Hello, everyone. Looking for authors who have touched on Lord Dunsany's work, other than Lovecraft, who wrote an entire essay on this author. Also I'm particularly interested to know if anyone has researched it from an ecocritical perspective.

Hi can you please help me what do I put on my PowerPoint for discussing/reporting analytical essay I'm having a hard time where to start and what to make also it's hard to understand what analytical essay really is

Im thinking of peguin or wordsworth classics, but as far as i know, peguin has more poems than the wordsworth edition, but i don't know if it has the "deathbed" leaves of grass in it too.

Hi ! i am looking for literature on the importance of found family/alternative familial structures. For more context, I love persuasion by Jane austen and may use the novel for my MA thesis - I find the found family aspect of the novel fascinating.

Anything would help !

edit: ignore the typo in the title :/

I don't specialise in literature at all and am hoping that one of you would be able to shed some light on this for me, please.

I am currently re-reading Anna Karenina and it to me it feels as though the late 19th century, with the birth of psychoanalysis, too, was a time during which subjectivity really comes to the forefront.

Particularly, it seems as though romance is a great vehicle for authors to explore subjectivity.

I know subjectivity really becomes the overwhelming reality during moderninsm, but is it true that this was a bit of a turning point in literature?

Thank you!

I'm sure, deep down, anyone committing such atrocities first-hand would know they are in the wrong. But characters like Kurtz, his Intended, and Marlow's Aunt actually seem to believe that they are doing the Africans a favour. The aunt went so far as to paint Marlow (while trying to get him the job) as an "emissary of light" or "apostle" and it makes me think she believes similar of the other colonial agents. The only message they are bringing is one of death and destruction. To some extent, they must all know this. So what makes them think they are helping the Congolese in any way?

Is there a common word to describe the people who read or listen to a poem? Or both are fine?

Hi all!

I just finished my bachelor's, and I'm looking to do a master's in lit online since I'll be working during my studies and would prefer not to have to be on a campus or move away from my partner. I'm looking for a program that's online but still respected by the academic community. I'm also looking for a general literature degree, not just English lit. Thanks in advance!

As per the title,I've been playing around with the idea of getting some subscriptions to different magazines or quarterlies. Someone left a James Joyce Quarterly in my English building today and it made me realize there are probably tons of niche Quarterlies out there I don't even know about, and same goes for magazines.

Hello! I’m beginning a PhD in English Literature, and my topic is on time loops and alternate realities in postmodern fiction. I am looking for recommendations of books for my potential corpus. I am currently considering Replay by Ken Grimwood, Recursion & Dark Matter by Blake Crouch, The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle by Stuart Turton, and The First Fifteen Lives of Harry August by Claire North.

My thesis will be on self-reinvention in these novels and the idea of possibilities and counterfactual thinking (the idea of “what if” and “what would have happened if” you made different decisions in a different life).

If you have any idea of a novel that would be worth considering, please let me know!

Let us know what you have been reading lately, what you have finished up, any recommendations you have or want, etc. Also, use this thread for any questions that don’t need an entire post for themselves (see rule 4).

Hello, community! I need help with one question, I hope they can explain it more clearly here: What is the difference between ecopoetry, ecopoetics and ecophilosophy? I more or less managed to build an internal paradigm of their difference, but I could not make a final conclusion for myself.

Hi everyone,
for a seminar on Henry James we were advised to get a copy of the New York edition of Portrait of a Lady. I have an old copy by Wordsworth Classics, ISBN is 1853261777. Upon checking I'm beginning to think this is the New York edition but could somebody point me to a definite marker as to what edition I have?
Maybe a specific passage?
Thank you in advance :)

Hi, I'm soon to be a third year English/Creative Writing student and next year, my choices for English are Gothic Literature and Environmental Literature. I'm interested to hear what people who've studied those genres (in school or otherwise) have to say about them, so that I can get a better insight into both genres. Thanks!

I'm a secondary student and I missed out on a chance to take literature as an elective class due to the lack of students who signed up. I decided to study literature myself so I can still take the exams. Are there are any suitable online courses for beginners? (I have not taken literature before, my only experience is first language english class) I'm fine with paying, and I'd prefer one that would give a certificate at the end. Thanks!

Hi all! I'm a university undergrad trying to find books for a project, and I think I'd like to investigate sapphic women in Francophone literature, but most of the literature & scholarship (after an admittedly cursory search) is about lesbians, and not bisexual women. I thought I'd come here to see if anyone in this sub has anything that would be helpful — I found a bunch of texts from an old post in this sub, too. I also am realizing that i don't know much about the history of bisexuality & bisexual representation in literature, so even if you don't have any specific books in mind, I'm happy to hear anything that could point me in the right direction!

Let me elaborate.

In many countries, there is this appreciation for certain books, artworks, music, etc... from previous centuries. You see this in Britain, in Sweden, but even in Brazil and Mexico.

