English literature website

[Sunday21]

https://www.bl.uk/20th-century-literature/articles/a-room-with-a-view-class-conventions-and-the-quest-for-clarity

I think we had a ‘cool website’ topic but I could not find. I often suspect that there is a lot going on in novels that I don’t get eg Room with a View. This site may help! 

[Sunday21]

Oh this website (message above) is fun. Detail from Christmas traditions...

Turkeys had first been brought to Europe by the Spanish in the 16th century, but before steam they were not a holiday staple. Before the railways with their speedy transport, animals had been herded to market alive. Turkeys, however, were poor walkers: their feet were tender, and they needed to be fitted with little leather boots to protect them on the march..

.turkeys with boots! 

[Vort]

3 hours ago, Sunday21 said:

Turkeys had first been brought to Europe by the Spanish in the 16th century, but before steam they were not a holiday staple.

Interesting. I've heard of deep-frying them, but I didn't realize that steaming was such an important step in European acceptance of the turkey. I'll have to give that a try.

[Vort]

3 hours ago, Sunday21 said:

turkeys with boots! 

[Sunday21]

5 minutes ago, Vort said:

Interesting. I've heard of deep-frying them, but I didn't realize that steaming was such an important step in European acceptance of the turkey. I'll have to give that a try.

 

4 minutes ago, Vort said:

Really this deserves more than one laugh! 😆 😂 🤭 ! 

[Sunday21]

Look at the actual pages of the illegal Tyndale New Testament!

https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/william-tyndales-new-testament

[Guest MormonGator]

I thought Howards End was vastly superior to A Room with a View. In fact, I think Howards End is one of the best novels of the last century. 

[Vort]

14 minutes ago, MormonGator said:

I thought Howards End was vastly superior to A Room with a View. In fact, I think Howards End is one of the best novels of the last century. 

Did Howard agree?

[Sunday21]

1 hour ago, MormonGator said:

I thought Howards End was vastly superior to A Room with a View. In fact, I think Howards End is one of the best novels of the last century. 

I saw the movie but I think that I would need a bucket full of Prozac to get through the book! 😢

[Guest MormonGator]

9 minutes ago, Sunday21 said:

I saw the movie but I think that I would need a bucket full of Prozac to get through the book! 😢

SPOILER ALERT 

It clearly and famously asks the question-Who will inherit England? Ironically, it gives a crystal clear answer.  It's the Bast-Schlegel child that will. 

Edited October 27, 2019 by MormonGator

[Sunday21]

1 hour ago, MormonGator said:

SPOILER ALERT 

It clearly and famously asks the question-Who will inherit England? Ironically, it gives a crystal clear answer.  It's the Bast-Schlegel child that will. 

Woo! Not a light read clearly! I may need a lot of literary criticism to follow that book! I wish it was possible to get a good ‘annotated’  edition of books in é-format. I mean an edition with a ton of footnotes and explanations as opposed to the skimpy editions labeled as ‘annotated’. I need a lot of help to get through these classic books! 

[Guest MormonGator]

25 minutes ago, Sunday21 said:

 I need a lot of help to get through these classic books! 

Any English major who says they didn't rely on Cliffnotes or Sparknotes (which was in it's infancy when I was in college) is a compulsive liar. We all needed help. 

[Guest LiterateParakeet]

8 hours ago, MormonGator said:

Any English major who says they didn't rely on Cliffnotes or Sparknotes (which was in it's infancy when I was in college) is a compulsive liar. We all needed help. 

I'm not an English major, but I love Cliffnotes and Sparknotes.  Sometimes a little help makes all the difference in appreciating a book.  For example, I read Lord of the Flies in highs school.  I thought it was barbaric and I absolutely hated it.  My daughter read it (because she wanted to know what everyone was talking about).  She loved it and encouraged me to give it another try, with some help from cliffnotes (or some such.)  That made a huge difference, the second time through, I thought it was brilliant.   

[Guest MormonGator]

1 hour ago, LiterateParakeet said:

I'm not an English major, but I love Cliffnotes and Sparknotes.  Sometimes a little help makes all the difference in appreciating a book.  For example, I read Lord of the Flies in highs school.  I thought it was barbaric and I absolutely hated it.  My daughter read it (because she wanted to know what everyone was talking about).  She loved it and encouraged me to give it another try, with some help from cliffnotes (or some such.)  That made a huge difference, the second time through, I thought it was brilliant.   

LOTF has lost it's power, sadly. At the time of publication the idea of little kids committing such horrific acts of violence was very disturbing. Now, it's sadly common place. I never particularly liked the book just because I thought it was uninteresting. I read it in 9th grade and I just couldn't get into it. 

Edited October 28, 2019 by MormonGator

[Sunday21]

I am hoping to go to a book club tonight! We are discussing Mrs Westaway. I literally pulled an all nighters reading this!

https://books.google.ca/books/about/The_Death_of_Mrs_Westaway.html?id=PnVEDwAAQBAJ&printsec=frontcover&source=kp_read_button&redir_esc=y

[Guest MormonGator]

@Sunday21 & @LiterateParakeet have you read "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf? She's more known for her essays but this book is a gem. It's very complicated, very Freudian and not much happens. However, it's probably one of the best modernist literature novels ever written.   

 

[Sunday21]

7 hours ago, MormonGator said:

@Sunday21 & @LiterateParakeet have you read "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf? She's more known for her essays but this book is a gem. It's very complicated, very Freudian and not much happens. However, it's probably one of the best modernist literature novels ever written.   

 

Dear @MormonGator,

I read it ..but I have no idea what was going on! I have to say, this book would really put you off family! I should buy Coles/Sparks Notes from ABEbooks and try again! 

[Vort]

7 hours ago, MormonGator said:

@Sunday21 & @LiterateParakeet have you read "To the Lighthouse" by Virginia Woolf? She's more known for her essays but this book is a gem. It's very complicated, very Freudian and not much happens. However, it's probably one of the best modernist literature novels ever written.

One of my favorite literary sentences in all the canon, courtesy of Virginia Woolf. Honestly, just read and ponder this. It's poetry in prose form.

Considering how common illness is, how tremendous the spiritual change that it brings, how astonishing, when the lights of health go down, the undiscovered countries that are then disclosed, what wastes and deserts of the soul a slight attack of influenza brings to light, what precipices and lawns sprinkled with bright flowers a little rise of temperature reveals, what ancient and obdurate oaks are uprooted in us in the act of sickness, how we go down into the pit of death and feel the waters of annihilation close above our heads and wake thinking to find ourselves in the presence of the angels and the harpers when we have a tooth out and come to the surface in the dentist’s arm chair and confuse his ‘Rinse the mouth—rinse the mouth’ with the greeting of the Deity stooping from the floor of Heaven to welcome us—when we think of this and infinitely more, as we are so frequently forced to think of it, it becomes strange indeed that illness has not taken its place with love, battle, and jealousy among the prime themes of literature.

Your freshman English teacher would doubtless mark this with a red pen, "BREAK UP THIS RUN-ON SENTENCE!" What a pity that people don't actually write what's in their souls any more, but instead cling to a random bunch of "rules" about not making sentences too long or convoluted,  not splitting infinitives, and not ending sentences with a preposition, among other banalities.

[Guest MormonGator]

Just now, Vort said:

Your freshman English teacher would doubtless mark this with a red pen, "BREAK UP THIS RUN-ON SENTENCE!"

Wow, dude we've found something we agree on. We both like Virginia Woolf!! 
And no, my freshmen English teacher would understand that stream of consciousness and modernist literature doesn't follow traditional grammar rules.