From Jonathan Swift’s The Battle of the Books (1704).
Matthew Arnold used the phrase “sweetness and light” in Culture and Anarchy (1869) to elaborate his idea of culture as a humanizing and ennobling force.
Yes. Roman emperor Caligula banned Homer’s works during his reign (37-41 A.D.) because they were said to promote unhealthy ideas about Greek freedom.
The retarded narrator of the first section of the Faulkner’s novel The Sound and the Fury is thirty-three years old. Faulkner asked that Benjy’s stream of consciousness be printed in eight different colors of type to better express the layers of Benjy’s memory. The request was not granted.
Paul Clifford (1830) by Edward Bulwer-Lytton novel begins, “It was a dark and stormy night”. It is also the opening line of numerous novels by Snoopy.
Roland and Orlando are the same character. Roland, knight of Charlemagne’s court, is the hero of The Song of Roland, an eleventh-century French epic. Orlando is the Italian form of Roland’s name; he appears in Ariosto’s Orlando Furioso (1532).
The German word for “overman” or “superperson” first appears in Goethe’s Faust (1808,1833), referring to an extraordinarily gifted person. Nietzsche used the term iibermensch for his transcendent man in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1883-91). The Nazis adopted the term as part of their doctrine of Aryan supremacy.
At the end of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow (1819), Washington Irving’s schoolmaster Ichabod Crane disappears after being hit by the Headless Horseman’s “head.”