Recent Posts - page 49
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Analysis of Angela Carter’s Puss-in-Boots
This story is the most ebullient of the reimagined fairy tales in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection The Bloody Chamber. The volume’s title suggests the more characteristic tone of these tales of sex, violence, and the struggles for power within male-female… Read More ›
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Analysis of Fay Weldon’s Pumpkin Pie
Fay Weldon’s story “Pumpkin Pie,” published in the 1991 collection Moon over Minneapolis: Or Why She Couldn’t Stay, uses a shifting style of narration and integrated symbolism to comment on class and gender issues. The story follows Antoinette, a maid… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ian McEwan’s Psychopolis
The final story in Ian McEwan’s collection In between the Sheets (1978), “Psychopolis” was originally published in American Review and anthologized in the influential The Penguin Book of Modern Short Stories (1987), edited by Malcolm Bradbury, McEwan’s former tutor at… Read More ›
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Analysis of D. H. Lawrence’s The Prussian Officer and Other Stories
The publication by Duckworth of D. H. Lawrence’s first volume of short stories on November 26, 1914, collected writing from as early as 1907. Except for the unpublished Daughters of the Vicar, the book was compiled from work that had… Read More ›
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Analysis of Salman Rushdie’s The Prophet’s Hair
Extensively anthologized, Salman Rushdie’s “The Prophet’s Hair” was initially published in the London Review of Books and the Atlantic. The story was later included in a limited, privately printed edition in 1989, along with a companion piece, “The Free Radio,”… Read More ›
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Pre-Raphaelitism
The Pre-Raphaelites were a group of authors in the later 1840s through the close of the 1890s who espoused a distinctive artistic philosophy. In form, Pre-Raphaelite short stories exhibit a highly finished style that refl ects and embodies the aesthetic… Read More ›
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Analysis of Dylan Thomas’s Portrait of the Artist as a Young Dog
The 10 stories in this collection were written in Laugharne during 1938 and 1939 (though not in the order in which they appear in the volume), and the collection signaled the emergence of Welsh writer Dylan Thomas (1914–53) as a… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ian McEwan’s Pornography
The short story “Pornography” opens Ian McEwan’s second collection of short stories, In between the Sheets (1978). The story returns to the familiar themes of McEwan’s earlier collection of stories, First Love, Last Rites (1972), with its focus on the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s The Poor Relation’s Story
One of two short stories by Charles Dickens that appeared in the Christmas number of Household Words in 1852, A Round of Stories by the Christmas Fire. The story was later published by Chapman and Hall in Christmas Stories (1859),… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ella D’Arcy’s The Pleasure-Pilgrim
When Ella D’Arcy’s collection of short stories Monochromes, which includes “The Pleasure-Pilgrim,” was published in 1895, she was a fixture of the 1890s London literary scene. She was an editor of the provocative journal The Yellow Book and was compared… Read More ›
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Analysis of Michèle Roberts’s Playing Sardines
Playing Sardines (2001), the collection in which the short story of the same name appears, is Michèle Roberts’s second independently authored collection of short stories. Chronologically and thematically it may be considered alongside Roberts’s most recent novels, including The Looking… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s Plain Tales from the Hills
The first edition of Plain Tales from the Hills contains 40 stories written by Rudyard Kipling between 1884 and 1887. Most of the stories were first published in the Civil and Military Gazette, of which Kipling was assistant editor, in… Read More ›
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Analysis of Samuel Beckett’s Ping
“Ping” was first written in French (titled “Bing”) in 1966 and was translated by the author in 1967. It came at a time when Samuel Beckett was pushing the boundaries of what was possible in both prose and drama and… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rudyard Kipling’s The Phantom Rickshaw
Written when Rudyard Kipling was 19, this story first appeared in the 1885 Quartette, the Christmas annual of the Gazette. An ironic and haunting ghost story, “The Phantom Rickshaw” has a message: Using people, specifically women, as mere sex objects… Read More ›
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Analysis of Saki’s The Penance
One of Saki’s [H. H. Munro’s] tragicomic explorations of the gap between imaginative children and conventional adults, “The Penance” first appeared in the Westminster Gazette on September 24, 1910. Octavian Ruttle has recently killed the neighboring children’s tabby cat, which… Read More ›
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Analysis of Doris Lessing’s Our Friend Judith
A short story originally published in Partisan Review (1960) and later collected in Doris Lessing’s volume of short stories A Man and Two Women (1963). Written more than a decade before the mainstream feminist movement and two years before her… Read More ›
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Analysis of E. M. Forster’s The Other Side of the Hedge
This short story was first published in the liberal monthly Independent Review in 1904. Later it was reprinted in E. M. Forster’s first short story collection, The Celestial Omnibus and Other Stories (1911), and in The Collected Tales of E…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Wilkie Collins’s The Ostler
“The Ostler” was originally published in the special Christmas issue of Household Words in 1855, and Wilkie Collins later expanded this supernatural story for inclusion in The Queen of Hearts (1859) as “Brother Morgan’s Story of the Dream Woman.” Collins… Read More ›
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Analysis of A. L. Kennedy’s Original Bliss
“Original Bliss” takes as its theme a situation prevalent in many of A. L. Kennedy’s short stories: A frustrated female character, hemmed in by the mundane routines of her life, must enter a period of struggle in order to maintain… Read More ›
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Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s On the Western Circuit
“On the Western Circuit” addresses many of the same questions of sexuality, propriety, and class structure that dominate much of Thomas Hardy’s longer fiction, but it does so from a fundamentally different perspective. Like such novels as Tess of the… Read More ›
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