#british literature
You are more to me than all art can ever be.
Oscar Wilde, The Picture Of Dorian Gray.
Death of Lewis Carroll
14 January 1898
English author Lewis Carroll died in Guildford, England, at the age of 65 on this day in British history, 14 January 1898. Carroll’s real name was Charles Lutwidge Dodgson. He is most remembered for his pair of ‘Alice’ stories, Alice’s Adventures in WonderlandandThrough the Looking-Glass, What Alice Found There. Carroll spent most of his life as a mathematics lecturer at Christ Church, Oxford, and as a gentleman-photographer in some of England’s upper social circles.
Read more about Lewis Carroll’s life here….
http://todayinbritishhistory.com/2014/01/lewis-carroll-dies-guildford-age-65-14-january-1898/
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Books to Get Out of the UK and Ireland: May Edition
Books to Get Out of the UK and Ireland: May Edition
Are you looking for your next great read? Why not try out the books from across the pond? Despite from what governments say, books are essential and are needed now, more than ever. So if you are need of a variety and want to read diverse stories, then I suggest you try out some British and Irish titles!
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“I can’t keep on all my life writing in the same way…The world now is quite different and so is my life in it.” —Anna Kavan, née Helen Woods, born this day in 1901
As editor Victoria Walker notes in her intro, Kavan’s stories about troubled outsiders recall the work of Jean Rhys, Jane Bowles, and Carson McCullers, and her gothic tones might remind you of Leonora Carrington and Isak Dinesen. Definitely worth a read.
Cover art: Gertrude Abercrombie, Reverie, 1947; photograph: Illinois State Museum
That, to me, is the interest of this case. We are cut off from all the normal routes of procedure. Are these people whose evidence we have taken speaking the truth, or lying? We have no means of finding out—except such means as we can devise ourselves. It is an exercise, this, of the brain.
—Agatha Christie, “Murder on the Orient Express”
ECF journal for Spring 2016 (28.3) contains a new essay on Thomas Holcroft, writer, dramatist ( 1745-1809):
“‘The Greatest Appearance of Truth’: Telling Tales with Thomas Holcroft,” by Eliza O’Brien, Newcastle University
Read this article on Project MUSE: http://muse.jhu.edu/issue/33316
ReadMemoirs of Bryan Perdue (1805) by Thomas Holcroft online here:
http://catalog.hathitrust.org/Record/001420412
The final two images above show actors performing parts in Holcroft’s play “The Road to Ruin” (1792).
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—Matthew Crawford, “Covid Was Liberalism’s Endgame”
If I may reassert my old theme: to achieve this goal we will have to restore the aesthetic education that co-evolved with liberalism to prevent its decay into the Hobbesian reduction Arendt saw at the origin of totalitarianism.
This education tends to reinforce both through its content—works of the imagination—and its form—exploring the plurality of interpretation these works provoke—an anthropology for which the human being has flexible imaginative sovereignty over the social rather than being its ward or toy.
And while we’re familiar with conservative challenges to such a curriculum, the more novel threat has come from today’s illiberal left-liberalism. For these partisans, texts without transparency are elitist, while pluralism is the alibi of the malefactor, even the fascist. So the only appropriate material for instruction, they conclude, is didactic children’s literature.
This superficially surprising development is rooted in the natural or structural totalitarianism of the intellectual class going back to Plato, generally a left-wing phenomenon in the modern era. But we should recall that the leftist-Platonist Shelley replaced the philosopher-king with the poet-legislator to supplant a ruler with a representative and an issuer of authoritative images with a provider of open-ended ones.
To whatever extent we can read our way out of the present dilemma in which liberalism has become total rule by the expert class, we will need to read more than the philosophers. For an image to meditate on, here’s the banner I put on the first page of my Brit Lit II syllabus over a decade ago, the first year I decided contemporary syllabi needed illustrations:
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Arianna Bellucci’s illustrated book covers for Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmesstories.
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Marie-Alice Harel’s illustrated book cover for the Folio Society edition of Diana Wynne Jones’s Castle in the Air.
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