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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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A BRIEF
HISTORY OF WESTERN CULTURE
By Michael
Peverett
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Most visitors arrive here with an interest in a particular author, and I suppose most are students. Some of the articles will be useful, but all of them should carry health warnings: this work does not have the imprimatur of scholarship, though some of the pieces dealing with contemporary poetry have been published. The following remarks (brief as their subject is not) are about the Brief History in general.
This was a book begun without a plan, except to focus my own reading. When I give it up (because such books are given up, not finished) I expect it will be mainly a record of my own limitations, which is what amateur writing always is.
One of my ideas was, nevertheless, to range as widely as possible; not only geographically, but by accepting the random events in a reader’s life that bring acquaintance with some book that is never mentioned as “great” or “classic”. Most books have attracted no criticism at all, even if they were bestsellers in their day. I have wanted to understand this.
I take, in principle at least, the view that any book has any value, and I have tried to be a “method” reader and to work out a way of reading that makes the book get up and answer back. Inconsistently, I’ve also exposed older books to readings that are patently modern in their preoccupations. Also inconsistently, I have not kept out my own interests so that themes of e.g. ecology, botany, and varieties of alternative society are more often than not lurking in the margins.
As for the geographical range, the main and overwhelming issue is languages. I have smatterings of various European ones; in sharply descending order, my best ones are French, Spanish, Swedish, Italian and German. But even these smatterings leave barely a trace on the articles here.
Some people will notice that there’s a small but growing number of entries about cultural artefacts that are not “Western” at all. I am very pleased about this, but I don’t feel these entries (which I know will always be disproportionately few) justify changing the title. Brief History of Western Culture is a stupid title anyway, but Brief History of World Culture would be monstrous.
I know there are plenty of errors here. If you want to, you can point them out in emails to m.peverett@ukonline.co.uk, and I’ll probably change what I’ve written.
I’ve also got a blog (http://michaelpeverett.blogspot.com/) which tries to do other things.
Best wishes, whoever you are!
Michael Peverett
FAQ
What’s the best way of printing out a
hard copy of the Brief History?
The easy answer is, just choose the “Print” option from your browser toolbar or File menu. One thing to watch out for, though, is that the option to "Print only the selected frame" is checked (which by default it is), and that the frame containing the text is indeed the selected frame. (If you have just moved the Geocities advert to one side, then the advert is the selected frame until you click back into the text window.)
The print looks very good. No lines are truncated, the poetry is formatted correctly and it even has page numbers. It makes much better reading than the screen.
However, the print will be of the whole HTML document in which you happen to be looking, so it might be up to fifty pages long and contain loads of other stuff you’re not interested in. Which is fine, if you are sensibly printing on a nice fast laser-printer at your workplace. If your only means of printing is a slow expensive inkjet at home, you might not be up for this. In which case, your best bet is to highlight the text you want and select “Copy”, then paste it into a blank document on your word processor – and then print that.
As the “Brief History” gets longer I am breaking it up into increasing numbers of HTML documents. If you want a copy of the WHOLE “Brief History” (as it exists at this moment), then you’ll have to print out the nine main sections, and then make your way to the separate HTML files containing the material on Shakespeare, Scott, Dickens and others, and print those out separately. This is becoming a very dated way of organizing material on a website, but it works OK, and I’d rather use my limited hours for writing more articles than for redesigning the site.
(I have printed out the whole Brief History recently. Because of its now impressive length, I decided to print it double-sided. However, I discovered that this takes the printer MUCH longer, and presumably uses a lot more electricity, so it's a tough call from the environmental point of view.)
How do I cite the Brief History in my essay?
Consult your style sheet! I would suggest that you merely give the entry and its year, e.g.
Michael Peverett, “Christopher Marlowe (1564-1593)”, web essay, 2004.
You will be unable to supply a more specific location for a quote. But none of the entries is very long.
Including the URL is useful, in the short term anyway.
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A Brief History of Western Culture – Michael Peverett |
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