There are many interesting things from the 1700s and 1800s from the US that I often feel doesn't get that much attention from the broad American public but only niche academic folks.

Now obviously there is Poe, Whitman, Emerson, etc...that's not even a debate.

There was also many writers in the 18th century, and while Benjamin Franklin was indeed a bright mind in his century, he wasn't some bright star among a bunch of bumpkins. It's more nuanced than that.

There was Susana Rowson, Alexander Reinagle, Hannah Webster Foster, or the iconic Francis Hopkinson, but also Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatly, among many others.

Meaning that these early iconic American artists ever hardly get the same treatment by the American people as their contemporaries in France and Britain get from their countrymen.

Schools mostly focus on post-civil war writers, and hardly ever on the early American writers that were parallel to Jefferson and Adams.

Why is this?

Again, let me be very clear. i am NOT saying that folks don't appreciate these early writers at all. Im saying that the early American literature is not as culturally relevant and appreciated by contemporary Americans in the same way that French, British, German, etc... literature from that same time period is appreciate by the contemporary French, Brits, Germans, etc....

I want read to Arabic literature and philosophy. Especially fiction, I want to know what will a great start to it? I'm interested in prose with existentialist themes and philosophy relevant to history of science. English translations please!

I'm looking for more works that do close, structural and formalist readings of prose works. Similar to Brooks' The Well Wrought Urn and Barthes' S/Z.

Apologies if this a silly question--I'm rereading The Dead for my survey of English literature course, and I noticed the anecdote Gabriel relays about Johnny the horse bears a strong resemblance to the final scene of The Sound and the Fury. For reference, here's the passage from The Dead.

Out from the mansion of his forefathers," continued Gabriel, "he drove with Johnny. And everything went on beautifully until Johnny came in sight of King Billy's statue: and whether he fell in love with the horse King Billy sits on or whether he thought he was back again in the mill, anyhow he began to walk round the statue." Gabriel paced in a circle round the hall in his goloshes amid the laughter of the others. " Round and round he went," said Gabriel, "and the old gentleman, who was a very pompous old gentleman, was highly indignant. 'Go on, sir! What do you mean, sir? Johnny! Johnny! Most extraordinary conduct! Can't understand the horse! ' "

And here's the one from The Sound and the Fury:

They approached the square, where the Confederate soldier gazed with empty eyes beneath his marble hand in wind and weather. Luster took still another notch in himself and gave the impervious Queenie a cut with the switch, casting his glance about the square. "Dar Mr Jason car," he said, then he spied another group of negroes. "Les show dem niggers how quality does, Benjy," he said. "Whut you say?" He looked back. Ben sat, holding the flower in his fist, his gaze empty and untroubled. Luster hit Queenie again and swung her to the left at the monument. For an instant Ben sat in an utter hiatus. Then he bellowed. Bellow on bellow, his voice mounted, with scarce interval for breath. There was more than astonishment in it, it was horror; shock; agony eyeless, tongueless; just sound, and Luster's eyes backrolling for a white instant. "Gret God," he said. "Hush! Hush! Gret God!"

Am I just linking Dubliners and The Sound and the Fury because I read them in the same class? (lol) Or was Faulkner intentionally referencing Joyce here? Thanks!

I am not really sure what to do. I wrote a journal article, submitted it to a journal, got a very helpful revise-resubmit, and--some months later--started PTSD treatment for some very severe trauma. I am aware this sounds dramatic, but I can no longer engage with the material in the paper without exacerbating my PTSD symptoms and ruining my sleep. I have tried and failed many times and told the journal I've been dealing with some health issues for two years. Can I just ask them to withdraw it with the reason of ongoing health issues? I am truly mortified.

What it says on the tin. In the 10th edition of The Norton Anthology, the comma which ends line fifteen ("And miles to go before I sleep,") is replaced with a period. I've never seen it formatted that way before, and it's kind of an important comma for the suicide poem interpretation so I'm wondering what gives. Anyone know if this is a thing? Or is it just a weird error?

What are some good texts (fiction or nonfiction) which include mirrors as a recurring symbol, or analyse how mirrors function as a symbol in literature? I've been intrigued by them as I've seen them pop up in horror, but I'm not too sure what they mean.

So, I've got a BS and an MS in Geology. I've always been fascinated with landscape, and because of this I've always loved both the Earth Sciences and Romanticism. I'm thrilled to have the amount of knowledge about the Earth and its landscapes that I do now, it adds an extra dimension to spending time in wilderness, hiking, etc, and has generally been a good career so far that has taken me to some interesting places in the middle of nowhere (mineral exploration camps, etc) for long periods of time, which gave me a lot of time to read.

Writing has been a passion of mine for a long time too. Anyway, I feel like I really want to explore more of the literary world, now that I've gone as far as I think I'm going to go in the geosciences, formal-education-wise.

