...author’s attempt to express what it is to be human. To be human is a diverging experience between the sexes, both biological and socially, and consequently the extent of gender equitability within society has always been a prevalent and contended concern. An engagement with this contention will define gender politics for this essay. Jane Austen and Mary Shelley, writing at the beginning of the nineteenth-century, joined their female contemporaries in a growing generation of authoresses who forged careers in discipline of male authority. In this respect, they are inescapably engaging with gender politics. Margaret Kirkham comments that ‘this burgeoning of the female talent...was bound to have a profound effect upon any young woman beginning to write once it had occurred’, suggesting that, regardless of whether the female intended to represent female concerns within their work; a female, in becoming ‘an author, was, in itself, a feminist act’ (Kirkham 33). With the status of the authoress in mind whilst analysing Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein, this essay will focus how Austen and Shelley engage with gender politics through characterization and narrative form, and the female concerns they address, both implicitly and explicitly, throughout their texts. Austen predominately engages with gender politics through her protagonist Catherine. Catherine is presented as the unlikely heroine; ‘no one...would have supposed her born to be a heroine’ (Austen 3). Austen subverts the expectation...
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...Romanticism Unshackled: a Study of the Modern Prometheus The most remarkable aspect about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein is the ability to label the novel in so many different ways amongst many genres, ranging from science fiction, to fantasy, to horror, and have all of them be correct. At such a young age, Mary Shelley constructed a narrative so revolutionary, intricate, and involved that it is still pertinent to be written about in college essays almost 200 years after it was written. As the author, Shelley is often attributed with vast creative intellect, and rightly so, as is evidenced while reading through her novel. It is imperative to recognize, however, just how much influence her colleagues—the Romantic poets—had on the ideas that became manifested in her writing. Frankenstein should bear the title of Romantic literature because the novel embodies trademark Romantic ideas, situations, and characteristics throughout the text. In an attempt to categorize any novel as Romantic, however, one must first attempt to identify what, exactly, makes a work Romantic. A group of poets, including the likes of William Blake, Samuel Coleridge, William Wordsworth, John Keats, Lord Byron and—Mary’s husband—Percy Shelley, who are commonly credited as being the ground-breaking authors of the Romantic movement (Ferguson). A prime example of this method of poetry was introduced in the 1798 collection, Lyrical Ballads. This work, written by Wordsworth and Coleridge, is a compilation...
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...Wright 1 1960 words Julian E. Wright Dr. Sharon Fulton Literature Humanities/Essay 1 27 February 2014 Violence in Dante’s Inferno and Ovid’s Metamorphoses Scenes of great violence, as the prompt says, are often written into dynamic narratives of great literary merit. From Dante Alighieri’s Inferno to Ovid’s Metamorphoses, the inclusion of violence as a literary technique is used to propel the narrative forward, all while adding action, intrigue, and engaging the reader. Despite it’s validity as a literary technique, the inclusion of violent scenes in literature serve much more than the simple purpose of pushing a plot along a set of structured points. Scenes of violence provoke thought in areas ranging from human nature to the nature of sin, thoughts that often can’t be provoked my images of calm, sublime, or tranquility. Extreme violence, juxtaposed with other scenes, provides insight into the amazing nature of human capability and human nature. In Dante Alighieri’s Inferno there is an abundance of violence that is illustrated in varying ways. Despite the copious inclusion of violence scenes throughout the text, violence does not appear throughout the literary work for its own sake. As one reads on through the Inferno, it provides it’s own clarity. As the levels of Hell increase, the severity of violence does so as well. The violence that appears occurs in different fashions, sometimes mentally, sometimes physically and many times both simultaneously. The scenes violence included in Dante’s Inferno contributes...
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...The fact that men and women have different motives for attending their funeral points to a gender conflict and testifies to their controversy. And the reference to a "fallen monument" gives her something sublime but also inhumane. Miss Emily as a monument - this description is repeated several times, her rare sightings adding to the mystery: "Now and then we would see her at the window for a moment” (Faulkner 221). And even towards the end of the story - she no longer leaves the house at all - she is now and then seen in her window: "like the carven torso of an idol in a niche, looking or not looking at us, we could never tell which" (Faulkner 222).The monument Faulkner made his character in to and the tone of the story gives way to associations with grace, respect and timelessness, but also acts as being inhumane, artificial - ultimately: dead (which is Emily’s outcome). Emily also moves between the border of life and death. It cannot be said,...
