hide Matching Documents

Browsing named entities in Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing). You can also browse the collection for 1380 AD or search for 1380 AD in all documents.

Your search returned 1 result in 1 document section:

Harper's Encyclopedia of United States History (ed. Benson Lossing), Libraries, free public (search)
belong to the literature of power. Their purpose is not to furnish information, but to give pleasure. Literature of this sort adds no new fact, nor is it superseded, nor does it lose any of its value by lapse of time. To assume that it does would be to assume that beauty of form could become obsolete. This is not so in painting, in sculpture, in architecture. Why should it be so in prose fiction, in poetry, in the drama? Was there, in fact, an aesthetic value in the Canterbury tales in 1380, in Hamlet in 1602, in Ivanhoe in 1819, that is not to be found in them now? But a large portion of latter-day fiction is fiction with a purpose; another way of saying that it is a work of art composed for the dissemination of doctrine. This element promotes it at once to the dignity of a treatise, a new view of politics, a new criticism of social conditions, a new creed. Here is something that concerns the student of sociology. And surely his needs are worthy of prompt response. In