General Map

Wuthering Heights

Beloved

The Hours

"Ballad of Mary Hamilton," "Four Maries"

A Room of One's Own

Paradise Lost

The Passion of New Eve

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman

"A Rose for Emily"

Things Fall Apart

The Waste Land

Moby Dick

Emma

Caleb Williams

"The White Man's Burden"

Heart of Darkness

Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power

Desire Under the Elms

The Pilgrim's Progress

Reader, I Married Him

Jane Eyre

Pamela

Romantic Poetry

The Picture of Dorian Gray

Wide Sargasso Sea

Rebecca

Oroonoko

"The Yellow Wallpaper"

The Awakening

The House of Mirth

"The Room Nineteen"

Nightbitch

The Scarlett Letter

Dracula

Portrait of a Lady

Frankenstein

Christabel

Lear

Translations

The Woman in White

The Historian

Possession

House of Leaves

Top Girls

The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde

Belfast

Homebody/Kabul

The Ferryman

Sleep Deprivation

Lear (1971)

Edward Bond

• British drama.
• Rewriting of Shakespeare’s King Lear.
• Focus on the individual’s place in society and his/her moral responsibility within.
• Investigation of the human condition within its political context.
• Lear concerns with power, the way it corrupts, and how the protagonist faces such corruption.

Things Fall Apart (1958)

Chinua Achebe

• African society's perspective on the impact of British colonialism.
• Counterpoint to Conrad's European view.
• Achebe accused Conrad of racism.

Frankenstein (1818, 1831)

Mary Shelley

• A ‘Chinese boxes’ narrative structure
• Epistolary novel
• The epitome of modern monstrosity
• A new myth
• The modern Prometheus
• The monster as anti-Narcissus
• The double motif
• Ice/Fire

• Romantic landscape

Possession (1990)

A. S. Byatt

• Poems, letters, “found manuscript.”
• Two modern-day academics attempt to uncover the truth about the relationship between two Victorian poets.
• Genres: suspense story, mystery novel, romance.
• Gothic elements.
• Metafiction, pastiche.
• Cyclical, parallel plots in different periods.
• Topics: love, passion, sexuality, power dynamics between genders.
• Satire of academic criticism.

Sleep Deprivation Chamber (1996)

Adam and Adrienne Kennedy

• American drama.
• Autobiographical play that recalls family memories to present police brutality in 1990s America.
• Recounts the brutal beating of a young, middle-class black man and the events that follow at a trial.
• Portrait of the prevailing racism in the US in the last decades of the 20th century.
• Dialogue centered on the privilege of white memory in face of inescapable Black trauma.
• Individual vs. collective memory.

The Waste Land (1922)

T.S. Eliot

• Moral and spiritual collapse.
• Metaphor of the barren desert.
• Crisis of Western civilization.
• Post-war trauma.
• Fragmentation of the self.
• Fragmentary structure.
• Literary allusions: "The horror, the horror" appears in the first version. Also in "The Hollow Men".

Dracula (1897)

Bram Stoker

• Epistolary genre (letters), journal entries, newspaper articles.
• A vampire from Transylvania moves to Victorian London.
• Gothic horror (supernatural).
• The vampire’s invasion of London represents Victorian fears: changes in gender roles, sexuality, purity of “race”.

The Scarlett Letter (1850)

Nathaniel Hawthorne

• Set in the Puritan American colonies, this is the story of one of the first empowered female protagonists in American literature, Hester Prynne.
• Rebellion against the conformist and oppressive societal norms regarding women's roles and sexuality.
• Accused of adultery and condemned by the village to wear a scarlet “A” on her chest
• She earns her living as a single mother, showing integrity and self-reliance despite reputation and community exile.
• Prynne’s empowerment through sexuality, nature and female intuition.
• Themes: female independence, stifling effects of societal expectations on women, struggle for self-identity.

Jane Eyre (1847)

Jane Eyre (1847)

Charlotte Brontë

Charlotte Brontë

• Jane, an empowered, central female character
• A powerful first-person narrative
• Combination of realism and romanticism
• Rochester as a (Byronic) hero
• An interesting colonial aspect: the “Indies”

• Jane, an empowered, central female character
• A powerful first-person narrative
• Combination of realism and romanticism
• Rochester as a (Byronic) hero
• An interesting colonial aspect: the “Indies”

House of Leaves (2000)

Mark Z. Danielewski

• Multiple narrators, “found manuscript/footage”.
• Johnny Truant finds a manuscript about a family's documentary, which details their experiences in a strange house.
• Metafiction: story within a story.
• Formatting: text arranged to mirror the events in the story.
• Genres: Gothic psychological horror, love story.
• Satire of academic criticism.
• Topics: fear, obsession, the unknown, the nature of reality.

