Who asked, “Was this the face that launched a thousand ships, /And burnt the topless towers of Ilium”?
Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus (c. 1588-92), on conjuring up Helen of Troy.
Dr. Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s play Dr. Faustus (c. 1588-92), on conjuring up Helen of Troy.
In the 1886 work by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry Jekyll is the London doctor who creates the potion that turns him into Edward Hyde.
Thomas Hardy published his last novel thirty-three years before his death. Hardy’s last novel was Jude the Obscure (1895), the story of Jude Fawley’s adulterous love for his cousin Sue Bridehead. The novel so shocked readers that Hardy gave up writing fiction and turned to poetry. Hardy died in 1928.
The tragedy Samson Agonistes by John Milton, about Samson’s battle of faith and destruction of the Philistine temple, spans one day.
According to the Book of Genesis, Ishmael is the son of Abraham and Hagar.
Henry Fielding (1707-54) called the novel a “comic-epic poem in prose”, in the preface to his 1742 novel Joseph Andrews.
Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902-50) coined the phrase the “American Renaissance”, in his work The American Renaissance: Art and Expression in the Age of Emerson and Whitman (1941). The phrase refers to a time in the mid-nineteenth century that saw a flourishing of talent in American letters. Francis Otto Matthiessen (1902-50), in his work The American…