriptive account of the Mutiny on the Bounty. The Lost World literary genre was inspired by real stories of archaeological discoveries by imperial adventurers. Contemporary European politics and diplomatic manoeuvrings informed Anthony Hope 's swashbuckling Ruritanian adventure novels The Prisoner of Zenda Robert Louis Stevenson —94 also wrote works in this genre, including Kidnapped , an historical novel set in the aftermath of the Jacobite rising of , and Treasure Island , the classic pirate adventure.
Wilkie Collins ' epistolary novel The Moonstone is generally considered the first detective novel in the English language, and soon after Sir Arthur Conan Doyle began his Sherlock Holmes series about a London-based "consulting detective". Doyle wrote four novels and fifty-six short stories featuring Holmes, from up to , with a final case in Wells 's — writing career began in the s with science fiction novels like The War of the Worlds which describes an invasion of late Victorian England by Martians , and Wells is, along with Frenchman Jules Verne — , as a major figure in the development of the science fiction genre.
The history of the modern fantasy genre is generally said to begin with George MacDonald , the influential author of The Princess and the Goblin and Phantastes William Morris was a popular English poet who also wrote several fantasy novels during the latter part of the nineteenth century. This short story was inspired by the life of Lord Byron and his poem The Giaour. Irish writer Bram Stoker was the author of seminal horror work Dracula with the primary antagonist the vampire Count Dracula.
Penny dreadful publications were an alternative to mainstream works, and were aimed at working class adolescents, introducing the infamous Sweeney Todd. The premier ghost story writer of the 19th century was the Irish writer Sheridan Le Fanu. Literature for children developed as a separate genre during the Victorian era, and some works became internationally known, such as Lewis Carroll , Alice's Adventures in Wonderland At the end of nineteenth-century, the author and illustrator Beatrix Potter was known for her children's books, which featured animal characters, including The Tale of Peter Rabbit In the latter years of the 19th century, precursors of the modern picture book were illustrated books of poems and short stories produced by illustrators Randolph Caldecott , Walter Crane , and Kate Greenaway.
These had a larger proportion of pictures to words than earlier books, and many of their pictures were in colour. Vice Versa by F. Anstey , sees a father and son exchange bodies — body swaps have been a popular theme in various media since the book was published. The poetry of this period was heavily influenced by the Romantics , but also went off in its own directions.
Particularly notable was the development of the dramatic monologue , a form used by many poets in this period, but perfected by Browning. He was described by T. Eliot, as "the greatest master of metrics as well as melancholia", and as having "the finest ear of any English poet since Milton ".
While Elizabeth Barrett Browning was the wife of Robert Browning she had established her reputation as a major poet before she met him. Her most famous work is the sequence of 44 sonnets " Sonnets from the Portuguese " published in Poems Dante Gabriel Rossetti — was a poet, illustrator, painter and translator. He founded the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood in with William Holman Hunt and John Everett Millais , and was later to be the main inspiration for a second generation of artists and writers influenced by the movement, most notably William Morris and Edward Burne-Jones.
While Arthur Clough —61 was a more minor figure of this era, he has been described as "a fine poet whose experiments in extending the range of literary language and subject were ahead of his time". George Meredith — is remembered for his innovative collection of poems Modern Love In the second half of the century, English poets began to take an interest in French Symbolism.
Irishman Yeats went on to become an important modernist in the 20th century. Also in the s A. Housman — published at his own expense A Shropshire Lad. The poems' wistful evocation of doomed youth in the English countryside, in spare language and distinctive imagery, appealed strongly to late Victorian and Edwardian taste. The nonsense verse of Edward Lear , along with the novels and poems of Lewis Carroll , is regarded as a precursor of surrealism. Writers of comic verse included the dramatist, librettist, poet and illustrator W.
Gilbert — , who is best known for his fourteen comic operas produced in collaboration with the composer Sir Arthur Sullivan , of which the most famous include H. Pinafore , The Pirates of Penzance and one of the most frequently performed works in the history of musical theatre, The Mikado. For much of the first half of the 19th century, drama in London and provincial theatres was restricted by a licensing system to the Patent theatre companies, and all other theatres could perform only musical entertainments although magistrates had powers to license occasional dramatic performances.
