Written in the 1980s at the height of Thatcher’s Britain, Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta is a politically charged graphic novel set in a dystopian near-future world in which Britain has fallen into fascism following a brief nuclear exchange. The
Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot is often used as an example of a work astride two movements: modernism and postmodernism. It was written in 1955 when modernism was experiencing something of a revival in the wake of the Second World
In his 1919 essay of the same title, Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud defines das unheimliche (‘the uncanny’) as, ‘that class of frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.’ His original essay relies on the etymology of the
First Performed Plays First Printed 1590-91 Henry VI, Part II 1594? 1590-91 Henry VI, Part III 1594? 1591-92 Henry VI, Part I 1623 1592-93 Richard III 1597 1592-93 Comedy of Errors 1623 1593-94 Titus Andronicus 1594 1593-94 Taming of the
Volume one of The History of England takes us from a geographical overview of prehistory through the tribal chieftain-monarchies of early England and the establishment of single ruling dynasties, up to the reign of the first Tudor monarch, Henry VII. The
The Daemon Knows is an exploration of what Bloom calls the “American sublime”: that class of literature that reaches beyond the human, in a way that is distinctly American. What is beyond the human falls, by Bloom’s estimation, into three
In this book, Robert Colls sets out to chart George Orwell’s changing attitudes towards “Englishness”, and the various positions he holds, and tries to hold, in relation to it. He achieves this through a mixture of biography, political history, and
Umberto Eco’s final novel is a fast-paced historical thriller centred on a newspaper that will never be published, and a conspiracy theory surrounding the death of the Italian dictator Benito Mussolini. At just under 200 pages, Numero Zero is the shortest
The emerging field of comics studies has grown rapidly in recent years. This has seen the publication of a number of introductory and theoretically engaged books aiming to provide comics and graphic novels with their own theoretical language, separate from
Roberto Bolaño’s By Night in Chile is a study in unreliable narration. It tells the story of the writer/priest/critic Sebastian Urrutia Lacroix as he reflects, from his death-bed, on certain events in his life, particularly those in connection to the Pinochet regime.