Thomas Shadwell was refer to as “Mac Flecknoe”, a playwright whose work John Dryden despised.
Dryden satirized Shadwell as the son of (“Mac”) Richard Flecknoe, another bad contemporary poet.
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.
John Donne (1572?-1631) wrote, “Go and catch a falling star,/Get with child a mandrake root”, in the opening lines to the poem, “Song,” which was published posthumously, in 1633.
Ethan Frome and his beloved, Mattie Silver, drive a sled into a tree in a botched suicide attempt in Edith Wharton’s novel, Ethan Frome.
The last poem of Lyrical Ballads is Wordsworth’s “Lines Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey.”
A bildungsroman (in German, it means “education novel”) deals with the formation of a young person and includes common coming-of-age stories. James Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916) is an example. A roman a clef (in French, it means a “novel with a key”) contains one or more characters or situations…
Charles Dickens wrote two historical novels: A Tale of Two Cities (1859), set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, and Barnaby Rudge (1841), set during the anti-Catholic riots sparked by Lord George Gordon in 1780.