“What Mary Shelley novel is sent in the future? The Last Man (1826). Set in the twenty-first century, it depicts England as a republic and describes the destruction of humanity by plague.”
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research, women's history
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Charlotte and Emily Bronte. Are the Brontes taught in high school?
If nothing else, this is an interesting artistic family: lesser-known sister Anne also a writer, perhaps because she originally published her novels under the name Acton Bell which may account for her public status among her more famous sister; she also died young, at 29, of tuberculosis. She was also the youngest of six children–in addition to the four siblings mentioned here, two elder sisters, Maria and Elizabeth, rounded out the family. Branwell Bronte, also a writer and an accomplished translator, was also a painter, for which he is primarily known. He too died young, the result of unhappiness and, apparently, drug addiction.
The patriarch of the family, Patrick Bronte (Branwell Bronte carried the full name Patrick Branwell Bronte, after his father and his mother’s–Maria Branwell–maiden name), was a clergyman of humble Irish origins.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
Who established the first literary club in America? Author Anne Hutchinson organized literary groups for women in the seventeenth century.
Excerpted from: Corey, Melinda, and George Ochoa. Literature: The New York Public Library Book of Answers. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1993.
“The Great Advantage of living in a large family is that early lesson of life’s essential unfairness.”
Nancy Mitford, The Pursuit of Love, ch. 1 (1945)
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, women's history
“If you can’t be a good example, then you’ll just have to be a horrible warning.”
Excerpted from: Schapiro, Fred, ed. The Yale Book of Quotations. New Haven: Yale University Press, 2006.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities, women's history
“Mary Wollstonecraft: (1759-1797) English author. Wollstonecraft is famous for her groundbreaking Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792), and as the wife of William Godwin and the mother of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. Yet her political and literary life developed much earlier. Wollstonecraft was the father of an alcoholic father, from whom she tried to protect her mother, just as she helped her sister flee an abusive husband. After helping to found a girl’s school, working as a governess, and suffering years of poverty, she began to write. Her first novel, Mary, a Fiction (1788), was actually based on her own life. In the same year, she published a children’s book (later illustrated by William Blake). Her A Vindication of the Rights of Man (1790) predated Thomas Paine’s famous response to Burke’s Reflections on the Revolution in France and was similar in kind. In her more famous Vindication of the Rights of Woman, she showed how women were an oppressed group as much as the working class. Her analysis of social roles and the effect of laws that reduced women to the status of nonpersons was a model for later feminists.
Wollstonecraft lived in France during the revolution’s most violent phase, and began an unhappy affair which led to a child and two suicide attempts, She met Godwin after her return to London, and married him in 1796. She died the following year after giving birth to her daughter Mary.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Octavia Butler: (1947-2006) American novelist and short-story writer. Butler, who is the first black woman to achieve recognition for writing science fiction, has won the top honors in her field, the Hugo and Nebula awards. She is best known as the author of the Patternist series (Patternmaster, 1976; Mind of My Mind, 1977; Survivor, 1978; Wild Seed, 1980; Clay’s Ark, 1984), based on a society whose inhabitants have evolved telepathic powers. The most successful of her other novels is Kindred (1979), the tale of Dana Franklin, who is mysteriously transported from her 1975 Los Angeles home across time and space to emerge in 1830s Maryland as a free black woman in a slave state. Other works include Dawn (1987), Adulthood Rites (1988), and Imago (1989), the Xenogenesis trilogy, and Parable of the Sower (1993).”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
“Nella Larsen: (1891-1964) American novelist and short-story writer. Larsen’s reputation as one of the luminaries of the Harlem Renaissance rests upon her two published novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929). Both are studies of middle-class mulatto women and the politics of the color line. Here work is noted for its economy of expression and psychological depth. Although Larsen was the first African-American woman to win a Guggenheim fellowship (1930), her literary career declined shortly afterward due to professional and personal difficulties. Larsen died in obscurity after working as a nurse for more than twenty years in New York City.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
Here is a Cultural Literacy worksheet on Haiti. This is a full-page worksheet, so it is suitable, I think, for a number of uses besides the rather limited do-now scope of the shorter, half-page Cultural Literacy worksheets posted on this blog.
Have you, by any chance, read C.L.R. James’s well-regarded history of the Haitian Revolution, The Black Jacobins? I just started it yesterday, and it is all it is reputed to be: classic, at once passionate and analytical, infused with a rich contempt for tyranny, and and endowed with a welcome and edifying scholarly apparatus. I should also mention that Mr. James wrote with verve, and used his gifts as a prose stylist to produce fiction and drama as well.
If you find typos in this document, I would appreciate a notification. And, as always, if you find this material useful in your practice, I would be grateful to hear what you think of it. I seek your peer review.
“Sterling Allen Brown: (1901-1989) American poet, folklorist, editor, and critic. Brown was one of the first writers to identify folklore as a vital component of the black aesthetic and an important form of artistic expression. His first collection of poems, Southern Road (1932), was a critical success, fusing elements of ballads, spirituals, work songs, and the blues into narrative poems generally written in a Southern dialect. Two of Brown’s works written in 1937, Negro Poetry and Drama and The Negro in American Fiction, are major books of criticism on African-American studies. In 1941, Brown, along with colleagues Arthur P. Davis and Ulysses S. Lee, edited the The Negro Caravan, which was considered by many “the anthology of African-American literature.” With the publication of The Collected Poems of Sterling A. Brown (1980), Brown won the 1982 Lenore Marshall Poetry Prize and received widespread and deserved recognition.”
Excerpted from: Murphy, Bruce, ed. Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia, Fourth Edition. New York: Harper Collins, 1996.
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