This is the third post I write here on Stevenson’s “The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde”, which shows that a masterpiece is that kind of text that delivers something new every time the reader approaches it. In preparation for my classes, I read Nancy Gish’s essay “Jekyll and Hyde: The Pathology of […]
About a year ago I wrote an entry (20-X-2011) connecting Anne Brontë’s Gilbert, the hero of The Tenant of Wildfell Hall, and Heathcliff, the hero-villain of her sister Emily’s Wuthering Heights. I still think that Anne bore Emily’s novel in mind as she wrote her own and that Gilbert is a more civilised version of […]
An MA student, Rubén, asks me to supervise his dissertation on Richard Yates’s 1961 novel Revolutionary Road –a novel I promised myself not to touch ever after seeing the film adaptation (because of its very ugly plot). Yet, what can I do? I like his proposal to consider 1950s masculinity and so… I must read […]
I read with my class the interview in Oliver Twist between the whore Nancy and the lady Rose –both 17-year-old girls separated by a social abyss. Dickens speaks through each girl’s mouth, first to claim (through Nancy) that it’s not inborn malice but the bad luck of finding yourself in an appalling environment as a […]
A ridiculous moment in Dickens’s ‘paper’ (as he calls them) on a charity dinner in his Sketches by Boz (1836-37) provokes a strong sense of dèja vú. Soon I identify it with a memory of reading Mariano José de Larra’s articles back when I was a secondary-school student and again as an undegrad. Suddenly, I […]
One of our Erasmus students at Edinburgh emails us the reading list for one of her subjects, a crash course on ‘Scottish Fiction’ (third year, I guess): Week 1. Introduction; extracts from Tobias Smollett, Humphrey Clinker (1771) and James Barker, The Wonder of All the Gay World (1749) Week 2. Walter Scott, The Heart of […]
Typically, there comes a point when after reading a particular book six or seven times, a new angle opens up and I wonder how come I’d missed that. In the case of Dickens’s Oliver Twist perhaps this has much to do with having overlooked the details of the rocambolesque explanation of the connection between the […]
NOTE: This post was written on 26 July Preparing for my Victorian Literature subject next semester –in particular for Oliver Twist– I read back-to-back Friedrich Engels’ The Condition of the Working Class in England in 1844 (published 1845 in German, 1887 in English) and Jack London’s The People of the Abyss (1902). Each is a […]
Whether you’re interested in Victorian Literature, Gothic fiction or the material aspects of Literature (i.e. the market), Marie Corelli’s name is sure to surface in your reading. I’m interested in these three issues and so, sooner or later, I was bound to read her best-selling novel The Sorrows of Satan (1895). Corelli (née Minnie Mackay) […]
I must thank my PhD supervisor in Scotland, Prof. David Punter, for inviting me to overcome my prejudice against the colourful covers of Terry Pratchett’s novels and kicking me head first into the Discworld. 17 years and 39 novels later I can only say ‘thank you, thank you, thank you…’ for so much literary pleasure. […]