Commentary – Page 3 – Interesting Literature

A Short Analysis of Katherine Mansfield’s ‘Prelude’

‘Prelude’, the long short story which opens Katherine Mansfield’s 1920 collection Bliss and Other Stories, is a modernist masterpiece. But like much modernist fiction, its meaning and its subtle use of symbolism and other narrative devices are unlikely to be fully apparent after a first, or even a second reading. You can read ‘Prelude’ here; on Tuesday we offered a detailed summary of the ‘plot’ of the story; now, we venture to put down some words of analysis about this story.

Because ‘Prelude’ is a modernist short story, the emphasis is on character rather than plot, as is also often the case with James Joyce’s short stories or Virginia Woolf’s short fiction. Mansfield is using the Burnells’ house-move,

A Summary and Analysis of John Keats’s ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ (‘the beautiful lady without mercy’) is one of John Keats’s best-loved and most widely anthologised poems; after his odes, it may well be his most famous. But is this poem with its French title a mere piece of pseudo-medieval escapism, summoning the world of chivalrous knights and beautiful but bewitching women, or does it have a deeper meaning?

You can read ‘La Belle Dame sans Merci’ here before proceeding to our summary below (it might be helpful to have the poem open in a separate tab so you can follow the poem and summary together).

A Short Analysis of William Shakespeare’s The Tempest

On Tuesday, we offered a short plot summary of The Tempest, one of Shakespeare’s last plays, and his final solo work for the theatre. As we remarked then, The Tempest is essentially a fantasy story (or ‘romance’ to use the term that tends to be used to categorise The Tempest) featuring a magician, the ‘monstrous’ offspring of a wicked witch, treachery and conspiracy, drunkenness, fairies, a lavish masque, young lovers, and much else. How should we go about interpreting Shakespeare’s last solo work for the theatre? Below, we offer some notes towards an analysis.

Inspiration for The Tempest

Shakespeare is thought to have based his play The Tempest on a real-life shipwreck. William Strachey’s A True Reportory of the Wracke and Redemption of Sir Thomas Gates, Knight, an account of his experience

A Summary and Analysis of John Keats’s ‘Ode to a Nightingale’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘Ode to a Nightingale’ is one of a series of odes the Romantic poet John Keats (1795-1821) wrote, and one of the most famous. Before we offer a brief summary of Keats’s poem, it might be helpful to read ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ here in a separate tab, and follow the poem and our analysis alongside each other.

A Short Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s ‘Monday or Tuesday’

Earlier this week, we offered a brief summary of Virginia Woolf’s story ‘Monday or Tuesday’. But summarising this strange little story doesn’t exactly help us in understanding what it means. So below we offer a few words of analysis of this modernist piece of impressionism. You can read ‘Monday or Tuesday’ here.

If you found reading ‘Monday or Tuesday’ a disorienting experience, don’t worry: you’re meant to. One of the things Woolf is exploring through this short story is disorientation, distraction, the difficult and perhaps foolish quest for truthful and honest representation of the world through one’s writing. Even the title hints at this confusion and uncertainty: to the narrator, and perhaps to Woolf herself, today could be either Monday or Tuesday.