By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The focus of this week’s column is an Elizabethan poet who wrote, among other things, a sequence of love sonnets in the early 1590s and a work often referred to, in short, as Richard III. This writer was born in the Tudor era but actually died, in the 1610s, in the Jacobean period. His name was Giles Fletcher, the Elder (c. 1548-1611).
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
I was down in Dorset last week, so I thought I’d blog about that this week. Specifically, I thought I’d look into the significance the Isle of Portland has in the annals of English literature. If you’d be expecting Thomas Hardy to figure prominently, you’d be right – though Portland takes us to one of his lesser-known and more bizarre books.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
I’m fond of debunking widely believed but factually erroneous ‘truths’ about literature. It’s one reason I began this blog, some years ago when I still had my youthful bad looks. There’s a wonderful word for such truths-that-turn-out-to-be-not-so-true, and it was coined by Norman Mailer in his biography of Marilyn Monroe. It is the word factoid.
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.
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.