The Great Vowel Shift was a series of changes in the pronounciation of English vowel sounds, marking the dividing line between Middle English and Modern English. A wholesale shift of sounds took place during the fifteenth century, including (most significantly for this question) the silencing of ...
An excerpt from My Glove by Katherine A. Powers:
I walked around (out of sight of the house) with the glove tucked under my arm, wishing I could shove it in my back pocket like boys did in books, but of course my pants, when I was allowed to wear pants, had no pockets because my mother had made ...
When I was a student, many years ago, I remember reading a fascinating piece about traditional African poetry. It mentioned a style --maybe from West Africa, maybe related to the griots --where each line of the poem is basically an elliptical allusion to a well-known proverb. So the poem stands a...
One of the top tags on this site is story-identification, with over 400 questions to date. Such questions are on-topic here: a literature site is the most likely to have well-read people with the necessary experience to be able to identify stories and solve such questions. But identifying other t...
When I was a student, many years ago, in the mid 1990s, I remember reading a fascinating piece about traditional African poetry. If I remember correctly, it was a scholarly article reprinted an anthology that we were assigned in high school --but I don't know if that's accurate or not. I graduate...
Choose what describes the tone of “The Wanderer” best.
a) It is deeply philosophical.
b) It is highly emotional.
c) It is carefree
Petrarch's celebrated sequence of 366 poems to Laura goes by three different titles. As far as I can tell, they're used interchangeably:
Il Canzoniere, The Songbook
Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, Fragments of Common Things
Rime Sparse, Scattered Rhymes.
Scholarly as well as popular editions or tran...
