Interesting Literature

Beasts and Un-Beasts: On Saki’s ‘The Penance’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Penance’ has everything we expect from a quintessential Saki story: cruel and borderline feral children, misunderstood animals, and some of the wittiest prose ever committed to paper. If you’ve never read Saki before, I previously compiled a list of ten of my favourite stories of his, though ten really isn’t a big enough number. On some level, every short story by Hector Hugh Munro (1870-1916) is worth reading (it’s thought he took his pen name Saki from The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam).

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.