At seventeen years old, Catherine takes a vacation to Bath, which "offers a variety of human types . . . that a girl from a village rectory could never have encountered at home" (Lauber 18). She is often uncertain of herself, not liking to spend tim Continue Reading...
Gothic Literature
A darkened room and a secret passage, a beautiful heroine in a flowing nightgown, candles that go out and doors that mysteriously open are all trademarks of the gothic literature tradition. Dark and stormy nights where a young woma Continue Reading...
The lack of rights within marriage that makes women basically "property" to the man is obviously central to this story, as indicated by the way in which Maria is imprisoned. There are a variety of ways in which this most disturbing of issues is add Continue Reading...
All without distinction were branded as fanatics and phantasts; not only those, whose wild and exorbitant imaginations had actually engendered only extravagant and grotesque phantasms, and whose productions were, for the most part, poor copies and g Continue Reading...
Poe, Fall of the House of Usher
Edgar Allan Poe's "The Fall of the House of Usher" is perhaps the best-known American entry into the genre of Romantic and Gothic tale, yet it is worth asking what elements actually identify it as such. Spitzer descri Continue Reading...
Contact in Canadian Literature: The Use of Gothic Elements in the Negotiation of Cultural Differences between Settlers and Indigenous Nations
Introduction
Common elements of gothic literature include mystery, fear, omens, curses, preternatural settin Continue Reading...
Feminist Reading of Austen's Persuasion
"I Will Not Allow Books to Prove Anything":
Women Reading and Women Writing in Austen's Persuasion
Feminist criticism is equally concerned with female authorship and with female readership and in the case of Continue Reading...
Emma: The Character of Frank Churchill and 'reading' the moral qualities of men in Jane Austen
One of the challenges posed by Jane Austen, of her heroine Emma Woodhouse, in the novel entitled Emma, is how Emma must learn to be a good reader of both Continue Reading...
Her blooming full-pulsed youth stood there in a moral imprisonment which made itself one with the chill, colorless, narrowed landscape, with the shrunken furniture, the never-read books, and the ghostly stag in a pale fantastic world that seemed to Continue Reading...
Gender and the 19th c English novel
The question of gender in the nineteenth century English novel is complicated by consideration of more recent late twentieth century theorizing about gender. In particular, Judith Butler's highly influential notio Continue Reading...