The passing of the Theatres Act removed the monopoly on drama held by the Patent theatres. Irish playwright Dion Boucicault —90 was an extremely popular writer of comedies who achieved success on the London stage with works like London Assurance , , in the middle of the 19th century. However, drama did not achieve importance as a genre in the 19th century until the end of the century, and then the main figures were also Irish-born.
Both of these Irish writers lived mainly in England and wrote in English, with the exception of some works in French by Wilde. The year marked a significant change in the relationship between Great Britain and Ireland , with the setting up of the predominantly Catholic Irish Free State in most of Ireland, while the predominantly Protestant Northern Ireland remained part of the United Kingdom. This separation also leads to questions as to what extent Irish writing prior to should be treated as a colonial literature.
There are also those who question whether the literature of Northern Ireland is Irish or British. Nationalist movements in Britain, especially in Wales and Scotland, also significantly influenced writers in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. From around the Modernist movement began to influence British literature.
While their Victorian predecessors had usually been happy to cater to mainstream middle-class taste, 20th-century writers often felt alienated from it, so responded by writing more intellectually challenging works or by pushing the boundaries of acceptable content. In Parenthesis , an epic poem by David Jones first published in , is a notable work of the literature of the First World War , that was influenced by Welsh traditions, despite Jones being born in England.
Two Victorian poets who published little in the 19th century, Thomas Hardy — and Gerard Manley Hopkins —89 , have since come to be regarded as major poets. While Hardy first established his reputation the late 19th century with novels, he also wrote poetry throughout his career. However he did not publish his first collection until , so that he tends to be treated as a 20th-century poet. Free verse and other stylistic innovations came to the forefront in this era, with which T. Eliot and Ezra Pound were especially associated. Eliot — was born American, migrated to England in , and he was "arguably the most important English-language poet of the 20th century.
The Georgian poets like Rupert Brooke, Walter de la Mare — and John Masefield —, Poet Laureate from maintained a more conservative approach to poetry by combining romanticism, sentimentality and hedonism.
Edward Thomas — is sometimes treated as another Georgian poet. In the s the Auden Group , sometimes called simply the Thirties poets , was an important group of politically left-wing writers, that included W. Auden was a major poet who had a similar influence on subsequent poets as W. Eliot had had on earlier generations.
Essentials
While modernism was to become an important literary movement in the early decades of the new century, there were also many fine writers who, like Thomas Hardy, were not modernists. Rudyard Kipling — , who was also a successful poet; H.
Chesterton — ; E. The most popular British writer of the early years of the 20th century was arguably Rudyard Kipling , a highly versatile writer of novels , short stories and poems, and to date the youngest ever recipient of the Nobel Prize for Literature Wells was a highly prolific author who is now best known for his work in the science fiction genre. He was killed in action during the invasion of Normandy. Alun Lewis — , born in South Wales , was one of the best-known English-language poets of the war [] The Second World War has remained a theme in British literature.
Though some have seen modernism ending by around , [] with regard to English literature, "When if modernism petered out and postmodernism began has been contested almost as hotly as when the transition from Victorianism to modernism occurred". It is especially rich in French editions and includes a historically significant gathering of works by the oppositional German writers of the s and s, with whom Heine is associated: Oppenheimer presented to the German Literature Collection a group of volumes by and about the poet Rainer Maria Rilke.
The collection is in mint condition and many of the volumes are specially bound. Oppenheimer — is better known as a collector of children's books, an interest he developed after his immigration to the United States in Purchased in , the Kurt Wolff papers consist of approximately 4, letters and some manuscripts from the files of the Kurt Wolff Verlag from the years — The longest files of correspondence are with Franz Werfel and with Walter Hasenclever, a friend from Wolff's student days in Leipzig.
In all, correspondents are represented in the collection. In and Christian Wolff donated his mother's papers, an archive that includes correspondence and other records from the early s through the s, reflecting Helen Wolff's distinguished career as an international publisher based in New York. The Beinecke Library's Hermann Broch archive is the world's principal repository of the manuscripts and correspondence of this exiled Austrian novelist and cultural critic. Broch's road to New Haven, where he spent the last two years of his life, was itself the stuff of fiction. He was born in Vienna in , the eldest son of a wealthy industrialist.