The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890-91)

Oscar Wilde

• Dorian: a beautiful monster
• The Narcissus myth
• Dual London
• ‘Ineffable’ crimes
• The portrait as double
• Homoerotic desire

Pilgrim's Progress (1678)

John Bunyan

• A religious allegory
• Popular among Victorian children
• The journey structure
• Symbolic/allegorical settings
• Bunyan and the origins of the English novel

Belfast Girls (2012)

Jaki McCarrick

• Irish drama.
• The Great Famine from a feminist perspective.
• Set in 1850, it is a fictional story based on factual records about five young women who escape the Great Famine by taking passage on a ship bound for Australia.
• Orphan Emigration Scheme.
• McCarrick's story explores questions around classism, patriarchy and the effects of colonialism.

The Historian (2005)

Elizabeth Kostova

• Letters, memoirs, intertextual references to Dracula.
• History of Vlad Tepes, "the Impaler," and Count Dracula, interweaved with the story of a modern-day academic on a quest for Vlad’s tomb.
• Genres: adventure novel, Gothic, detective fiction, postmodern historical novel.
• Three different time periods.
• Topics: history and its role in society, love for literature, good and evil, religion.
• Intermingling of academia and the occult.

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Nightbitch (2021)

Rachel Yoder

• A contemporary novel about motherhood where a woman gives up her art gallery job to stay at home with her baby. Her frustration at being a housewife takes the form of an almost mythic bodily transformation into a she-dog, who ends up transferring her creative impulse into performance art.
• Confinement, lack of motivation and regret for losing her previous independent and nurturing life are resolved through a fable like narrative. She empowers herself by embracing the animal nature and instinctive power of the female body, a savage wisdom that comes from her own transformative experience as a mother.
• The third person narrative addresses the main character as “the mother” or as “nightbitch”, depending on her performance and her double role.

"A Rose for Emily" (1930)

William Faulkner

• Topics: the Old South vs. modernity; subversive gender roles; physical and moral decay.
• Southern Gothic and Southern Renaissance.
• Challenge to the Southern Belle and the romantic discourse.
• Third-person plural narrator for a community’s collective experience.

Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886)

Robert Louis Stevenson

• Doppelganger: the monster within
• Forerunner of the ‘mad scientist’
• Patriarchal claustrophobia
• Gothic atmosphere
• Dual London/ Edinburgh
• The limits of science
• ‘Unspeakable’ crimes
• Suspense and horror

Wuthering Heights (1847)

Emily Brontë

• Set in the Yorkshire moors.
• Relationship between two families, the Earnshaws and the Lintons.
• A controversial novel, for it challenges Victorian values on morality and authority.
• Influenced by the Gothic and Romanticism.
• Themes: love, revenge, violence.

Romantic Poetry

First decades of 19th century

• Influence on the Brontë children
• Vision of nature
• Vision of love and passion
• Byron’s fame and the Byronic hero
• Pervading influence during the Victorian era

Behind a Mask, or a Woman's Power (1866)

Louisa May Alcott

• Genre: American and female Gothic; governess novel.
• Topics: critique of women’s lack of options; seduction; class conflict; age matters.
• Challenge to Victorian values: femme fatale vs. “angel in the house”; marriage; “true womanhood.”

Emma (1815)

Jane Austen

• Set in the south, in Regency England (fictional Highbury and surroundings).
• Women and money matters; Emma’s wealth.
• Marriage (not love) as the fundamental value for a woman’s economic output.
• Boredom; lack of actual life perspectives and private spaces for women.
• Austen praised by Woolf as a novelist whose greatness is comparable to Shakespeare’s.

The Awakening (1898)

Kate Chopin

• Process of self-realization and empowerment of main female character, Edna Pontellier.
• Settings: Southern Creole community and New Orleans.
• Inner and sensual awakening to sexuality, artistic sensitivity and independence.
• Questioning marriage, motherhood and traditional female roles.
• Third-person narrative moving between regionalism, romanticism and modernist style.
• Turn-of-the century novel between the 19th c. and the 20th c. The “New Woman”.
• Consequences on mental-health due to oppression.

The Woman in White (1860)

Wilike Collins

• Letters, journal entries, official documents.
• Intricate story: Walter Hartright encounters a mysterious woman in white, lost in London; he later finds out that she has escaped from an asylum.
• Genres: “sensation novel,” mystery novel, Gothic fiction, detective fiction.
• Considers women’s rights in 19th-century England.
• Critical of traditional gender roles (i. e. marriage).

Rebecca (1938)

Daphne du Maurier

• What kind of neo-Victorian text?
• The “ghost” of the first wife
• Gothic atmosphere: Manderley and Thornfield Hall
• Use of narrative suspense
• Rebecca as a “New Woman”?

