The Literature Collection
To access or cite this collection:
http://digital.library.wisc.edu/1711.dl/LiteratureJump to: Selected Subcollections | Materials in Collection | Related Materials
About the Literature Collection
The Literature Collection is a multilayered grouping of works in literature and the humanities. From medieval to modern, scholarly to satirical, there is something for everyone. Diversity rules: there are texts translated from Nordic languages, texts left untranslated from Spanish, poetry old and new, and a rich vein of information about the writer James Joyce. And that's just the beginning! We invite the serious researcher, or the merely curious, to explore what we have gathered, and to return again and again.
More Information about Selected Subcollections
Jump to: Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery | The Deipnosophists, or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus | Fables, by Robert Louis Stevenson | Nordic Translation Series
Beowulf: A New Translation for Oral Delivery
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The Deipnosophists, or, Banquet of the Learned of Athenaeus
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Fables, by Robert Louis Stevenson
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Nordic Translation Series
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Other Materials in the Collection
- Mon village, ceux qui n'oublient pas
- The Robert Southey Collection
- Selected Works of Edith Nash
- Wisconsin Literary Magazine
Related materials
- Cairns Collection of American Women Writers
- Ibero-American Electronic Text Series
- Illumination: the Undergraduate Journal of Humanities
- Illustrated Shakespeare
- James Joyce Scholars' Collection
- Jónas Hallgrímsson: Selected Poetry and Prose
- Little Magazine Interview Cumulative Index
- Wright American Fiction, 1851-1875

Beowulf is the oldest narrative poem in the English language, embodying historical traditions that go back to actual events and personages in fifth- and sixth-century Scandinavia. During the long preliterate centuries when these traditions were transmitted in the form of oral poetry, they were combined with with a number of legendary and folktale elements (among these are Grendel and his mother, the dragon, and probably the hero Beowulf himself). The written text of the poem, as we have it today, took shape in England during the middle or late Anglo-Saxon period and survives in a single manuscript from around the year 1000.
The author of The Deipnosophists was an Egyptian, born in Naucratis, a town on the left side of the Canopic Mouth of the Nile. The age in which he lived is somewhat uncertain, but his work, at least the latter portion of it, must have been written after the death of Ulpian the lawyer, which happened A.D. 228.
Robert Louis Stevenson's Fables was published in New York by Longmans, Green in 1902. Previously, the thirteen fables had been published with other works. Stevenson had a long-standing fascination with the fable as a literary form. In 1888, he approached his publisher with a collection of fables that he had composed over the years. This edition includes six etchings by Ethel King Martyn.
The Nordic Translation Series was published by the University of Wisconsin Press between 1965 and 1970. The series presented here contains eleven texts by nineteenth- and twentieth-century authors. The works were translated into English from their original languages, which include Swedish, Danish, Norwegian, Icelandic, and Finnish.