The Legend of Good Women

Geoffrey Chaucer

Beschreibung

Geoffrey Chaucer, born in London around 1340, was an English poet, author, philosopher, scientist, diplomat and politician. He has been called the “father of English literature”, or, alternatively, the “father of English poetry”, but he should be considered, in a broader sense, for the breadth of his interests and the richness of his works, the father of English Humanism. He is seen as crucial in legitimising the literary use of Middle English when the dominant literary languages in England were still Anglo-Norman French and Latin.Parallel to his activity as a prolific writer, he maintained a career in the civil service as a bureaucrat, courtier, diplomat, comptroller of the customs for the port of London and member of parliament.The Legend of Good Women, the third longest of Chaucer’s works, after The Canterbury Tales and Troilus and Criseyde, is a poem in the form of a dream vision and is possibly the first significant work in English to use the iambic pentameter or decasyllabic couplets which Chaucer later used throughout The Canterbury Tales. This form of the heroic couplet would become a significant part of English literature no doubt inspired by Chaucer.The poem - indebted to several sources, including Ovid’s Heroides and Metamorphoses, the works of Virgil and Vincent of Beauvais - is a collection of different narratives, a sequence of stories about famous women from history and mythology: Cleopatra, Thisbe of Babylon, Dido queen of Cathage, Hypsipyle, Medea, Lucretia, Ariadne, Philomela, Phyllis, and Hypermnestra. A historical, mythical, heroic and allegorical exaltation of the feminine, even from the most sacred and spiritual point of view.

Verfügbar seit: 09.08.2023.

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Lewis Carroll

Lewis Carroll was born Charles Lutwidge Dodgson on the 27th January 1832 at Daresbury, Cheshire, the eldest boy and the third child. Another eight followed.

When Dodgson was 11, his cleric father moved his family to Croft-on-Tees in the North Riding of Yorkshire. Although his father was active and highly conservative his son was ambivalent with those values and with the Church as a whole.

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In March 1856, he published the romantic poem ‘Solitude’ as by ‘Lewis Carroll’.

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Lewis Carroll died of pneumonia following influenza on 14th January 1898 in Guildford, Surrey. He was 65.

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02 - The Hunting of the Snark. Fit the First - The Landing
03 - Fit the Second - The Bellman's Speech
04 - Fit the Third - The Baker's Tale
05 - Fit the Fourth - The Hunting
06 - Fit the Fifth - The Beaver's Lessom
07 - Fit the Sixth - The Barrister's Dream
08 - Fit the Seventh - The Banker's Fate
09 - Fit the Eighth - The Vanishing

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