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Questions tagged [literature]

written works, especially those considered of superior or lasting artistic merit.

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Does "the captain's daughter" refer to a whip/cat o' nine tails?

Many versions of the popular sea shanty "Drunken Sailor" includes the following verse: What shall we do with a drunken sailor, Put him in bed with the captain's daughter. Sources including Wikipedia claim that this is a reference to getting…
lambshaanxy
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Did Lincoln tell Stowe "So you're the little woman that started this great war!"?

I have decided to give Uncle Tom's Cabin another read. A famous quote that surrounds this book, and Harriet Beecher Stowe, in general, is that when she met Abraham Lincoln, he told her So you're the little woman that started this great war! Did…
M.A.R.
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Do the post offices worldwide offer the service of pursuing the addressee over the world? Did they in the past?

There is a poem named "Post" by Samuil Marshak, written in 1927. The poem tells a story of a letter being sent from Rostov to Leningrad. The addressee, Boris Zhitkov (another writer) was not found at home as he had left for Berlin. The letter,…
Anixx
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Did the first Mughal emperor of India, Babur, write love poems for men?

Sites such as this, this and this claim that Babur the founder of the Mughal dynasty and the first Mughal emperor of India wrote love poems for men. Ziya Us Salam an Indian literary and film critic also concurs the same. By his own admission, he…
pericles316
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Was Nabokov's Lolita named after a horse?

I've gotten a pretty popular (based on levels of forwarding) chain email in Russian recently discussing funny "facts" about literature. Most were either mildly amusing or obvious BS, but one claim struck me as "too crazy to be false" - namely, that…
Lola
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Did Percy Bysshe Shelley take credit for work done by Mary Shelley?

This is going to be a rather unorthodox question by me, as I can't fully legitimize the claim about to be questioned, but today, in conversing with a colleague of mine, the Shelleys popped up in conversion. During this conversation I was told by…
David G.
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Is Robinson Crusoe the first English novel?

This is not the first time I've heard of this, and I'm not really sure this is true. Then I came across this book review: Robinson Crusoe is a novel by Daniel Defoe, first published in 1719 and sometimes regarded as the first novel in…
Thursagen
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Was Licio Gelli nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature?

In Wikipedia it's stated that Licio Gelli In 1996, Gelli was nominated as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in Literature, supported by Mother Teresa and Naguib Mahfouz. The references give some (little) evidence to this claim -rather curious,…
leonbloy
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Did Americans coin the phrase "to make money"?

This claim comes from a work of fiction but it is often repeated as true by fiscally conservative individuals who respect the author. In Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged, a character named Francisco gives a speech on the nature of money. Francisco says…
William Grobman
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