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...The dominant artistic movement from about 1900 to 1940, modernism was characterized by the reexamination of existence from every possible angle. Modernist writers sought to leave the traditions of nineteenth-century literature behind in terms of form, content, and expression. They realized that a new industrial age—full of machines, buildings, and technology—had ushered out rural living forever, and the result was often a pessimistic view of what lay before humankind. Frequent themes in modernist works are loneliness and isolation (even in cities teeming with people), and a significant number of writers tried to capture that sense of solitude by engaging in stream-of-consciousness writing, which captures the thought process of a single character as it happens without interruption. Some of the most famous modernist authors include Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Virginia Woolf, and James Joyce. 1. Open form and free verse are distinguishing characteristics of modernist poetry. Though commonplace now, this style was quite a break from nineteenth-century rules about meter and rhyme. 2. The moniker “The Lost Generation” was coined by Gertrude Stein and refers to those artists of the 1920s who had become disillusioned with America and found themselves living as ex-patriots in Europe, chiefly in France. 3. An example of stream-of-consciousness (also called “interior monologue”) from Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway: “She felt somehow very like him—the young man who...
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...IS NOVEL? A Novel is prose narrative of considerable length and some complexity that deals imaginatively (fictional) with human experiences (near to life) through a connected sequence of events involving a group of persons in a specific setting. Previously it was known as fictional narrative or narrative prose. ( A Narrative opens “in media res”. This means it opens usually with the hero at his lowest point “in the middle of things”, earlier portions of the story appear later as flashbacks..) Main characterstics of novels are theme, plot or setting, structure, action or events in a sequence, strong characterization and expressive language. The genre of extended prose fiction or narrative fictional prose i.e. novel is rooted in the tradition of medieval "romances" or the heroic romance in prose. The term ‘roman or romance’ linked fictions back to the histories that had appeared in the Romance language of 11th and 12th-century southern France. The typical Arthurian romance became a fashion in the late 12th century. The unexpected and peculiar adventures surprised the audience in romances like Sir Gawain and the Green Knight (c. 1380).The romance had become a stable generic term by the beginning of the 13th century, as in the Roman de la Rose (c. 1230), famous today in English through Geoffrey Chaucer's late 14th-century translation. Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde (1380–87) is a late example of this European fashion. Prose narrators wrote narrative patterns as employed in fairy...
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...can irritatedly ignore its dedication and letter to the royals Albert and Victoria, and simply summarize it as the story of a medieval King, the adventures of his accompanying knights, the fortune of the ladies at his court, and the creation and downfall of his kingdom in twelve books. Those readers, however, who are familiar with the previous versions of Arthurian stories written by Chrétien de Troyes and Thomas Malory, for instance, cannot be satisfied with that. They wonder about Tennyson's framing poems “Dedication” and “To the Queen”, stumble over the changes the author made in his adoption of the Arthurian legends, and start thinking about what Idylls of the King really is about. So did Cecil Y. Lang and published her results in the essay Tennyson's Arthurian Psycho-Drama. In her work she makes an important discovery, namely that “Tennyson seldom composed anything […] without some kind of contemporary reference” (Lang 16). This finding excludes the possibility 1 that Tennyson just wanted...
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...The MIT Press http://www.jstor.org/stable/1511610 . Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at . http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. The MIT Press is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Design Issues. http://www.jstor.org DesignHistory DesignStudies: or ject Sub Matter Methods and Victor Margolin This a slightly is revised version a talk of that waspresented theconference at "Design: e Storia Storiografia" and (Design: history historiography) was heldat theMilan which Politecnico 15-16April It on 1991. wasfirst published Design in Studiesv. no.2 (April 13 1992): 104-116, is reproduced with and here thepermission Butterworth-Heinemann, of UK. Oxford, Judging from the numberof publications,conferences,and exhibitions in recent years that have focused attention on design in the past, one might assume that design history is a flourishing enterprise. Thereare now active societies of design historiansin Britain, the United States,and Scandinavia and severalinternational conferences of design historianshave been held. The...
