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"His heroes Achilles and Odysseus are depicted not only as noble warriors in the Trojan War that established ancient Greece as a great power, but also as very human characters confronting both fate and their own weaknesses."
The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, James Canton
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Excerpt from this review of the book from its publisher, Harper Collins:
Thrown into turmoil by the end of his long-term relationship, Professor James Canton spent two years meditating beneath the welcoming shelter of the massive 800-year-old Honywood Oak tree in North Essex, England. While considering the direction of his own life, he began to contemplate the existence of this colossus tree. Standing in England for centuries, the oak would have been a sapling when the Magna Carta was signed in 1215.
In this beautiful, transportive book, Canton tells the story of this tree in its ecological, spiritual, literary, and historical contexts, using it as a prism to see his own life and human history. The Oak Papers is a reflection on change and transformation, and the role nature has played in sustaining and redeeming us.
Canton examines our long-standing dependency on the oak, and how that has developed and morphed into myth and legend. We no longer need these sturdy trees to build our houses and boats, to fuel our fires, or to grind their acorns into flour in times of famine. What purpose, then, do they serve in our world today? Are these miracles of nature no longer necessary to our lives? What can they offer us?
Taking inspiration from the literary world—Henry David Thoreau, Leo Tolstoy, Katherine Basford’s Green Man, Thomas Hardy, William Shakespeare, and others—Canton ponders the wondrous magic of nature and the threats its faces, from human development to climate change, implores us to act as responsible stewards to conserve what is precious, and reminds us of the lessons we can learn from the world around us, if only we slow down enough to listen.
One of Shelley's most significant contributions to the Gothic genre is her ability to expand on the stock themes of persecution, threat, and monstrous hauntings into a more sophisticated exploration of one of the key Romantic preoccupations of the period: the alienated individual in the modern world.
Frankenstein (1818), Mary Shelley --- Early Gothic taken from The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, by James Canton (x)
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A disillusioned individual, often born into wealth and privilege, the superfluous man regards the society around him with boredom, cynicism, and lack of interest, at the same time feeling himself to be morally and intellectually superior.
on 'The Superfluous Man' in Eugene Onegin (1833), Alexander Pushkin taken from The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, by James Canton (x)
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"I have courage enough to walk through Hell barefoot."
The Robbers, Friedrich Schiller from The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, James Canton
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"......'Comedy', which at the time was a term used for works in which the difficulties or challenges faced by the protagonist were resolved in a broadly happy ending (to contrast to the classical tragedies, which focused on loss and suffering)."
on Comedy & The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri from The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, James Canton
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"All is for the best in the best of all possible worlds."
Candide, Voltaire from The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, James Canton
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"But at my back I always hear Time's winged chariot Hurrying near"
To His Coy Mistress from Miscellaneous Poems (1681), Andrew Marvell from The Literature Book: Big Ideas Simply Explained, James Canton
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