(Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating bac...)
Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.
English Readings for Schools. Shakespeare's Hamlet
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Leopold is delighted to publish this classic book as part of our extensive Classic Library collection. Many of the books in our collection have been out of print for decades, and therefore have not been accessible to the general public. The aim of our publishing program is to facilitate rapid access to this vast reservoir of literature, and our view is that this is a significant literary work, which deserves to be brought back into print after many decades. The contents of the vast majority of titles in the Classic Library have been scanned from the original works. To ensure a high quality product, each title has been meticulously hand curated by our staff. This means that we have checked every single page in every title, making it highly unlikely that any material imperfections – such as poor picture quality, blurred or missing text - remain. When our staff observed such imperfections in the original work, these have either been repaired, or the title has been excluded from the Leopold Classic Library catalogue. As part of our on-going commitment to delivering value to the reader, within the book we have also provided you with a link to a website, where you may download a digital version of this work for free. Our philosophy has been guided by a desire to provide the reader with a book that is as close as possible to ownership of the original work. We hope that you will enjoy this wonderful classic work, and that for you it becomes an enriching experience. If you would like to learn more about the Leopold Classic Library collection please visit our website at www.leopoldclassiclibrary.com
The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Considered in Its Chronological Relations (Classic Reprint)
(Excerpt from The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Con...)
Excerpt from The Prologue to the Legend of Good Women Considered in Its Chronological Relations
French and Italian sources and models. The attempt was there made to show, on the basis of such relations, that B.
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This work has been selected by scholars as being cultur...)
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The Road to Xanadu - A Study in the Ways of the Imagination
(This vintage book contains John Livingston Lowes's most f...)
This vintage book contains John Livingston Lowes's most famous work, 'The Road to Xanadu'. In this text Lowes examines the various sources of Coleridge's 'The Rime of the Ancient Mariner' and 'Kubla Khan', exploring the books that he believed Coleridge would have read. It offers a fascinating insight into the creative process of the master poet. This is a text that will appeal to those with an interest in Coleridge and his most famous poems, and is a book not to be missed by the discerning poet and student of poetry. The chapters of this book include: 'Chaos', 'The Falcon's Eye', 'The Deep Well', 'The Shaping Spirit', 'The Magical Synthesis', 'Joiner's Work: An Interlude', 'The Loom', 'The Pattern', 'The Fields of Ice', 'The Courts of the Sun', 'The Journeying Moon', etcetera. We are republishing this vintage book now in a modern, affordable edition - complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author.
John Livingston Lowes was an American literary scholar, educator, and literary critic. He was a professor of English in Harvard University.
Background
John Livingston Lowes was born on December 20, 1867 in Decatur, Indiana, United States. He was the older of two children and the only son of Abraham (or Abram) Brower Lowes and Mary Bella (Elliott) Lowes, both of Welsh, Scottish, and English descent. His father, a native of Warren County, Ohio, had graduated from Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and Western Theological Seminary in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His studies had been interrupted by service in the Civil War. His mother was the daughter of the Reverend David Elliott, a professor at the seminary. Abraham Lowes was ordained in the Presbyterian ministry in 1867 and during his son's childhood served in Decatur, Indiana (1867 - 1868), Tidioute, Pennsylvania (1869 - 1870), Mason, Ohio (1871 - 1874), Belle Vernon, Pennsylvania (1874 - 1882).
Education
Lowes was educated at Jefferson Academy, Canonsburg, Pennsylvania and at Washington and Jefferson College, Washington, Pennsylvania. He graduated at the head of his class in 1888. He received his Master of Arts degree in 1891. Then, making a radical shift in the paternal direction, he entered Western Theological Seminary, where he graduated in 1894; although licensed, he apparently did not preach. Then he spent a year (1894 - 1895) at the universities of Leipzig and Berlin. In 1902, at the age of thirty-four, Lowes went to Harvard for graduate work in English. He wrote his doctoral thesis, under the supervision of G. L. Kittredge, on the prologue to Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and received his degree in 1905.
Honorary degrees were bestowed upon him by Washington and Jefferson College (1924), the University of Maine (1925), Tufts (1928), Yale (1928), Oxford (1931), Brown (1932), Harvard (1932), and McGill (1936).
Career
Lowes started his career as a teacher of mathematics at Washington and Jefferson College in 1888-1891. Then he became professor of ethics and Christian evidences at Hanover College in Indiana. Here he found his true vocation when his title was enlarged to include "Instructor in English" (1896 - 1901) and "Professor of English Language and Literature" (1901 - 1902). From 1905 to 1909 he was professor of English at Swarthmore College, and from 1909 to 1918 at Washington University, St. Louis, where in 1913-1914 he was also dean of the college. The crowning phase of his career began in 1918 with his appointment at Harvard, where he remained until his retirement in 1939; in 1930 he was named Francis Lee Higginson Professor. During the years 1924-1926 he was chairman of the English department. He was said to be one of the very few men in the Division of Modern Languages who would stand up to the Napoleonic Kittredge.