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...arguments usually question or celebrate the transgressive potentials of the book (Giroux; Mendieta), or address issues of masculinity brought into the fore by their literary and cinematic representations emergent in the same decade (Tuss; Friday). However, few, if any, have addressed the literary aspirations of the text and its author. Although none of the approaches to the thematic concerns of Fight Club are unjustified, in the argument that follows I will suggest that conclusions drawn and critical judgments passed have been hasty, and not only failed to take into account the formal aspects of story-telling, but that the narrative features of Palahniuk’s text have largely went unexplored, and constitute a blind spot of the reception. Critics condemning or acclaiming the novel, and, indeed, many a cultic reader of Palahniuk ignored Fight Club as a literary narrative, and have inadvertently been repeating the catchphrases of the text, either reinforcing or trying to undermine what they have understood as their meaning. I see the significance of Palahniuk’s fiction and the literary event of Fight Club’s publication in somewhat different terms. Palahniuk’s emphasis and continued insistence on minimalism suggest that his fiction is properly understood as belonging to a literary tradition whose evaluation remains troubled and, for a large part, unsettled. Nevertheless,...
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...Approaching the Work Anthology How to compare the poems Meerkat Poetry Meerkat Poetry In section B of your AS exam, you will be asked to write one essay about the poems in the Work anthology. You will be given a choice of two questions. You can compare and contrast at least two poems of your choice, in response to a statement: OR You can compare one named poem and one other of your choice, in response to a statement: All the poems that you choose must come from the Work section of the anthology, which you have studied. How will my response be marked? Your response will be marked for three assessment objectives: AO1: 15 marks: AO2 – 5 marks: AO3 - 20 marks: TASK 1: Understanding how to compare Look carefully at the mark scheme for AO3. In addition to what is noted above, it always states: “In order to meet the AO3 requirement, effective comparison and contrast will need to be demonstrated.” Answer the following questions. 1. How are you asked to show similarities between the poems? 2. How are you asked to show differences? 3. What is meant by “literary” – what might you refer to in a literary response? Sample question with its indicative content from the mark scheme: For 5a: Compare all the way through, all your points should lead to exploring a similarity of a difference Compare all the way through, all your points should lead to exploring a similarity of a difference It’s OK to disagree with the statement in the question It’s OK to disagree with the statement in...
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...International Journal of Applied Linguistics & English Literature ISSN 2200-3592 (Print), ISSN 2200-3452 (Online) Vol. 2 No. 4; July 2013 Copyright © Australian International Academic Centre, Australia A Stylistic Analysis of D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lovers’ Nozar Niazi English Department, Lorestan University, Khorramabad-Iran E-mail: nozar_2002@yahoo.co.in Received: 04-04-2013 doi:10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.2n.4p.118 Abstract Accepted: 14-05-2013 Published: 01-07-2013 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.7575/aiac.ijalel.v.2n.4p.118 This paper aims at analyzing D.H. Lawrence’s ‘Sons and Lover’ using a stylistic approach. Stylistics is a study of the amalgamation of form with content. The stylistic analysis of a novel goes beyond the traditional, intuitive interpretation, because it combines intuition and detailed linguistic analysis of the text. The defining elements of modern language are within the text itself, not prescribed from outside. With modernist texts, usually understanding comes from close study of the language system defined within the text itself. Form, technique and style are considered not as a mere vehicle of the content of the story, but an integral part of the work’s meaning and value. In our analysis of ‘Sons and Lovers’ the resources of language: lexis, syntax, phonology, figurative language, cohesion and coherence, are discussed in relation to the style of discourse in order to explore hidden meanings in the text. The resources of language are shown...
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...MODULE 1: INTRODUCTION This module provides an overview on the subject of art appreciation for those entirely new to the subject. This is a complex topic to deal with and it is impossible to have a truly comprehensive discussion on the topic in such a brief essay. The student is advised to consult more advanced texts to gain further understanding of how to appreciate art more fully. HUMANITIES: What is it? • The term Humanities comes from the Latin word, “humanitas” • It generally refers to art, literature, music, architecture, dance and the theatre—in which human subjectivity is emphasized and individual expressiveness is dramatized. HOW IMPORTANT IS HUMANITIES • The fields of knowledge and study falling under humanities are dedicated to the pursuit of discovering and understanding the nature of man. • The humanities deal with man as a being of purpose, of values, loves, hates, ideas and sometimes as seer or prophet with divine inspiration. • The humanities aim at educating. THE ARTS: What is it? • The word “art” usually refers to the so-called “fine arts” (e.g. pictorial, plastic, and building)– and to the so-called “minor arts” (everyday, useful, applied, and decorative arts) • The word “art” is derived from arti, which denotes craftsmanship, skill, mastery of form, inventiveness. • Art serves as a technical and creative record of human needs and achievements. The word 'art' is often used in our daily lives. However, when...
