Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, and more Chaucer

I talked briefly about the romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c.1375-1400) in today's Outlines class. You will not have to answer questions about it in the exams or tests, but perhaps some extra information might interest some of you.

There is a useful short introduction to the poem here, on the Luminarium webiste. On the same site, you can also find two modern translations of the poem. I mentioned last week that J.R.R. Tolkien (author of The Lord of the Rings) wrote one of the most important studies of Beowulf. He also wrote on, and was influenced by, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.

Luminarium also has some excellent pages on Geoffrey Chaucer, which you might well find helpful. These include a link to the text of the poem in the original Middle English with parallel translation into modern English. I'll talk more about Middle English at our next class.

The Canterbury Tales

This week in Outlines of English Literature we will (hopefully!) begin to look at Geoffrey Chaucer's The  Canterbury Tales. You can find a very good modern verse translation of all the tales here. There is another one here, and you can find others all over the web. I'll say a little bit more about these in class. 

International Modernism - A Quiz!

Here's a link to a quiz on modernism in The Guardian newspaper. There's no reason you should know all or even any of the answers (yet!), but it gives an idea of modernism's reach into all forms of art and culture across the world. There's a 'comments' section below, with some interesting, some not-so-interesting, and some simply mad or sad comments.

D. H. Lawrence Online

While I'm mentioning the BBC iPlayer, they've also got a reading of a D. H. Lawrence short story, "Rawdon's Roof" - it's only 20 minutes long, so give it a try. Those on the Modernism and British Poetry course have read a Lawrence poem already ("Hummingbird"); the story might also be interesting for any of you doing the Modernism and the British Novel course. Ok, so it's not a novel, but D. H. Lawrence is an important writer of both fiction and poetry in the early twentieth century.

While on the subject of Lawrence, it is fifty years since the trial of Penguin Books for the publication of Lady Chatterley's Lover. The Lady Chatterley case was a defining moment in the history of censorship and of sexual attitudes in Britain. As Philip Larkin later wrote in his poem 'Annus Mirabilis':

Sexual intercourse began
In nineteen sixty-three
(which was rather late for me) -
Between the end of the "Chatterley" ban
And the Beatles' first LP.*

You can read more about the trial here.

(*LP - Long-playing record, or album.)

Thomas Hardy on the BBC

The BBC are currently dramatizing Thomas Hardy's novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes, for radio. You can listen to it on the BBC iPlayer website. I've only listened to the first part, but it seems quite easy to follow.

Readings of Milton

Sir John Gielgud was one of the greatest English actors of the twentieth century. Here he is introducing John Milton's sonnet, 'Methought I saw my late espoused saint'. The sonnet itself is read by Ian Richardson, another great Shakespearean actor. You can also find readings of other Milton sonnets on this site, including 'On His Blindness', which we'll be looking at next week.

Modernism Links

‘Abeceda’  by Vitĕzslav Nezval & Karel Teige (Czechoslovakia, 1923)

Glasgow University has this page of links to a number of excellent Modernism-related websites. Some of these might be of interest if you are taking my Modernism and British Poetry course, and/or Modernism and the British Novel. There is so much rubbish on the internet that you should be careful what resources you are using - these are all reliable sites.

One interesting site linked to is that of the Modernism: Designing a New World exhibition, which took place at the Victoria and Albert museum in London four years ago. You can see images from the exhibition on the website. They serve as a useful reminder that Modernism influenced all areas of cultural activity, including design and fashion (something I know one or two of you are interested in).

There is also a select list of graduate courses at the bottom of the page, for those of you who might be thinking of going on to study this period at a higher level, perhaps in the UK (again, I know this applies to at least one of you!).

More Breaking News: Anglo-Saxon Hospital Discovered!

This find dates to the same period as the Beowulf manuscript. It will change how we see Anglo-Saxon culture - and it's a reminder of how civilized the Anglo-Saxons were. It wasn't all mead-halls, flyting and fighting!

Breaking News: New Milton Poem Discovered...

...and it's a rude and perhaps not particularly good one. Whether it is really by Milton is still being argued about. It uses the sort of crude sexual innuendo typical of English students showing off to each other in the seventeenth century - and now.  Here's a link to Cambridge University's Centre for Material Texts blog on the poem, which also gives the full text - all eight lines of it.

Yeats reading 'The Lake Isle of Innisfree'

Here is a link to Yeats himself reading "The Lake Isle of Innisfree". You will have to do your best to ignore the comical attempt to make his lips move on the accompanying photograph.

I haven't managed to find Dylan Thomas reading Thomas Hardy's poetry, I'm afraid. I'll give you my own performance of "The Ruined Maid" either tomorrow or next week - unless you want to save yourselves from that horrible fate by volunteering.

The Panopticon

In talking of Charles Dickens's preoccupation with prisons today, I mentioned the Panopticon, Jeremy Bentham's design for a new kind of penitentiary. There's a good link about it here, and you can go from that page to Bentham's writings on the subject, if you're interested. I'll try to add more later.

Seamus Heaney's Beowulf - The Prologue

Here's a link to Seamus Heaney (winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, 1995) reading his translation of the prologue of Beowulf. This might help you with reading the prologue for the class.

You might also find this website useful. It gives the original Old English text (don't worry about this!) with a modern verse translation that keeps the caesuras (the breaks between the first and second parts of each line). It also has very helpful notes - click on the links and they will appear in a new window. You can also listen to a reading of selections of the original Old English, if you like!

Cover versions - from 'The Passionate Shepherd' to Hendrix, via Handel

I mentioned today Handel's operatic reworking of Milton's 'L'Allegro'. With Charles Jennens, who was responsible for the libretto, Handel created a 'pastoral ode' that intercuts 'L'Allegro' with  'Il Penseroso', in a way that brings out the argument between the two texts quite nicely. Stanford University has made the  complete libretto available online - you can see it here.

Jennens also added a third part, called 'Il Moderato', the moderate, although in doing so he has generally been seen (perhaps unfairly?) as misreading Milton's two poems. I think you can listen to Handel's version online at fizy.com - just type in 'Handel' and 'L'Allegro' and something should come up.
I also mentioned George Romney's painting of Mirth and Melancholy, inspired by Milton's poems. Here it is: you can form your own opinions about it.

On the subject of cover versions and adaptations, don't forget to check out Jimi Hendrix's version of 'Star Spangled Banner'.

Finally (for now!), if you haven't yet had enough of things related to Christopher Marlowe's 'The Passionate Shepherd', have a look at Sir Walter Raleigh's 'The Nymph's Reply to the Shepherd' and John Donne's 'The Bait'. 

One last thing - please feel free to leave any questions, observations, or ideas for other relevant reading/listening/viewing in the comments. Academic queries about the course, though, should be made to me in the usual ways, by coming to see me or sending an email.

Welcome to the Drudging Goblin. Here I will post anything and everything I come across related to my teaching. I'll probably also occasionally post various unrelated things simply because they amuse or interest me.

Why the Drudging Goblin? My Milton students should know.

More to follow....