What are Jekyll and Hyde’s first names? In the 1886 work by Robert Louis Stevenson, The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, Henry Jekyll is the London doctor who creates the potion that turns him into Edward Hyde.
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
“Anticlimax: According to Dr. Johnson’s definition (and he appears to have been the first to record the word) it is “a sentence in which the last part expresses something lower than the first.” In fact, a bathetic declension from a noble tone to one less exalted. The effect can be comic and is often intended to be so. A good example occurs in Fielding’s burlesque (q.v.), Tom Thumb:
King [Aruther, to his queen Dolallola]
…Whence flow those tears fast down thy blubber’d cheeks,
Like swoln Gutter, gushing through the streets?
The effect can also be unintentionally comic. There is a well-known example in Crashaw’s Saint Mary Magdelene, or the Weeper:
And now where e’er He Strays,
Among the Galilean Mountains,
Or more unwelcome ways,
He’s followed by two faithful fountains;
Two walking baths, two weeping motions;
Portable & compendious oceans.”
Excerpted from: Cuddon, J.A. The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory. New York: Penguin, 1992.
“There is nothing here to appease a reader’s basic literary needs.”
Atlantic Monthly
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Down and Out in Paris and London: An autobiographical study (1933) by George Orwell (1903-50), the author’s first published book. It is an account of working with the poor in London’s East End, and performing menial jobs in a working-class district of Paris, while trying to get his writing published. A useful piece of advice in the book is to stick to the cheaper restaurants in Paris, as in the more glamorous establishments the waiters are likely to spit in the soup.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, readings/research
“Under certain circumstances, profanity provides a relief denied even to prayer.”
Mark Twain
Excerpted from: Winokur, Jon, ed. The Big Curmudgeon. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2007.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
[In this squib, Stanley Kaufmann alludes to Truman Capote’s famously snarky remark about Jack Kerouac’s prose, to wit, “That’s not writing, that’s typing”.]
“One can say of this book–with sufficient truth to make it worth saying: ‘This isn’t writing. It’s research.'”
Stanley Kaufmann, The New Republic
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference, Social Sciences
Tagged fiction/literature, humor, literary oddities
“…The book is unnecessary.”
Granville Hicks, Saturday Review
Excerpted from: Bernard, Andre, and Bill Henderson, eds. Pushcart’s Complete Rotten Reviews and Rejections. Wainscott, NY: Pushcart Press, 1998.
Posted in English Language Arts, Quotes, Reference
Tagged fiction/literature, literary oddities
“Narrative, whatever its medium, holds the interest of the audience by raising questions in their minds and delaying the answers…. The questions are broadly of two kinds, have to do with causality (e.g. whodunit?) and temporality (what will happen next?).”
Excerpted from: Wiggins, Grant, and Jay McTighe. Understanding by Design. Alexandria, VA: ASCD, 1998.
“A collection of stories (1931) by the US writer Damon Runyon (1884-1946), comprising amusing tales of gangster life, told in Runyon’s colorful version of New York underworld patois. The first collection was followed by several others, and the stories feature characters such as Joe the Joker, Nicely-Nicely, Apple Annie, and Regret the Horseplayer. The musical comedy entitled Guys and Dolls (1950), based on Runyon’s stories and with music and lyrics by Frank Loesser (1910-69) and book by Jo Swerling and Abe Burrows, focuses on the romance that develops between a Salvation Army worker (representing the ‘dolls’) and gambler Sky Masterson (representing the ‘guys’). It was filmed in 1955 starring Frank Sinatra, Marlon Brando, and Jean Simmons.”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
“A cult radio serial by Douglas Adams (1952-2001), broadcast in 1978 and 1979. The story begins with the imminent destruction of Earth to make way for a hyperspace express route, and the escape of Earthling Arthur Dent and his exterrestrial friend Ford Prefect by hitching a ride on a Vogon spacecraft. The programme combined the comic with the surreal and introduced a host of eccentric characters. In 1981 the serial was adapted for television. The fictional book mentioned in the title gives handy tips to space travellers, and is frequently quoted; its verdict on the Earth is ‘mostly harmless.’ It transpires that the Earth was originally constructed to solve the question of Life, the Universe, and Everything, to which the answer turns out to be 42.
Adams went on to adapt and extend the idea in book form, characteristically producing a “trilogy in five parts’: A Hitch-Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1979), The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (1980), Life, the Universe and Everything (1982), So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish (1984), and Mostly Harmless (1992).”
Excerpted from: Crofton, Ian, ed. Brewer’s Curious Titles. London: Cassell, 2002.
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