I would like to start by telling you a story. “It was a dark and stormy night, we sat by the calcined wall. And it was said to the Tale-Teller, ‘tell us a tale’. And the tale ran thus:… ‘It was a dark and stormy night, we sat by the calcined wall. And it was[…]
Conrad’s The Secret Agent (1907), dedicated to H. G. Wells, was written looking back at the Victorian period from the modernist period: a time of advanced technology and machinery but also a time of anxiety about their effect on society. The dedication to Wells implies that the novel will echo the angst surrounding technological and[…]
The purpose of this essay is to explain how and why two characters from ‘ Macbeth’ and ‘ A Doll’s House’ succeeded in persuading their spouses to see their points of view. Further, t he dynamics of how two particular scenes could be staged to achieve maximum effect will be considered. The two scenes in[…]
Published in 1632 Robert Burton’s ‘The Anatomy of Melancholy,’ places the term ‘melancholy’ as an umbrella for any number of mind ‘disorders’ including lovesickness and religious melancholy. To the seventeenth century mind, therefore, melancholy or madness indicated a number of variable conditions that overlapped and caused a change in the normal personality of the sufferer.[…]
This etching by Goya, completed around 1800, was inscribed by the artist “Here comes the Bogeyman.” (‘Que viene el Coco’) It is a disturbing image in many respects as the mother cowers with her two children as the cowled figure approaches them; he surely means no good. (*) This hooded figure in the nineteenth century[…]