Category: literary criticism
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Art & Cognition: False Images in the Poetry of Spenser and Sidney
During the English reformation ‘images’ were especially suspect. They were seen as impersonators, their deceptiveness offering nothing more than a temptation to idolatry and damnation (Tassi, 24). Both Spenser and Sidney were well aware of this and perhaps they conjured up the ‘false images’ in their own poetry with a view to teaching readers about…
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Whispers from a Secret Life – The poetry of Christina Rossetti
In the Freudian context, this almost always relates to the Oedipal complex. A young girl like Rossetti, once bound to her mother through homosexual desire, must turn that desire toward father and the wish for his baby (Blass and Simon, 169).
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Cosmology and the Fate of Hardy’s Tragic Heroines
To what extent are Hardy’s tragic protagonists themselves responsible for the fate that overtakes them? I suggest that depends on cosmology. As scientific advancements in the 19th century made it difficult for Hardy to accept his Christian cosmology, he looked for alternatives (Inghan, 181). I suggest that Hardy mixes and matches them to…
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Comparison and Contrast Using Jungian (Archetypal) Literary Criticism of Extracts from Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss and Forster’s A Passage to India
One of the primary purposes of Jungian Literary Criticism is to uncover the unconscious dynamics underpinning the work so as to gain a better understanding of their function (Dawson, 277). Hence Jungian Literary Criticism often begins with the question: “What psychological factor (whether image or complex of concerns) might have been responsible for this text?”…
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A Critique of Ecriture Feminine
In the wake of Queer theory, I suggest that the binary oppositions between ‘feminine and masculine’ supporting Cixous’ ecriture feminine have dissolved. Indeed queer now uses ‘the open mesh of possibilities’ – those ‘gaps, overlaps, dissonances and resonances, lapses and excesses of meaning’, which Cixous once claimed for ecriture feminine.