Exploring Reciprocity in Faulkner’s Light in August

Among the most intricate of William Faulkner’s works, Light in August (1932) dramatizes not only the economic and racial conditions of the post-bellum South, but also the fraught search for meaning that was so central to the modernist project. In exploring these themes, critical discussions of the novel have often focused on the split psyche of Joe Christmas.

Race, Gender and Jessica: The Problem of Conversion in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice confronts readers with the question of religious conversion, a complicated issue that runs throughout the play. When the Prince of Morocco comes to win Portia, he says, “I would not change this hue/ Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen” (2.1. 11-12). The word “except” suggests that, in the event that Portia were to require it, the Prince would in fact “change his hue” or convert his blackness into some fairer shade.

Shifting Shepherds in the Poetry of Marvell, Milton, and Herbert

Throughout much of Western literature, the shepherd has endured as a versatile and complex poetic figure. In his subsistent relationship with nature and distance from the urban, the shepherd has traditionally functioned as a lens and mouthpiece through which history’s poets have examined and voiced their social criticism.

The Hidden Voice: An Examination of Female Black Authorship in the Nineteenth Century

How does one articulate a slave’s continual pain? Which compositional medium best conveys a lifetime of misery? What last-minute omissions can a publishing company make to encapsulate the emotional onslaught felt by millions of voiceless sufferers? With all things considered, can the written word ever authentically illustrate a life enslaved?

The Women of Beowulf: Power and Duty in Anglo-Saxon Society

“Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum / þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon, / hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon” translates to “So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. / We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns” (ll. 1-3). Thus begins the Old English poem Beowulf, which offers one of the few remaining glimpses of Anglo-Saxon culture.

Buying Beauty and Silencing Women: Moving Debates in Epicene and the Roaring Girl

In early modern London, rising consumer culture and rising tension about gender roles generated a heated discourse around the commodification of beauty, its definition, and the gendering of its production and consumption. The conceptualizations of beauty at the time privileged the male gaze and revealed cultural anxieties about the legibility of gender and the female subject/body.

Intimations and Abstractions: Keats's Reformulations of the Romantic Ego

What is this soul then? Whence

Came it? It does not seem my own, and I

Have no self-passion or identity

—John Keats, Endymion (IV: 475-477)[1]

Poetry without egotism comparatively uninteresting.

—Coleridge, Notebooks (v. 1: 62)[2]

On Exactitude in Tao Lin: Technological Models of Reality

Arguments regarding the potential for a representational model to approach or achieve reality date back to Plato and Aristotle, yet become increasingly relevant given literature’s preoccupation with assimilating and deciphering the impact of technological advancements and online communication.

The Collective Self-Conscious: Archetypes of Imperial Decay in Virginia Woolf's The Waves

In “The Future of the Novel,” D.H. Lawrence lamented the “self-consciousness” of the modern novel, complaining of characters “absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don’t feel,” and dismissing such work as “awful” and “childish” (152). To Lawrence, the then-fashionable stream-of-consciousness experiments of other early modernists, namely James Joyce, lacked a vitality that only engagement with the objective—the real, physical world—could provide.

Writing Masculinity: Jewish Archetypes, Self-Fashioning, and the Comic Book Genre in Michael Chabon's The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay

 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay occupies an immense historical space, extending from the streets of Nazi-occupied Prague to a solitary base in Antarctica, to pre-World War II Manhattan and its post-war suburbs. The novel’s main protagonist, Josef Kavalier, traverses nations, genres, and ideologies in an attempt to find a stable home and a defined Self.