Essays on Voice

The aim of this research proposal is to gain an insight into how men feel about the narratives of fatherhood and masculinities in family studies. What is a father? What does it mean to be a man? At present the general consensus is that the...

The Rise and Fall of Little Voice is in many ways a ‘la piéce bien faite’ (translated as ‘well-made play’), which consists of a four point structure: an exposition; a complication and a climax followed by a denouement. Certainly, the exposition can be identified as...

Aura is a novel that explores the corporeality of aging, the eternal nature of desire and the struggle against mortality. What strikes the reader from the outset is the second person narrative in the present tense, a stylistic choice that is known to have a...

When I first heard we were going to watching a New Zealand film as part of our film study, I can honestly say that I was not in the least interested. It’s nothing personal, but when I compare New Zealand movies to American movies I...

Female speech in Jane Austen’s novels is heavily dictated by the whims of her male characters, and although “[f]emale speech is never entirely repressed in Austen’s fiction, [it] is dictated so as to mirror or otherwise reassure masculine desire” (Johnson 37). However, there are times...

In Zora Neale Hurston’s novel Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie is encouraged to develop her own personality throughout the book, and she is forced into constant movement down roads after being abandoned by her grandmother and her three husbands. This movement allows her the...

In several respects, American writers have use literature as a means to promote equal rights for women; however, these writers are often white females – or even white males. While these writers are certainly able to uncover a variety of aspects that American society needs...

“How will you like being made exactly like other people?” is a question that echoes through Antoinette’s mind early within Jean Rhys’s responsive and revisionist text, Wide Sargasso Sea (Rhys 22). Constructing her protagonist from Charlotte Brontë’s insane Bertha Mason, Rhys aims to write the...

It’s hard to find your voice in a society that suppresses you while convincing you that you’re free to say what you want. The Stonewall riots of 1969, led by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera, both transgender women of colour, marked a turning point...

Amazon.com reviews for Ama Adhe’s The Voice That Remembers only include four and five star ratings, with comments ranging from “Her story is one all should read because her message helps one gain perspective and perseverance through adversity” to simply “I think (Adhe’s) book made...

Heralded as an early pioneer of the Harlem Renaissance, Claude McKay (1889-1948) is often included in the African American literary cannon. On the surface, his poetry, with its focus on issues of racism and exclusion, appears to fit neatly into this category. Recent scholarship, however,...

For the modernists, the linear narrative was something of a constraint on the writer’s ability to express their ideas and perceptions of the world. To discard the linear narrative, therefore, seemed the most logical solution to this problem. As Virginia Woolf writes in her 1925...

However much of its text might be preoccupied with ‘realist’ visuals, Nikolai Gogol’s ‘poem of Russia,’ Dead Souls is still rife with extra-narrative commentary and digressions, in keeping with Gogol’s established style and his stated intentions for the novel as a morally-edifying work. Within the...

Christina Rossetti’s poems were viewed as moral pieces, especially in comparison to her brother Dante’s sensual and even sexual poetry. However, Rossetti’s poetry is demonstrative of the Victorian mindset in that, it is not simply dutiful and preaching. Rossetti’s poems, like the Victorians, are full...

Abstract Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Purple Hibiscus is discussed here as a dialogic novel, with a focus on multiple consciousness and the multi-voiced perspective of the characters, and the interpretation of the characters and the novel based on the ensuing consciousnesses. Bakhtin’s idea of dialogism and...

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster’s inscription to Howard’s End, is more problematic than it ought to be. It is a typically Forsterian injunction: idealistic, sweetly humanist and absolute, but vague and stated to be challenged. First, to what does the statement apply? It is there beneath...

Despite the adaptation of a text to film benefiting from the opportunities and abilities bestowed to a director through the visual aspect of the medium, narrative complexity and depth of literary themes almost inevitably suffer a condensation. Ralph Fiennes’s adaptation of William Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is...

Introduction The human voice is remarkable instrument as voice is work as the unique identification for each individual. A speaker can evoke a wide range of emotion and mental images by slight changes of vocal timbre, loudness, or subtle nuances in inflections. A person’s voice...

In Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Mary Barton, class inequality becomes a major theme from the beginning of the book, especially in light of the possibility of a marriage between Mary Barton and Harry Carson. While Mary saw Mr. Carson as an escape from her lower class...