Continuing on the theme of cultural hybridity, let’s finish up these British Lit blogs by discussing the melding of East and West, and tradition and the modern-world that appears in ‘The Waiter’s Wife’ from Zadie Smith’s White Teeth. The focus of the story is the character of Alsana, a Bangladeshi woman in an arranged marriage…

In the days of the British Empire, there were a multitude of distinctions between people. There were the distinctions between the colonizers and the colonized, often racial and class distinctions. This was the big one, of course. But there was also the distinction between the “true” English, and the English whose families had lived in…

To be entirely honest, I was supposed to read Heart of Darkness in high school. I read some of it, hated it, and stopped reading and faked my way through quizzes. Eventually, I had to read it for another college course, and I did, but still struggled with it. I struggled with it this time…

Time passes. This is inevitable. If you’re writing a story, time is most likely going to elapse within it, though some writers aren’t very good at showing this in a realistic manner. Virginia Woolf is one of those writers that is really good at it. Mrs. Dalloway follows the elderly Clarissa Dalloway, but we are…

A longer time ago than I like to think about, when I was a junior in high school, my English class did a unit on T.S. Eliot. The teacher gave us all copies of The Waste Land that he’d printed out and added his own notes too. I adored it and years later still have…

Think of the Victorian Era and you’re bound to think of the term “repressed.” Though of course everyone was not repressed in this time period, there was quite a bit of it going around. There were also “rules” about ways in which one should act in society. These rules could be quite constricting, and Robert…

Poor Guenevere has had her share of mistreatment over the long history of Arthurian-legend. Her role as adulteress over shines her role as queen, and her beauty is more often talked about than her ability as a wise ruler. Sometimes she is treated with pity, sometimes with scorn and sometimes with outright vilification, such as…

There are some pretty strong Bronte-vibes coming off of Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Old Nurse’s Story. No wonder she was asked by Charlotte Bronte’s father to write a biography of her. Both are writers of gothic stories, and Gaskell’s has some things in common with Jane Eyre: the old, gloomy, ancestral setting; the “mad” woman (though…