2.       What is Beau Brummell credited with inventing?

3.       What were the gentleman's clothes of the Regency period intended to express?

4.       What is another footnote in fashion history?

5.       Where did the expression 'toff' come from?

6.       Why was St James in London important for the Regency Gentleman?

7.       What were down the backstreets and alleys of St James's Street?

8.       Why did Beau Brummell start to act crazily?

Explanation: It is difficult to imagine a time when literature was not an academic discipline and part of every English university’s curriculum, but as this quotation shows, we have only been studying literature for 166 years.  Literature is central to the humanities because it helps us to understand what it is to be human; the trials and joys and mysteries and decisions of our lives and those of our ancestors are recorded in books.  Like scripture before it, literature provides lessons on life which is why the earlier courses were mostly concerned with ethical issues.  Now, although an affective response still provides much class discussion as we relate to the heroes and villains of a text, we also tend to focus on technical issues of how these characters and situations are created and what might be behind or beyond their creation, such as issues of psychoanalysis, class, gender, race, ideology and semantics.

Explanation: Here we see the incredible diversity of the 19^th century novel which ranged from razor sharp satirical social commentary grounded in the Enlightenment to Gothic flights of fancy into the timeless sublime mysteries and horrors of the Romantics.  The novel as a literary genre reached its peak in the 1800s because it is a genre that, in my opinion, relies on plot and there were so many stories and different ways to tell them in such a rapidly changing society with such a rich print heritage of past adventures and genres to draw from during this time of accelerating change, mechanised publication, and a mass readership which made it easier to access the past and stamp its indelible mark on the future.

Explanation: This quotation illustrates that what we now regard as high culture, literature, was once much closer to mass culture.  The works of Dickens are designed to delight and entertain us.  If an overworked literature student quickly skim-reads and Schmoops his/her way through these novels, they will not get the same rewards as they would by immersing themselves in the text without distraction or, better still, from listening to the texts - hearing them performed.  The sounds of the specific words chosen by these authors were just as important as the content and create an emotive atmosphere in a similar way to a movie soundtrack.