‘The Swan’ is a poem by the American poet Mary Oliver (1935-2019), who has perhaps not received as much attention from critics as she deserves. It’s been estimated that she was the bestselling poet in the United States at the time of her death, so a few words of analysis […]
‘Everybody’s Protest Novel’ is a polemical essay by James Baldwin (1924-87), published in 1949. In the essay, Baldwin outlines the problem with novels which highlight the oppression of black people in the United States, starting with Uncle Tom’s Cabin in the 1850s. For Baldwin, these novels are fantasies which actually […]
‘Young Goodman Brown’ is an 1835 short story by the American author Nathaniel Hawthorne. Inspired in part by the Salem witch craze of 1692, the story contains a number of powerful symbols. But how should we analyse the symbolism of the story? Let’s take a closer look at the most […]
The short stories of the American writer Kate Chopin (1850-1904) are important precursors to twentieth-century modernism, and can be viewed as forerunners to the short fiction of Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and other high modernists. Where other nineteenth-century writers tended to privilege plot over character, and action over introspection, Chopin […]
‘The Bloody Chamber’ is the title story in Angela Carter’s 1979 collection of fairy tales rewritten from a feminist perspective. In the story, the longest in the collection, a young bride recounts her marriage to a Marquis whose previous three wives all died in mysterious circumstances, and the grisly discovery […]