Criticism
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Things Have Changed: the Moon in Romeo and Juliet
Even Plutarch gives us versions of the moon yearning after the sun. Although elsewhere they’re figured as siblings. God – those Ancient Greeks!
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08.08 Shirley Jackson
Horror shows us the monster. We react. Terror invites us to imagine it. We anticipate.
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First 100 words: ‘The Great Gatsby’
in 100 WordsAs a ‘cold reader’, I assume our narrator is Gatsby. On the whole, I’m not sure how much to trust or like him, yet.
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05.08 Toni Morrison
I don’t think Toni Morrison wasn’t writing greetings cards. Or motivational posters.
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Comfortably Numb: Medicine in Richard II
“Hello? Is there anybody in there?” Richard II is too comfortably numb to listen to deathbed advice from his dissenting uncle.
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First 100 words: ‘Nineteen Eighty-Four’
in 100 WordsIt’s England, but not as we know it. And I don’t much like what they’ve done with the place.
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From the Archives: 27.07.18
‘you ought to be able to do this – and enjoy the process – for any text’. Challenge accepted!
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‘The Revolution Will Not Be Televised’: Rome in Julius Caesar
To Shakespeare’s audience, Rome was more than an idea – it was often an ideal. But what is this ‘Rome’? Who gets to define it? Or what it wants/needs?
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First 100 Words: ‘Rebecca’
in 100 WordsThe temperature’s dropped, storm clouds have suddenly covered the sun, and … oh my god, are those wolves I can hear in the background? Let’s look closely at how du Maurier does this in just 100 words.
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24.07 Madeline Miller
‘Who wants to live forever?’, as Queen sang in 1986. On her birthday, let’s explore that idea through Madeline MIller’s retellings (with a little help from Tennyson, Edna St Vincent Millay, and Stephen King).