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Meaning of "Rustum" in Trollope's "Orley Farm"

Trollope in Orley Farm refers to "the wisest Rustums of the law." Who was the original Rustum? He had left that congress, though the wisest Rustums of the law from all the civilized ...
Richard Hevener's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
61 views

Seeking Title of WWII Movie Featuring a Resistance Group and a Unique Method to Expose an Informant [closed]

I'm trying to recall the name of an old black-and-white WWII movie centered around a resistance group (possibly French or Polish) opposing Nazi occupation. In a pivotal scene, the group intercepts a ...
Neutrino's user avatar
  • 155
0 votes
0 answers
13 views

Was the feeling of attraction towards a lower social class present in Moravia's "Agostino" discussed by critics?

Alberto Moravia's Agostino is clearly a Bildungsroman: the events that happened to the thirteen-year-old ingenuous protagonist during the summer of 1942 mark his entry into adolescence. But some other ...
Charo's user avatar
  • 2,064
2 votes
0 answers
29 views

What's the significance of this sentence in the tale "Ladri in chiesa" by Alberto Moravia?

The tale Ladri in chiesa (Thefts in church) belongs to the book Racconti romani (Roman tales) by Alberto Moravia. Unfortunately, I haven't been able to find any translation to English of this short ...
Charo's user avatar
  • 2,064
1 vote
0 answers
44 views

What is this "flashforward" technique called?

I was reading The Elusive Samurai, a manga by Yusei Matsui, which is set in the XIV century in Japan. The author uses some kind of special "flashforward" in which the characters, mostly ...
TenSeconds's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
43 views

How can corruption be shown in the creation of middle class?

In Tomorrow's People, by Paul Morland, the author discusses the inequality of infant mortality within nations: The worst countries have made the fastest progress, so the gap is closing at the ...
Ahmed Samir's user avatar
  • 4,103
2 votes
1 answer
65 views

Significance of "further up and further in"?

In C.S. Lewis's Narnia grand finale, The Last Battle, one chapter is entitled "Further Up and Further In", and this phrase is repeated a great many times by various characters: "Then [...
Rand al'Thor's user avatar
  • 71.1k
2 votes
1 answer
112 views

What happened to the gills of picked shrimps?

Agatha Christie's detective Jane Marple made her first appearance in a sequence of six short stories published in The Royal Magazine between 1927 and 1928. The stories' success led Christie to write a ...
verbose's user avatar
  • 22.1k
1 vote
2 answers
93 views

What does "The Shampoo" written by Elizabeth Bishop tell?

The still explosions on the rocks, the lichens, grow by spreading, gray, concentric shocks. They have arranged to meet the rings around the moon, although within our memories they have not changed. ...
user19826's user avatar
-1 votes
0 answers
77 views

As a Chinese reader, how do I appreciate "the great gatsby"? [closed]

As a Chinese reader, I didn't find "The Great Gatsby" particularly striking. I know the era in which the novel is set—the Roaring Twenties in the United States and I can see Gatsby's tragic ...
Qiulang 邱朗's user avatar
14 votes
1 answer
1k views

Meaning of "furnished with a pipe and a supply of cold without" in Trollope's "Orley Farm"

In Trollope's Orley Farm we are told that Mr. Moulder was "furnished with a pipe and a supply of cold without." What does this mean? It appears a little later that Moulder also has a glass ...
Richard Hevener's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
36 views

Goosebumps book about 2 kids in a haunted school

I remember reading a book, quite a long time ago, about a guy who is sent to a haunted school, where all the children are ghosts, except for a single girl, who is human like him, and she help in ...
Agnijo Das's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
37 views

Children's book about a Pig that buys a duck from the market to eat, takes the Duck home and they eat peas together

This would have been in circulation in Australia in the 1980's, possibly a book club / scholastic book. A pig goes to the market to buy a duck to eat for dinner, takes the duck home and they both eat ...
Ben's user avatar
  • 21
5 votes
1 answer
108 views

What is the meaning of Lord Vetinari's dungeon door in Terry Pratchett's "Guards! Guards!"?

The following passage is taken from the section of the book where Captain Vimes gets thrown into the dungeon, where he realizes that the Patrician is also being held captive: It was a perfectly ...
user1301428's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
86 views

Catharsis in Medea

Catharsis is defined by Aristotle as a pure release of supressed emotions. It generally occurs at the end of the play or at the resolution, when the audience undergoes a powerful experience of a range ...
user19792's user avatar
1 vote
1 answer
107 views

Meaning of “All spirits are enslaved that serve things evil” in "Prometheus Unbound"

The line “all spirits are enslaved that serve things evil” can be found in the play Prometheus Unbound by Percy Bysshe Shelley. My initial interpretation is, spirits that serve evil are enslaved by ...
BinaryPatrick's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
123 views

Legend about the Invention of Steel

I am trying to track down a legend concerning the invention of steel (originally told to me by a group of touring historians visiting my Australian high school 40 years ago). Under the legend, a ...
Miner_Glitch's user avatar
1 vote
0 answers
92 views

Identify a short story where a husband purposely drives his wife crazy

When I was in college I read a short story for a class and I'd like to find it again. I'm recalling this from my bad memory, so there could be many errors here.. The general plot was that a husband ...
Mike Willis's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
45 views

What did Walt Whitman mean by "a pennant universal"?

