Scholars see litarature as a history of styles and strucrure, influences and themes.
But for most English people, the history of their literature is something much vaguer. It is an impressionistic collage of places and personalities.
It begins with Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, a band of mediaeval pilgrims entartaining one another with stories as they travel on horseback from London to Canterbury.
... then Shakespeare in the Globe Theatre by the Thames, where he performed his plays for the boisterous tradesmen and the cultured gentry of Elizabethan London...
... the 18th Century poets reding their latest works to each other in the coffee houses of Covent Garden. And the great Dr. Johnson, who lived in Fleet Street.
The mind's eye sees Wordsworth striding accross the hills of the Lake District, and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the D'Urbervilles on the horizon of the Dorset countryside.
But the strongest image of all is a solitary, windswept house on the desolate Yorkshire moors - the scene of Emily Bronte's haunting story of violence and passionate love, Wuthering Heights.
0 yorum:
Yorum Gönder