Discussion Groups / English Usage / May 2009

You have. You talk about "outstanding literature" which means "above all
literature" and therefore the basic meaning must be "best". If it is not
best, it is not outstanding, isn't it so?

T.S. Eliot, Pinter, Boakye, D'Aguiar, Churchill, Kane, Ravenhill,
Delaney, Wesker, Beckett, Frayn,Bennett if you are asking me.

Have you heard of plays and dramas like "Top Girls, Blasted, Shopping
and f.cking, The Homecoming, Happy Days, Chicken Soup with Barley -
Roots, Look Back in Anger, Copenhagen, The History Boys?" just to
mention a few?

If you don't know them, you might as well be considered ignorant of
English literature :-)

The great wealth of English literature makes it, however,  impossible to
deal with the subject in any detail within a scope of one posting. You
must therefore confine yourself to only a few of the outstanding
writers.

Who has not heard for instance of William Shakespeare, one of the
greatest dramatists of all time?

He is famous for his comedies such as "Twelfth Night, As you like it,
and the Taming of the Shrew and equally famous for his magnificient
tragedies as Macbeth, Hamlet and Othello. Shakespeare lived in the reign
of queen Elisabeht, which was a great age of English literature.

Of later plays there's "He stoops to Conquer" by Oliver Goldsmith, and
the School for Scandal by Richard Sherridan.
Then coming to the present days we have the dramas of the Irish author
Bernhard Shaw, possibly his best known plays are "Cæsar and Cleopatra,
Man and Superman, Back to Methuselah and Saint Joan".

English poetry covers such a wide field that I can't do little more that
enumerate a few names: Chaucer is well known for his Canterbury Tales,
Milton for his two famous epics "Paradise Lost and Paradise Regain, Pope
for his mastery of the classical style, while the romantic school
recalls famous names as  Byron, Shelly, Keats and Browning.

English novelists have been translated into so many languages that
people who know no English are nevertheless familiar with English
writings. Yet it is only those who can read these novels in the original
who can really appreciate such masterpieces as Ivanhoe by Walter Scott,
and David Copperfield, Oliver Twist and The Old Curiosity Shop by
Charles Dickens.

So even if I or others don't actually know a novel like "Naked Lunch" we
are not at all ignorants either.

Literature?  Who decides what books are literature?  What is
literature?

I've never heard of Naked Lunch, or William S. Burroughs.  I have
heard of Kerouac and his book, but never seen a copy.  Why would I
want to?  I've lived through that, and I never thought much of
beatniks; later, I thought less of hippies.

Writers I have heard of?  Charlotte Bronte (yawn), Emily Bronte (ick),
Charles Dickens (boring), Herman Melville (if not boring, then
disgusting), Steinbeck (except for Travels with Charley and the
translation of Morte d'Arthur, horrid), Crane and Maugham and Remarque
(depressing), and a bunch of others whose books were so memorable that
I forgot them as soon as the semester was over.  Others whose work I
seek out and re-read?  Twain, London, Shakespeare (not the sonnets),
Browning (Robert, not his drippy wife), Heinlein (not the last few),
Poul Anderson, L.M. Bujold, F.P. Keyes, F.H. Burnett, many more.
Reading should not be work; it should be fun.

That time, yes.

Bill

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