William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth (7 April 1770 – 23 April 1850) was a major English Romantic poet who, with Samuel Taylor Coleridge, helped to launch the Romantic Age in English literature with the 1798 joint publication Lyrical Ballads.

Wordsworth's magnum opus is generally considered to be The Prelude, a semiautobiographical poem of his early years which he revised and expanded a number of times. It was posthumously titled and published, prior to which it was generally known as the poem "to Coleridge." Wordsworth was Britain's Poet Laureate from 1843 until his death in 1850.

First publication and Lyrical Ballads

Wordsworth in 1798, about the time he began The Prelude.^[8]

In his "Preface to Lyrical Ballads", which is called the "manifesto" of English Romantic criticism, Wordsworth calls his poems "experimental." The year 1793 saw Wordsworth's first published poetry with the collections An Evening Walk and Descriptive Sketches. He received a legacy of £900 from Raisley Calvert in 1795 so that he could pursue writing poetry. That year, he met Samuel Taylor Coleridge in Somerset. The two poets quickly developed a close friendship. In 1797, Wordsworth and his sister Dorothy moved to Alfoxton House, Somerset, just a few miles away from Coleridge's home in Nether Stowey. Together, Wordsworth and Coleridge (with insights from Dorothy) produced Lyrical Ballads (1798), an important work in the English Romantic movement. The volume gave neither Wordsworth's nor Coleridge's name as author. One of Wordsworth's most famous poems, "Tintern Abbey", was published in the work, along with Coleridge's "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner". The second edition, published in 1800, had only Wordsworth listed as the author, and included a preface to the poems, which was augmented significantly in the 1802 edition. This Preface to Lyrical Ballads is considered a central work of Romantic literary theory. In it, Wordsworth discusses what he sees as the elements of a new type of poetry, one based on the "real language of men" and which avoids the poetic diction of much eighteenth-century poetry. Here, Wordsworth gives his famous definition of poetry as "the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings: it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility." A fourth and final edition of Lyrical Ballads was published in 1805.

Geoffrey Chaucer

Geoffrey Chaucer (pronounced /ˈtʃɔːsər/; c. 1343 – 25 October 1400) was an English author, poet, philosopher, bureaucrat, courtier and diplomat. Although he wrote many works, he is best remembered for his unfinished frame narrative The Canterbury Tales. Sometimes called the father of English literature, Chaucer is credited by some scholars as the first author to demonstrate the artistic legitimacy of the vernacular Middle English, rather than French or Latin.

William Golding

Introduction

William Golding

Imagine a man who embraced solitude as a child but who became famous for writing about group dynamics. Imagine a man who enjoyed the benefits of a peaceful adolescence, complete with private schooling, but who spent his adult years writing about the inherent violent nature of humans. Imagine a man who was groomed by his parents to be a scientist but who ended up as one of the greatest writers of his time. Imagine William Golding. Raised by educated parents who supported rational thought, Golding used his experiences from World War II to create novels of dark human action. Nothing in Golding’s past suggests that he should become the foremost author of the twentieth century to write about the conflict between barbaric human nature and civil reasoning; his novels, however, continue to entertain and raise those same questions today.

Essential Facts

1. During his five-year military career, Golding was a participant in both the sinking of the great German battleship, the Bismarck, and in the allied invasion of Normandy.
2. Golding’s most famous novel, The Lord of the Flies, was originally titled The Strangers Within and was published twenty-nine years before he won the Nobel Prize for Literature.
3. Lord of the Flies was rejected by twenty-one publishers before acceptance by Faber and Faber.
4. One of Golding’s hobbies was researching and exploring the myth of the Loch Ness monster.
5. Golding was knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in 1988.

http://www.enotes.com/authors/william-golding

Harold Pinter

Introduction

Harold Pinter

Harold Pinter began his career as an actor, but he quickly turned his attention to writing and became one of the twentieth century’s most prolific and important playwrights. Pinter loves to play with words, and many of his works feature witty banter between characters interspersed with long pauses. Pinter did not originally want to be categorized as a political writer, but in the 1980s, his work took on a decidedly leftist tone. Pinter’s personal life has been as stormy as that of many of his characters. He was married to actress Vivien Merchant for several years, and they had one son. He then embarked on several long affairs, which cost him his marriage and the love and respect of his son.

