-
Reflection: Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh and Western Cultural Imperialism
Rajaa Alsanea’s Girls of Riyadh explores the lives of four Saudia Arabian friends through emails written by an anonymous member of the friendship group. Described by Marilyn Booth as a novel about the “self-fashioning of the Saui bourgeoisie”, upon publication the novel achieved status in the West as a shining… Continue reading
-
Categorising Sylvia Townsend Warner’s Summer Will Show
In the most basic sense, Summer Will Show can be defined as a lesbian novel as it largely follows the intimate relationship between two women, specifically noting the displacement of the male figure associating them both together. However, the complexity of identity, the surrounding politics, and the deliberate vagueness in… Continue reading
-
Frankenstein and Early 19th Century English Political Thought
Now more commonly associated with the stand-alone Gothic genre, the 1818 version of Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was written during the Romantic Era and a period of social unrest in Europe, making it a work of Gothic or Dark Romanticism. Still shadowed by the influence of the French Revolution, revolutionary and… Continue reading
-
A Woman and Her Dog: The Experiences of Confinement and Liberation in Virginia Woolf’s Flush
In ‘Flush’, Virginia Woolf explores the ways Elizabeth and Flush experience confinement and liberation, focusing on how certain aspects of their identities inform these experiences. The parallels between Elizabeth and Flush’s experiences have led to the Feminist reading championed by Susan Squier that Flush’s confinement is an allegory of the… Continue reading
-
Man, Animals and Power: The Covert Dynamics between Man and Animals in Ted Hughes’ ‘The Dove Breeder’
In ‘The Dove Breeder’, Hughes explores the relationship between man and animals. Through his illustration of the simultaneous experiences of loss and gain for the titular breeder and the birds he keeps, Hughes suggests that the relationship is inherently exploitative because of man’s anthropocentric view of life. The poem’s narrative… Continue reading
-
Views From Sixteen: The Books That Impacted Me The Most Between Sixteen and Eighteen
This is a list of some of the books that have had the biggest impact on my thinking or were earth-shattering for me in some way. Coincidentally, these are all books I read at sixteen or seventeen while studying for my A-Levels (not my A-Level texts themselves) so maybe there’s… Continue reading
-
Translation as Metamorphosis in Geoffrey Chaucer and John Gower’s Versions of Ovid’s Metamorphoses
The primary meaning of the verb translate is ‘To convert or render (a word, a work, an author, a language, etc.) into another language’. Thus, a translation is often understood as a (usually completed) work resembling that from which it is translated, often with the only difference between source and… Continue reading
-
Atonement Revisited: On Writing and ‘The Briony Question’
I can’t technically join the masses in saying Atonement is Ian McEwan’s masterpiece, being the only novel of his that I’ve read. But I happily join them in singing its praises as a masterful piece of literature. McEwan’s prose is spellbindingly beautiful and the novel is rich with the metaphors… Continue reading