‘The Ice Palace’ is a short story by the American writer F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), originally published in the Saturday Evening Post in May 1920. The story is about a southern belle who becomes engaged to a man from the North; however, she almost freezes to death in an ice […]
Although it was a last-minute addition, the myth of the Fisher King plays an important part in one of the greatest poems of the twentieth century: T. S. Eliot’s modernist poem The Waste Land (1922). But what is the story of the Fisher King, and what is its meaning and […]
‘What is Enlightenment?’, full title ‘Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?’, is a 1784 essay by the philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724-1804). As the longer title suggests, Kant’s essay is a response to a question (posed by a clergyman, Reverend Johann Friedrich Zöllner) concerning the nature of philosophical enlightenment. What is […]
What are the best short stories which are set in school, or which focus on school and one’s schooldays? There are plenty of stories which are ‘set in schools’ in the sense of being set reading for schoolchildren, but it’s harder to find some canonical and classic short stories which […]
Postmodernism came to prominence in the second half of the twentieth century. As the name suggests, postmodernism developed out of modernism: it came after modernism, both in the sense that it chronologically followed it, and in the sense of extending, and to some extent critiquing, the aims and attitudes of […]