Britská literatura
Spark, Muriel. The Driver's Seat.
Summary
Lise (34) is buying a colourful dress for her holiday. When the salesgirl tells her the dress is made of a stain-resisting material, she gets into rage at the "offence" and leaves the shop. Back at...
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Spender, Stephen. "I think continually of those who were truly great".
Summary
- the speaker pays a posthumous tribute to great men
- great men: supposedly ancient historians, artists, or poets; ambitious, zealous, and passionate
- captured the aspects of history and so made it...
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Spender, Stephen. "In railway halls, on pavements near the traffic".
Summary
- the speaker sadly informs about ruined beggars who survive rather than live in the streets
- refuses to assume the poetic pose of rendering them as beautiful birds on a "singing tree" when they are...
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Spender, Stephen. "Seascape".
Summary
- the speaker describes the smooth surface of the ocean = essentially unmoving, permanent
- the ocean mirrors the objects on the shore, absorbs the sounds from the shore, and swallows the butterflies...
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Spender, Stephen. "The Pylons".
Summary
- the speaker indignantly informs about the change of a rural landscape into an industrial one
- the landscape of hills, stones, and "hidden villages" full of secrets turned into the landscape of...
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Spender, Stephen. "What I Expected".
Summary and Analysis
- unrhymed, with the exception of occasional imperfect rhyme
- the speaker briefly describes his romanticised expectations about war, then shifts to devote the remaining ¾ of the poem to...
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Spenser, Edmund. The Faerie Queene. Book I.
Introduction
(from Norton)
A Moral Allegory
The characters and adventures in all of the six Books of The Faerie Queene enact or embody particular virtues and vices. In Book I, the Redcrosse Knight is the...
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Sterne, Laurence. Tristram Shandy. Volumes I-III.
Summary
Volume I
Tristram's Conception: The book opens with the following sentence: "I wish either my father or my mother, or indeed both of them, as they were in duty both equally bound to it, had minded what...
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Swift, Jonathan. "A Modest Proposal".
Introduction
(from Norton)
A satirical essay manifesting a brilliant use of irony and parody and at the same time developing a carefully structured logical argument. Gives a sardonic glance at the by then...
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Swift, Jonathan. Gulliver's Travels.
Introduction
The book mingles all the seemingly incompatible genres: a light-hearted travel and adventure novel, a serious minded treatise on the aspects of society (politics, religion, education, etc.), and a...
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Swinburne, Algernon Charles. "The Garden of Proserpine".
Summary
- the presumably dead speaker describes the bleak and barren garden of Proserpine around him
- observes we are all to die and retire neither to heaven nor to hell but to the sleepy garden of...
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Synge, John Millington. Riders to the Sea.
Summary
Persons
MAURYA: an old frail woman. Querulous because desperate. Lost her husband and five sons at sea.
BARTLEY: her last living son and the family provider.
MICHAEL: her last son to have disappeared...
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Synge, John Millington. The Playboy of the Western World.
Summary
Preface
The author explains the origins of the marked language that he employs in this as well as in his other plays. He heard all of the uncommon words and sayings actually used by Irish peasants to...
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Thackeray, William Makepeace. The Book of Snobs.
Summary
"Prefatory Remarks"
The author demonstrates on examples from history that when a nation is in need, the right man appears to save the people. He identifies himself as the Man who is destined to...
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Thomas, Dylan. "In my craft or sullen art".
Summary and Analysis
- irregularly yet skilfully rhymed
- melodic: regular poetic line; keeps the reader attentive throughout the whole poem through the irregular end rhyme
- the slightly self-deprecating...
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