Provided that the author is an ideological product who participates in the dominant social discourse produced in the nexus of power and knowledge, as Michel Foucault argues, a literary work, after all, can be a cultural product by a writer under specific circumstances In this vein, this paper attempts to explore how Hawthorne and Melville were struggling with the idea of au..
This paper concerns how George Eliot`s Silas Marner could also be read as a fiction containing political ideals despite its apparently peaceful, pastoral narrative, which is usually expected to be typically apolitical To argue this point, such fictional elements as use of language, characterization, structure, image and symbols are revisited in new perspectives and ways ..
Although George Eliot acknowledges Wordsworth`s influence by quoting his poetry for the epigraph of Adam Bede, Eliot`s response to Wordsworth in the novel is not a straightforward celebration The efficacy of Wordsworthian rhetoric, which aims at the education of sympathy, is questioned in Arthur`s dismissal of Wordsworth`s Lyrical Ballads and his later victimization of..
This study aims to examine Melville`s ideologic discourse as it concerns American noble individualism, especially that related to capitalism and democracy in his major works For this purpose, I try to analyze Melville`s criticism of early American capitalism, taking such characteristic examples as the city, slavery, and the drinking of hard liquor, and discuss how it com..
The middle of the nineteenth century was a period of great change in the history of children`s literature But children`s literature in that period was not an exception in confirming that it is a discursive field in which the image of the child is (re)produced and that the `child` is a constructed concept which carries the ideals of societies The second half of the nineteenth c..
While Beulah has been viewed as a conservative domestic novel supporting the dominant ideological ideal, True Woman, Nina Baym reinterprets this book as a fairly radical one manifesting women`s absolute autonomy and intense individualism by highlighting Beulah`s unprecedented intensive desire for independence This new perspective justly illuminates the precursory aspe..
The readers of Lady Susan find the book puzzling because there exist in it a large amount of elements foreign to the readers familiar with Jane Austen`s six major novels This derives mainly from the novel`s extraordinary heroine and the world she creates with her lively energy, unsurpassed selfishness, and brilliantly deceitful schemes The peculiarity or the foreignness o..
This article examines how the Britain`s imperial century (1815-1902) rises, prospers, and falls as a metaphor in the three literary texts of Victorian England I survey not only the responses of the gentry of the British colony, but also the influence of the British imperialism on colonies such as the Antigua sugar plantation, the West Indies, and Jamaica In the beginning o..
Richard Polwhele and Edmund Burke, the two prominent figures of English conservatism in 1790s, resort to female body when they preach the virtue of conservatism and criticize radicalism of the day In their arguments, the amazonian female body represents unnaturalness and immorality of radicalism, while sensitive female body symbolizes the virtue of tradition and status q..
This paper examines the features commonly found in the Silver-Fork novels and why they attracted Victorian readers It focuses on Pelham to illustrate the characteristics and popularity of this sub-genre It also explores how Bulwer-Lytton, while following the Silver-Fork tradition, transfigures Pelham into a politically radical and socially liberal literary text which ..
With the famous essay series On Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts Thomas de Quincey became arguably the inaugurator of the line of writings that glorify crime, especially murder, as an aesthetic achievement The essay series have also earned him an occasional honorary mention as a precursor of crime novels This is a preliminary to a study of De Quincey`s murderous es..
We find the ending of The Portrait of a Lady troublesome in that, Isabel, always imagining herself free and independent, has in fact delivered herself into the cage of her bondage This acute problem keeps open the debate as to whether her decision derives from her choice or from the outer forces of her environment In this essay, I hope to explore Isabel Archer as both object ..
At the end of Tsitsi Dangarembga`s Nervous Conditions, the narrator, Tambuzai Siguake, concludes that she has maintained independence and remains capable of critique after living with her uncle and gaining admission to the white girls` school of the Sacred Heart She says she has not been brainwashed But a brainwashed person would say that In this respect, Tambu is an unre..
Elizabeth Gaskell`s Mary Barton has attracted many critics` attention because of its industrial theme, but they claim that the novel has disappointed them with the unrealistic and bourgeois resolution of the class conflict Some extreme Feminist criticisms try to stress on John Barton`s oppression and Mary`s anger at her father, which is not to the point of the theme and s..
The name of Sophia Lee and her novel The Recess may have little prominence not only in the English literature in general but also in the genre of Gothic proper The Recess has failed to arouse critics` interests, which is rather unusual considering its enormous popularity in both England and Europe This novel, however, requires our attention today in that it tries to re-con..