Possession: A Romance
Possession: A Romance published in 1990 and became Winner of England’s Booker Prize and the literary sensation of the year. Possession stood a best- seller book in England and in America By March 1991, by selling more than 100,000 copies in the United States alone. Warner Brothers bought the film rights in 1991, and the playwright Henry David Hwang (M. Butterfly) has written the screenplay. The novel became a film by the same name in 2002.
When Byatt’s American publisher, Random House, asked her to omit some of the poetry and place description-the novel is 555 pages in hardcover-she refused. On the other hand, she agreed to make a trivial nonetheless, telling change in her description of Roland, who is in the American
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And it has that kind of dreadful energy that comes of having written it from the first word to the last with the whole book in your head.
Counting in the following way shows that she knew everybody would accept it:
It’s the only one I’ve written to be liked, and I did it partly to show off. I thought, why not pull out the stops, why do these painstaking observations . . . why not write about the 19th century!” but she also says that “I actually paced it for the first time with the reader’s attention span in mind”.
However, these and other comments Byatt offers about her work may be stands the proverbial grain of salt-there is indeed a good deal of art in Possession, and sometimes the life becomes imprisoned within the art, nevertheless, in its exploration of love and loss, the novel rings true and deep. Even though authors are not always the best commentators on their own work, Byatt as a literary critic is better than numerous in this regard. Still, Byatt is as susceptible as the next author to the “interview effect”: an author, forced to make pronouncement on the ineluctable creative process, loses or obscures a bit of the truth of
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. . . The librarian fetched a checked duster, and wiped away the dust, a black, thick, tenacious Victorian dust. . . . Roland undid the bindings. The book sprang apart, like a box, disgorging leaf after leaf of faded paper, blue, cream, gray, covered with rusty writing, the brown scratches of a steel nib. Roland recognized the handwriting with a shock of excitement.”
It was her mother who inspired Byatt the passion for the old-fashioned Victorians who provided her Browning (the model for the fictional 19th-century poet Randolph Henry Ash in “Possession”) as a child.
“For the Victorians, everything was part of one thing: science, religion, philosophy, economics, politics, women, fiction, and poetry. They didn’t classify-they thought BIG. Ruskin went out and learned geology and archaeology, then the history of painting, then mythology, and then he thought out, and he thought out. Now, if you get a literary theorist, they only talk to other literary theorists about literary theory. Nothing causes them to look
But, it is the beginning of a new challenge for herself. The weekend before she is supposed to give her speech, she has no idea what to write. She wanted to be able to express herself and give a voice to her freedom. Finally she has an idea late the night before, “I started to write, recklessly, three, five pages, looking up once only to see my father passing by the hall on tiptoe. When I was done, I read over my words, and my eyes filled.
III. Discussion/Essay Questions: 1. Hans Hubermann hid Max because Hans knew Max’s father and when he died in the war, he promised Max’s mother that he would help in anyway he could. Do you think that Hans Hubermann would have still hidden Max if he didn’t know Max’s father?
We will analyse, in this essay, the differences as well as the similarities which exist between Jane Eyre and Incidents in the life of a slave girl written by herself. We will see that they differ in terms of genre, the period of history in which they find themselves, the way the characters are presented and so forth. However, they share some of the main values concerning womanhood, race and some other aspects of life which they both treat in different ways and yet they do so in a specific aim. Charlotte Brontë and Harriet Jacobs present to us two texts which are both based in totally opposite moments in history. While many differences exist between the two texts, they have several aspects in common.
“I hungered for the sharp, frightening, breathtaking, almost painful excitement that the story had given me, and I vowed that as soon as I was old enough I would buy all the novels there were and read…So profoundly responsive a chord had the tale struck in me that the threats of my mother and grandmother had no effect whatsoever,” (Wright, 40). Wright feels so captivated from the stories he is reading, that he does not care for any consequences from the real world. This early exposure to literature keeps him eager to continue learning about new stories and knowledge. Wright has this same kind of realization again when he borrows a co-worker’s library card. “I hungered for books, new ways of looking and seeing.
