By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
In a previous post, we offered our pick of ten great books about literature, some of the very best books we’ve read in the course of our research for this blog. Now, we’ve narrowed this down to a more specific topic: those books which serve as great short introductions to the study of English Literature.
A short introduction to the children’s classic, Charlotte’s Web, in the form of five interesting facts
1. Charlotte’s Web was a huge bestseller. It was the last children’s book to appear on the New York Times bestseller list until the Harry Potter series nearly half a century later. It has gone on to sell an estimated 45 million copies worldwide, making it one of the biggest-selling children’s novels ever. Indeed, Publishers Weekly have called it the biggest-selling children’s paperback ever published.
By Dr Oliver Tearle
1. Nobody knows for sure why limericks are named limericks.
There have been numerous theories put forward for why the five-line verse known as the ‘limerick’ is so named, but none of them is conclusive. The name ‘limerick’ was first applied to the five-line form in the late nineteenth century, and one theory holds that comic verses once contained the line ‘Will [or won’t] you come (up) to Limerick?’
A short introduction to the classic novel Of Mice and Men, in the form of five interesting facts
1. John Steinbeck’s original title for his classic novella, Of Mice and Men, was ‘Something That Happened’. This deliberately nondescript title was intended to remove any sense of individual blame for the events that occur in the novella (something quite different from the ironic intention behind the similarly titled play Stuff Happens, David Hare’s recent play about the Iraq War). Of Mice and Men, as the novel came to be known, focuses on two migrant workers, George (a smart, quick-thinking man) and his friend Lennie (a simpler man, who is mentally disabled but physically big and strong – ironically, his surname is ‘Small’), who work on various farms during the Great Depression in America in the 1930s (Steinbeck was drawing on his own experiences as a ‘bindlestiff’, as he also would for his next novel, The Grapes of Wrath). Joseph Heller, author of Catch 22, was possibly alluding to Steinbeck’s working title when he called one of his own later novels Something Happened.