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Comparing Saidiya Hartman’s ‘Venus in Two Acts’ and Catherine Gallagher’s Practicing New Historicism
Recognising literature as a cultural artefact, Gallagher and Hartman both explore rewriting narratives to give voice to the silenced.
Ellie Valentine
May 27, 20241 min read


The Philosophical Laboratory Case of Crime and Punishment Analysed in Three Narrative Levels
The country, the city, and the mind: while being an arbitrary split, this is a handy one in Dostoevsky's polemical masterpiece.
Ece Yasirik
May 27, 20241 min read


Feeding the Flame: Nutrition, Queer Desire, and Identity in Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit and Melissa Broder’s Milk Fed
The two novels are markedly similar in how they use satiation to embody both the restriction and eventual acceptance of queer sexuality.
Zoe Milton
May 27, 20241 min read


Spenser’s Ambivalence: Perspectives on Ireland Within Errour’s Monstrous Den
I demonstrate that placing Redcrosse and Errour together does not offer a chiaroscuro effect, and instead balances the two together.
Courtney Beale
May 27, 20241 min read


The Ethics of Privacy in Henry James’ The Aspern Papers
This essay explores the ethical considerations of biographical pursuit as James creates a story where the narrator and protagonist clash.
Aanya Mitra
May 27, 20241 min read


Carving out ancestry and family from life writing.
Woolf's memoir delves into her mother's influence, while Baldwin reflects on racial inheritance and Ondaatje navigates a colonial past.
Aanya Mitra
May 27, 20241 min read


How are Wuthering Heights and The Picture of Dorian Gray’s settings bound up with their Gothic effects?
Gothic techniques and setting are integral to navigating the characters' psychological states, as well as their wider social environments.
Brooke Jessop
May 27, 20241 min read


‘Hear How the Imagery Aestheticises?’: Elizabeth Bishop, Mark Doty and the Dangers of Poetic Appropriation.
This essay explores the process through which a subject is sublimated into poetry in the work of Mark Doty and Elizabeth Bishop.
MarÃa López Penalva
May 27, 20241 min read


How do Geoffrey Chaucer’s ‘The Knight’s Tale’ and Lady Mary Wroth’s ‘Pamphilia to Amphilanthus’ present the experience of romantic love?
Both texts poignantly present anxieties towards love which exist in the present-day - anxieties which concern forces of patriarchal power.
Catrina Kean
May 27, 20241 min read


Examining the Past in Black American Fiction: History, Temporality and Politics of the Black Body in Octavia Butler, Richard Wright and Ralph Ellison.
It is an essay that engages with several issues key to Black American Fiction, such as politics, power, and intersectionality.
Rosie Higgins
May 27, 20241 min read


Naming Oroonoko and Fantomina
In Fantomina, ownership is defied by veiling one’s real identity, whereas in Oroonoko, the character’s real name symbolises his enslavement.
Tatun Harrison-Turnbull
May 27, 20242 min read


Feeling Lonely in Keep the Aspidistra Flying and Down and Out in Paris and London
This essay explores systemic, romantic, financial, and sexual failures that lead to individual and shared experiences of loneliness.
Tatun Harrison-Turnbull
May 27, 20242 min read


Intimations of Transcendence in Derek Walcott’s The Season of Phantasmal Peace
This essay confronts Walcott's The Season of Phantasmal Peace, reading it as a meditation upon a moment of transcendence.
Alfie Goodwin
May 27, 20241 min read


‘Defining Her Feelings in a Language Chiefly Made by Men’: Uncovering Alternative Female Subjectivities in the Victorian Novel.
This essay inspects how and to what extent male authors managed to present women’s subjectivity authentically.
Jasmine Niblett
May 27, 20242 min read


In what ways and to what ends do Freshwater by Akwaeke Emezi and The Girl Who Was Plugged In by James Tiptree manipulate narrative perspective?
In this essay, Alexandra Kogan compares two authors’ approaches to the questions of narrative subjectivity and authorial control.
Alexandra Kogan
May 27, 20241 min read


(Re)memory and (Re)construction: Imaginatively Constructing Histories in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and George Eliot’s Silas Marner
Characters from both texts are imaginatively recast to redefine personal histories and to reconnect with shared histories.
Jolie Chen
May 27, 20241 min read


What kind of life-writing emerges from Virginia Woolf’s essays?
The topic addressed is Virginia Woolf’s life-writing – which is approached as an investigation into her own and her family’s selfhood.
Chloe Jane Mansola
May 27, 20242 min read


Feminism, Revisionism, and ‘Dethronement’ in Margaret Atwood’s Circe/Mud Poems
Engaging with the postmodern trend of feminist revisionism popularised in the 1970s, Atwood critiques the mode of classical poetry.
Anna Jefferies
May 27, 20241 min read


Feminism, Truth and the Misplacement of Belief in Breach Theatre’s It’s True, It’s True, It’s True
Set in the patriarchal setting of the courtroom, the play is staged in a space in which belief is misplaced, and justice withheld.
Anna Jefferies
May 27, 20241 min read
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