Saturday 26 June 2021
ELIZABETH GASKELL'S NORTH AND SOUTH
Friday 25 June 2021
GEORGE ELIOT'S MIDDLEMARCH
George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans, was an English Victorian novelist who developed the method of psychological analysis characteristic of modern fiction. Her major works include Adam Bede (1859), The Mill on the Floss (1860), Silas Marner (1861), Middlemarch (1871–72), and Daniel Deronda (1876).
Middlemarch is considered to be George Eliot’s masterpiece. The realist work is a study of every class of society in the town of Middlemarch—from the landed gentry and clergy to the manufacturers and professional men, farmers, and labourers. The focus, however, is on the thwarted idealism of its two principal characters, Dorothea Brooke and Tertius Lydgate, both of whom marry disastrously.
https://www.gradesaver.com/middlemarch
Saturday 19 June 2021
WILLIAM BLAKE'S ILLUMINATED PRINTING
"A method of printing which combines the painter and
the poet." William Blake
Read here.
https://www.skoletorget.no/abb/eng/blake/ill_print.html
Wednesday 16 June 2021
BERTHA MASON IN JANE EYRE
Bertha Mason is a complex presence in Jane Eyre. She impedes Jane’s happiness, but she also catalyses the growth of Jane’s self-understanding. The mystery surrounding Bertha establishes suspense and terror to the plot and the atmosphere. Further, Bertha serves as a reminder of Rochester’s youthful libertinism (=the behavior of a libertine, a person who is unrestrained by convention or morality, one leading a dissolute life).
Yet Bertha can be
interpreted as a symbol. Some critics have read her as a statement about the
way Britain feared and psychologically “locked away” the other cultures it encountered
at the height of its imperialism. Others have seen her as a symbolic representation
of the “trapped” Victorian wife, who is expected never to travel or work
outside the house and becomes ever more frenzied as she finds no outlet for her
frustration and anxiety. Within the story, then, Bertha’s insanity could serve
as a warning to Jane of what complete surrender to Rochester could bring about.
Monday 7 June 2021
British novelist, essayist, and social and literary critic E.M. Forster died on 7 June 1970.
One of the most gifted writers of his time, he penned some of the best novels of the 20th century that were well-plotted and ironic and included themes of class and hypocrisy in English society. Read here.