Narrative beginnings in Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club: a feminist study (1).(Critical Essay) Romagnolo, Catherine Like virginity, literary introductions are often seen as an awkward embarrassment, an obstacle to be overcome as quickly as possible in order to facilitate vital experiences. On the other hand, “the first time” is a supremely privileged moment, to […]
Category: Studies in the Novel
Myths of Modern Individualism: Faust, Don Quixote, Don Juan, Robinson Crusoe. (book reviews) Backscheider, Paula R. WATT, IAN. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 293 pp. $27.95. In 1951, Ian Watt published “Robinson Crusoe as a Myth”: he began, “Defoe’s first full-length work of fiction seems to fall … into place with Faust, Don Juan […]
THE MEDICAL GAZE AND THE FEMALE CORPSE: LOOKING AT BODIES IN MARY SHELLEY’S FRANKENSTEIN.(Critical Essay) LIGGINS, EMMA In the nineteenth century, practices which involved looking at dead bodies were classified as potentially perverse. Observing the body and writing about it in meticulous detail became a hallmark of the era, as bodies on display in hospitals, […]
Reading Blackwater Park: gothicism, narrative, and ideology in ‘The Woman in White.’ Bernstein, Stephen With The Woman in White Wilkie Collins wrote, Peter Brooks notes, a “slightly perverse, dilatory, almost fetishistic text of narrative pleasure,” one replete with “readers and writers constantly scribbling and constantly reading one another, even when they weren’t meant to” to […]
“WITHIN THE DOMAIN OF CHAOS”: NATHANIEL HAWTHORNE, LUCRETIAN PHYSICS, AND MARTIAL LOGIC.(Critical Essay) KEVORKIAN, MARTIN “The Union,” declared Hawthorne in 1860, “is unnatural, a scheme of man, not an ordinance of God.” For Hawthorne, the idea of national unity did not merit the shedding of blood; if it were to become a question of war […]
Atwood, Margaret. Negotiating with the Dead: a Writer on Writing.(Book Review) Ingersoll, Earl G. ATWOOD, MARGARET. Negotiating with the Dead: A Writer on Writing. Cambridge University Press, 2002. 219 pp. $18.00. Margaret Atwood’s most recent book, Negotiating with the Dead, comprises six essays based on the Empson lectures she delivered at Cambridge in 2000. The […]
Jane’s Crown of Thorns: feminism and Christianity in Jane Eyre.(Critical Essay) Lamonaca, Maria St. John is unmarried: he never will marry now. Himself has hitherto sufficed to the toil; and the toil draws near its close: his glorious sun hastens to its setting…. And why weep for this? No fear of death will darken St. […]
Cowart, David. Don DeLillo: the Physics of Language.(Book Review) Moraru, Christian Athens: The University of Georgia Press, 2002. xiv + 257 pp. $45.00. DUVALL, JOHN. Don DeLillo’s Underworld. A Reader’s Guide. New York: Continuum, 2002. 96 pp. $9.95. In Don DeLillo’s 1991 novel, Mao II, a character–a dark visionary–offers that “Beckett is the last writer […]