By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
First published in 1819, ‘Rip Van Winkle’ is one of the most famous pieces of writing by Washington Irving, whose contribution to American literature was considerable. ‘Rip Van Winkle’ has become a byword for the idea of falling asleep and waking up to find the familiar world around us has changed.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Eveline’ is one of the shortest stories that make up James Joyce’s collection Dubliners (1914), a volume that was not an initial commercial success (it sold just 379 copies in its first year of publication, and 120 of those were bought by Joyce himself). We have analysed the collection as a whole, and summarised each of the stories in Dubliners, here.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Open Window’ is one of Saki’s shortest stories, and that’s saying something. Few of his perfectly crafted and deliciously written tales exceed four or five pages in length, but ‘The Open Window’, at barely three pages, outstrips even ‘The Lumber-Room’ or ‘Tobermory’ for verbal economy.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘Hop-Frog’, like many of Edgar Allan Poe’s best stories, carries the force of parable. It is a curious mixture of revenge, horror, and spectacle, about a dwarf who exacts spectacular brutal vengeance on a cruel monarch. The story was first published in March 1849; by the end of the year, Poe would be dead.
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)
‘The Cask of Amontillado’ is one of Poe’s shorter classic tales. It was first published in 1846 in a women’s magazine named Godey’s Lady’s Book, a hugely popular magazine in the US in the mid-nineteenth century. (The magazine had published one of Poe’s earliest stories, ‘The Visionary’, twelve years earlier.)