The Politically Incorrect Guide to English and American LiteratureWhat PC English professors don't want you to learn from . . . - Beowulf: If we don't admire heroes, there's something wrong with us - Chaucer: Chivalry has contributed enormously to women's happiness - Shakespeare: Some choices are inherently destructive (it's just built into the nature of things) - Milton: Our intellectual freedoms are Christian, not anti-Christian, in origin - Jane Austen: Most men would be improved if they were more patriarchal than they actually are - Dickens: Reformers can do more harm than the injustices they set out to reform - T. S. Eliot: Tradition is necessary to culture - Flannery O'Connor: Even modern American liberals aren't immune to original sin |
From inside the book
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Page 6
... man who hates the warrior (who's a better man than he is). Your average college professor is not a great admirer of all things military. He tends to think of soldiers as bloodthirsty killers or deluded dupes. And Beowulf is one long ...
... man who hates the warrior (who's a better man than he is). Your average college professor is not a great admirer of all things military. He tends to think of soldiers as bloodthirsty killers or deluded dupes. And Beowulf is one long ...
Page 10
Elizabeth Kantor. respect. It's the quality that determines the worth of a man. To the extent he has it, he's worthy of praise. To the extent he lacks it, he has to hear the humiliating things that the man who “wants to speak the truth ...
Elizabeth Kantor. respect. It's the quality that determines the worth of a man. To the extent he has it, he's worthy of praise. To the extent he lacks it, he has to hear the humiliating things that the man who “wants to speak the truth ...
Page 12
... Man who is stronger, braver, and more patient than any other man, and Who faces death and emerges with a different kind of victory. But to get the full flavor of the intersection between Christianity and the heroic pagan culture of the ...
... Man who is stronger, braver, and more patient than any other man, and Who faces death and emerges with a different kind of victory. But to get the full flavor of the intersection between Christianity and the heroic pagan culture of the ...
Page 16
... man from the hardships that ordinarily keep men in check. The successful man enjoys unalloyed power and pleasure; he can let his pride grow, and his conscience sleep. And he becomes dissatisfied with what he has. Things are bound to end ...
... man from the hardships that ordinarily keep men in check. The successful man enjoys unalloyed power and pleasure; he can let his pride grow, and his conscience sleep. And he becomes dissatisfied with what he has. Things are bound to end ...
Page 19
... man lets his beloved hawk go—by which sacrifice, the poet tells us, we can know the boy will not fail in the fight. The hawk flies to the woods; the boy steps to the battle. The earl's men are letting go of the pleasures and ...
... man lets his beloved hawk go—by which sacrifice, the poet tells us, we can know the boy will not fail in the fight. The hawk flies to the woods; the boy steps to the battle. The earl's men are letting go of the pleasures and ...
Contents
3 | |
References | 243 |
Index | 265 |
Back Cover | 285 |
Front Cover | 286 |
Title Page | v |
Copyright Page | vi |
Table of Contents | ix |
Introduction | xiii |
First Chapter | 3 |
References | 243 |
Index | 265 |
Back Cover | 285 |
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The Politically Incorrect Guide to English And American Literature Elizabeth Kantor Limited preview - 2006 |
Common terms and phrases
American literature Anglo-Saxon artists Battle of Maldon beauty Beowulf Canterbury Tales century characters Chaucer’s Christian civilization Coleridge comedies courtly love criticism culture dead white males death Donne Donne’s Dryden eeeeee eighteenth-century Eliot England English and American English literature Evelyn Waugh example Faulkner Faustus female feminist Flannery O’Connor gender God’s Handmaid’s Tale happiness heart Henry hero human nature husband Jane Austen Jane Austen’s novels John Johnson kind king Lady language literary lives man’s Marlowe Marlowe’s marriage Marxism medieval Milton modern moral Old English patriarchal PC English professors Piers Plowman poem poetry political Pope postmodernist religion religious Renaissance sexual Shakespeare Shakespeare’s Sonnets Shelley sonnet story T. S. Eliot teach there’s things traditional tragedy truth University viewed Western what’s who’s wife Wilde William William Faulkner woman women words Wordsworth writing wrote young
Popular passages
Page 76 - Thy husband is thy lord, thy life, thy keeper, Thy head, thy sovereign ; one that cares for thee, And for thy maintenance : commits his body To painful labour, both by sea and land ; To watch the night in storms, the day in cold, While thou liest warm at home, secure and safe; And craves no other tribute at thy hands, But love, fair looks, and true obedience, — Too little payment for so great a debt.
Page 72 - ... the real state of sublunary nature, which partakes of good and evil, joy and sorrow, mingled with endless variety of proportion and innumerable modes of combination; and expressing the course of the world, in which the loss of one is the gain of another; in which, at the same time, the reveller is hasting to his wine, and the mourner burying his friend; in which the malignity of one is sometimes defeated by the frolick of another; and many mischiefs and many benefits are done and hindered without...
Page 75 - I will be master of what is mine own. She is my goods, my chattels ; she is my house, My household stuff, my field, my barn, My horse, my ox, my ass, my anything...
Page 134 - Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone: Fair youth, beneath the trees, thou canst not leave Thy song, nor ever can those trees be bare; Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, Though winning near the goal — yet, do not grieve; She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!
Page 132 - I never was attached to that great sect Whose doctrine is that each one should select Out of the crowd a mistress or a friend, And all the rest, though fair and wise, commend To cold oblivion...
Page 203 - I believe that man will not merely endure: he will prevail. He is immortal, not because he alone among creatures has an inexhaustible voice, but because he has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.
Page 203 - The poet's, the writer's, duty is to write about these things. It is his privilege to help man endure by lifting his heart, by reminding him of the courage and honor and hope and pride and compassion and pity and sacrifice which have been the glory of his past.
Page 85 - Before all temples the upright heart and pure, Instruct me, for thou know'st; thou from the first Wast present, and, with mighty wings outspread, Dove-like, sat'st brooding on the vast abyss, And mad'st it pregnant: what in me is dark Illumine; what is low, raise and support; That to the height of this great argument I may assert eternal Providence, And justify the ways of God to men.
Page 94 - And from thence can soar as soon To the corners of the moon. Mortals, that would follow me, Love Virtue ; she alone is free. She can teach ye how to climb Higher than the sphery chime; Or, if Virtue feeble were, Heaven itself would stoop to her.