Essential Facts

1. Harold Pinter’s stage name as an actor was David Baron.
2. Pinter won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2005 and the Legion d’honneur in 2007.
3. Pinter is a huge cricket fan. He has said, “One of my main obsessions in life is the game of cricket—I play and watch and read about it all the time.”
4. Pinter has been vocal about his politics and was once thrown out of the U.S. embassy in Turkey.
5. Pinter publicly announced in 2005 that he was retiring from playwriting. Since then, he has written a screenplay, short dramatic sketches, and a great deal of poetry.

http://www.enotes.com/authors/harold-pinter

James Joyce

Introduction

James Joyce

One of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century, James Joyce suffered from an incurable case of wanderlust. During his 58 years, he lived in many different parts of the world. He began his life in Dublin, Ireland, which was the setting for most of his great fiction. In 1903, he moved to Paris, but returned to Dublin a year later when his mother was dying. He remained in Dublin long enough to marry Nora Barnacle, a maid at a Dublin hotel. Shortly thereafter, Joyce moved to Zurich and then on to Trieste where he stayed for a decade teaching English and writing. Joyce’s life was a troubled one with bouts of alcoholism, depression, and poverty. Despite his problems, he managed to write many influential pieces of literature: Ulysses, Finnegans Wake, the short story collection Dubliners, and a somewhat autobiographical novel, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.

Essential Facts

1. Joyce was attacked by a dog as a young boy and ended up with a severe canine phobia that persisted throughout his life. He was also afraid of thunderstorms because his grandmother once told him storms were a sign of God’s wrath.
2. Dedham, Massachusetts, hosts an annual James Joyce Ramble, which is a 10K race. Each mile is dedicated to one of Joyce’s works, and actors in period costumes line the streets and read from his novels as the runners pass.
3. The last story in Joyce’s Dubliners collection, “The Dead,” was made into a film in 1987 by director John Huston. It was Huston’s last major film before he died.
4. Joyce’s grandson, Stephen, has supposedly destroyed many letters written by his grandfather. He has also blocked what he considers “inappropriate” adaptations of his grandfather’s work.
5. The library at the University College in Dublin is named after James Joyce.

http://www.enotes.com/authors/james-joyce

aristole

Aristotle (Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC)[1] was a Greek philosopher, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality and aesthetics, logic and science, politics and metaphysics. Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church and some strains of Eastern Orthodox thought[citation needed]. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"),[2] it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.[3]

William Shakespeare

Works

Comedies Main article: Shakespearean comedy All's Well That Ends Well‡ As You Like It The Comedy of Errors Love's Labour's Lost Measure for Measure‡ The Merchant of Venice The Merry Wives of Windsor A Midsummer Night's Dream Much Ado About Nothing Pericles, Prince of Tyre*† The Taming of the Shrew The Tempest* Twelfth Night The Two Gentlemen of Verona The Two Noble Kinsmen*† The Winter's Tale*

Histories Main article: Shakespearean history King John Richard II Henry IV, part 1 Henry IV, part 2 Henry V Henry VI, part 1† Henry VI, part 2 Henry VI, part 3 Richard III Henry VIII†

Tragedies Main article: Shakespearean tragedy Romeo and Juliet Coriolanus Titus Andronicus† Timon of Athens† Julius Caesar Macbeth† Hamlet Troilus and Cressida‡ King Lear Othello Antony and Cleopatra Cymbeline*

Poems Shakespeare's Sonnets Venus and Adonis The Rape of Lucrece The Passionate Pilgrim[nb 5] The Phoenix and the Turtle A Lover's Complaint

Lost plays Love's Labour's Won Cardenio†

Apocrypha Main article: Shakespeare Apocrypha Arden of Faversham The Birth of Merlin Locrine The London Prodigal The Puritan The Second Maiden's Tragedy Sir John Oldcastle Thomas Lord Cromwell A Yorkshire Tragedy Edward III Sir Thomas More

http://en.wikipedia.org

Plato

The son of wealthy and influential Athenian parents, Plato began his philosophical career as a student of Socrates. When the master died, Plato travelled to Egypt and Italy, studied with students of Pythagoras, and spent several years advising the ruling family of Syracuse.