Basically, I'd be very interested in exploring how landscape plays a role in literature and western (though not just western) thought. I love Thoreau, Lord Byron, Emerson, Tolkien, Yeats, Wordsworth, and generally all works of fiction or non-fiction with rich and poetic landscape descriptions and I think it's fascinating that descriptions of landscape (and landscapes in real life of course) can be so emotional and evocative. I'd love to explore more about how these things are interconnected. I'd bet we wouldn't have so much protected natural public land in the USA if it weren't for originally the Romantics then the Transcendentalists.

Is this a fool's errand? I have well paying job in my field, but I feel kinda called to this for some reason. I'm not yet 30, and delving deeper into literature like this seems like a stone I might've left unturned. Would I even be considered without an English background?

I've been working on the search of the everyday in modernist lit for quite some time now (there's a decent bibliography on that already, but also space for new explorations), and I tried hard not to start my research with any proper definition of the everyday, but go in rounds and see which approaches yield results and which go nowhere. "A novel with a theory inside it is like a gift with a price-tag", wrote Proust in the last volume of La Recherche, ironically in the middle of a very long theoretical digression lol. And so the search for the everyday life that can be written about begins.

Such going back to rediscover our pre-theoretical, everyday attitude is very prominent in early phenomenology; Welsch writes somewhere that there were philosophers who really captured the spirit of the (modernist) times, like Nietzsche, and ones that completely missed it, like academical philosophy and especially Husserl. Now this is not entirely true: Husserl tried to make his project about "the science of the obvious/trivial"; tried to go back to the things as they appear to us, fleeting sensations; disregarded entire metaphysics and science to focus on the first person experience; explicitly said that the sensations of oneself, the body and the world appear to us at the same time and are entangled; now we're talking, I thought to myself as I plunged to read primary material months ago.

That Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty are super important explorations of the theme that Woolf called "the cotton wool of daily life" (dumbing us down unless someone says something witty, according to Gina, and terribly difficult to write about: there's nothing so unnatural as nonchalance in writing after all), there's no doubt about it (and there's more and more written on the subject, especially The Waves is a novel that's gained a following in phenomenological circles, with Heidegger and MM-P on board, always with a good citation). All good.

But when reading Husserl I've come to the conclusion that he's absolutely hopeless in literary studies. A mathematician and logician after all, all of his big talk about Lebenswelt doesn't help any explorations of the lived-everyday-world in any way at all. The fact that the founding father of phenomenology never really explored the logos part of the equation and always disliked language, which is messy, historical, social and impure, doesn't help at all.

(Ariane Mildenberg who's a very witty scholar and the authors of recent Phenomenology to the Letter beg to disagree with me, but what they mention as limited understanding of Husserl's philosophy among modern day literary scholars was already quite prominent among Husserl's students in the 30s... I also quite enjoyed de Warren's writings putting Husserl's philosophy in the context of the shock of the World War, but alas nothing usable to me there except the notion of the crisis, which is foundational to every modernist poet, novelist and philosopher after all).

Sorry for a longer post. I'm going back to Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty to finally have something concrete to write about. But I hope I'm wrong and perhaps there's more to add regarding Husserl and literature? Disagreements, agreements, complaints, rude PMs, bibliographical references – I'm taking it all and thanks in advance. ;)

At my university, the focus for a Master’s thesis is on conducting textual analysis, thoroughly understanding prior research, and constructing a solid argument. There seems to be a tendency to discourage overly complex approaches, such as incorporating philosophy or extensive methodological frameworks.The professors say that only a small amount of new discoveries is sufficient.

Of course, writing a logically sound thesis is the most important aspect. I also understand the importance of not broadening the scope too much and ensuring prior research is well-addressed. That said, I want to write a thesis that deeply analyzes a literary work and reflects my personal interest in the text.

Does this mean the expectations for a Master’s thesis are lower (or more constrained) because I’m studying English literature in a non-English-speaking country? Or are Master’s theses generally at this level regardless of the country?

I look forward to your responses. Thank you.

Hello, I'm a English lit major from Turkey so it's not my native language. For my British Drama course im reading "The Way of the World" by William Congreve, a comedy from restoration period. The thing is the language feels complex with lots of words that i am unfamiliar with. Therefore I can't follow the plot or comprehend what's going on.

For the course, previously I read; Second Shepherd's Play, Everyman and Doctor Faustus which I would say were not this challenging. Last week we were assigned of Ben Jonson's Volpone and that felt hard as well.

My question is that is it my English skill or the texts are actually hard to get into? I wonder how hard is reading Shakespeare or other playwrights for native speakers? Any suggestions to enhance my comprehension? Thanks in advance. It really demotivates me towards my field, despite my love for it 🫥

Let us know what you have been reading lately, what you have finished up, any recommendations you have or want, etc. Also, use this thread for any questions that don’t need an entire post for themselves (see rule 4).