Through the constant transformation and waning status of an intertwined English family, Mary Shelley’s 1826 post-apocalyptic novel The Last Mantackles the consequences of the Anthropocene and bears particular significance for modern questions of gender and nature. As the narrator, Lionel, recounts his story, he centers his relationship with the romantic, selfless hero Adrien, alternately idolizing and forgoing his own wife.

In 1949, Simone de Beauvoir published The Second Sex, a treatise on feminism that was regarded as a central fixture of the feminist movement for decades. The work sought to liberate women from the oppression imposed by male-dominated society, arguing against the categorization of women as “the Other,” the pure valuation of beauty, and the trend of defining the female identity based on feminine biology. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, a number of films emerged that claimed to fulfill de Beauvoir’s conception of the liberated woman.

In novels such as Ian McEwan’s Atonement and Kazuo Ishiguro’s A Pale View of Hills, we meet unreliable narrators with traumatic pasts. As these novels develop, it is revealed that the narrators exclude important facts, feelings, and descriptions of characters and circumstances. This leaves us, as readers, to wonder why the narrator does not accurately depict themselves nor the world around them. Essentially, as we encounter unreliable narrators in fiction, we raise the questions of cause and effect.

In Rudyard Kipling’s novel Kim, the very first scene is one where the eponymous character, a young Irish orphan living in India, resolves a linguistic mismatch. A Tibetan lama asks a policeman for directions to the Lahore Museum in Urdu, but the policeman speaks only Punjabi, thus rendering the lama “helpless” (Kipling 12) until Kim steps in to translate. Unsurprisingly, the theme of the power of language continues throughout the novel, further complicated by the introduction of English to the mix of Urdu, Punjabi, and Hindi.

In James Olney’s 1984 essay “I Was Born: Slave Narratives, Their Status as Autobiography and as Literature,” Olney addresses that most slave narratives follow the same format, which makes them both straightforward and repetitive. He argues that these strict conventions are essential because slave narratives exist for ex-slaves to add their story to the ever-growing testament about slavery, not for the author to explore and take ownership of their history.

Growing up is a universal part of the human experience. A whole genre of literature, called the bildungsroman, follows this path from adolescence to adulthood. The term bildungsroman was not widely used until around 1870, but it was first coined in 1817 and aptly labels a long list of works stretching from the end of the eighteenth century to the early twentieth century ("Bildungsroman"). The root word bildung translated from German into English can refer to “development,” “education,” “apprenticeship,” “self-culture,” “acculturation,” or “formation” (Lyons 1).

Elizabeth Gaskell’s novel Cranford (1851–53) is set in a quiet English village withdrawn from the commerce and industrialization dominating larger cities. The society of Cranford is populated by a small group of matriarchs, unmarried or widowed, who often ritualize and bond over domesticity: salvaging and sewing of fabrics, discussing elegance and etiquette - what to wear, how to eat and what food to serve, when to call and how long the call should last - sharing new crotchet and knitting patterns, gossips and new collections of fineries.

While it was not until later in his career that F. Scott Fitzgerald moved to Hollywood, his 1925 magnum opus, The Great Gatsby, bears the distinct influence of the silver screen. At the time when he penned the novel, celebrity culture was rapidly emerging, and film actors and actresses ascended to American royalty. This was accompanied by an explosion in advertising which marketed every product imaginable to help viewers emulate their favorite idols.

In The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston writes a “memoir of a girlhood among ghosts” by piecing together cultural myths and personal experiences to develop her sense of self. Her novel challenges the genre of memoir, as it includes elements of fiction and often deviates from her own life. Kingston’s literary and stylistic choices are significant in that they convey her unique, intersectional position.