His early training was in business and technology, and as a young man he successfully managed the family textile mills in Teesdorf, Lower Austria, rising to a position of considerable national prominence in the industry. Broch's true interests, however, were in literature, art, and philosophy, and after the sale of the family firm in the late s, he moved to Vienna and devoted himself wholly to writing. He died in and is buried in Killingworth, Connecticut. Broch bequeathed his papers to Yale, and this core collection has since been richly augmented by purchase and by gifts of manuscripts, letters, and memorabilia from his family and friends.
Virtually all of his books and essays are represented in manuscript form, most of them in multiple drafts, and the collection includes unpublished fragments as well as juvenilia, chiefly of a philosophical and mathematical nature. Broch was a letter-writer par excellence, and the archive contains a massive file of correspondence, both incoming and outgoing. Two recently added groups of central importance are his letters to fellow writer Franz Blei, and hundreds of letters to his second wife, Annemarie Meier-Graefe, from the s to The archive contains a number of autobiographical documents, one of them only recently unsealed.
Broch's printed works including a full range of translations are supplemented by clippings and reviews that document the author's reception to the present. Irma Rothstein's bust of Broch and Peter Lipman-Wulf's death mask of the novelist are also part of the archive. At the core of Yale's Thomas Mann holdings are nearly forty manuscripts given by Mann in for the purpose of establishing a collection. With the help and dedication of its advisor, Joseph W. Angell, the Mann Collection grew to include manuscript items, about four linear feet of correspondence and special files, and a large collection of printed materials by and about Mann.
In , Yale purchased the major portion of Helen Lowe-Porter's Thomas Mann papers, including typescripts of her translations of essays and lectures by Mann and her English renditions of five of his novels, often accompanied by German typescripts, which were prepared under Mann's supervision and have occasional manuscript corrections. Among the longer Mann correspondences held at Yale are the letters with Joseph Angell between and , the letters to Hermann J.
Weigand between and and to Helen Lowe-Porter, — The letters to Agnes Meyer, numbering over three hundred, offer indispensable information on Mann's years in the United States. The bulk of Meyer's letters to Mann have apparently not been preserved. Mann's letters to Meyer, edited by Hans R.
Essentials
Vaget, were published by Fischer Verlag in Nonprint materials in the Mann Collection include Esther Vance's oil portrait of the author, done at Princeton. There are also several photographs of Mann, one of them by Edward Steichen, dated The Beinecke Library holds a nearly complete collection of printed works by Thomas Mann, many of them signed by the author. A new era began for the Yale Collection of German Literature in when the Beinecke Library acquired about five thousand literary first editions and periodicals in German from the early twentieth century through about In , the German government awarded Mr.
Frick its Federal Service Cross in recognition of his role in preserving books and writing by victims of the world wars.
The Expressionist authors present in the collection range from the well known, such as Trakl and Heym, to the barely remembered. An abbreviated list may suggest the scope: Special mention might be made of nine titles in the collection by Arthur Ernst Rutra, cited earlier as a Heine collector. One of the books by Rutra in the Frick Collection--a volume of stories--has the author's handwritten dedication to Thomas Mann and stamps indicating that the book was confiscated from Mann's library by the Nazis.
Beyond the Expressionist movement, the Frick Collection covers the s and s in depth, including not only the well-known authors of the period such as Heimito von Doderer 19 titles , but also many lesser-known writers whose books are rarely seen in contemporary editions, either because they were suppressed by the Nazis, or because they were Nazi collaborators whose works fell into disrepute after the war. Among the latter is the playwright Hanns Johst 32 titles , who became head of literary academies under Goebbels. Many of the authors in the Frick Collection were victims of the Holocaust.
Traven, who died in Acapulco in 21 titles. In most cases, the Frick Collection includes postwar publications of authors whose careers continued after A few later authors are also represented, among them H. Leslie Willson at the University of Texas at Austin. The archive, with its correspondences, manuscripts, and graphic art, reflects his decades of activity as editor, literary scout, friend, advisor, and teacher. In a similar way, the Willson material documents the educated tastes of one connoisseur and scholar as they intersected with the copious literary output of the postwar decades.
Another focus of the library is the interaction of text and graphic arts, as in its extensive holdings of the output of the Eremiten Verlag founded in and its authors. While individual twentieth-century books are now being purchased on a regular basis, the German Literature Collection has had several opportunities to add nearly complete author collections of printed works.