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One of the persistent concerns of Gothic is the relationship between the past and the present. Isolate and discuss two different treatments of this topic in Gothic literature or film.
Literature Essay

• Assessment: Literature Essay
• Mark: A
• Year: 2007
• Wordcount: 2176

Excerpt:
In the eighteenth century many writers and readers regarded their contemporary present as ‘modern’ and enlightened and favoured a realist literature. As a consequence, Walpole (1986: 43) argues in his second Preface to The Castle of Otranto, “the great resources of fancy have been dammed up”; or to put it in Clery’s (2006: 27) words “what the modern era had gained in civility it had lost in poetic imagination”. One way to bring life back into the culture of this time was to re-establish the connections with a barbaric, mythical and unenlightened age. In particular, the Gothic age with its name referring to the Goths , was seen by contemporary readers and authors as a time of barbarism that “stood for the old-fashioned as opposed to the modern; the barbaric as opposed to the civilised; crudity as opposed to elegance; old English barons as opposed to the cosmopolitan gentry” (Punter 1996: 5). These and similar characteristics of a forgotten age became “invested with positive value” and were perceived as “representing virtues and qualities that the ‘modern’ world needed” (Punter and Byron 2006: 7).
The aim of this paper is both, to locate and compare the relationship of the past and the present in Horace Walpole’s Castle of Otranto and Ann Radcliffe’s The Romance of the Forest, but also to investigate the ambivalent nature of this relationship. Since the Gothic is by definition “about history and geography” (Mighall 1999: xiv), I will highlight the significance of the feudal and catholic past for early Gothic writing in analysing the texts’ settings and the authors’ use of the supernatural. In doing so, I will show that, on the one hand, the past was idealised but on the other hand, also served as the barbaric ‘Other’ to the enlightened present. Hence, this essay engages with one of the underlying questions of some early Gothic texts asking “which is darker, the murky past or an apparently enlightened present”? (Cavallaro 2002: 39).

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Literature

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 [148.63kb]
Category: General
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Sociology Literature

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 [178.22kb]
Category: Literature
download: 164

Literature