Ding Dong, the Witch Might Be Dead
The Testaments is undeniably a testament to Margaret Atwood’s literary mastery. She has produced the modern equivalent of a traditional fairy tale – a young adult fantasy – but one that is beautifully written, cleverly plotted and only rarely suffers from didacticism. One might wonder, however, if it is entirely proper for a young rebel to believe in fairy tales.
Not So Insular
Geoffrey Chaucer chose to write in English rather than French or Latin and is honoured as ‘the Father of English Literature’. Nevertheless his culture was a broadly European one and his career involved much European travel. Did he also visit Ireland and might Gaelic literature have been an influence?
The hegemony of history
Quentin Skinner’s most significant contribution to the history of ideas was his insistence that canonical texts do not stand outside history proposing universal and ‘ageless’ truths. They must rather be understood in the context of their publication. But does that mean they have little to say to us today?
Beneath the Surface
Sherwood Anderson credited his mother with awakening his curiosity about what lay behind the facade of apparently ordinary lives in small-town America. When his masterpiece, ‘Winesburg, Ohio’, was published he was castigated as an ‘opener of sewers’; in his home town library the book was kept in a locked cupboard.
The Glimmer
Nineteen Eighty-Four ends with the total defeat of its rebellious protagonist Winston Smith. Or so it seems. But if the victory of the Party seemed final in 1984, who could it have been who wrote (in ‘oldspeak’) the book’s appendix, dated 2050, entitled ‘The Principles of Newspeak’?
Stasis in Darkness
In Ingeborg Bachmann’s newly reissued novel ‘Malina’, questions of existence, and the relation of the one who writes to what is written, are continually at play. This is not to say that it is not ‘serious’, rather that its effects are often achieved through parody, laughter, allusion and humour.
Love Your Hair
Hair – rather than skin colour –can be seen as the principal signifier of race and has the power to confer classification as black or not. The story of how ‘treatments’ for taming black hair were developed by black entrepreneurs is a depressingly familiar capitalist narrative.
Wartime Voices
After the deluge of books, documentaries, exhibitions, conferences and commemorations marking the course of the First World War, there is something affirming in returning to the texts of poems written just before, during and somewhat after that cataclysmic event.
Well Bless Your Heart!
If you want to be a Southern lady and reach the summit of flowery femininity and thoughtful, gracious manners, there are a few things to master: how to bestow a sharp-edged compliment and when not to wear pearls. But above all never be seen chewing gum, because that’s just cheap.
The Spring-Time of the World
In 1792 Tom Paine wrote that whatever shape summer might take it was ‘not difficult to perceive that the spring is begun’. If the French Revolution did not fulfil the radicals’ hopes, these early years left an enduring legacy to Wordsworth, making him the great poet of feeling and hope.