Read "On a School of English" by Arthur Quiller-Couch online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
"The Subject of English Literature. " Surely -- for a start -- there is no such thing; or rather, may we not say that everything is, has been or can be, a subject of English Literature? Man's loss of Paradise has been a subject of English Literature, and so has been a Copper Coinage in Ireland, and so has been Roast Sucking-pig, and so has been Holy Dying, and so has been Mr. Pepys's somewhat unholy living, and so have been Ecclesiastical Polity, The Grail, Angling for Chub, The Wealth of Nations, The Sublime and the Beautiful, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Prizefights, Grecian Urns, Modern Painters, Intimations of Immortality in early Childhood, Travels with a Donkey, Rural Rides and Rejected Addresses -- all these have been subjects of English Literature: as have been human complots and intrigues as wide asunder as Othello and The School for Scandal; persons as different as Prometheus and Dr. Johnson, Imogen and Moll Flanders, Piers the Plowman and Mr. Pickwick; places as different as Utopia and Cranford, Laputa and Reading Gaol. Epipsychidion is literature: but so is A Tale of a Tub.
Listen, for this is literature: