Interesting Literature

Why ‘Man Friday’ Wasn’t Man Friday

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Robinson Crusoe probably has more misconceptions surrounding it than just about any other novel in English literature.

For a start, it’s often claimed it was the first novel (it wasn’t). It’s sometimes claimed, with a little more nuance, that it was the first English novel (it wasn’t). It’s also claimed that it was inspired by one man, the real-life, shipwrecked Scot named Alexander Selkirk (it wasn’t). It’s then claimed that Crusoe was shipwrecked on a deserted island (he wasn’t). This last ‘fact’ is immediately refuted by the fact that it was on this supposedly deserted island that Crusoe met his servant Man Friday, who was so named because Crusoe discovered him on a Friday (he didn’t).

Let’s take these misconceptions one at a time.

A Medley of Topical Allusions: Sidney’s Sonnet 30 from Astrophil and Stella

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Astrophil and Stella by Sir Philip Sidney (1554-86) is the first substantial sonnet sequence in English literature. Although there had been earlier collections that featured sonnets (George Gascoigne’s A Hundreth Sundrie Flowers, published in 1573, being perhaps the most notable), and Anne Locke’s religious Meditation of a Penitent Sinner: Written in Maner of A Paraphrase upon the 51. Psalme of David (1560) takes the prize for the first ever sonnet sequence written in English, Sidney’s was the first long cycle of sonnets on the theme of love.

Shakespeare, Alcohol, and the Origins of ‘In a Pickle’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

An Elizabethan playwright and poet from Warwickshire (who, among other things, gave us the phrase ‘all’s well that ends well’) furnishes the Oxford English Dictionary with its earliest citation for ‘pickle’ in the sense of ‘a (usually disagreeable) condition or situation; a plight, a predicament’.

Layamon’s Brut: English Poetry’s First Epic

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

What was the first great epic poem in English literature? It’s sometimes claimed that Beowulf should have that title, so my subtitle for this week’s dispatch makes a somewhat contentious claim. It depends on how we view ‘English’, both as an identity and as a language.

The Curious Origins of the Word ‘Leviathan’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

Where does the word ‘leviathan’ come from, and what animal does it refer to? The origins of the word are to be found in the Old Testament, but we need to take a closer look at the Bible to uncover the true meaning of the word, and to discover why the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes took the word and used it as the title for his 1651 book Leviathan.