Tag: literature

Written by Yummy's World

The heroine of modernist fiction is tempted and tormented by a dream of freedom which cannot be realised- Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and Katherine Mansfield’s Prelude

Women writers at the beginning of the 20th Century began an exploration into the mind and a self-awareness of the individual. These writers concerned themselves not only with time and history but with a sense of perception and an investigation into the inner dimensions of the human mind. According to Peter Barry, the period of […]

Written by Yummy's World

Make it New- How do writers of the period represent the lives of the poor and the working classes?- John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They?

Both John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath and Horace McCoy’s They Shoot Horses, Don’t They? are set in America during the 1930’s and the plight of the poor and the working classes is represented as a response to the socio-economic problems of the time. Following the Wall Street Crash in 1929, America found itself amidst […]

Written by Yummy's World

Return of the Native is concerned not with the modern city but with life in the country. In what ways could the text be regarded as a ‘modern novel’, despite its rural setting?

During the 19th Century, the novel began its rise to show the struggle between ‘self’ and ‘other’. As the century progressed, authors of the time began to explore this binary divide to understand the ‘modern’. The investigation into human kind and to define and assert the self, began with a search for identity. In The […]

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What is Realism, how does it work in practice, and what is its function? Chapter 50 Charles Dickens Oliver Twist

In the same way Victorian journalist Henry Mayhew reported on the life of the working classes in his articles published in the ‘London Labour and London Poor’, Dickens captures the social fabric of Victorian London at the time of his writing. Mayhew’s depictions of the London street markets evoke chaotic scenes and images that invade […]

Written by Yummy's World

Does Peacock’s novel, so critical of Romanticism, set it outside the remit of the Romantic agenda, or could it be argued that Peacock’s critique comes to the rescue by suggesting ways of overcoming the crisis of Later Romanticism?

Thomas Love Peacock’s Nightmare Abbey was a satirical and experimental novel. Prose was a new form for the Romantics and Peacock took great care to move away from traditional tropes of the early Romantics work by gently pushing the boundaries and taking a light-hearted swipe at his contempories. Robert Kiely believed that Peacock understood the […]