(Edit: This was closed because it was marked as "opinion based" and I was asked to edit the question so that it could be answered by facts and citations. @Fumblefingers gave citations, ...
sysmod's user avatar
  • 141
4 votes
1 answer
119 views

What - if anything - was Artaud trying to achieve with his odd translation of Through the Looking Glass?

Antonin Artaud was a French theatre practitioner who is sometimes associated with the surrealists. Among his ideas was a desire to get "beyond" the limitations of language and to a freer ...
Matt Thrower's user avatar
  • 21k
9 votes
3 answers
4k views

Meaning of "the way they used to use up old women, in Russia, sweeping dirt" in "The Handmaid's Tale"

I think of my mother, sweeping up deadly toxins; the way they used to use up old women, in Russia, sweeping dirt. Only this dirt will kill her. What does this mean?
Alexander's user avatar
4 votes
0 answers
104 views

Children's Book, Characters Made of Vegetables

My sister and I had a book when we were children (late 1980s, early 1990s at a push). The artwork was quite grown up and quite creepy for a children's book. The characters were made up of a variety of ...
Gemma Sinclair's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
162 views

Meaning of "Am I clear? Have I a certificate, or what have I to do to get one? And when will it be dated? You can't think what hangs by it!"

(From The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Chapter XVIII, published 1892) Passage 286 “Even so, Jim. My questions,” I repeated. “I put questions as well as yourself; and however ...
philphil's user avatar
  • 183
2 votes
1 answer
571 views

Is this an editing error in this part of 1985 by Anthony Burgess?

-(Interviewer)You’re under arrest. -(Burgess) I beg your pardon? -You’re under arrest. -You’re joking. Yes, joking. I knew somehow you were joking. -But for a moment you thought I was serious. -Yes, I ...
Abw's user avatar
  • 131
0 votes
1 answer
76 views

What does Anthony Burgess mean about "the State is all that matters and no one has a right to hear Beethoven"?

That’s what I believe in – mind, free mind, trying to understand itself as well as the world without, and to hell with the little men who try to stop free enquiry and the State is all that matters and ...
Abw's user avatar
  • 131
5 votes
0 answers
87 views

Account of picking up a black hitchhiker who then wanted to be let out

I remember decades ago reading a book with the following vignette, set in the 60s. The white male narrator is driving through the countryside and picks up a hitchhiking young black man. The rider is ...
scottef's user avatar
  • 255
2 votes
1 answer
73 views

Book about some teenagers building a robot

I’m looking for a young adult book I read around the mid 2000s. I was living in Bahrain at the time, but the book was in English and I think it was bought in England (Manchester). I think the book had ...
A-Fairooz's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
43 views

Book about a boy that joins a traveling "snake-oil" show and eventually escapes, finds his father?

I used to have this book about 20-ish years ago. Setting for the story is some time around the gold rush Boy runs away from home (possibly an orphanage?), a man on a traveling wagon offers to hide ...
sǝɯɐſ's user avatar
  • 121
4 votes
1 answer
96 views

In which C.S. Lewis essay or book chapter did he talk about the habit of using the word "we" when preaching?

I remember C.S. Lewis writing somewhere about how some preachers like to use the word "we" when pointing out a problematic behavior. For example, consider the statement "We secretly ...
Andrew Ulrich's user avatar
25 votes
3 answers
7k views

Meaning of "the field was found to be plowed as thoroughly as any young man at Oxford" in 'The Book of Dragons'

E. Nesbit, in The Book of Dragons, toward the end of the chapter titled 'The Island of the Nine Whirlpools', wrote: The nine rubies were used afterwards in agriculture. You had only to throw them out ...
Winky's user avatar
  • 355
5 votes
0 answers
145 views

Reference to Novalis in Ghérasim Luca's poem "La Poésie Pratique"

Ghérasim Luca's poem "La Poésie Pratique" / "Practical Poetry" contains the following lines: En pratiquant le bouche à bouche de mot à mot de « feu » le mort à « feu » vif d' « ...
Le Petit Nicolas's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
63 views

Looking for a children's book from the 1950s about an anthropomorphized animal who's abandoned by his family

I am looking for a children's picture book that I read in the late 1950s about an animal (don't remember what kind of animal, possibly a mouse or hamster) who was a member of a large family. He came ...
Susan Worley's user avatar
3 votes
0 answers
46 views

Are there standard guidelines on apostrophising to denote swallowed syllables for scansion?

