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Literature
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  Labor & Labour  ·  Labour Party (GB) I  ·  Labour Party (GB) II  ·  Ladder  ·  Lady  ·  Lake & Lake Monsters  ·  Land  ·  Language  ·  Laos  ·  Las Vegas  ·  Last Words  ·  Latin  ·  Laugh & Laughter  ·  Law & Lawyer (I)  ·  Law & Lawyer (II)  ·  Laws of Physics & Science  ·  Lazy & Laziness  ·  Leader & Leadership  ·  Learner & Learning  ·  Lebanon & Lebanese  ·  Lecture & Lecturer  ·  Left Wing  ·  Leg  ·  Leisure  ·  Lend & Lender & Lending  ·  Leprosy  ·  Lesbian & Lesbianism  ·  Letter  ·  Ley Lines  ·  Libel  ·  Liberal & Liberal Party  ·  Liberia  ·  Liberty  ·  Library  ·  Libya & Libyans  ·  Lies & Liar (I)  ·  Lies & Liar (II)  ·  Life & Search For Life (I)  ·  Life & Search For Life (II)  ·  Life After Death  ·  Life's Like That (I)  ·  Life's Like That (II)  ·  Life's Like That (III)  ·  Light  ·  Lightning & Ball Lightning  ·  Like  ·  Limericks  ·  Lincoln, Abraham  ·  Lion  ·  Listen & Listener  ·  Literature  ·  Little  ·  Liverpool  ·  Loan  ·  Local & Civic Government  ·  Loch Ness Monster  ·  Lockerbie Bombing  ·  Logic  ·  London (I)  ·  London (II)  ·  London (III)  ·  Lonely & Loneliness  ·  Look  ·  Lord  ·  Los Angeles  ·  Lose & Loss & Lost  ·  Lot (Bible)  ·  Lottery  ·  Louisiana  ·  Love & Lover  ·  Loyalty  ·  LSD & Acid  ·  Lucifer  ·  Luck & Lucky  ·  Luke (Bible)  ·  Lunacy & Lunatic  ·  Lunar Society  ·  Lunch  ·  Lungs  ·  Lust  ·  Luxury  

★ Literature

The most powerful story from Odysseus’ wanderings is his descent into the realm of dead souls – the underworld.  ibid. 

 

He’s [Homer] responding to what’s gone before.  ibid. 

 

When Odysseus himself returned home after twenty years he found that his palace was under siege by a gang of local nobles.  ibid. 

 

 

Today, one novel more than any other stands up for women’s rights across the world: Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale, a dystopian story of state-sponsored female oppression published in 1985 and a rallying call for women everywhere.  Novels that Shaped Our World I: A Woman’s Place, BBC 2019     

 

‘The Me-Too novel for this generation.’  ibid.  comic

 

The novel has always strongly reflected women’s concerns … The novel has shaped women’s lives and sustained them.  ibid.

 

Samuel Richardson’s Pamela: the work of a London printer Samuel Richardson: it sold like hotcakes.  ibid.

 

Thanks largely to Pamela, the novel was now considered an essentially female form.  ibid.    

 

Mary Shelley: Frankenstein became the best known horror story ever.  ibid.

 

‘The book and the film have almost nothing in common.’  ibid.  Anthony Horowitz  

 

Jane Austen: the supreme chronicler of women’s real lives.  ibid.     

 

An editor, critic and translator, Mary Ann Evans [T S Eliot] chose the male pseudonym partly because she wanted to distance her novels from what she regarded as frivolous women’s fiction.  ibid.

 

Constance Maud: No Surrender … ‘A real historical account with fictional characters.’  ibid.  novelist  

 

Zora Neale Hurston: The Eyes Were Watching God All four of her grandparents had been slaves.  ibid.                  

 

 

Throughout its whole history, one of the most popular, controversial and compelling themes of the English novel has been the story of Empire.  Long after it ended, some novelists were still defending Britain’s status as a world power just as it was coming to a close.  Novels that Shaped Our World II: The Empire Writes Back

 

The English language novel began as the Empire was gearing up.  ibid.

 

Robinson Crusoe has been endlessly translated, adapted, filmed and painted.  The English novel was off to a flying start.  ibid.

 

Jane Eyre: ‘I knew Mr Rochester had been a traveller to distant shores’.  ibid.    

 

1852 Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin … Long been criticised for being sentimental and sensationalist, but it showed what a campaigning novel can achieve.  ibid.  

 

Samuel Selvon: The Lonely Londoners … published in 1956.  ibid.    

 

 

The Ragged Trousered Philanthropist … Trainspotting … Oliver Twist … The Code of the Woosters … Billy Liar … Sybil … Mary Barton … The Great Gatsby … Lady Chatterley’s Lover … A Kind of Loving …  Novels that Shaped Our World III: The Class Ceiling            

 

One of the most famous of all novelists Charles Dickens made his name by taking us into the hidden world of the very lowest members of society.  ibid.

 

 

An ancient technology, one that’s at least 5,000 years old: the technology of writing.  Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing 1: From Pictures to Words, BBC 2020,

 

Egypt: The halls of Teti’s tomb with thousands of stylised pictures, but this was not decoration.  These pictures are hieroglyphs, a writing system older than the pyramids themselves.  ibid.  

