Literary Taste: How to Form It

Description

Arnold Bennett is mostly known to the public as the author of the novels describing life in the Potteries Towns in Staffordshire, but his non-fictional works such as this essay are also great and worth reading. Literary Taste: How to Form It is a long piece of writing published in 1909 that deals with the methodology of getting youth to like reading and adds an extensive list of readings recommended for young people.

The essay sets out to address all the possible problems that educators may encounter while trying to get kids to love literature. It includes 10 chapters, each of them discussing one specific aspect – the first chapter is entitled The Aim, the third is Why a Classic is a Classic, the fourth and the fifth chapters discuss where to begin reading and how to read a classic, while the second half of the book discuss style, verse and the system one needs to be able to really read and comprehend a classic text.

The list of proposed readings includes modern,as well as classic literature – the prose section includes Bede’s Ecclesiastical History, Thomas More’s Utopia, as well as Jane Austen, Anthony Trollope, Thackeray, Samuel Butler and Stevenson, while the poetry recommended starts with Beowulf and Everyman and continues through Marlowe and Shakespeare, all the way to Blake and Burns, to mention just a few of the suggested novelists and poets. The recommendations come organized in chronological order, the first set including prose and poetry written up to 1700, the second set comprising works that appeared between 1700-1800, the third cluster is for works between 1800-1900 and the fourth is for the period between 1900-1935. As an interesting addition, Bennett also includes a list of the books that are available for those on a tight budget, with detailed calculations about total costs as well.
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