TagAcademic Essay

A Stasis in Motion: Wordsworth’s Poetics academic essay by Reuben Jentink William Wordsworth’s “The Complaint of a Forsaken Indian Woman” is “concerned with the variations” (Simpson xi) in perspectival positionality. For David Simpson, “it is the mind that sees, not the eye” (xi). The forsaken woman’s “perspectival” death-song is a dialectic between, on the one

“Small, fierce, and restless eyes”: Stereotype and Hybridity in Thomas De Quincey’s Confessions of an English Opium-Eater academic essay by Kelly O’Connor “Thou hast the keys of Paradise, oh, just, subtle, and mighty opium!” exclaims Thomas De Quincey as he concludes the chapter on “The Pleasures of Opium” in Confessions of an English Opium-Eater (55).

Queering Fear: The Danger of Normality in J.M. Barrie’s Peter and Wendy and Jeanette Winterson’s Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit academic essay by Tristen Kiri Brudy   Western society, the legal system and families are traditionally geared to protect children in order to properly prepare them for life as adults. The idea of putting

Re-verseing Space/Creating Norma(lcy) essay by Daniel Swenson   The 1950s exist in a space of contemporary thought that is stagnant and unchanging in time. The popular American images of poodle skirts, brylcreem, plastic bracelets and aviators reinforce and reward an image of gleaming surface. Heteropatriarchal gender roles were not just mere scripts that people noted

Keats’s “The Eve of St. Agnes”: A Consumerist Fantasy essay by Allison Birt   Nineteenth century London witnessed an exponential increase in the number and variety of shops available to its citizens. Goods from Britain’s growing colonial empire and increasingly sophisticated manufacturing sector filled these shops with ready-made luxury items that were very popular among

Holiness, Whole-ness and Holes An Exploration of the Protestant Journey in Book One of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene essay by Stephanie Airth   Throughout Book One of Edmund Spenser’s The Faerie Queene, the Red Cross Knight’s progression from an unproven, proud knight to the “patron of true holinesse” (1.1 Argument) reflects the Protestant journey

What the Dead Know: Political and Personal Corpses in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four essay by Chelsea Pratt .       Seeping ulcers, naked bodies, tortured forms: as intellectual as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four might seem, it also draws heavily on the corporeal aspects of human existence. In fact, the individual body often serves to emblematize Oceania itself: the

The Book of Shells and Stones: A Reading of Wordsworth’s Dream of the Arab essay by Javier Ibáñez   .       Book V of William Wordsworth’s The Prelude opens with a lament over the fact that the mind does not have “[s]ome element to stamp her image on / In nature somewhat nearer to her own,” but

The Geography of Pain Exploring the relationship between places and people in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway and Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises. essay by Genevieve Barrons   .       The phrase “lost generation”—as used by Ernest Hemingway in the epigraph to The Sun Also Rises—refers to a state of political and spiritual crisis. However, at

Her Father’s Daughter: Locating the Maternal in Shakespeare’s King Lear essay by Chelsea Pratt .             Opening with a jocular account of extramarital pregnancy, the language of female reproduction permeates the whole of King Lear.  Despite these linguistic invocations, the maternal body remains physically absent on stage: the princesses’ mother has passed away before the action

Baby, It’s Biological: Incest as the Human Circulatory System in ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore essay by MacKenzie Walker .        John Ford’s Tis a Pity She’s a Whore (1633) is a very bloody production. Scholars conclude that Ford uses the flow and restriction of blood to illustrate his premise that incest is the most appealing