The English reader
Subtitle: what every literate person needs to know
By: edited by Diane Ravitch and Michael Ravitch.
Contributors: Ravitch, Diane.; Ravitch, Michael.
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2006
Place of publication: Oxford; New York
Language: eng
Number of pages: 486
ISBN-13: 9780195077292
Subjects: English literature
Description: From the Publisher: In this sequel to the best-selling The American Reader, mother-and-son team Diane and Michael Ravitch have gathered together the best and most memorable poems, essays, songs, and orations in English history, capturing in one compact volume writings that have shaped not only England, but democratic culture around the globe. Here are words that changed the world, words that inspired revolutions as well as lovers, dreamers, and singers, words that every educated person once knew-and should know today. Framed by two inspiring speeches-Queen Elizabeth before the invasion of the Spanish Armada and Winston Churchill during the dark days of World War II-the book features work by William Wordsworth and W.H. Auden, Thomas Hobbes and John Stuart Mill, Mary Wollstonecraft and Virginia Woolf, Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, and many other extraordinary writers. Readers will find ardent love poems such as Marlowe's "The Passionate Shepherd To His Love" and Shakespeare's "Shall I Compare Thee to a Summer's Day?" We also find more philosophical works such as Yeat's "The Second Coming" and Matthew Arnold's "Dover Beach." There are excerpts from Isaac Newton and Charles Darwin, Walter Pater and John Ruskin, Edmund Burke and Thomas Carlyle, and other influential thinkers. In addition, the book includes song lyrics ranging from "Greensleeves" to "Rule, Britannia," and works that, though not considered classics, were immensely popular in their day and capture the spirit of an era, such as W.E. Henley's "Invictus" ("I am the master of my fate: / I am the captain of my soul"). The editors also provide brief, fascinating biographies of each writer. An exquisite gift, The English Reader offers the best of the best-the soaring language and seminal ideas that fired the imagination of the English-speaking world.
Notes: Includes index.
Table of contents: title: Queen Elizabeth I (1533-1603); title: William Shakespeare (1564-1616); title: Scarborough Fair; title: Edmund Spenser (1552-1599); title: Christopher Marlowe (1564 - 1593); title: Sir Walter Raleigh (1552-1618); title: Greensleeves; title: Francis Bacon (1561-1626); title: John Donne (1572 - 1631); title: Ben Jonson (1573 - 1637); title: Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679); title: King James Bible (1611); title: Robert Herrick (1591 - 1674); title: George Herbert (1593 - 1633); title: Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682); title: Barbara Allen; title: John Milton (1608 - 1674); title: Jeremy Taylor (1613 - 1667); title: The two brothers; title: Richard Lovelace (1618-1657); title: Andrew Marvell (1621 - 1678); title: John Bunyan (1628-1688); title: Lord Randal; title: John Dryden (1631 - 1700); title: John Locke (1632 - 1704); title: The girl I left behind me; title: Isaac Newton (1642 - 1727); title: O God, our help in ages past; title: Joy to the world; title: Jonathan Swift (1667 - 1745); title: Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744); title: Rule, Britannia; title: John Wesley (1703 - 1791); title: Jesus, lover of my soul; title: William Pitt (1708 - 1778); title: Heart of Oak; title: Samuel Johnson (1709 - 1784); title: Thomas Gray (1716 - 1771); title: Adam Smith (1723 - 1790); title: God save the king; title: Edmund Burke (1729 - 1797); title: Oliver Goldsmith (1730 - 1774); title: William Cowper (1731 - 1800); title: William Blake (1757 - 1827); title: Mary Wollstonecraft (1759 - 1797); title: Robert Burns (1759 - 1796); title: Auld lang syne; title: William Wilberforce (1759 - 1833); title: Thomas Robert Malthus (1766-1834); title: Amazing Grace; title: William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850); title: Sir Walter Scott (1771 - 1832); title: Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772 - 1834); title: Walter Savage Landor (1775 - 1864); title: William Hazlitt (1778 - 1830); title: Lord Byron (1788 - 1824); title: Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792 - 1822); title: John Clare (1793 - 1864); title: Felicia Hemans (1793 - 1835); title: John Keats (1795 - 1821); title: Thomas Carlyle (1795 - 1881); title: Thomas Hood (1799-1845); title: John Henry Newman (1801 - 1890); title: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806 - 1861); title: John Stuart Mill (1806 - 1873); title: Edward Fitzgerald (1809 - 1883); title: Alfred, Lord Tennyson (1809 - 1892); title: Charles Darwin (1809 - 1882); title: Edward Lear (1812 - 1888); title: Robert Browning (1812 - 1889); title: Emily Bronte (1818 - 1848); title: John Ruskin (1819 - 1900); title: Matthew Arnold (1822 - 1888); title: Thomas Henry Huxley (1825 - 1895); title: I know where I'm going; title: Walter Bagehot (1826 - 1877); title: Christina Rossetti (1830 - 1894); title: Lewis Carroll (1832 - 1898); title: William Morris (1834 - 1896); title: Walter Pater (1839 - 1894); title: Thomas Hardy (1840 - 1928); title: Algernon Charles Swinburne (1837 - 1909); title: Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844 - 1889); title: W. E. Henley (1849 - 1903); title: The Major General's song; title: Robert Louis Stevenson (1850 - 1894); title: Oscar Wilde (1854 - 1900); title: Emmeline Pankhurst (1858 - 1928); title: A. E. Houseman (1859 - 1936); title: David Lloyd George (1863 - 1945); title: There'll always be an England; title: Roger Casement (1864 - 1916); title: Rudyard Kipling (1865 - 1936); title: William Butler Yeats (1865 - 1939); title: G. K. Chesterton (1874 - 1936); title: Edward Thomas (1878 - 1917); title: E. M. Forster (1879 - 1970); title: Virginia Woolf (1882 - 1941); title: D. H. Lawrence (1885 - 1930); title: Rupert Brooke (1887 - 1915); title: Keep the home fires burning; title: T.S. Eliot (1888 - 1965); title: Wilfred Owen (1893 - 1918); title: George Orwell (1903 - 1950); title: W.H. Auden (1907-1973); title: Dylan Thomas (1914-1953); title: Phillip Larkin (1922- 1985); title: Winston Churchill (1874 - 1965).