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So presumably, your English teacher wouldn't regard A Midsummer Night's Dream, with its fairies, love potions and half-human half-donkey, or The Tempest with Caliban the witch's son and Prospero the magician, as literature?
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No, he would say that such things as sorcery and strange creatures such half-humans/half-donkeys were believed to exist during the Shakespearian era and so the plays still give an accurate reflection of life at those times. Tolkien, living in the 20th. century, ought well to know that talking trees and such don't exist.
Also, while we talk about Shakespeare as a literary genius; yes, his plays did have great public appeal when they came out, but I'm going to stick my neck out and say that it was as much, if not much more, for their entertainment value as for the people standing on the floor in the globe to go into the theatre and have all manners of catharsis and food for thought.
As for Animal Farm, it's one long analogy (there's a better word for it than that, and I'm sorely wishing I bothered remembering all these terms, my English teacher would have me shot at dawn for this [img]smilies/mad.gif[/img] )about any number of political and social situations in the world (or so I do believe my teacher would say)
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Take, for example, the popularity of JRRT's works. Have the scholars learned nothing from the history of literature? As Lush points out, the works of both Shakespeare and Dickens (and many others to boot, I should imagine) had mass appeal when first performed/published. Indeed, I recall my English Literature teachers making much of Shakespeare's wide appeal with his audiences, pointing out the jokes and devices thrown in for the benefit of the unschooled masses.
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True, but if literature is generalized to be nothing but books that had great popularity when published, that leaves most pompous scholars in the lurch with all their fancy arguments as to why a book is good enough to become literature. As such, it devalues the whole concept of "literature" to me, because literature still conjures up the hope that someone spent time and effort to produce a quality work that is good to read and gives one food for thought on its theme.
Imagine if Danielle Steel or any other author who churned out entertainement books by the dozens became literature in a few hundred years. I'm pulling my hair out already (hope I don't offend anybody, but most airport literature doesn't appeal to me)!
Maybe it sounds a bit wierd, but I got the impression that there were certain rules and unwritten contracts that had to be fulfilled in order for something to become literature, and it seems to me that one of the crutial contracts is that the story has to unfold on this planet (Earth, the third rock from the sun in case you have any doubts) among human beings (and I know that bends slightly for Orwell's Animal Farm)
[ April 09, 2003: Message edited by: tifo_gcs ]