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...Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction ‘Jonathan Culler has always been about the best person around at explaining literary theory without oversimplifying it or treating it with polemical bias. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction is an exemplary work in this genre.’ J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine ‘An impressive and engaging feat of condensation . . . the avoidance of the usual plod through schools and approaches allows the reader to get straight to the heart of the crucial issue for many students, which is: why are they studying literary theory in the first place? . . . an engaging and lively book.’ Patricia Waugh, University of Durham Very Short Introductions are for anyone wanting a stimulating and accessible way in to a new subject. They are written by experts, and have been published in 15 languages worldwide. Very Short Introductions available from Oxford Paperbacks: ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY Julia Annas THE ANGLO-SAXON AGE John Blair ARCHAEOLOGY Paul Bahn ARISTOTLE Jonathan Barnes Augustine Henry Chadwick THE BIBLE John Riches Buddha Michael Carrithers BUDDHISM Damien Keown CLASSICS Mary Beard and John Henderson Continental Philosophy Simon Critchley Darwin Jonathan Howard DESCARTES Tom Sorell EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY BRITAIN Paul Langford The European Union John Pinder Freud Anthony Storr Galileo Stillman Drake Gandhi Bhikhu Parekh HEIDEGGER Michael Inwood HINDUISM Kim Knott HISTORY John H. Arnold HUME A. J...
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...narrator is Robert Walton, who, in his letters, quotes Victor Frankenstein’s first-person narrative at length; Victor, in turn, quotes the monster’s first-person narrative; in addition, the lesser characters Elizabeth Lavenza and Alphonse Frankenstein narrate parts of the story through their letters to Victor. climax · The murder of Elizabeth Lavenza on the night of her wedding to Victor Frankenstein in Chapter 23 protagonist · Victor Frankenstein antagonist · Frankenstein’s monster setting (time) · Eighteenth century setting (place) · Geneva; the Swiss Alps; Ingolstadt; England and Scotland; the northern ice point of view · The point of view shifts with the narration, from Robert Walton to Victor Frankenstein to Frankenstein’s monster, then back to Walton, with a few digressions in the form of letters from Elizabeth Lavenza and Alphonse Frankenstein. falling action · After the murder of Elizabeth Lavenza, when Victor Frankenstein chases the monster to the northern ice, is rescued by Robert Walton, narrates his story, and dies tense · Past foreshadowing · Ubiquitous—throughout his narrative, Victor uses words such as “fate” and “omen” to hint at the tragedy that has befallen him; additionally, he occasionally pauses in his recounting to collect himself in the face of frightening memories. tone · Gothic, Romantic, emotional, tragic, fatalistic themes · Dangerous knowledge; sublime nature; texts; secrecy; monstrosity motifs · Passive women; abortion symbols ·...
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...Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction ‘Jonathan Culler has always been about the best person around at explaining literary theory without oversimplifying it or treating it with polemical bias. Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction is an exemplary work in this genre.’ J. Hillis Miller, University of California, Irvine ‘An impressive and engaging feat of condensation . . . the avoidance of the usual plod through schools and approaches allows the reader to get straight to the heart of the crucial issue for many students, which is: why are they studying literary theory in the first place? . . . an engaging and lively book.’ Patricia Waugh, University of Durham Jonathan Culler LITERARY THEORY A Very Short Introduction 1 Great Clarendon Street, Oxford o x2 6 d p Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide in Oxford New York Athens Auckland Bangkok Bogotá Buenos Aires Calcutta Cape Town Chennai Dar es Salaam Delhi Florence Hong Kong Istanbul Karachi Kuala Lumpur Madrid Melbourne Mexico City Mumbai Nairobi Paris São Paulo Shanghai Singapore Taipei Tokyo Toronto Warsaw with associated companies in Berlin Ibadan Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries Published in the United States by Oxford University Press Inc., New York © Jonathan Culler 1997 The moral rights...
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