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a kind of apartment building that housed most of the urban citizen population of ancient Rome, including ordinary people of lower- or middle-class status (the plebs) and all but the wealthiest from the upper-middle class (the equites). The ground-level floor of the insulae was used for tabernae, shops and businesses, with the living space upstairs.

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a pastoral comedy by William Shakespeare believed to have been written in 1599 or early 1600 and first published in the folio of 1623. The work was based upon the early prose romance Rosalynde by Thomas Lodge. As You Like It follows its heroine Rosalind as she flees persecution in her uncle's court, accompanied by her cousin Celia and Touchstone the court jester, to find safety and eventually love in the Forest of Arden.

Grant DeVolson Wood

(February 13, 1891 – February 12, 1942)

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an American painter, born in Anamosa, Iowa. He is best known for his paintings depicting the rural American Midwest, particularly the painting American Gothic, an iconic image of the 20th century.

The Eclogues

also called the Bucolics

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the first of the three major works of the Latin poet Virgil. Imitating the Greek Bucolica by Theocritus, Virgil created a Roman version partly by offering a dramatic and mythic interpretation of revolutionary change in Rome during the turbulent period between roughly 44 and 38 BC.

Virgil's book contains ten pieces, each called an eclogue, populated by and large with herdsmen imagined conversing and performing amoebaean singing in largely rural settings, whether suffering or embracing revolutionary change or happy or unhappy love. Performed with great success on the Roman stage, they feature a mix of visionary politics and eroticism that made Virgil a celebrity, legendary in his own lifetime.

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a bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning Jewish-American author with a number of notable novels to his credit, including The Caine Mutiny, The Winds of War, and War and Remembrance.

Thomas Hart Benton

(April 15, 1889 – January 19, 1975)

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an American painter and muralist. Along with Grant Wood and John Steuart Curry, he was at the forefront of the Regionalist art movement. His fluid, almost sculpted paintings showed everyday scenes of life in the United States. Though his work is perhaps best associated with the Midwest, he created scores of paintings of New York, where he lived for over 20 years; Martha’s Vineyard, where he summered for much of his adult life; the American South; and the American West.

John Marin

(December 23, 1870 - October 2, 1953)

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an early American modernist artist. He was known for his abstract landscapes and watercolors.

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a wide range of dances that have to do with traditional dancing performed by the common people within a given culture. Folk dance embodies elements that are unique or at least indicative of a particular culture while still sharing some broad characteristics with dances developed in other cultures.

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a form of folk dance. It is a social dance form, which has earliest documented instances in the late 16th century.

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a 1958 novel written by Maxwell Kenton (pseudonym of Terry Southern) in collaboration with Mason Hoffenberg published by Olympia Press. The story owes its plotline to Voltaire's Candide. Candy Christian, aged eighteen, is an extremely pretty and desirable but naïve young woman, who finds herself in a variety of farcical sexual situations as a result of her desire to help others. The men in her life, regardless of age or relationship, wish only to possess her.

Playboy Magazine described the story as a "young heroine's picaresque travels, a kind of sexual pinball machine that lights up academia, gardeners, the medical profession, mystics and bohemians."

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the first published full-length novel of the English author and magistrate Henry Fielding, and among the first novels in English. Published in 1742 and defined by Fielding as a ‘comic romance’, it is the story of a good-natured footman's adventures on the road home from London with his friend and mentor, the absent-minded parson Abraham Adams. The novel represents the coming together of the two competing aesthetics of eighteenth-century literature: the aristocratic approach of Augustans and the popular prose fiction of novelists.

The novel draws on a variety of inspirations. The work owes much of its humour to the techniques developed by Cervantes, and its subject-matter to the seemingly loose arrangement of events, digressions and lower-class characters to the genre of writing known as picaresque. It relies on bawdy humour but is also rich in philosophical digressions.

Miguel de Cervantes Saavedra

(29 September 1547 – 23 April 1616)

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a dramatic novel by George Eliot. Her third novel, it was first published in 1861. An outwardly simple tale of a reclusive weaver, in its strong realism it represents one of Eliot's most sophisticated treatments of her attitude to religion.

