Literature
There are several instances of the county providing an important role in literature, perhaps the most famous literacy association is that between Whitby in North Yorkshire and Bram Stoker's Dracula. When Stoker wrote the novel, he was living in Whitby at the time and parts of it are set there, it includes several parts of Whitby folklore such as the beaching of the Russian ship Dmitri, which became the basis of Demeter in the book. Today there is a Dracula Museum in the town, celebrating the association. In terms of poetry, one of the most well known from Yorkshire is Andrew Marvell from Winestead-in-Holderness, he was noted for writing metaphysical poetry during the 1600s and his association with several other noted British poets from the era.
| “ | Then music, the mosaic of the air, Did of all these a solemn noise prepare; With which she gain'd the empire of the ear, Including all between the earth and sphere. |
” |
|
—Andrew Marvell, "Music's Empire" |
||
The Brontë sisters -- Anne Brontë, Charlotte Brontë and Emily Brontë—were all Yorkshirewomen born in Thornton and raised in Haworth, West Yorkshire. Their novels, written in the mid-1800s, caused a sensation when they were first published and were subsequently accepted into the canon of great English literature. Amongst the most noted novels credited to the sisters are Anne's The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, Charlotte's Jane Eyre and Emily's Wuthering Heights.
In the present day, the most prominent Yorkshire presence in English literature is that of the playwright, author, actor, screenwriter and commentator Alan Bennett, born 1934 in Leeds, where much of his work is set.
Read more about this topic: Culture Of Yorkshire
Famous quotes containing the word literature:
“A book is not an autonomous entity: it is a relation, an axis of innumerable relations. One literature differs from another, be it earlier or later, not because of the texts but because of the way they are read: if I could read any page from the present time—this one, for instance—as it will be read in the year 2000, I would know what the literature of the year 2000 would be like.”
—Jorge Luis Borges (1899–1986)
“What makes literature interesting is that it does not survive its translation. The characters in a novel are made out of the sentences. That’s what their substance is.”
—Jonathan Miller (b. 1936)
“But it is fit that the Past should be dark; though the darkness is not so much a quality of the past as of tradition. It is not a distance of time, but a distance of relation, which makes thus dusky its memorials. What is near to the heart of this generation is fair and bright still. Greece lies outspread fair and sunshiny in floods of light, for there is the sun and daylight in her literature and art. Homer does not allow us to forget that the sun shone,—nor Phidias, nor the Parthenon.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)