Not all gothic novels contain the supernatural While Walpole and Lewis people their novels with blatant ghosts, Radcliffe, after having allowed a glimpse of supernatural beings and mysterious events, strives to exorcise them by explaining them on the natural ground Radcliffe with her unique use of `explained supernatural`, therefore, has been agreed to be a conservative ..
This paper is an attempt to define the nature of contemporaneity of Tristram Shandy by Laurence Sterne, the 18th-century British clergyman-novelist The word contemporaneity in this case is defined in terms of its historically equivalent understanding of human thought shared by the cross-section of humanity in this postmodern era, which runs through time and space What St..
It is generally recognized by so-called persona critics that personae in J Swift`s satirical works are putative authors or supposed authors with opposite or contrary attitudes and values to those of Swift, and that their main function is to enhance the ironic effect of the works In other words, Swift`s personae may be said to embody the attitudes and attributes of the target..
Richard Chase`s concept of the American romance as distinct from the English novel has held powerful sway in the world of American novel criticism ever since the publication of his The American Novel and Its Tradition in 1957 However, his theory has not remained unchallenged, and indeed recently it has even been declared unfounded An examination of the history of American..
Charles Dickens` The Old Curiosity Shop can be analyzed as a reflection of the modern society in its formation stage The modern age began with capitalism Capitalism induced economic modernization, such as the migration from the countryside to the cities and the radical development of industry and expansion of cities At the same time, capitalism brought, also, social moder..
Sympathizing with the inferior conditions of women under the patriarch, William Makepeace Thackeray wrote The History of Henry Esmond to compensate for Victorian women`s helplessness and to satirize man-made society full of social pretension, hypocracies Henry Esmond reveals the struggle for power between men and women Unlike Victorian women depending on their husband..
This paper tries to reexamine the function of self-consciousness in Laurence Sterne`s Tristram Shandy Tristram as a self-conscious narrator is a thesis widely popularized by Wayne Booth and many critics often examine Tristram`s self-consciousness as a matrix of the unity of the text For Sterne, however, unity of either self or a text is a problematic concept which not onl..
While reading Emily Bronte`s Wuthering Heights, the reader may feel a sense of puzzlement, as if (s)he were lost within a maze Above all, the author herself deliberately attempts to conceal her female identify in the Victorian Age (It is interesting to note that she had to publish the novel under the pseudonym of Ellis Bell) Moreover, she employs a male narrator called Mr ..
The hardest problem of morality in the Victorian Period was what to substitute for the other-worldly ethics of Christianity, which had served as an undoubted fountain of the meaning of life in the Western World for a long time but was being overthrown by the everintensifying scientific positivistic ideas in the 19th century Europe George Eliot, who was regarded as a champi..
Oedipus Tyrannus, Sophocles` version of Oedipus myth, focuses on Oedipus` search for Lams` murderer, a search which is transformed into a tragic quest for his own identity In his effort to discover who and what he is, Oedipus comes to an understanding of the human condition as nothingness--the gap between man and the gods Therefore, though Oedipus succeeds in his quest for..
Frankenstein, written by a youn1g woman writer Mary Shelley, belongs to the tradition of gothic romance Gothic romance aims at awakening the readers` fear and terror, and is considered to be the return of the repressed in a world of light, reason, rationahty, and enlightenment Gothic romance is the opposite of formal realism which emphasizes the value of domestic happiness-..
The purpose of this paper is to examine the representation of female body in Charlotte Bronte`s Jane Eyre, with emphasis on the 19th-century ideology of female body, sexuality and madness The monstrous body of Bertha Mason, a distinct perversion from the tradition of desirable female body raises complex questions of female body, sexuality and madness Through Bertha Bronte..