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a novel by George Eliot. The novel details the lives of Tom and Maggie Tulliver, a brother and sister growing up on the River Floss near the village of St. Ogg's in England. Maggie Tulliver holds the central role in the book. Her relationship with her older brother Tom, and her romantic relationships with Philip Wakem, a hunchbacked, sensitive and intellectual, friend, and with Stephen Guest, a vivacious young socialite in St. Ogg's and assumed fiancé of Maggie’s cousin Lucy Deane, constitute the most significant narrative threads.

A Journey to the Center of the Earth 

ou Voyage au centre de la Terre

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a classic 1864 science fiction novel by Jules Verne. The story involves a German professor who believes there are volcanic tubes going toward the center of the Earth. He, his nephew Axel, and their guide Hans encounter many adventures, including prehistoric animals and natural hazards, eventually coming to the surface again in southern Italy.

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a person employed to tell jokes and provide general entertainment, typically by a European monarch.

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the belief that life was better or more moral during the early stages of mankind or among primitive peoples and has deteriorated with the growth of civilization.

Primitivism in music seeks to express ideas or images related to antiquity or to some "primitive" culture or attitude.

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the first opera by the Austrian composer Alban Berg. It is the first to use leitmotifs.

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a book in which Rousseau theorized about the best way in which to set up a political community in the face of the problems of commercial society. A progressive work, it helped inspire political reforms or revolutions in Europe, arguing against the idea that monarchs were divinely empowered to legislate.

Claude Debussy

(August 22, 1862 – March 25, 1918)

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a French composer who was one of the most prominent figures working within the field of impressionist music.
His music is noted for its sensory component and how it is not often formed around one key or pitch. Often Debussy's work reflected the activities or turbulence in his own life. His music virtually defines the transition from late-Romantic music to 20th century modernist music. In French literary circles, the style of this period was known as symbolism, a movement that directly inspired Debussy both as a composer and as an active cultural participant.

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a movement in European classical music, mainly in France, that began in the late nineteenth century and continued into the middle of the twentieth century. It focused on suggestion and atmosphere rather than strong emotion or the depiction of a story as in program music. Musical Impressionism occurred as a reaction to the excesses of the Romantic era.

Alban Berg

(February 9, 1885 – December 24, 1935)

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an Austrian composer who produced compositions that combined Mahlerian Romanticism with a personal adaptation of Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique. His first opera is Wozzeck.

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a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau.

The work tackles fundamental political and philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society— how, in particular, the individual might retain what Rousseau saw as innate human goodness while remaining part of a corrupting collectivity.

Rousseau seeks to describe a system of education that would enable the natural man to survive corrupt society. He employs the novelistic device of Émile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated.

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a tragedy play by George Bernard Shaw, based on the life and trial of Joan of Arc. Published not long after the canonization of Joan of Arc by the Roman Catholic Church, the play dramatizes what is known of her life based on the substantial records of her trial.

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a epistolary novel by Charles Dickens, considered the last of his picaresque novels. Dickens set the novel in America, portraying the United States satirically as a near wilderness with pockets of civilization filled with deceptive and self-promoting hucksters.

The main theme of the novel is selfishness, portrayed in a satirical fashion using all the members of the Chuzzlewit family. The novel is also notable for two of Dickens' great villains, Seth Pecksniff and Jonas Chuzzlewit.

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a novel by Theodore Dreiser about a young country girl who moves to the big city where she starts realizing her own American Dream by first becoming a mistress to men that she perceives as superior and later as a famous actress. It has been called the "greatest of all American urban novels."

Euripides

(ca. 480 BC – 406 BC)

Charles Edward Gordone

(October 12, 1925 - November 16, 1995)

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an American playwright, actor, director, and educator. He was the first African American to receive the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, and devoted much of his professional life to the pursuit of multi-racial American theater and racial unity.

Clifford Odets

(July 18, 1906 – August 18, 1963)

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an American playwright, screenwriter, socialist, and social protester. Odets's dramatic style is distinguished by a kind of poetic, metaphor-laden street talk, by his socialist politics, and by his way of dropping the audience right into the conflict with little or no introduction. Often character is more important than plot. Among his plays are Waiting for Lefty, Awake and Sing, and Golden Boy.

