Portal:Literature/Did you know/Week 4

... that Johann Christoph Gottsched (pictured) was a German author and critic who advocated the principle that poetry must be the product of strict and artificial rules?

... that "Let us go then, you and I, / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherised upon a table" are the first lines of T. S. Eliot's 1915 poem, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"?

... that David Garrick, Lilian Baylis, Hugh "Binkie" Beaumont, and Joan Littlewood were important London theatre managers?

... that a miller, a reeve, and a pardoner are among the pilgrims who tell their stories in Geoffrey Chaucer's Canterbury Tales?

... that "Deus ex machina" is a Latin phrase that is used to describe an unexpected, artificial, or improbable character, device, or event introduced suddenly in a work of fiction or drama to resolve a situation or untangle a plot?

... that in 1956, Adele Wiseman, a second-generation immigrant to Canada, published her first novel, The Sacrifice?

... that Joseph Conrad, Vladimir Nabokov, Ernest Borneman, and Jerzy Kosiński are four novelists who wrote in English rather than their respective mother tongues?