Michel Foucault, in his seminal essay, What Is An Author?, considers the relationship between author, text, and reader: “…the quibbling and confrontations that a writer generates between himself and his text cancel out the signs of his particular individuality.”(Foucault, 1477) Forms of discourse, and the...
As a Romantic, Keats maintained a tragic concern with the importance of dramatic irony – or, as noted by Schlegel, the ‘secret irony’ in which the audience is aware of the protagonist’s situation and his own ignorance of it. In ‘Lamia’, this notion is evident...
Throughout the Old English poem Judith, the poet goes to great lengths to paint a clear and decided picture of providential history. A providential view of history leaves no doubt that God is involved and that He clearly favors one side over the other. In...
In a dichotomy that continues to plague media representations of female sexuality to this day, biblical women have a strong history of falling into one of two unflattering characterizations: victim or villain. Particularly where sexuality is involved, these women often even manage to fulfill both...
“The Island At Noon” by Julio Cortazar follows main character Marini, who works as a flight attendant flying over the Aegean sea and wishes to travel to an island he observes out the window. However, when he makes it to the island, while he finds...
Some stories depend more heavily on their environment to advance their plots and themes than others. Such is the case with Juno and the Paycock by Sean O’Casey. The play follows the plight of a working class family in Ireland during the civil war that...
Sean O’Casey’s drama Juno and the Paycock details the slow, painful degradation of the Boyle family in war-torn Ireland in the early 1920s. Juno remains strong and calm throughout the course of the play, even though she suffers from a drunkard, good-for-nothing husband, an illegitimately...
Perhaps the most iconic scene in Francois Truffaut’s Jules and Jim (1962) begins at 11:38. When Jules (Oskar Werner) and Jim (Henri Serre) and going to meet Catherine (Jeanne Moreau) to spend the evening together, and Catherine excites the scene by sporting a costume of...
An ancient world re-created on a private island. Plants and animals genetically engineered in secret. Man-made dinosaurs – living – towering as tall as buildings. Every once in a while comes a novel so enchanting that even the most skeptical of readers begin to believe...
Jonathan Swift played the misanthrope; that is, such was his thorough enjoyment in moralising those practices he perceived to be symptomatic of the rancid condition of human nature, that this vehemence became as much a part of his poetry as the derision itself. In many...
The gender dynamic constructed in the Restoration and early eighteenth century British literature manifested itself around the conceptual binary of man and woman. The debate that appears in literature of this time roots itself in societal expectations for the performance of gender: when these expectations...
Journey’s End’ by R.C, Sherriff was written in the late 1920s when attitudes towards the First World War began to change and people began to realise the horrors of the war and face them. This play offers different view than most about the commanding officers...
Of the many themes in Joseph Andrews, one of the most complicated issues is the value of a formal education. Throughout the novel, Parson Adams is depicted as a man who has been educated in the classics, and a formal education is important to him....
In his novel Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding uses irony to express satire and offer social commentary. Irony “results when there is a disjunction between what an audience would expect and what really happens.” The dominant form of irony in Joseph Andrews is dramatic irony: Fielding...
When placed in an environment of high stimulation, populace, and activity, one may begin to feel the desire to escape or detach from civilization. Such environments, most notably urban cities, often consist of a variety of tall buildings, which contain numerous tiny living spaces. Such...
Modernism as a literary genre began sometime before the First World War. It was, however, in the fires of this great conflict that the genre was forged and adopted its characteristics of disorientation and disconnection. The development of modernism can be traced in the poetry...
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and Identity and Intercultural Communication by Judith Martin and Thomas Nakayama are both concerned with identity and the effect it can have on the way someone’s life turns out. While Jesus’ Son is a book of short stories about a...
Considering its initial publication in 1892, during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Frances E. W. Harper employs the meaning of racial uplift through passing. During the era of slavery, the phenomenon of racially passing was a common practice in that it gave...
In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, Mother Culture is the embodiment of unquestioned influences man is accustomed to living by. Her story tells the Takers that they were intended to lead the world into paradise; however, quite the opposite happened. Because of Mother Culture’s bias towards the...