Tag: Literary criticism
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Knowing It When You See It: Fanny Hill, Her Literary Sisters and Her Legacy
“…our virtues and our vices depend too much on our circum-stances…” (Fanny Hill, p. 77) I recently read John Cleland’s infamous novel Fanny Hill: or, the Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure (1748/9), and while not really a piece of high literature, it got me thinking about a whole host of other banned/censored books and…
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American Authors in the First Millennium: Zora Neale Hurston’s The Life of Herod the Great and Thornton Wilder’s The Ides of March
While it’s hard to ever call historical fiction set in the Roman period passé, I do sometimes feel like I’m out here on an island, as it seems most of the current genre zeitgeist is for almost entirely 20th century historical fiction, with a few forays into midcentury Victorian. But as I’m pretty much never…
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My Best Reads of 2024
Here we are, at the end of another year already! I hope that your literary year, whether as a reader, a writer, or just a person questing for knowledge in all its forms, was fruitful. Because of a small effort to take some time off from writing (or at least, feel less guilty for not…
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Anne Again: Reviewing and Revisiting YA Holocaust Literature
In February of last year, I wrote an entry that was in the macro about authorial ethics in historical fiction and in the micro about fictional portrayals of Anne Frank specifically. I was pleased that entry seems to have connected with a number of you, both because I think it was an interesting and important…
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The Dark Knight Returns: Abridgment, Adaptation, and Revisiting The Count of Monte Cristo
“Tell the angel who will watch over your future destiny, Morrel, to pray sometimes for a man who, like Satan, thought himself, for an instant, equal to God; but who now acknowledges, with Christian humility, that God alone possesses supreme power and infinite wisdom.” – The Count of Monte Cristo, chapter 117 “You’ll like it;…
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Any Dream Will Do: The Enduring Legacy of The Tale of Sinuhe
“O God, whosoever thou art that didst ordain this flight, show mercy and bring me to the Residence! Peradventure thou wilt grant me to see the place where my heart dwelleth. What matter is greater than that my corpse should be buried in the land wherein I was born?” – The Tale of Sinuhe (Gardiner…
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Girls and Boys and Boys and Girls: Medieval Identity and Gender in Le Roman de Silence and Aucassin et Nicolette
This week, as threatened, I want to get back into some medieval literature with two more lesser-known 13th century French chanson prose poems, the Arthurian-adjacent Roman de Silence and the tongue-in-cheek romance parody Aucassin et Nicolette. While not perhaps immediately similar, both of these works have what a modern audience would likely find surprisingly sophisticated…
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Appointment in Chautauqua: Meditations on Salman Rushdie’s Knife
“So my first thought when I saw this murderous shape rushing toward me was: So it’s you. Here you are… This was my second thought: Why now? Really? It’s been so long. Why now, after all these years?” — Knife “The history of life was not the bumbling progress—the very English, middle-class progress—Victorian thought had…
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Christendom’s Favorite Frienemy: the History and Hagiography of Salah al-Din in the Western Imagination
“[Saladin] gave [the stolen Christian baby] to the mother and she took it; with tears streaming down her face, and hugged the baby to her chest. The people were watching her and weeping and I was standing amongst them. She suckled it for some time and then Saladin ordered a horse to be fetched for…
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For Those in Peril on the Sea (and Life): Shipwrecked with Barbara Newhall Follett’s Lost Island
“Even beauty changed. You changed. You were caught in the midst of complex currents of continual change. Perhaps it was good, if only you could accept it completely—if only your heartstrings would accept it. Perhaps it could keep you alive and happy and excited, if you knew how to use it. That was how you…
Sarah Holz 