In his seminal 1798 poem “Lines written a few miles above Tintern Abbey,” William Wordsworth retrospectively offers an idealized description of the landscape surrounding the Tintern Abbey from his position above the River Wye. Through his manipulation of the landscape to fit his desired image, Wordsworth inadvertently highlights his egotistical approach to writing autobiographical poetry,... Continue Reading →
Familial Morality: Wright’s Argument for Prevention in Mansfield Park
“Prevention as Narrative in Jane Austen’s ‘Mansfield Park,’” Erika Wright’s 2010 sociological criticism of Austen’s third novel, examines the relationship between the metaphorical prevention and treatment of characters’ “diseased” moralities. Wright claims that Mansfield Park employs a preventionist narrative that subverts readers’ expectations of an “illness-cure trajectory,” in which a novel’s characters must be “cured”... Continue Reading →
FILTH: Looking Beyond What You See
Norton paperback edition. Filth, the 1998 novel by Scottish author Irvine Welsh, is the best satirical novel I've read since Bret Easton Ellis's American Psycho. Rather than delving into the mind of a wealthy and psychotic businessman, Welsh places us within the mental confinements of one of Edinburgh's Finest, a detective named Bruce Robertson. Bruce's... Continue Reading →
Narrative Dissonance: THE HISTORY OF LUMINOUS MOTION
"It was like that intensification of language where language itself obliterated, as if someone had typed a thousand sentences across the same line of gleaming white bond until nothing remained but a black mottled streak of carbon" (9). First American edition. I first discovered author Scott Bradfield through his YouTube series "Reading Great Books in... Continue Reading →
Richard Brautigan and American Identity
First edition hardcover. 1964. The year 1964 was chock-full of zany, experimental, low-stakes fiction writers like Richard Brautigan. A Confederate General from Big Sur chronicles a period in the life of its narrator, Jesse, and his relationship with Lee Mellon, a man who just swears up and down that he's the descendant of a Confederate... Continue Reading →
Valperga Literature Review 