The Hours (1998)

Michael Cunningham

• The title, a homage to Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway, whose working title was “The Hours”.
• Non-linear narrative time and conscious imitative style.
• Crisis of Western civilization.
• Time and its significance on individual lives.
• Fragmentation of the self.
• Hybrid structure: fictionalized biodata and narrative.
• Literary allusions to Woolf's work.
• Themes: women’s sexuality and women’s health.

Reader, I Married Him (2016)

Ed. Tracy Chevalier, several authors

• What kind of neo-Victorian text?
• Commemorating the bicentenary of Charlotte Brontë’s birth
• From the novel to the short story
• Different perspectives of a multi-author book
• Contemporary relevance of Jane Eyre

The Portrait of a Lady (1881)

Henry James

• Coming-of-age story of the empowered main female character, Isabel Archer.
• An intelligent, curious and independent young woman from the American upper class in England.
• Critical question in the novel: the limits of women’s freedom. Archer decides to marry the man she chooses but must endure an unhappy and abusive marriage.
• Economic inheritance allows the heroine independence.
• Archer’s capacity of resilience, survival and (American) self-reliance; she trusts her inner self, challenging nineteenth-century control on women through imposed roles, such as that of a wife.

"Ballad of Mary Hamilton", "Four Maries"

(anonymous)

• Set in Scotland (Edinburgh or Glasgow).
• The lecturing "I" in Woolf’s A Room: “Here then was I (call me Mary Beton, Mary Seton, Mary Carmichael or by any name you please".
• Fisrt person narrative on the misfortune of Mary Hamilton, one of the four Ladies-in-Waiting to a Scottish Queen.
• One of the few instances of women appearing in a historical poem.
• Different recorded versions (e.g. by Joan Baez).

"The Yellow Wallpaper" (1892)

Charlotte Perkins Gilman

• A short story about a woman who suffers from postpartum depression. Doctor’s prescription - supported by the husband - is to keep her isolated and confined in a room of a country house. She is also forbidden to write.
• Feminist critique of oppression and sexism of the medical institution and marriage, revealing patriarchal power over women’s bodies, psyche, and artistic vocation.
• Madness as the consequence of this control and rigidity on women’s roles as mothers and wives.
• The author experienced herself a “rest cure” after being a mother.

Homebody/Kabul (2005)

Tony Kushner

• American drama.
• Post 9/11 play.
• Written before 9/11, addresses the clash of cultures between Westerners and Afghans.
• An attempt to understand the 9/11 terrorist attacks by exploring the relationship between Afghanistan and the West.
• Reflection on the clash of cultures.
• Tony Kushner connects theater, thought and current events.
• Trauma, memory, history.

Beloved (1987)

Toni Morrison

• Topics: slavery; memory; the repressed; the burden of the past.
• Southern Gothic.
• Challenge to ideologies: national history; motherhood; family; the domestic.
• Fractured narrative to mirror a fractured racialized and gendered experience.

Heart of Darkness (1899)

Joseph Conrad

• Journey to the heart of the Congo (exploration of human darkness).
• River metaphor.
• Critiques 19th-century imperialism in Africa.
• Dehumanization and corruption.
• Story within a story.
• External narrator (witness).

Pamela (1740)

Samuel Richardson

• The success of a “conduct book”

• The notion of “virtue”
• First-person narrative: epistolary/journal form

• Pamela and Mr. B: parallelisms with Jane and Rochester
• Class boundaries and marriage

Caleb Williams (1797)

William Godwin

• A Gothic novel by Mary’s father, a Jacobin thinker
• Social injustice.

Translations (1980)

Brian Friels

• Northern Irish drama.
• The play interweaves personal conflict with historical events.
• Recreates what was happening in the 1980s between Britain and Ireland through an appeal to the past.
• Colonialism/Post-colonialism.
• Ireland’s Anglicization (1822-1842).
• Language and its relationship with power.

A Room of One's Own (1929)

Virginia Woolf

• Based on two lectures at Newnham and Girton (Cambridge women’s colleges).
• Women’s absence from (higher) education, history, and literature.
• Emphasis on the need for women to talk about their own experiences.
• No literary success despite the greatest genius (Judith Shakespeare).
• A literary history of women writers.
• Lesbianism and sisterhood among women.
• A creative, androgynous state of mind.
• An essay with a fictional speaker.

Oroonoko (1688)

Aphra Behn

• Set in an English colony.
• An African prince, sold as a slave, and taken to the New World.
• Early critique of colonialism.
• First-person narration.

