Perception of Children in Victorian England: Great Expectations / The Chimney Sweeper

Life for children in Victorian Era was very different than childhood in today’s world. Especially life for young children was very cruel. The texts, Great Expectations, by Charles Dickens, and “The Chimney Sweeper”, by William Blake, deal with the idea of how children were perceived in Victorian Era. Stage one of the book, Great Expectations, … Read more

Compare how Duffy forms a female perspective in the anthologies ‘The World’s Wife’ and ‘Feminine Gospels’ .

The World’s Wife is a collection of witty and dramatic poems by Carol Ann Duffy, which takes a female perspective through different characters, stories, historical events, and myths. The original stories focus on legendary men, but Duffy takes a feminist approach to each tale and presents them in an altered fashion, showing the women who … Read more

Carol Ann Duffy – reconstructing ‘voiceless women’ throughout history

Carol Ann Duffy wrote two collections of poems, ‘The World’s Wife‘ 1999 and ‘Standing Female Nude’ 1985, in order to scrutinize the representation of both genders by reconstructing many of the ‘voiceless women’ throughout history. In fact, the title ‘The World’s Wife’ is an idiom that shows men being the norm as “The World” whereas … Read more

Valentine – Carol Ann Duffy

What can we tell about the subject matter of the poem from its title? The poem’s title is ‘Valentine.’ From the title the poem could be talking about the person she is in love with, her valentine. It could’ve been describing the person and using mushy language to describe her lover. The title could have … Read more

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales – historical context

Geoffrey Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales, written in the late fourteenth century, follows the story of over thirty characters on a pilgrimage who tell tales for game. Chaucer’s unfinished masterpiece is reminiscent of the era as to when Medieval society had begun to collapse due to changing classes and rising conflicts between groups. The story documents … Read more

Comparing Chaucer and Shakespeare – literary and generic conventions

Geoffrey Chaucer lived from 1343-1400, coincided with Middle Ages. His works were composed between 1374 and his death in 1400. He was a comptroller of wool for a living meaning writing was a pastime for him. William Shakespeare lived from 1564-1616, approximately two hundred years after Chaucer. Most of his plays and poetry were written … Read more

Chaucer’s The Wife of Bath

Ganim asserts that the Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales was “deeply implicated and interested in the burning issues of his day” (90) and Oberembt builds on this by stating that “we must, of course, affirm the omnipresence of misogyny in the Middle Ages and the anti-feminist bias of many great minds of this era” (287). However, in … Read more

Irony in the Canterbury tales

Irony is the general name given to literary techniques that involve surprising, interesting, or amusing contradictions. 1 Two stories that serve as excellent demonstrations of irony are “The Pardoners Tale” and “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale,” both from Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. Although these two stories are very different, they both use irony to teach a lesson. Of the stories, … Read more

Geoffrey Chaucer / The Canterbury Tales – social classes

Geoffrey Chaucer, author of The Canterbury Tales and many other famous pieces of British Literature, has shown a special talent for writing from the views of different social classes in his literary works.  Chaucer was able to accurately portray and break through every social class in his writings from lifelong experiences where he grew from … Read more

The Knight’s Tale and the Miller’s Tale (no universal standard to judge love and marriage)

Dissecting love and marriage ideals is an impossible task because human actions in emotional situations do not follow any logic, something that has been proven consistently over time and across cultures and classes. It is also corroborated within Geoffrey Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, a tale of tales, that makes fun of the conventional beliefs about these … Read more

The Pardoner’s Tale (The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer)

In The Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer uses a satirical frame narrative to describe thirty pilgrims’ journey to Canterbury. Included in these pilgrims is Chaucer himself as Chaucer the Pilgrim. The Canterbury Tales, a cross-section of fourteenth-century society, includes every class of society of the time, except royalty and serfs. Chaucer opens the story at the … Read more

Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

The novel, Brave New World, written by author Aldous Huxley in 1932, focuses around themes such as conformity and individuality. In Huxley’s World State, the World Controllers use a drug; soma, which provides comfort, safety, and stability to the people by protecting them from the harmful realities of the world. The citizens are conformed to … Read more