Word: englands
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...chivalric diction," then, Heaney tried to leave his "Ulster fingerprints" on it, to reintroduce Beowulf in the formal, but simple, idiom of his father's relatives. "Scullions," according to Heaney, had just as much right to Beowulf as the Early English Text Society. After all, the geographically-defined "England" does not exclusively own what is called the English language. Though he is considered an Irish poet, Heaney's medium is exactly that language which is not contained by national boundaries...
...proved his claims, cashed in his chips and changed his identity for good. Up until his epic first fight with Sonny Liston in 1964, Clay and his chatter had been just a good joke. Suddenly he was the heavyweight champion of the world, a position that, like Queen of England and Archbishop of Canterbury, carried certain moral responsibilities. So was Clay planning to be yet another credit to his race, like Joe Louis and Floyd Patterson, or was he going to be the other kind of black champ, a devil incarnate, like Liston then and Mike Tyson...
...landscape experience in the early 19th century was that Americans tended to see their wilderness as God's promise, whereas Australians emphatically didn't. Northeastern America had been settled by free, self-exiled Puritans, convinced of their sacred mission to convert "the Lord's waste," the forests of New England, into a place fit for God's elect. In the 17th century the Wild West was in the East, but by the early 19th the frontier had moved thousands of miles westward, taking with it the same optimistic, sacramental fantasy, translating it into the pompous and morally corrosive idea...
Australia wasn't like that. It began not as a place for self-appointed saints carrying out their radical notions of God's design, but as a jail, a receptacle for the convict outcasts of England. It had no rhetoric of God and Country, and mercifully still doesn't. It was born in sin, not in virtue. The walls of the prison were not brick and stone but space itself. Australia had no Mississippi or Missouri, no fertile center; explorers went out into it, found little but desert, and died. The literary myth of its landscape, created by writers from...
...young jackeroos (Australian for cowboys) galloping furiously to head off a stampeding mob of sheep, remains a national icon a century later. Streeton painted not wilderness but settled pastoral land, framed by vast space. In The Purple Noon's Transparent Might, 1896 (the title is from Shelley: culturally, England still bore strongly on these highly nationalist artists), the high-keyed light and crisp, decisive brushwork create a broad, deep and coherent space brimming with heat...