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The significance of British Imperialism to culture
Sociology Essay

• Assessment: Analytical exercise
• Mark: A
• Year: 2007
• Wordcount: 2188

This essay contains close readings of
1) De Quincey T., Confessions of an English Opium Eater: The Malay (1822)
2) De Quincey T., Confessions of an English Opium Eater: Oriental Dreams (1822)
3) Coleridge S.T., Christable; Kubla Khan: A Vision; The Pains of Sleep: Kubla Khan (1816)

Excerpt:
Tiffin (1995: 95) points out that more than “three quarters of the contemporary world has been directly and profoundly affected by imperialism and colonialism”. With the end of the Napoleonic Wars in 1815, for instance, Britain was left in governing power over 200 million people , of whom a large proportion were Asians (Leask 1996: 235). These political developments went hand in hand with a wave of European artistic and scholarly interest in the cultures and languages of Eastern nations from about the 1760s onwards (Schwab 1996: 294-296). The increased encounter with other cultures, in person and via traveller narratives or cultural artefacts, had a deep impact on Britain’s cultural production.
Romantic poets , for example, adopted the imagery and narratives from these sources and looked to the Orient for creative and sublime inspiration but also with feelings of anxiety. Since language is one form through which thoughts and ideas are represented in a culture (Hall 2003: 1), the aim of this analytical exercise is both, to highlight the role of Romantic poetry in the construction of oriental stereotypes, and also, to investigate its significance in accordance with Said’s notion that the “Orient was almost a European invention” (Said 2004: 329). I will accomplish these aims by examining the discursive strategies employed in Romantic poetry, such as idealization of the Orient, the projection of fantasies and sexual desire as well as the drawing attention to cultural differences and the tendency to represent non-Europeans as the uncivilized and barbaric essential ‘Other’.
According to Hall (2003: 42-43) Foucault is concerned with “the production of knowledge (rather than just meaning)” through a particular discourse. Therefore…

Full text:
file: Romantics_Sociology.pdf []
Category: General
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Sociology Literature

How and why has the Gothic been of importance in writing by and for women?
Literature Essay

• Assessment: essay
• Mark: A
• Year: 2006
• Wordcount: 3285

Excerpt:
The Gothic genre arose with the publication of Walpole’s Castle of Otranto in 1764, and achieved instantly a high popularity. It was particularly associated with female writers and readers (Markman 2003: 48). The Gothic novels of the first wave consist often of a formulaic plot around a hidden crime that feature stereotypical characters in a medieval setting and draw on supernatural occurrences (Markman 2003: 1-16). Within these tensions of gothic horror, female writers and readers started to explore their private fears and desires. On the one hand, many Gothic texts written by women draw on female fears of male oppression and betrayal. On the other hand, these texts picture female desires in exploring the themes of identity and sexuality, and feature heroines that are models of resistance.
This essay will examine the importance of Gothic fiction as a space of freedom for women during the late 18th century. In looking at Radcliffe’s Romance of the Forest and Austen’s Northanger Abbey, I will particularly focus on the construction of female identity, the theme of female oppression as well as the function of the Gothic heroine. In the first part, I will examine the significance of Gothic fiction for the female reader. After that I will highlight the opportunities within this genre for the female author. The aim of this essay is to provide evidence that suggests that the significance of the Gothic genre lies in the texts’ function to serve as a “reflective distortion of social reality” (Meyers 2001: 17) with an aim to question and test out 18th century boundaries and limits.
Gothic texts crossed social boundaries in exploring “new extremes of feeling, through the representation of scenes and events well beyond the normal range of experience” (Clery 2000: 13). These new emotions are often linked to the texts’ exploration of female fears and desires that were regarded as inappropriate in 18th century society…

Full text:
file: GothicWomen_Literature.pdf []
Category: Literature
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The 1930s are notoriously marked by a high degree of politicisation of literary writing. Consider any poet working in the period and discuss the extent to which this observation is either useful or accurate as a means of reading their work. Can the 1930s be marked out as a special case in this way, and if so why?
Literature Essay

• Assessment: essay
• Mark: A
• Year: 2006
• Wordcount: 3263

Excerpt:
The 1930s was a decade that can be characterized by the economic depression and the rise of authoritarian ideologies in Italy, Germany and Spain. These historical and political circumstances had a deep impact on the young writers and poets of Britain and Europe (Manteiga 1989:3). As Woolf (2004: 613) points out “in 1930 young men at college were forced to be aware of what was happening in Russia; in Germany; in Italy; in Spain. They could not go on discussing aesthetic emotions and personal relations”. Hence the poetry of this time is often seen as directly influenced by politics and as such “public, classical, and through association with Marx, left-wing” (Caesar 1991: 37). After the war, in the 1950s, this focus on politics within art had changed. Critics saw the 1950s and 1960s as a period where poets were “indifferent to the immediate problems of society” (Booth 2005:112). The Movement poets, for instance, were primarily concerned to uphold with their poetry conservative opinions and a sense of tradition (Draper 1999: 231).
In the first part of this essay I will examine the extent of the politicisation of the 1930s poetry of Auden, who is seen as “the clear Master of the Period” (Skeleton 2000: 33). In a detailed analysis of ‘Spain 1937’, a ‘Communist to Others’ and other examples of Auden’s poetry of the 1930’s I will assess the degree to which “the mere making of a work of art is itself a political act” (Auden 2004: 383). In the second part I will compare the committed writing of the pre-war period with the poetry of Philip Larkin. In examining ‘MCMXIV’, ‘Church Going’ and other examples of his writing of the 1950s, this essay will establish the notion that Larkin’s poetry is not only driven by a sense of nostalgia but is also concerned with the social injustices of his time.

Full text:
file: Poetry1930s_Literature.pdf []
Category: Literature
download: 254

Literature