 

The creation of writing is the event which gave humanity a history.  ibid.  

 

So what I was holding in my hand [Sumerian clay tablet] was the distant ancestor of today’s spreadsheet.  ibid.  

 

Like hieroglyphs, Chinese characters are stylised pictures … ‘There are so many similarities.’  ibid.  academic in both     

 

 

In the year of our Lord 1448 in Mainz, Germany, a goldsmith by the name of Johannes Gutenberg was experimenting with a lead alloy and a hand-held mould.  His aim was to speed up the process of putting ink on paper but what he did was to speed up history.  Gutenberg’s invention spelled the end of the Middle Ages and ushered in the modern world of science and industry.  Lydia Wilson, The Secret History of Writing II: Words on a Page

 

The fall of the Roman Empire is one of the great inflection points of history and it coincides with a change in the technology of Europe.  As papyrus disappeared so did the book as a relatively inexpensive everyday commodity.  ibid.   

 

The fact that parchment could be folded made it possible to stitch leaves together into a codex, the modern form of the book.  ibid. 

 

Brush calligraphy produced works of art that were prized in China every bit as much as illuminated manuscripts were in Europe.  But in a medieval manuscript the art is in the decoration around the text.  The nature of the Latin alphabet and the characteristics of parchment produced letters that were regular and repetitive.  But in Chinese brush-calligraphy the art is in the brushwork that produces the characters themselves.  And that is made possible by the nature of the writing surface.  Paper was invented in China in 2nd century A.D.  ibid. 

 

Paper was key to another Chinese invention: woodblock printing.  Each handwritten page of text was glued to a wooden block and then the characters were carved out by a skilled craftsman.  This step was laborious and expensive.  ibid.

 

The Islamic Golden Age: the arts and sciences flourished … We still count using an Arabic numbering system.  ibid. 

 

The secret of Gutenberg’s printing press was his ability to mass-produce copies of each individual letter.  And in this he had a hidden advantage: ‘the letters of the alphabet are really simple shapes … These simple block-like letters can become blocks of metal and can become printed.’  ibid.  expert 

 

 

I was a man who stood in symbolic relations to the art and culture of my age.  The Importance of Being Oscar, BBC 2020

 

I treated art as the supreme reality, and life as a mere mode of fiction.  ibid.

 

He was always aware he was an outsider as an Irishman so there was always an edge.  ibid.  Jerusha McCormack, author

 

Oscar’s first foray into playwriting is a play called Vera or The Nihilists, a play about Russian revolutionaries … It’s not terribly good.  ibid.

 

The Picture of Dorian Gray: It caused a storm of protest in the press.  People picked up on the homosexual subtext, the relationship between Basil the painter and Dorian.  ibid.

 

Lady Windermere’s Fan is the first of the society comedies.  It’s set on the evening of Lady Windermere’s coming of age ball … But a bad rumour has come to her ears that her husband is embarking on an affair with a mysterious woman called Mrs Erlynne.  ibid.

 

 

‘I was born among the working classes and brought up among them.  My father was a collier, and only a collier.  Nothing praiseworthy about him.  He wasn’t even respectable in so far as he got drunk frequently.’  D H Lawrence: Sex, Exile and Greatness, Sky Arts 2021

 

Though in his early life Lawrence disliked and even hated his father, in later years he came to respect and to love him.  Lawrence had a great love of nature which he inherited from his father.  He could name most plants and wild flowers.  ibid.

 

Lawrence’s savage pilgrimage started in Europe, spending most of his time trying to find a place to live contentedly.  On leaving Europe he travelled to Sri Lanka, Australia and then the west coast of America.  ibid.

 

 

Tales of love are as old as story-telling itself … Whenever a popular romantic story is brought to the big screen it’s easily anticipated.  Classic Literature & Cinema I: Love & Romance, Sky Arts 2021

 

Romeo & Juliet, William Shakespeare’s play of star-crossed lovers as the author dubbed them, has been the yardstick by which all subsequent romances have been dubbed.  ibid.

 

The first feature film of Sense & Sensibility was not until 1995.  ibid.

 

Jane Eyre: The novel has only grown in stature since then and has had seemingly endless adaptations.  ibid.

 

Anna Karenina has been adapted for the screen over a dozen times … Greta Garbo took on the role twice.  ibid.

 

 

From the aural tradition of ancient Greece to a paperback grabbed at the airport, nothing grabs the imagination of children and adults alike more than a great adventure story.  Classic Literature & Cinema II: Adventure

 

The 1954 film Ulysses with Kirk Douglas has so far been the only film adaptation of the story.  ibid.

 

One tale of the more recent past shares a story of a man trapped on an island is Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe.  ibid.                     

 

Swiss Family Robinson: Walt Disney made the first colour version in 1960 with John Mills as the head of the stranded family.  ibid.

 

Ivanhoe: The most famous film adaptation has been the 1952 version starring Robert Taylor and Joan Fontaine and Elizabeth Taylor.  ibid.

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