By Jonathan Bate
A popular critic, biographer, and Shakespeare pupil, Jonathan Bate presents during this Very brief advent a full of life and fascinating evaluate of the literature that Jorge Luis Borges known as "the richest within the world." From the medieval "Hymn of Caedmon" to George Orwell's "Why I Write," from Jane Austen to Ian McEwan, and from Winnie the Pooh to Dr. Johnson, this remarkable, compact survey stretches around the centuries, exploring the main literary kinds (poetry, novel, drama, essay and more), the numerous histories and theories of the very thought of literature, and the position of writers in shaping English, British, and post-imperial identities. Bate illuminates the paintings of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Wordsworth, Dickens, and plenty of different significant figures of English literature. He seems to be on the Renaissance, Romanticism, and Modernism, on the delivery of the unconventional and the Elizabethan invention of the assumption of a countrywide literature, and on the nature of writing itself. starting from children's literature to biography, this is often an imperative consultant and an concept for an individual attracted to England's excellent literary background.
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Additional resources for English Literature: A Very Short Introduction (Very Short Introductions)
Example text
Something remote from us and something that is getting even more distant’’ (Benjamin, ‘‘The Storyteller,’’ p. 83). ’’ They ‘‘make their appearance in the remotest times,’’ he continues, and ‘‘some of them . . cannot any more shew themselves in this world’’ (On Heroes, p. 133). Thus he, too, describes modernity as loss, absence, cessation – in other words, as disenchantment. Yet, having made this point, Carlyle proceeds to argue that it is possible for modern writing, even print produced for the marketplace, to become heroic when it presents itself as a prophetic voice.
At any given moment during the nineteenth century, many different forms of voice struggled and interacted with English print culture. By turning ‘‘speech’’ into a place-holder for rational debate, Habermas renders it monolithic and homogeneous. He inevitably simplifies speech, so intent is he on proving its turn from good to bad. But speech in the nineteenth century can no more be reduced to critical debate and rational conversation than print culture can be reduced to essays in Blackwood’s Edinburgh Magazine.
The repeated murder of a storyteller or a doomed speaker, a figure that Victorian fiction in fact conjured up to authenticate itself, is the curious tropology by which fiction after Dickens lays claim to the authority to forge communities where mechanization had silenced speakers. A VOICE IN WRITING I argue in this book that the Victorian novel indicates in many different ways that there must be a speaker – who is, paradoxically, at once a pathetic ‘‘poor, crushed, human creature’’ and irresistibly powerful and charismatic – at Mythologies of the storyteller 29 the origin of its language.