By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘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 perpetuate the status quo rather than disrupting or challenging it.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
The novels and 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 focused on interiority and the inner lives of her female protagonists.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘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 she made in a ‘bloody chamber’ of his castle.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Agony and the Sweat’ is the title sometimes given to one of the most memorable Nobel Prize acceptance speeches: the American novelist William Faulkner’s acceptance of the Nobel Prize for Literature at Stockholm in 1950. In his speech, Faulkner makes his famous statement about the ‘duty’ of writers: that they should write about ‘the human heart in conflict with itself’, as well as emotions and themes such as compassion, sacrifice, courage, and hope.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Nature’ is an 1836 essay by the American writer and thinker Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803-82). In this essay, Emerson explores the relationship between nature and humankind, arguing that if we approach nature with a poet’s eye, and a pure spirit, we will find the wonders of nature revealed to us.