Bertha, the locked up wife of Mr. Rochester in Jane Eyre. In this paper I will look at Victorian madness in general and at the figure Bertha more closely. Furthermore I will also look, from a somewhat feminist perspective, at Wide Sargasso Sea, a novel in which Jean Rhys takes up the figure of Bertha again. I shall try to explain this rewriting of a canonical text in a postcolonial context. Historical Madness Early in the Victorian period the madness seems to be lurking in the shadows
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Death Foretold? The novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold was written by Gabriel Garcia Marquez and further published in 1981. It is based on the true story of a man by the name of Santiago Nasar who had been accused for taking the virginity of an unmarried woman named Angela Vicario. The story takes place in a small town in Colombia, South America, set in the 1950’s. According to the Colombian culture, it is a terrible sin to take the virginity of an unmarried woman, so in the novel, this sinful man
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Peter Pan Peter and Wendy Peter and Wendy is a novel written by James M. Barrie. Hodder and Stoughton published it in 1911 in the United Kingdom. The novel is based on Barrie’s play The Boy Who Wouldn’t Grow Up which has the same storyline and was published in 1904 The novel is about the little girl Wendy and her smaller siblings Michael and John who goes on an adventure in the magic Neverland with Peter Pan, the boy who wouldn’t grow up. Peter listens to Wendy’s mother’s bedtime stories
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artificial artistic modes of expression that preceded it, for instance Romanticism and 18th century Classicism. It became prominent in French Literature in the late 19th century and Faubert was one of the artists art the forefront of the movement. Realist novels are based on the simple and mundane every day routines. Realist writers did not believe in writing about the extraordinary, instead they look to portray life in a truthful way, mainly by using an objective narrative point of view and by amassing accurate
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A Thousand Splendid Suns transports the reader to an unimaginable, unforgiving world. Khaled Hosseini wants the reader to understand, to experience, and to feel the depths of this place. A world unimaginable by many is brought to life through the experiences of the two women. Through the use of characterization, structure, and setting, Hosseini is able to express the despondent tone, while at the same time convey the idea that hope and endless courage are the only ways to survive in a world tarnished
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culture clash on a land where “Things Fall Apart; the center cannot hold” (Achebe, 2009). The title of this book is symbolic to the turnout of events in the story and foreshadows the inability of Umoufia to resist the pressures of change. In the novel, we see a clash between cultures and change that leads to the fall of the Igbo society, a clan that used to be strong and powerful before the white people came. The Igbo people face a dilemma on whether to accept the change, keep their way of life
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Brave New World by Aldous Huxley Brave New world is a dystopian novel written in England in 1931 and published in 1932 during the Modernism literary period. The setting of the novel is in London and New Mexico ruled under an imagined future one-world government called the World State. The World State of Brave New World is a totalitarian dystopia that uses technology to, deceive its citizens into loving their slavery. Dystopia is a society, in this case the World State, that is an imaginary society
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1996, Fight Club, started out as a book that inspired a massive following. Its popularity prompted David Fincher to use its storyline to shoot the 1999 movie by the same title. Like the novel, the movie also garnered a cultic following. The novel focuses on an unreliable and seemingly tormented narrator, whose name remains unnamed, and his relationship with the mysterious Tyler Durden. The duo creates a fight club, an underground boxing club, which later grows into an organization whose mission, Project
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believes it is important for people today to read this book because they need to be shown how important it is not to keep silent and let something like the holocaust happen again. Elie has some of the most marvelous figurative language throughout the novel, starting off with some metaphors. Elie and the rest of the block are running to a peculiar concentration camp, with no rest Elie starts having speculation of what will happened if he stops running. “ A great ideal wave of men came rolling onward and
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W.A. Smith’s literary novel, Einstein’s Fiddle, references the parable of the Prodigal Son. In the novel, we follow the prodigal Davy Calhoun’s flight from his family and his failure as a writer, his fall into despair, and a barely held hope for redemption and ultimately forgiveness. In 1985, alcohol-fuelled Davy sets off to his hometown Charlottesville, Virginia, after kidnapping his infant son from his estranged wife Molly in Chicago. Before reaching Virginia, Davy leaves the baby on a doorstep
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