“A Widow’s Quilt” was first published in the New Yorker magazine on June 6, 1977, just under a year before Warner’s death in May 1978. It was subsequently republished in a posthumous collection of her stories, One Thing Leading to… Read More ›
British Literature
Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s The Withered Arm
“The Withered Arm” by Thomas Hardy depicts the author’s fatalistic view of the world. The story, published in Blackwood Magazine in 1888 and in the collection Wessex Tales the same year, presents the characters as victims of a malevolent power… Read More ›
Analysis of Jeanette Winterson’s The World and Other Places
The World and Other Places is, to date, Jeanette Winterson’s only short story collection. In the afterword of the 1998 edition, Winterson explains how she wrote these 17 stories gradually over 12 years, after the publication of her first novel,… Read More ›
Analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Adventure of the Yellow Face
A detective story first published in the Strand Magazine in February 1893 and subsequently in the collection The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes (1894). Holmes is consulted by Mr. Grant Munro, on the subject of his wife’s mysterious behavior. Munro met… Read More ›
Analysis of Muriel Spark’s You Should Have Seen the Mess
“You Should Have Seen the Mess” is included in the 1958 collection The Go-Away Bird with Other Stories by distinguished Edinburgh-born writer Muriel Spark. Since its initial publication, it has become one of Spark’s most anthologized stories, probably because of… Read More ›
Analysis of Joseph Conrad’s Youth: A Narrative
“Youth: A Narrative” marks an important development in the literary career of Joseph Conrad. It is the first story in which Conrad draws on his own experience and the first to feature Marlow, the narrator also of Heart of Darkness… Read More ›
Stream of Consciousness
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 ›
Metafiction
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
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 ›
Suffragette Fiction
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 ›
Analysis of Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study in Scarlet
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 ›
Analysis of W. Somerset Maugham’s A String of Beads
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 ›
Analysis of Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde
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 ›
Analysis of Martin Amis’s Straight Fiction
“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 ›
Analysis of A. S. Byatt’s The Story of the Eldest Princess
“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 ›
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Story of a Non-marrying Man
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 ›
Analysis of Wilkie Collins’s The Lawyer’s Story of a Stolen Letter
“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 ›
Analysis of Bram Stoker’s The Squaw
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 ›
Analysis of Nick Hornby’s Speaking with the Angel
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 ›
Analysis of Angela Carter’s A Souvenir of Japan
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 ›
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