Literature Analysis

Answer 1)

Unlike George Orwell or Nadine Gordimer, Daphne du Maurier did not set out to write futuristic fiction, and her "Rebecca Notebooks," which outline the novel-to-be, show no political agenda. However, it is not unlikely that as a sensitive young artist, writing on the cusp of World War II, she did have her political intuitions and premonitions. If we address the fact that the focal point of the novel is neither the titular, impossibly beautiful Rebecca, nor the starchy Maxim de Winter, nor the assiduously unnamed narrator, but rather its magnificent centerpiece, Manderley, then an entirely new subtext is revealed: a political allegory that, though it may not seek to do so, foretells the future. "Part of Rebecca's popularity was due to its being seen as representing something that was threatened by the German invasion: the English way of life," writes Martyn Shallcross (Ambrosini, 66). It is Manderley that epitomizes this way of life.

Answer 2)

In the past century one objection to the works of John Webster which has returned to foul his reputation decade after critical decade, as predictable as the swallows, is that his plays are formless, lacking constructional or thematic unity. For example, in 1888 J. M. Symmonds, in his edition of Webster and Tourneur's plays, found that in Webster "the outlines of the fable, the structure of the drama as a complete work of art, seem to elude our grasp." In The White Devil "each part is etched with equal effort after luminous effect upon a murky background; and the whole play is a mosaic of these parts. It lacks the breadth which comes from concentration on a master-motive." William Archer, writing in the next decade, had harsher words: "Much might be said, if space permitted, of Webster's construction. ... Of dramatic concentration he did not dream." In the tragedies "the differentiation between romance and drama is still incomplete. They are not constructed plays, but loose-strung, go-as-you-please romances in dialogue.

Answer 3)

Perhaps no book is more of its age than Frankenstein. Written and published in 1816-1818, Frankenstein typifies the most important ideas of the Romantic era, among them the primacy of feelings, the dangers of intellect, dismay over the human capacity to corrupt our natural goodness, the agony of the questing, solitary hero, and the awesome power of the sublime. Its Gothic fascination with the dual nature of humans and with the figurative power of dreams anticipates the end of the nineteenth century and the discovery of the unconscious and the dream life.

The story of its creation, which the author herself tells in a “Preface” to the third edition to the book (1831), is equally illuminating about its age. At nineteen, Mary Godwin was living in the summer of 1816 with the poet Percy Shelley, visiting another famous Romantic poet, Lord Byron, and his doctor at Byron's Swiss villa when cold, wet weather drove them all indoors. Byron proposed that they entertain themselves by writing, each of them, a ghost story. On an evening when Byron and ...