Between The Purple Passages

Close Reading: Arachne, trans. by William Caxton

In his Middle English translation of a French retelling of the story of ‘Arachne’ found in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, William Caxton capitalises on the theme of propriety in the relationships between the gods and immortals and amongst mortals of different social standings to primarily warn readers against overstepping their bounds, focusing particularly on the proper deference… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Medieval Literature, Metamorphoses, Ovid, Ovide moralise, The Book of Ovyde Named Methamorphose, William Caxton
Close Reading: Autobiography of Eve by Ansel Elkin

Wearing nothing but snakeskin boots, I blazed a footpath, the first radical road out of that old kingdom toward a new unknown. When I came to those great flaming gates of burning gold, I stood alone in terror at the threshold between Paradise and Earth. There I heard a mysterious echo: my own voice singing… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Ansel Elkin, Autobiography of Eve
“A Rich Man’s Whimsy”: Approaches to Rewilding in Sarah Hall’s The Wolf Border

In her 2015 novel The Wolf Border Sarah Hall depicts the phenomena of rewilding, a process in conservation biology whereby extirpated species are reintroduced to their original landscapes in an effort to decrease human intervention in nature’s processes. Set against the backdrop of an alternate Scottish independence referendum, Hall explores the idea of reintroducing the… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Sarah Hall, The Wolf Border
“Harlotrye” and “Moralitee”: Sexual (& Other) Violence in Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ and ‘The Reeve’s Tale’

Excluding ‘The Knight’s Tale’, the first fragment of The Canterbury Tales is characterised by “harlotrye” referring to crude jesting, not exclusively of a sexual nature as harlotry particularly means now. Chaucer represents harlotry as the antithesis of morality, or “virtuous conduct and thought” as in the ‘Miller’s Prologue‘ Chaucer the pilgrim (the voice narrating the… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Miller’s Tale, The Reeve’s Tale
Close Reading: Opening of ‘The Miller’s Tale’, Geoffrey Chaucer

This carpenter hadde wedded newe a wyf Which that he loved more than his lyf;Of eightene yeer she was of age.Jalous he was, and heeld hire narwe in cage,For she was wilde and yong, and he was oldAnd demed himself ben lyk a cokewold.He knew nat Catoun, for his wit was rude,That bad man sholde… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales, The Miller’s Tale
Close Reading: ‘Sonnet 45’, Pamphilia to Amphilanthus, Mary Wroth

Good now be still, and doe not me torment, With [multituds] of questions, be at rest, And onely let me quarrell with my breast,Which stil lets in new stormes my soule to rent. Fye, will you still my mischiefes more augment? You saye, I answere crosse, I that confest Long since, yet must I euer… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Mary Wroth, Renaissance Poetry
Reading Alien (dir. by Ridley Scott) Against Barbara Creed’s ‘The Monstrous Feminine’

Drawing on Sigmund Freud’s theory of sexuality, in an essay titled ‘The Monstrous-Feminine’ Barbara Creed applies psychoanalytic theory to the horror film genre, observing the relationship between femininity and monstrosity. In her rejection of the widespread evaluation of the female role in horror as one of pure victimisation, she argues that there is a subconscious… Continue reading

Past Essays, The Stage and Beyond

Barbara Creed, Ridley Scott
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 light on the untold stories… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Girls of Riyadh, Rajaa Alsanea
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 the exploration of sexuality within… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Historical Fiction, Summer Will Show, Sylvia Townsend Warner
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 anti-revolutionary thought in Britain was… Continue reading

Past Essays, Prose and Poetry

Edmund Burke, Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, Thomas Paine

About

If your hobbies also include reading, thinking excessively about everything you read, and learning other people’s thoughts on the things they’ve read recently or a long time ago, you’re very welcome here!

This is where you can find my observations on various texts (a text here being anything that can be ‘read’ and thus including film, theatre, or Taylor Swift lyrics, for example) and what I think can be found between their “purple passages”.