Cardiff University (CF)

Notes covering: - Life and career of Sebald - Sebald and War - Sebald and genre - Place of WWII and the Holocaust in Austerlitz - Nazism

Core themes of Atonement: - Life and Family of the author - Setting of the novel - Character analysis - Narrative technique

Elizabeth Barrett Browning’s Sonnet 43 is principally a poem about the intense love and compassion a woman feels for her husband. The poem is taken from a collection of sonnets, entitled Sonnets from the Portuguese, which trace the interlude between 1945, when Elizabeth met her partner Robert Browning, to 1846, when they were married. Browning lived and wrote during the Victorian era, a time of major societal and economical change. This is reflected in her work, which draws on religious, polit...

Gothic fiction of the 1880s and 1890s dramatises the late Victorian fear of “otherness”. In fin-de-siècle Britain, the concept of racial and cultural degeneration spawned fears of a primitive “other”. This fear is encoded in The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886) and The Picture of Dorian Gray (1891). In both texts a primitive “other” threateningly lurks within externally moral men. Indeed, both Stevenson and Wilde suggest that the threat of “otherness” comes from with...

The novel, The Handmaid’s Tale’ is set in the Republic of Gilead, a land where women have to breed, or face being hung at the wall or sent out to die slowly of radiation sickness. The world of the novel is set in the future after a nuclear war. The United States, where the novel is set, does not exist as a union of states anymore, but still exists as a land mass. The people are governed in a very sanctimonious way and the society is theocratic, and many of their freedoms and liberties have ...

Contrapuntal analysis, advocated by Edward W. Said, demands a vision in which imperialism and literature are viewed simultaneously. Reading a Charlotte Brontë novel contrapuntally is considering how the text interacts with its metropolitan context alongside the historical context of British imperialism. In Jane Eyre (1847) the colonial histories of the West Indies and India intertwine with the experiences of women in the metropolis. The metropolitan history of Shirley (1849) can be situated in ...

Throughout her novel (The Handmaid’s Tale) Margaret Atwood expresses various forms of rebellion through different characters and situations. The Handmaid’s Tale in its own context is not considered a novel when referring to rebellion, but the expression of a satirical dystopia which is mainly expressed through the beliefs and actions of different characters. It is therefore often compared to George Orwell’s nineteen eighty-four with the expression of freedom from and freedom to.

Toni Morrison’s fiction is preoccupied with the persistence of the past. Indeed, in Beloved (1987) and Jazz (1992) the past continually resurfaces in the present. In Beloved, for example, Sethe is haunted by her past in the form of her departed daughter. Whereas in Jazz, the past is tragically repeated in the lives of Joe and Violet Trace. In both texts, Morrison’s characters must confront their past in order to move on. Accordingly, their experiences demonstrate Morrison’s ‘concern to b...

Magical realism, as ‘a mode suited to exploring- and transgressing- boundaries’ , is useful for feminist objectives. The genre challenges dominant ways of seeing the world and can therefore be used to contest androcentric worldviews. In The House of the Spirits (1985), for example, the use of the supernatural empowers the women of the Trueba household. In Nights at the Circus (1984) the magically realist body of Fevvers is a symbolic representation of the New Woman. In both texts, however, t...

Many modern dramas feature an unconventional couple. From Kane’s coupling of Hippolytus and Phaedra, to Parks’s pairing of Booth and Lincoln, playwrights use the unconventional couple as a device to explore the different thematic interests of their plays. In The Homecoming (1965), for example, Pinter dramatises the unconventional relationships formed between Max, his sons, and Teddy’s wife. Suddenly Last Summer (1958), however, centres on the potentially incestuous couplings of Mrs Venable...