He is credited with coining dozens of new words which are still in common use. He died on his birthday. Some of his writing was first published without his permission. His works, when first published in the seventeenth century, proved hugely successful and influential. This description could easily fit William Shakespeare, but it also fits a relatively unsung hero of literature, Sir Thomas Browne.
English Literature
The Best Literary Facts from the Twitterverse
Last Wednesday, we issued our 50,000 followers on Twitter with a challenge: to tweet us with the best literary fact they know. The reason for this was simple: since last December, the modestly sized research team here at Interesting Literature has been tweeting (as @InterestingLit) little facts, quotations, and links based on all aspects of literature, … Read more
Brave New Worlds before Huxley and Orwell
In this guest blog post written for the excellent Great Writers Inspire blog, run by the University of Oxford, our founder-editor Dr Oliver Tearle explores the complex history of dystopian fiction. Click on the link below to visit the Great Writers Inspire site and read the blog post, which includes details of the science fiction novel written by … Read more
Guest Blog: Literature’s Top Ten Sleepers
By Dr Michael Greaney, Lancaster University Imagine a reader – say, a Martian with a library card — whose sole acquaintance with human experience was from books. What picture of human life would this well-read alien carry around in its imagination? And what would be missing from that picture? One area of our creaturely existence … Read more
Guest Blog: Shakespeare Beyond Doubt
By Professor Stanley Wells, CBE It’s not often, when one publishes a book, that a parody of it appears shortly afterwards – or, indeed, ever – but this has happened with Shakespeare Beyond Doubt, the collection of essays that I edited along with Paul Edmondson and that was published by Cambridge University Press in April … Read more