In the early part of the century, and notably at Harvard, literary scholarship, following the German model, was preoccupied with the manifold factual data of literary history, with the tracing of themes, sources, and influences from author to author and country to country. The main field of operations was medieval literature. Such aims and methods accomplished a great deal in discovering and ordering a mass of information that more critical successors could build upon. Lowes's work in this vein was focused on Chaucer, and he contributed much to the scholarship that was establishing the chronology and literary relationships of the poems. He was distinguished from run-of-the-mill medievalists by the breadth and depth of his literary and extraliterary learning and by his active concern with the workings of poetic art--virtues that found much fuller scope in his later writings.
In 1918 he gave the Lowell Institute lectures in Boston. These became his first book, Convention and Revolt in Poetry (1919), which was addressed to the literary public and carried into print the qualities that made Lowes such a popular teacher. He discussed the role of traditional and original forms in English poetry, distilled some of his medieval lore and some of his later interest in Coleridge and other romantic poets, and dealt at length with the new Imagists. The book now seems old-fashioned, because its author's catholic gusto is far from the austere analytical subtlety of later critics. Yet the sophisticated reader may still feel his spirit quickened by Lowes's generous ardor, his intimate sense of the past, his insistence that poetry creates a reality beyond the merely actual, that it exists to be read by human beings and is a power in their lives. Since conceptions of art are subject to strange vagaries, notoriously in recent times, the central principles of traditional poetry are always in need of reaffirmation, and Lowes felt them vividly.
In 1936 he published his collection of papers, Essays in Appreciation. His masterwork, The Road to Xanadu (1927), stands as the finest product of the kind of scholarship in which its author had grown up. With indefatigable labor and learned acuteness, he had followed, in one of Coleridge's notebooks, the clues to the poet's immense and heterogeneous reading, which ranged from narratives of voyages to the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society, so that he was able to find sources for almost all the descriptive details in The Rime of the Ancient Mariner and Kubla Khan. The minute and precise documentation of Coleridgean alchemy (so far, of course, as that can be described) might in other hands have been merely mechanical, but Lowes vitalized it by the imaginative insight of a critic working, as it were, within the poet's mind. Some later critics have looked down their noses at the book as "dated. " An heir of nineteenth-century romanticism, Lowes regarded both poems as fantasies of "pure imagination, " a view which for most modern critics has given place to more positive interpretations: the erstwhile theologian might have been expected to see more than he did in the Mariner's guilt and redemption.
Lowes practiced the sound principle that the scholar should try to reach the general reader, and he denied the dichotomy often made between the scholar and the teacher. A newcomer to his classroom was half prepared for the "flashing eyes" of the inspired poet described in Kubla Khan, but not for the voice that boomed from the small, wiry figure on the platform. At his normal best, Lowes was one of the great teachers of his day; his courses attracted and excited crowds of undergraduates and graduates. He was inspirational in the good sense of the word; he shared his own rich, discriminating experience, and at the same time he imparted, and expected to receive from students, solidly informed criticism. His zeal could stir even low-spirited writers of doctoral dissertations. He saw the advanced study of literature not as a trade but as a high calling, and he made novices feel that they were being inducted into a goodly company. Chaucer had never been absent from Lowes's mind, and in his Swarthmore lectures of 1932 he spoke with ripe authority. He placed the poet in his medieval cosmos, in his varied everyday activities, and especially in his world of books, and illustrated his racy realism and imaginative art. Although Lowes's books seem to overflow with open-hearted spontaneity, his "very self, " except as it responded to literature, remained elusive.
Lowes belonged to a generation of scholar-critics and men of letters who enjoyed more than academic repute, such as George Saintsbury and Oliver Elten, Kittredge and E. E. Stoll. Like most of his contemporaries, he did not inaugurate any radical change in the theory or practice of scholarly criticism, and he was not, like Irving Babbitt, identified with any special doctrine; but he was a strongly individual and humane embodiment of learning, taste, and discernment.
His place in American literary scholarship was signalized by his being named the first incumbent of the George Eastman visiting professorship at Oxford (1930 - 1931).
Lowes was a member of the first group of senior fellows in the Society of Fellows established at Harvard by President A. Lawrence Lowell in 1933. He served as president of the Modern Language Association of America (1933) and was elected to membership in the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the American Philosophical Society, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the British Academy. He was also a member of the number of clubs, including the Round Table (St. Louis), the Saturday Club and the Club of Odd Volumes (Boston), the Century (New York), and the National (London).
Connections
On June 23, 1897, Lowes married Mary Cornett of Madison, Indiana. They had an only child, John Wilber.