The first half of the twentieth century was shorn by war, ripping society in England and across the European continent into fragments that many individuals struggled to bring back together to form a new picture. The period proved to be a cultural collage, as people aimed to reconcile their pasts with their presents to create a future. In no arena was this effort more addressed than in the arts. The inception of the avant-garde, modernist period “was characterised by cross-disciplinary practices and the dissolution of boundaries between forms and sense” (Hall 16).

Given that the kitchen is the stereotypical ideal place for a “proper” woman, it is curious that Laura Esquivel’s Like Water for Chocolate, which is mainly set in the De la Garza kitchen and primarily models its structure after a cookbook, is sometimes considered a feminist novel. Writing after the boom of Spanish and Latin American literature in the 1960s and 1970s, Esquivel is often classified as a post-boomor boom femenino author.

In her poem, “God works in a mysterious way,” Gwendolyn Brooks reflects on how religion has been subverted and replaced by a growing focus on the material world in the modern age. She even suggests this movement towards the modern is a necessary consequence of religion's inability to provide any kind of physical security or aid, and is representative of humanity's denial of external controls in favor of “assuming sovereignty” for itself.

Introduction

Shakespeare’s Hamlet provides a close look at a son’s relationship with his parents, particularly the way a man’s bond with his mother changes after his father dies. Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, is haunted by the violence of his father’s death and the unthinking way in which his mother chooses to wed her dead husband’s brother, the new King Claudius. From his first conversation with the ghost of his father, Hamlet learns that Claudius murdered his father and he grapples with the consequences of this knowledge for the rest of the play.

Oliver Goldsmith’s novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), centers around a vicar, Dr. Primrose, and his family, tracing their fall from relative privilege and wealth at Wakefield, their home parish, to a much more modest life on the lands of one Squire Thornhill. The novel chronicles their myriad adventures and steadily worsening misfortunes that finally give way to a happy culmination in which the vicar’s daughters get married and the family’s wealth is restored.

Text can both make and tell a life. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman heavily utilizes text in order to tell the life that one experiences. Tristram’s Uncle Toby lives his life constantly recreating the memory of the Battle of Namur through both text and physical fortifications. Outside in the yard, Toby and Trim spend their days building defenses to reenact the battle in which they both fought and experienced injuries.

“Trauma, in order to be communicated and integrated into one’s personal knowledge of the past as well as that of the collective, must be narrativized.”—Ilka Saal (459)