The Ferryman (2017)

Jez Butterworth

• Jez Butterworth, is an English playwright, screenwriter, and film director.
• Historical memory and theater.
• The intersection of politics and private life in Northern Ireland.
• Set during “The Troubles”, the story of the family of a former IRA terrorist, living in their farmhouse in rural Northern Ireland in 1981.
• Effects of conflicts in Northern Ireland (70s and 80s).
• There are many echoes of Friel's Translations in The Ferryman.

Moby Dick (1851)

Herman Melville

• Metaphor of human struggle against the forces of nature.

• Captain Ahab's obsession with hunting Moby Dick, leading to self-destruction.
• Journey as a metaphor for inner exploration.
• Intertextuality, blending of genres.

Paradise Lost (1667)

John Milton

• Influence on Mary Shelley’s narrative
• Satan as the monstrous anti-hero
• Eve as Narcissus (Book IV)

The Passion of New Eve (1977)

Angela Carter

• Inspired by Woolf's Orlando (1928).
• A sex change, from the male character Evelyn to Eve, with an emphasis on the worlds in which these changes occur.
• The importance of updating stories (in Carter’s work as a whole).
• A novel of its time (second-wave feminism).
• Artificiality of gender roles, performativity of sexual and gender identity.
• Theatricality of the feminine (cf. Woolf’s androgynous ideal).

"Christabel" (1816)

Samuel Taylor Coleridge

• Narrative poem with shifting narrative voices.
• Christabel meets Geraldine, possibly a malevolent female figure (a vampire?).
• Queer reading of this relationship (sexual transgression and undoing of traditional gender roles).
• Byatt’s Christabel refers to having met Coleridge as a child.
• Romantic understanding of the fall from innocence as a state of imaginative possession.

Top Girls (1982)

Caryl Churchill

• British drama.
• Gender and class issues.
• Examination of the women’s liberation movement of the 1980s .
• Top Girls is about working women and the challenges they face in the business world.
• The context is the Thatcher era.
• Churchill questions the benefit of incorporating women into professional life.
• Non-linear construction, overlapping dialogue, blending of fantasy and reality.
• Events are linked thematically, not by a sequence of time.

Jane Eyre (1847)

Charlotte Brontë

• Jane, an empowered, female central character
• A powerful first-person narrative
• Combination of realism and romanticism
• Rochester as a (Byronic) hero
• An interesting colonial aspect: the West Indies

The House of Mirth (1905)

Edith Wharton

• The tragic heroine Lily Bart belongs to the old New York high class. She has to open her way through the hypocritical, money-oriented and superficial new modern high class.
• Lily’s efforts to maintain her status despite money difficulties through a convenient marriage.
• Bad choices and failing to fulfill what society expects from her as a woman results in rejection and isolation from her social circles.
• She finally looks for a job and faces poverty, eventually committing suicide.
• Naturalistic and realistic narrative style. The novel criticizes social imposition of expectations on femininity, false morality, the rigidity of class, and the cruelty of society on women’s defiance of patriarchal values.

"To Room Nineteen" (1978)

Doris Lessing

• Susan, an intelligent woman who decides to leave her job to raise her four children and take care of her family and house in the suburbs of London.
• Feeling imprisoned by motherhood and family responsibilities, Susan looks for a time and a place of her own in a room in the house.
• At a point in the narrative, she decides to spend time in a hotel room where she escapes to reconnect with herself.
• Third-person narrative and irony to convey Susan’s sense of her own success as a modern woman, as well as her failure to realize the emotional impact of becoming a traditional mother and wife.
• New conflict for feminist women in the second half of the 20th c. between their apparent achieved freedom and the difficulty to change social expectations of feminine self-realization in motherhood and marriage - above all, within themselves.
• The protagonist’s inner conflict, together with her husband’s lack of understanding and the lack of support by social structures, affects Susan’s mental health, ending in suicide.

Wide Sargasso Sea (1966)

Jean Rhys

• What kind of neo-Victorian text?
• The story of Bertha Mason
• Colonial setting and Creole culture
• Innovative, twentieth-century narrative strategies
• Poetic style

Desire Under the Elms (1924)

Eugene O'Neill

• Topics: incest, lust, greed, psychological determinism.
• Genres: tragedy, romance, rewriting of classical myths.
• Naturalism and psychological realism.
• Family sins.
• Challenge to Victorian values: ambitious and sensuous mother; toxic domesticity.

A Vindication of the Rights of Woman (1792)

Mary Wollstonecraft

• A pioneer of feminism
• Mary Shelley’s mother
• Male-female relationships within the patriarchal sphere
• Education can be monstrous

"The White Man's Burden" (1899)

Rudyard Kipling

• Response to the U.S. acquisition of the Philippines.
• Associated with British imperialism.
• Justifying view of imperialism.
• Counterpoint to Heart of Darkness.