Literary Context Quotes

You have to learn the language of Hamlet.

When I was writing 'The Satanic Verses,' if you had asked me about the phenomenon that we all now know as radical Islam, I wouldn't have had much to say. As recently as the mid-1980s, it didn't seem to be a big deal.

Yeats, protected to some extent by the Nationalistic movement, wrote out of a somewhat protected world, and so his work does not touch life deeply.

When I say it doesn't make much difference, I mean in terms of the importance of the piece of literature.

Outside literature, high-flown sentiments are merely exasperating.

Why are we reading a Shakespeare play or 'Huckleberry Finn?' Well, because these works are great, but they also tell us something about the times in which they were created. Unfortunately, previous eras and dead authors often used language or accepted as normal sentiments that we now find unacceptable.

A book is judged, not by its reference to life, but by its reference to other books.

Literary works cannot be taken over like factories, or literary forms of expression like industrial methods. Realist writing, of which history offers many widely varying examples, is likewise conditioned by the question of how, when and for what class it is made use of.

But stories don't only speak; they are spoken to, by the circumstances under which they are written.

No poem, not even Shakespeare or Milton or Chaucer, is ever strong enough to totally exclude every crucial precursor text or poem.

To many writers and thinkers, though not to all, another text is, or can be, the most naked and charged of life-forces ... The concept of allusion or analogue is totally inadequate. To Dante these other texts are the organic context of identity. They are as directly about life as life is about them.

It's a different thing to write a love story now than in the time of Jane Austen, Eliot, or Tolstoy. One of the problems is that once divorce is possible, once break-ups are possible, it can all become a little less momentous.

If you open the door and realize things like the fact that Batman is occupying the same narrative space that Robin Hood used to fill 400 years ago, then you have the freedom to ignore the pointless "what is literature" discussion and just talk about stories.

There is no room for the impurities of literature in an essay.

Hemingway's remarks are not literature.

Literature belongs first and foremost to the language in which it is being written.

My book had a universal theme. It's not a "racial" novel. It portrays an aspect of civilization, not necessarily Southern civilization.

You know, since the reviews have come out and people have reacted to it, I've realized that is in a sense what has happened. But as I was writing them, I didn't feel a part of any tradition. I think that would have been too overwhelming, in a sense.

I think what matters most in literary work is the context, not the text.

The historical sense compels a man to write not merely with his own generation in his bones, but with a feeling that the whole of literature from Homer and within it the whole of the literature of his own country has a simultaneous existence and composes a simultaneous order.

Middle English is an exciting field - almost uncharted, I begin to think, because as soon as one turns detailed personal attention on to any little corner of it, the received notions and ideas seem to crumple up and fall to pieces - as far as language goes, at any rate.

The simple point is that literature belongs to the world man constructs, not to the world he sees; to his home, not his environment.

The Bible should be taught, but emphatically not as reality. It is fiction, myth, poetry, anything but reality. As such it needs to be taught because it underlies so much of our literature and our culture.

The story and the poem are obviously changed by being placed in the novel, so in a sense they're no longer the works that preceded the novel.

Dante can be understood only within the context of Italian thought, and Faust would be unthinkable if divorced from its German background; but both are part of our common cultural heritage.