By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘The Erl-King’ is a short story from The Bloody Chamber, a 1979 collection of feminist stories by the British writer Angela Carter (1940-92). In the story, a young girl wanders into a wood where a mysterious man of the forest seduces her; in his dwelling are cages containing birds
Literature
April 26, 2023, 10:58am Across the pond this morning, the good people at the Women’s Prize for Fiction—one of the literary world’s most high-profile and prestigious awards—announced the 2023 shortlist, which includes both former winners and three first-time novelists. This year’s shortlist was selected by a judging panel made up of broadcaster and writer Louise
‘The Tyger’ is one of the best-known poems of the poet and engraver William Blake (1757-1827). The poem, part of Blake’s Songs of Experience, is notable for its series of questions about the large and fearsome creature, the tiger. But it is also a poem built upon a sequence of powerful images and symbols. Indeed,
April 25, 2023, 11:00am Lloyd Devereux Richards’ debut thriller Stone Maidens was published in 2012, received by a largely indifferent world until Devereux Richards’ daughter Margueritte posted a TikTok about her dad, aged 74, last year. Nearly overnight, the mystery novel about an FBI forensic anthropologist, a serial killer, and some mysterious tribal artifacts, became
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Lottery in June, corn be heavy soon.’ This line is a quotation from one of the most disturbing short stories of the entire twentieth century; but what does it mean? Shirley Jackson’s ‘The Lottery’, published in the New Yorker in 1948, has been read as a response to the
April 25, 2023, 11:03am Ah, now I see why Republicans want to ban books and defund libraries. According to JSTOR Daily, a young Mao Zedong was an ardent library patron who loved hanging out with books so much he briefly became an assistant librarian. As Mao told his biographer Edgar Snow, after he quit secondary
‘The God’s Script’, sometimes translated under the title ‘The Writing of the God’, is a 1949 short story by the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986). The story concerns a Mayan priest who is imprisoned with a jaguar; the priest comes to realise that his god has hidden magic writing within the jaguar’s skin. ‘The
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘To every thing there is a season’ is a famous Biblical quotation. It is found in the Book of Ecclesiastes in the Old Testament. This short book is actually chock-full of oft-quoted lines: the phrases ‘nothing new under the sun’, ‘the sun also rises’, ‘eat, drink and be merry’,
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) Put simply, an ode is a poem written about, or to, a particular thing or person. So Andrew Marvell wrote a poem about Oliver Cromwell, Percy Shelley wrote an ode to the west wind, and John Keats wrote odes to everything from a Grecian urn to the state of
The History Department’s baby ceremony took place on a Thursday afternoon under the fluorescent lights in the Clausewitz Library, located in the windowless basement of one of West Point’s oldest buildings. Its walls are lined with black-, green-, and gold-bound tomes about military strategy and history, and the center of the room features clusters of
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘Everybody Wants to Rule the World’ is one of the most famous songs by Tears for Fears. But what is the meaning of this anthemic mid-80s song? Written by one of the band’s founding members Roland Orzabal, along with Ian Stanley, and producer Chris Hughes, the song reflects its
April 21, 2023, 9:30am Tomorrow is Earth Day, our annual reminder to spare a thought for our spinning planet lest we destroy it completely. Come on guys, how will we read outside if there is no outside left? If you’re lucky enough to be able to spend some time in the out-of-doors this weekend, here
What are the most important themes William Blake’s poem ‘A Poison Tree’? The poem is from Blake’s 1794 volume Songs of Experience, the companion-volume to his earlier Songs of Innocence. ‘A Poison Tree’ is a powerful poem about anger, and how anger eats away at us, causing us to behave in deceitful and dishonest ways,
A few years back we put together a comprehensive climate change library—fiction, nonfiction, poetry—to help readers grapple, both emotionally and practically, with the ongoing and imminent climate catastrophe we all face. We’re still happy with that collection of books, but in the interest of updating things we reached out to our favorite magazine of nature
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) ‘A Canary for One’ is a short story by Ernest Hemingway (1899-1961). He began writing ‘A Canary for One’ in 1926 and it was first published the following year. It contains a number of the most characteristic features of Hemingway’s writing: clear, unadorned prose, and a focus on ordinary,
TODAY: In 1899, Vladimir Nabokov is born. “Pugilistic metaphors and hard-drinking aphorisms … a brittle misogyny and a vainglorious narcissism. And then there are all the dead animals.” David Barnes considers the baggage of Ernest Hemingway, 100 years after his first published work. | Lit Hub Criticism How language acquisition nourishes a love of literature. |
The myth of Eros and Psyche has exercised writers’ and artists’ imaginations for several millennia, but what are the details of the myth? Below, we summarise the story of these unlucky lovers, and provide an analysis of the myth’s meaning and symbolism. Surprisingly, although the myth is usually referred to as ‘Eros and Psyche’, with
I had been counting down the weeks until I could see Are You There God? It’s Me, Margaret., the new film from writer-director Kelly Fremon Craig (Post Grad, Edge of Seventeen) and producer James L. Brooks (Terms of Endearment, Broadcast News) that adapts Judy Blume’s classic 1970 novel of the same name. When it was