This article opens with a statement that Aphra Behn’s novel, Oroonoko, is “fundamentally concerned with political obedience” (447), a term upon which Harol expounds throughout the article, and which the readers come to understand was a very pertinent topic of political discourse at the time (1688-1689). After explaining that Aphra Behn was known to side…
Category: Critical Analyses
The Patriarchal Source of Female Desire in Pamela, Roxana, and A Simple Story
The uninhibited literary space that the novel genre provided for eighteenth-century authors, opened a new door of speculation into into the mind and motives of women. The subject of female agency is a major preoccupation of the genre, revealing not only the motives of female desire, but more significantly, the sources from which these desires…
Phonological Analysis of Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay”
Nature’s first green is gold,Her hardest hue to hold.Her early leaf’s a flower;But only so an hour.The leaf subsides to leaf.So Eden sank to grief,So dawn goes down to day.Nothing gold can stay. “Nothing Gold Can Stay” by Robert Frost Robert Frost’s “Nothing Gold Can Stay” opens with a phonological emphasis on the fricatives [f]…
The Body, Material Consumption, and Desire in Johnathan Swift’s “The Lady’s Dressing Room” and John Wilmot’s “The Imperfect Enjoyment”
“In this age of consumption, men and women began to locate themselves within the materials of their society” The Body in Swift and Defoe, Carol Houlihan Flynn, p, 71 The eighteenth-century English social situation of desire-driven consumption manifested, throughout the era, in poetic forms and functions of the human body. Both materially and sexually, the…
An Eastward Journey toward Hope: Religion and Prophetic Voice in T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land
In the presence of disaster, people often turn toward religion as a means to ordering of the chaos and confusion that results from unpredictable and despairing life events. It is often the religious leader, the prophetic voice expressing divine sovereignty in the midst of disaster that calms the hearts of mankind with a hope, however…
Film Review: “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest”
The 1975 film, “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest,” directed by Milos Forman, is an award-winning masterpiece based on the novel by Ken Kesey of the same title. It follows the lives of obscurely-diagnosed patients in a mental hospital, posing an overarching question of “what really defines mental instability?” The incoming patient, R. P. McMurphy…
An Image of the Modern World through the Poetry of Eliot and Yeats
The poetry of T.S. Eliot and W.B. Yeats is harmonious in its attempt to capture the chaotic state of their modern world. The poets do not appear to present two separate senses of the era, but to write in conversation with one another, co-creating a picture of their time that can be seen through the…
Mary Shelley’s “Primordial Vision” in Frankenstein
Of the many mythic elements within Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, notions of creation, a lost Eden and the danger of acquired knowledge arise most prominently upon initial inspection, as the author herself directly references the classic myth of Prometheus and the Miltonian work, Paradise Lost. These references demonstrate within Shelley a unique ability to comprehend the…
Chasing the Fruit and the Preference of Innocence: Contextual Influences of William Blake and Mary Wollstonecraft on Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein
In the wake of John Locke’s philosophical reintroduction of ‘tabula rasa’ into English society, a popular discourse arose on the subject of proper education for children—those whose minds were completely formidable and dependent on the careful instruction of both morals and knowledge-based intellect for their successful development and progression through life.1 Among the critics who…
Blindness in Oedipus the King
The exchange between Oedipus and Tiresias in lines 299-462 of Oedipus the King reveals several comparisons that center on a theme of blindness. It is evident in the world and also through the text that there can be varying degrees of blindness, or visual impairment. Words to describe one’s vision often involve ideas of light,…