This dissertation argues that Iris Murdoch’s entire novelistic corpus should be read as a mystical attempt to portray the Good in an increasingly secularised world. Scholars of Murdoch’s work have tended to view her later novels as representing a turn towards more mystical ideas [...]
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One of Marilynne Robinson’s central concerns in her 2004 novel, Gilead, is the nature and forms of human attention: who and what we pay attention to, and, crucially, what we fail to pay attention to. The novel (the first in a tetralogy of interrelated novels) takes the form of a letter from John Ames [...]
Over the past few decades, there has been a sustained attempt to revive an ameliorative view of literature (specifically the novel), a movement which Dorothy J. Hale terms “New Ethics”. This is by no means a new approach; indeed, ethical defences of the novel are as old as the novel itself [...]
Both Laurence Olivier’s (1944) and Kenneth Branagh’s (1989) adaptations of William Shakespeare’s Henry V present radically contested notions of national identity, selectively emphasising and suppressing aspects of the original text in an effort to further explicitly ideological and propagandistic motives [...]
‘Language is the great study of man’ declared Ralph Waldo Emerson in his Journal of 1826. His bold statement is not altogether uncharacteristic of the Romantic movement as a whole; European Romanticism, along with its American Transcendentalist counterpart, displayed an uncommon preoccupation with language [...]
Both Orson Welles’s Macbeth (1948) and Akira Kurosawa’s Throne of Blood (1957) represent a crucial development in the history of Shakespeare on film through their exploration of specific filmic styles, as opposed to merely transposing the conventions of the theatre onto film [...]
The central purpose of William Blake’s poetry is to challenge and subvert “conventional” systems of “thought and perception” through a sustained focus on the energetic power of the imagination in contrast to the constraining forces of reason. Blake’s The Marriage of Heaven and Hell targets the metaphysical assumptions of orthodox religion [...]
Jane Austen’s central concern in her two later novels Mansfield Park and Persuasion is the means by which ‘strong feelings’ can be reliably communicated by characters and presented within literature itself. Through exploring the limits of language, and its inability to function at times of intense feeling [...]
The extent to which context should be “optional” in literary theory was most forcefully articulated in two primary theoretical approaches in the twentieth century. On the one hand, the schools of Formalism and New Criticism sought to analyse “the work itself” by separating it from any extraneous detail such as biographical or historical contexts [...]
An answer to this question requires one to clarify precisely what form of “morality” Nietzsche criticises and advocates for. Nietzsche criticises a specific form of morality, referred to hereafter as “Slave morality,” and advocates for a “Noble morality” as a new set of values that will enable the ‘higher type[s]’ of humans to flourish […]
Central to all of Jane Austen’s novels is a quest for self-knowledge and a preoccupation with self-delusion as a dangerous psychological obstacle which characters must overcome to achieve happiness. Austen shows that self-delusion – stemming from false prejudices based on arbitrary social distinctions [...]
More’s Utopia is a deeply ambiguous and paradoxical text, steeped in a tradition of ancient literature while also playfully subverting both contemporary and modern readers’ expectations. Utopia’s longer title draws attention to the text’s ‘beneficial’ nature, suggesting a straightforward interpretation [...]
T.S. Eliot’s The Waste Land stands as a manifestation of the poet’s intensely personal experience of mental disorder, and an attempt to salvage meaning and significant experience out of a post-war Europe characterised by disillusionment and nihilism. The poem materialises both conscious and unconscious thought [...]
Aristotle’s Poetics establishes the plot of Sophocles’ Oedipus the King as the most fully realised and logically developed of all Greek tragedy, specifically drawing attention to the complete reversal of fortune (peripeteia) combined simultaneously with Oedipus’ recognition of his true identity [...]
Modernism is a vast artistic movement which can broadly be defined as a both a self-conscious reaction to the moral evils associated with modernity (defined as an incessant drive for social, scientific and technological progress manifested in the industrial revolution), and an acknowledgement of the limits of artistic form [...]
Historically, the sonnet has continually proven itself to be an immensely versatile means of poetic expression, capable of transcending its confining restraints through an overriding structural harmony, coupled paradoxically with a surprising variety of formal manipulation, allowing poets to convey much in little (multum in parvo) [...]
Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus presents a contextually layered play, influenced by both the morality tradition and Faustian legend, while updating the didacticism of previous morality plays by blurring conventional definitions of good and evil, and focusing on Faustus’ decision to sin without temptation from traditional vices [...]
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