The coining of this term has generally been credited to the American psychologist William James, older brother of novelist Henry James. It was originally used by psychologists in the late 19th and early 20th centuries to describe the personal awareness… Read More ›
Though the term metalanguage—a language that describes or analyzes another language— was in use well before the 1960s, it was around this time that theorists including Roman Jakobson (Linguistics and Poetics [1960]) and Roland Barthes (Mythologies [1957] and Elements of… Read More ›
Feminist literary criticism has its origins in the intellectual and political feminist movement. It advocates a critique of maledominated language and performs “resistant” readings of literary texts or histories. Based on the premise that social systems are patriarchal—organized to privilege… Read More ›
The struggle for women to gain the right to vote was fought not only in the political arena but in literature. Although the suffrage movement can be dated to the mid-19th century, its literature as a distinct category is generally… Read More ›
A detective fiction novella first published by Arthur Conan Doyle in Beeton’s Christmas Annual, and published subsequently as a separate edition by Ward, Lock and Company in 1888, A Study in Scarlet marks the first appearance of Sherlock Holmes. The… Read More ›
A story within a story, “A String of Beads” draws much of its thematic complexity from the counterpoints it provides between the two levels of its narrative. The broader narrative is told in the first person by a male speaker… Read More ›
Longman, Green, and Company published Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde in 1886 as a “shilling shocker.” Stevenson reputedly developed the storyline from a dream he had about a man forced into a cabinet… Read More ›
“Straight Fiction” is not the first story in which Martin Amis depicts an upside-down world in a short story. In “The Time Disease,” published in Einstein’s Monsters (1987), Amis imagines a postnuclear society where to be ill is a sign… Read More ›
“The Story of the Eldest Princess” is one of the five stories that appeared in A. S. Byatt’s collection The Djinn in the Nightingale’s Eye (1994). It is an ostensible fairy tale that in fact subverts the assumptions of the… Read More ›
Published in 1973 in The Sun between Their Feet, the second volume of Doris Lessing’s Collected African Stories, “The Story of a Non-marrying Man” is paradoxically titled since it concerns a man who has in fact married bigamously many times…. Read More ›
“The Stolen Letter” was originally published as “The Fourth Poor Traveller” in The Seven Poor Travellers, the extra Christmas number of Charles Dickens’s Household Words (December 1854). At this time, Wilkie Collins was a protégé of Dickens. The story was… Read More ›
An unseasonable short story that Bram Stoker wrote in 1893 for Holly Leaves (the Christmas number of the Illustrated Sporting and Dramatic News), “The Squaw” is set in Nuremberg, a city that Stoker had visited in 1885. A self-regarding, unnamed… Read More ›
Speaking with the Angel is the result of editor Nick Hornby’s request to a group of writer friends to help in a charity with which he was personally involved. Hornby is the father of an autistic boy, and part of… Read More ›
One of the short stories from Fireworks: Nine Profane Pieces, “A Souvenir of Japan” reflects the influence of Angela Carter‘s residence in Japan (1970–72) on her writing. Written soon after her divorce from her first husband, this short story set… Read More ›
Ian McEwan departs somewhat from his typical style and subject matter in the story “Solid Geometry,” published in his first collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites. As in the rest of the stories in the collection, the main character… Read More ›
Sketches by “Boz” Illustrative of Every-day Life and Every-day People is a collection of Charles Dickens’s first-published works. He had begun his literary publishing career proper on December 1, 1833 (at age 21), when “A Dinner at Poplar Walk” (later… Read More ›
“Sir Edmund Orme” is one of Henry James’s many tales that revolve around strange apparitions. A fascination with occult (magical, theosophical, mysterious, or even spiritual) phenomena is evident in many of James’s tales and short stories. Like his contemporaries George… Read More ›
A much-anthologized story that first appeared in Mugby Junction, the extra Christmas number for Charles Dickens’s magazine All the Year Round in 1866. It later appeared in a one-volume edition of all the Christmas numbers from All the Year Round… Read More ›
This late novella, originally written in 1915, reworks themes from Joseph Conrad’s earlier writing, while also acting as an ambiguous response to World War I. (Conrad’s son, Borys, enlisted and became a second lieutenant while Conrad worked on the text.)… Read More ›
This fairy tale by Oscar Wilde was published in 1888 in a volume called The Happy Prince and Other Tales. After being away on a trip, a giant returns to his home only to find that children are playing in… Read More ›
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