Claudio Giovanni Antonio Monteverdi was an Italian composer, string player, choirmaster, and priest. A composer of both secular and sacred music, and a pioneer in the development of opera, he is considered a crucial transitional figure between the Renaissance and Baroque periods of music history.
The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, often shortened to Hamlet, is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare sometime between 1599 and 1601. It is Shakespeare's longest play, with 29,551 words. Set in Denmark, the play depicts Prince Hamlet and his revenge against his uncle, Claudius, who has murdered Hamlet's father in order to seize his throne and marry Hamlet's mother.
Jane Austen was an English novelist known primarily for her six major novels, which interpret, critique, and comment upon the British landed gentry at the end of the 18th century. Austen's plots often explore the dependence of women on marriage in the pursuit of favourable social standing and economic security. Her works critique the novels of sensibility of the second half of the 18th century and are part of the transition to 19th-century literary realism. Her use of biting irony, along with her realism and social commentary, have earned her acclaim among critics and scholars.
Macbeth is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. It is thought to have been first performed in 1606. It dramatises the damaging physical and psychological effects of political ambition on those who seek power. Of all the plays that Shakespeare wrote during the reign of James I, Macbeth most clearly reflects his relationship with King James, patron of Shakespeare's acting company. It was first published in the Folio of 1623, possibly from a prompt book, and is Shakespeare's shortest tragedy.
Scholasticism was a medieval school of philosophy that employed a critical organic method of philosophical analysis predicated upon the Aristotelian 10 Categories. Christian scholasticism emerged within the monastic schools that translated scholastic Judeo—Islamic philosophies, and thereby "rediscovered" the collected works of Aristotle. Endeavoring to harmonize his metaphysics and its account of a prime mover with the Latin Catholic dogmatic trinitarian theology, these monastic schools became the basis of the earliest European medieval universities, and scholasticism dominated education in Europe from about 1100 to 1700. The rise of scholasticism was closely associated with these schools that flourished in Italy, France, Spain and England.
King Lear is a tragedy written by William Shakespeare. It is based on the mythological Leir of Britain. King Lear, in preparation for his old age, divides his power and land to two of his daughters. He becomes destitute and insane and a proscribed crux of political machinations. The first known performance of any version of Shakespeare's play was on St. Stephen's Day in 1606. The three extant publications from which modern editors derive their texts are the 1608 quarto (Q1) and the 1619 quarto and the 1623 First Folio. The quarto versions differ significantly from the folio version.
In the First Folio, the plays of William Shakespeare were grouped into three categories: comedies, histories, and tragedies; and modern scholars recognize a fourth category, romance, to describe the specific types of comedy that appear in Shakespeare's later works.
Mr. William Shakespeare's Comedies, Histories, & Tragedies is a collection of plays by William Shakespeare, commonly referred to by modern scholars as the First Folio, published in 1623, about seven years after Shakespeare's death. It is considered one of the most influential books ever published.
Surfacing is a novel by Canadian author Margaret Atwood. Published by McClelland and Stewart in 1972, it was her second novel. Surfacing has been described by commentators as a companion novel to Atwood's collection of poems, Power Politics, which was written the previous year and deals with complementary issues.
Robert James Leslie Halliwell was a British film critic, encyclopaedist and television rights buyer for ITV, the British commercial network, and Channel 4. Halliwell's Filmgoer's Companion (1965) is a single volume film-related encyclopaedia featuring biographies and technical terms. Halliwell's Film Guide (1977) is dedicated to individual films. For some years, Halliwell's books were the most accessible source for movie information, and his name became synonymous with film knowledge and research. Anthony Quinton wrote in the Times Literary Supplement in 1977:
Immersed in the enjoyment of these fine books, one should look up for a moment to admire the quite astonishing combination of industry and authority in one man which has brought them into existence.
Epistulae ex Ponto is a work of Ovid, in four books. It is a collection of letters describing Ovid's exile in Tomis written in elegiac couplets and addressed to his wife and friends. The first three books were composed between 12–13 AD, according to the general academic consensus: "none of these elegies contains references to events falling outside that time span". The fourth book is believed to have been published posthumously.
Farah Jane Mendlesohn is a British academic historian, writer on speculative fiction, and active member of science fiction fandom. Mendlesohn is best-known for their 2008 book Rhetorics of Fantasy, which classifies fantasy literature into four modes based on how the fantastic enters the story. Their work as editor includes the Cambridge Companions to science fiction and fantasy, collaborations with Edward James. The science fiction volume won a Hugo Award. Mendlesohn is also known for books on the history of fantasy, including Children's Fantasy Literature: An Introduction, co-written with Michael Levy. It was the first work to trace the genre's 500-year history and won the World Fantasy Award.
William Shakespeare (1564–1616) was an English poet and playwright. He wrote approximately 39 plays and 154 sonnets, as well as a variety of other poems.
Socrates was a Greek philosopher from Athens who is credited as the founder of Western philosophy and among the first moral philosophers of the ethical tradition of thought. An enigmatic figure, Socrates authored no texts and is known mainly through the posthumous accounts of classical writers, particularly his students Plato and Xenophon. These accounts are written as dialogues, in which Socrates and his interlocutors examine a subject in the style of question and answer; they gave rise to the Socratic dialogue literary genre. Contradictory accounts of Socrates make a reconstruction of his philosophy nearly impossible, a situation known as the Socratic problem. Socrates was a polarizing figure in Athenian society. In 399 BC, he was accused of impiety and corrupting the youth. After a trial that lasted a day, he was sentenced to death. He spent his last day in prison, refusing offers to help him escape.
Portrait of Tommaso Inghirami is an oil painting by Italian artist Raphael. Painted ca. 1509, it exists in two copies, one of which is in display in the Palatina Gallery of Palazzo Pitti in Florence and the other in the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston. Known for its realism and attention to detail, the image is reminiscent of works by Hans Holbein the Elder, by whom Raphael may have been influenced in its execution. Stylistically, it relates to Raphael's Portrait of Agnolo Doni, ca.1506, in what Claudio Strinati described in 1998 as its "merciless clarity."
The Cambridge Companion to Bob Dylan is a book published in 2009 by Cambridge University Press intended to analyze the work of American singer-songwriter Bob Dylan. It is the fourth book of Cambridge Companion to American Studies. This book is edited by Kevin J. Dettmar and contains seventeen essays, each written by a different person.
Walter Everett is a music theorist specializing in popular music who teaches at the University of Michigan.
This is a timeline of science fiction as a literary tradition. While the date of the start of science fiction is debated, this list includes a range of Ancient, Medieval, and Renaissance-era precursors and proto-science fiction as well, as long as these examples include typical science fiction themes and topoi such as travel to outer space and encounter with alien life-forms.