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a late 19th and early 20th century architectural style that was most common in the Midwestern United States. The works of the Prairie School architects are usually marked by horizontal lines, flat or hipped roofs with broad overhanging eaves, windows grouped in horizontal bands, integration with the landscape, solid construction, craftsmanship, and discipline in the use of ornament. Horizontal lines were thought to evoke and relate to the native prairie landscape.

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a German architect and architectural theorist, known for his rationalist designs and the use of cubic forms. Among his notable projects are museums in Frankfurt, Hamburg and Cologne.

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Literally, to glide. This is a traveling step starting in fifth position with demi-plié: the front foot moves out to a point, both legs briefly straighten as weight is shifted onto the pointed foot, and the other foot moves in to meet the first.

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a ballet position which involves a rotation of the leg from the hips, causing the knee and foot to also turn outward, away from the center of the body. Properly done, the ankles remain erect and the foot arch remains curved and supporting.

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literally means "bent." When a dancer bends his or her knees, they open outwardly, with the legs turned out from the hips.

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Performing steps while on the tips of the toes, using a special blocked shoe. Although mostly a female dancers' skill, nowadays it is not unknown for male dancers to receive training in pointe work.

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a spin or whirl. Starting in one of many positions, the dancer makes at least one complete turn. Usually more than one turn is involved.

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a type of secular vocal music composition, written during the Renaissance and early Baroque eras. The madrigal was the most important secular form of music of its time. Throughout most of its history it was polyphonic and unaccompanied by instruments.

James Patrick Donleavy

(born April 23, 1926 New York City)

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an Irish-American author, he gained critical acclaim with his first novel, The Ginger Man. Correctly or incorrectly, his initial works are sometimes grouped with the Kitchen Sink artists as well as the Angry young men. Though not in the Beat tradition, Donleavy's the Ginger Man is often compared to Jack Kerouac's On the Road.

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 a group of mostly working and middle class British playwrights and novelists who became prominent in the 1950's. The label was applied to describe young British writers who were characterized by a disillusionment with traditional English society. The term, always imprecise, began to have less meaning over the years as the writers to whom it was originally applied became more divergent, and many of them dismissed the label as useless.

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the first major work by Charles Brockden Brown. Wieland is the first - and most famous - American Gothic novel. Wieland is often categorized under several sub-genres other than Gothic fiction, including horror, psychological fiction and epistolary fiction.

Charles Brockden Brown

(January 17, 1771 – February 22, 1810)

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an American novelist, historian, and editor of the Early National period, generally regarded by scholars as the most ambitious and accomplished US novelist before James Fenimore Cooper. The breadth and complexity of his achievement as a writer in multiple genres makes him a crucial figure in US literature and culture of the 1790s and first decade of the 19th century, and a significant public intellectual in the wider Atlantic print culture and public sphere of the era of the French Revolution.

Franz Kafka

(3 July 1883 – 3 June 1924)

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a culturally influential German-language, Jewish-national novelist. Contemporary critics and academics regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century. Most of Kafka's writing, much of it unfinished at the time of his death, was published posthumously. His major novels include Der Prozess (The Trial), Das Schloss (The Castle), and Amerika.

Jack Finney

(October 2, 1911 – November 14, 1995)

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an American author, best known for his science fiction and thriller novels, including The Body Snatchers and Time and Again.

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any drama written as verse to be spoken. For a very long period, verse drama was the dominant form of drama in Europe. Verse drama is particularly associated with the seriousness of tragedy.

Bertolt Brecht

(10 February 1898 – 14 August 1956)

John Gay

(30 June 1685 – 4 December 1732)

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an English poet and dramatist and member of the Scriblerus Club. He is best remembered for The Beggar's Opera. The characters, including Captain Macheath and Polly Peachum, became household names.

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a 1951 Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Herman Wouk. The novel grew out of Wouk's personal experiences aboard a destroyer-minesweeper in the Pacific in World War II and deals with, among other things, the moral and ethical decisions made at sea by the captains of ships. The mutiny of the title is legalistic, not violent, and takes place during a historic typhoon in December 1944. The court-martial that results provides the dramatic climax to the plot.