Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures Underground, later published as Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, fascinated Victorian audiences from the moment of its appearance. Ostensibly classified as children’s literature, focusing on the initiation/coming-of-age of its protagonist, seven-year-old Alice, the book also caught the… Read More ›
Anne Brontë’s autobiographical novel about a young woman governess features themes of social injustice, class consciousness, education, and isolation. Brontë’s first-person narrative alerts readers in its opening sentence that, by presenting a “history,” it intends to instruct and will be… Read More ›
A label often applied to the last half of the 18th century, the Age of Johnson takes its name from Samuel Johnson, lexicographer, critic, scholar, poet, and novelist most well known for his DICTIONARY OF THE ENGLISH LANGUAGE (1755). With… Read More ›
James Morier based his satire of Persian life on firsthand knowledge of the culture. Born in Smyrna (later Izmir), Turkey, Morier acted as attaché to two diplomats to Iran, Sir Harford Jones and Sir Gore Ouseley, from 1807 to 1814…. Read More ›
Sarah Fielding described David Simple as a “moral romance.” The episodic novel took a timely approach to the romance genre, moving away from the traditional chivalric tales to a story based on codes of middle-class ideology. Modern critics note that… Read More ›
When Amelia Opie (1769-1853), the most popular novelist of her day, decided to write Adeline Mowbray, based loosely on the tumultuous public relationship of her acquaintances William Godwin and Mary Wollstonecraft, she signaled readers with her subtitle that the female… Read More ›
“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 ›
“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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
“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 ›
“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 ›
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 ›
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