Last year saw the first cohort of English literature students who were born in or beyond 2000 – the so-called digital generation. I wanted to know whether the classics still affected their lives.
Dickens After Death, John Everett Millais, June 10 1870.
Charles Dickens Museum
When her contemporaries were engaging with European themes in their novels, Austen remained rooted in her home country.
A portrait of George Eliot at 30 by Alexandre-Louis-François d'Albert-Durade. Her masterpiece Middlemarch is often claimed to be the greatest novel in the English language.
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Henry James called her a ‘great, horse-faced bluestocking’. On the 200th anniversary of her birth, we celebrate George Eliot, a literary trailblazer with an endless appetite for ideas, living in a patriarchal time.
Currier and Ives 1875 print of Robinson Crusoe and his companion Friday.
Everett Historical via Shutterstock
Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe was one of the first novels (in the modern sense) written in English. Some 300 years later, the complicated castaway and his misadventures continue to shape culture.
Her novels and essays, especially Small Island and The Long Song, brought Britain’s slave-owning colonial history home to ordinary Britons, black and white alike.
To imagine is to form a mental image, to think, believe, dream, picture.
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The poet Percy Bysshe Shelley believed that we can exercise our moral imagination ‘in the same manner as exercise strengthens a limb’. Here, then, are some tips for fostering empathy through art.
Writing is a solitary art. But authors shortlisted for the Booker Prize have to perform in public. Here’s how this year’s crop fared.
Foxe’s Book of Martyrs, detailing the grim fate of Protestant clerics Latimer and Ridley, is one clue as to why Baldwin hesitated before publishing his irreverent book.
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