While my favorite sonnet will always be the beautiful and inspiring 116, I was taken by a new group of Shakespearean lines as I read through them this time. Sonnets 97-99, equally as passionate as my preferred, speak to the troubled hearts of separated lovers. I appreciated the connection between the three of them, and…
Category: Critical Analyses
The Love Speech of Cesario in Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night
The most striking part of this play for me is the level of cultural insight into Elizabethan society that the modern audience is able to gain from the duo-sex character of Cesario. In this character, we can hear the thoughts and emotions of an Elizabethan woman while watching the socially acceptable and expected actions of…
The Mythic Voice of Shakespeare’s Folkloric Characters: Tracing Old-English Poetic Structure in Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and The Tempest
In first-century England, Anglo-Saxon poetry consisted of oral verse accompanied by music, often touching on subjects such as hardships and bravery, wisdom gained through suffering, ancestral honor, and cultural legends. The Anglo-Saxon poet, or ‘scop,’ would often weave myth and folklore into true historical accounts, providing the people with a means of learning the historical…
Genderlect in Hemingway’s “Hills Like White Elephants”
I recently read for the first time Earnest Hemingway’s novel The Sun Also Rises, and was struck by several dialogues in which the author presented his interpretation of a female voice. I remember thinking at a certain point that all the women in his novel seemed rather disagreeable in their speech, and furthermore, that I…
The Sound and the Fury Linguistic Analysis: Quentin’s Speech
Quentin’s chapter, “June Second, 1910,” although narrated by an ostensibly disturbed voice that alternates between distant memory and present observation, begins with consistent and coherent language. Quentin’s grammar appears in tact and his syntax maintains its sense throughout the difficult subject matter. Toward the end of the chapter, however, the narrator’s language begins to fall…
Article Summary: “The Passion of “Oroonoko”: Passive Obedience, the Royal Slave, and Aphra Behn’s Baroque Realism” by Corrinne Harol
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…
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…