Author : Henry Craik
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9781331060734
Total Pages : 622 pages
Book Rating : 4.0/5 (67 download)
Book Synopsis English Prose, Vol. 2 by : Henry Craik
Download or read book English Prose, Vol. 2 written by Henry Craik and published by . This book was released on 2015-07-09 with total page 622 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Excerpt from English Prose, Vol. 2: Selections With Critical Introductions by Various Writers, and General Introductions to Each Period The authors represented in this volume begin with men whose life belonged in part to the reign of Elizabeth; they end with those who had reached manhood before the close of the Commonwealth. The period was a critical one for English prose. The glory and the daring, the marvellous creative power of the Elizabethan age - these were gone, and our literature was about to pass through a severe ordeal. The rich harvest which the Elizabethans had gathered was drawn from two sources. Something had been inherited from the native stock, which could trace its origin back to ages long before that of Chaucer. There had been no slight intermixture therein of the formal and unnatural - of the pedagogic, and even of the pedantic. But it had its excellences as well. It saved itself by its simplicity and directness; by its marvellous power of using for literary purposes the language of everyday life; above all, by its faculty of assimilating the romantic spirit, which set it free from the artificialities of the homily, and gave to it the quickening force of artistic effort. The native stock, then, was barren neither in promise nor in performance when there came to it the breath of a new life, partly stimulating, partly controlling, from the Classical and Romance literatures. It was the glory of the Elizabethans to absorb these without losing what was best and most characteristic in the native stock. It was through this added wealth that they achieved their greatness. But their achievements did not belong, in any large part, to the domain of prose. What they did in that domain was, at the best, to show what were the possibilities of English prose. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.
