By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Many notable short stories focus on the rough passage from childhood to adulthood. Of course, the transition from ‘child’ to ‘adult’ does not happen overnight, and is not the result of a single epiphany of crucial moment, but writers of short fiction often distil the development from innocence to experience using such moments for dramatic or narrative effect.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
Centaurs are surely the most famous human-animal hybrids from classical mythology, along with the Minotaur. But what do centaurs represent? These creatures – part-human, part-horse – turn up in a number of different myths from antiquity, but the meaning of these stories, and what the centaurs symbolise, varies from tale to tale.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘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 God’s Script’ takes in, among other things, some quintessentially Borgesian themes including the infinite, the power of writing, and the individual who is granted access to arcane knowledge.
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, unremarkable ‘events’ whose symbolism is allowed to come quietly and unobtrusively to the surface.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
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 the Greek god Eros being namechecked in the title, the first detailed narrative from antiquity involving these lovers was not written until the second century AD, and it was a Roman rather than a Greek author who was responsible for the story.