In the Italian poem Orlando Furioso by Ariosto (1532), the knight Orlando goes crazy with rage when he learns that Angelica, the woman he loves, has married someone else.
Orlando runs around naked, destroying everything in sight. By the poem’s end, he is cured.
The bank employee Joseph K. is arrested for no apparent reason on his thirtieth birthday Kafka’s The Trial.
Jean de Brunhoff created Babar the Elephant, in stories beginning with The Story of Babar (1933). De Brunhoff’s son Laurent continued the series.
Joseph Conrad make the journey down the Congo River in 1890, aboard the Roi des Beiges and it became the basis for Heart of Darkness. Conrad took over as ship master when the captain fell ill of tropical fever.
Four years separated the publication of Milton’s Paradise Lost and its sequel, Paradise Regained. The first was published in 1667, the latter in 1671.
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.
Frank Stockton wrote the story “The Lady or the Tiger?” in 1882.