Historical criticism strives to cognize a literary work by examining the social, cultural, and intellectual context that essentially includes the artist’s biography and milieu. Historical critics are more concerned with guiding readers through the use of identical connotation rather than analyzing the work’s literary significance. (Brizee and Tompkins). The journey of a historical reading begins with the assessment of how the meaning of a text has altered over time. In many cases, when the historical context of a text is not fully comprehended, the work literature cannot be accurately interpreted.
(38) The author shows that she is in favor of this when she says, “I was taken aback by the visceral longing I felt to be a part of
You can feel the gravity of her realization with the use of the writers diction including words that induce thought such as "ponderous" or "shadowy anguish". The
One would think that the most passionate writers were constantly surrounded by massive piles of books. That's the only way to get them passionate about reading. However this Eudora Welty was not one of these writers. In One Writer’s Beginnings Eudora Welty through the use of frantic imagery, intimidating connotative diction, and apposition is able to effectively portray her purpose of writing, that being the influence literature has made on her life. Welty utilizes frantic imagery that effectively demonstrates the excitement she had as a child for reading.
It may skew her thinking and at times be subjective. The intended audience is someone who is studying literature and interested in how women are portrayed in novels in the 19th century. The organization of the article allows anyone to be capable of reading it.
Since these creators are the source of the idolization of nature, she writes to them in order to reverse their misconception. Oates realizes that their subject is not the authentic force, but rather one that was handed endless meaning by artisans. She addresses them mockingly, utilizing rhetorical questions as a way to aggravate their thought process. Including herself in the audience of authors, she toys with the image of authors and jokes that the reason they write so profusely on nature is that “...we must, we’re writers, poets, mystics (of a sort) aren’t we, precisely what else are we to do but glamorize and romanticize and generally exaggerate the significance of anything we focus the white heat of our “creativity” upon?” (Oates 226).
In Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” demonstrates the personal growth of the dynamic protagonist Louise Mallard, after hearing news of her husband’s death. The third-person narrator telling the story uses deep insight into Mrs. Mallard’s thoughts and emotions as she sorts through her feelings after her sister informs her of her husband’s death. During a Character analysis of Louise Mallard, a reader will understand that the delicate Mrs. Mallard transforms her grief into excitement over her newly discovered freedom that leads to her death. As Mrs. Mallard sorts through her grief she realizes the importance of this freedom and the strength that she will be able to do it alone.
Lastly, one thing that stands out is the fact the author of the book is seen in the movie. In the
1.4 Literature overview At the end of the nineteen century, was published a book, for the first time, concerning Jane Austen’s literary work. Exactly in 1890, the writer Godwin Smith gave for printing Life of Jane Austen, and from then he started a new era which values the author’s literary legacy, so others begun to write critics; thus, this moment marked the first step of the authorized criticism, focused on Austen’s writing style. In conformity with B.C. Southam Critical Heritage, the criticism attributed to Jane had increased after 1870 and became formal and organized. Therefore, “we see the novels praised for their elegance of form and their surface ‘finish’; for the realism of their fictional world, the variety and vitality of their characters;
A S Byatt is one of the leading short story writers, whose thematic concerns revolve around female issues and their ever evolving notions of identity. One such unique and different presentation is in form of 'A Stone Woman ', where the protagonist undergoes certain transformations in her biological frame work and thus recieves certian innate changes in her identity that makes her static, stony instead of a living. Key words Transformation, Metamorphosis, grief, embodiement, petrification, woman, identity , growth, self, Ines, gems, stones, change,stone woman, iceland, Byatt, self, silence, stone,solitude, ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- A S Byatt always loves a good and dark
Her love is loyal and steadfast. Jane Eyre aspires after true love and she overcomes the obstacles in the process of pursing true love. At last, she succeeds and lives a happy life with her lover. Through the detailed analysis of Jane Eyre’s struggle for self-realization, it is known that whatever difficulties one encounters in his life, never be a quitter is the only way that one can do. Jane Eyre proves to the world of the 1800s that a woman beating the odds to become independent and successful on her own was not as far-fetched as it may have seemed.