There are various words in English which can be pronounced in different ways with different numbers of syllables. Poetry often requires them to be read in a particular way for appropriate scansion, ...
Rand al'Thor's user avatar
  • 71.1k
2 votes
1 answer
85 views

What does this line from an essay on T. S. Eliot mean?

The following extract is from Charles Altieri's essay "Eliot's Impact on twentieth-century Anglo-American poetry" published in The Cambridge Companion to T. S. Eliot. Here, Altieri is ...
user392289's user avatar
12 votes
3 answers
7k views

Is there a name for the literary device in the expression "Thanks, I hate it."?

"Thanks, I hate it!" is an expression one could use to passive-aggressively indicate a strong dislike for something. What kind of literary device is used in this saying? Can this be ...
user19705's user avatar
  • 139
1 vote
1 answer
150 views

Can plot development analysis (climax, denouement, etc.) apply to smaller segments throughout a work?

I am in a class where we are being taught to analyze the smaller consecutive units of text which make up chapters in the overall work (which is of a biographical-historical narrative genre), where we ...
SeligkeitIstInGott's user avatar
2 votes
0 answers
53 views

What differences are there between the editions of Grossman's translation of Don Quixote?

Putting aside the physical (like the cover, flaps etc.), what, if any, differences are there between these three editions of Edith Grossman's translation of Don Quixote? Are the annotations the same ...
FünfzehnFledermäuse's user avatar
3 votes
1 answer
54 views

Censorship reaction to Moravia's "La mascherata"

La mascherata is a novel by Alberto Moravia, published in 1941, during Italian fascist era. It is set in an imaginary dictatorship in Latin America. It is clearly a book against dictatorship. This ...
Charo's user avatar
  • 2,064
3 votes
0 answers
62 views

Casualty lists in school newspaper in Alice Winn's In Memoriam

Alice Winn's In Memoriam (2023) is set in part at Preshute, a fictional public school, around the time of World War I. The school newspaper carries a roll of honour that lists the names of deceased, ...
verbose's user avatar
  • 22.1k
3 votes
1 answer
88 views

Meaning of Shell, Remove, and Hundreds in Alice Winn's In Memoriam (and other novels with public school settings)

Alice Winn's In Memoriam (2023) is partly set in an English public school around the outbreak of World War I. Toward the beginning of the novel, the narrator states: Preshute was a younger public ...
verbose's user avatar
  • 22.1k
0 votes
1 answer
116 views

In The Scarlet Letter, did Hawthorne misuse the word prolixity?

The passage is beautiful, but I simply can't make sense of the descriptor "unpicturesque prolixity" where he writes Soon, likewise, my old native town .. with only imaginary inhabitants to ...
Stephen Waterhouse's user avatar
6 votes
1 answer
86 views

Why did blood build the House of Shaws in Kidnapped by Robert Louis Stevenson?

Does anyone know why allegedly blood built the House of Shaws? My dim memories of watching Kidnapped (1960) and reading the novel long ago include someone warning David Balfour that the House of Shaws ...
M. A. Golding's user avatar
4 votes
2 answers
682 views

Meaning of "My owners'll have to rank with the rest on their charter-party"?

(From The Wrecker by Robert Louis Stevenson and Lloyd Osbourne, Chapter XVI, published 1892) Passage 256 “All the same,” continued Nares, “you went into the opium-smuggling with your head down; and a ...
philphil's user avatar
  • 183
2 votes
0 answers
110 views

Story where a guy gets an email where if he agrees to go out and buy specific computers and store them in the attic then he'll get paid lots of money

I was talking with someone today and it reminded me of a story I read over 20 years ago. I can't remember if it was stand-alone or a short story. I know I read the book before the year 2000, so ...
Fering's user avatar
  • 121
1 vote
0 answers
21 views

What early copy of Kobzar was discovered in 2003?

The translator notes for the Taras Shevchenko poem Tribute to Shternberg in The Complete Kobzar mentioned that the authorship of the poem was in dispute until the 2003 discovery of a "rare early ...
EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine's user avatar
4 votes
1 answer
254 views

Greek Alexander Romance - Plot device or other function of Alexander's surreptitious stealing of Persian drinking cups?

In one of the more common form factors of the Greek Alexander Romance (by Pseudo-Callisthenes), we have this passage, located in Book II, 15: As they began to drink more deeply, Alexander had an idea:...
Arash Howaida's user avatar
0 votes
0 answers
34 views

Manga about a character who gets lost in the woods, wanders around and finds this small shack with a young male hermit

I remember reading a few chapters of a Japanese manga about 3 years ago, but my memory of it is very hazy. The story was not current and had been in production for several years already. If I had to ...
Listless's user avatar
0 votes
1 answer
95 views

Considering the similarities between H.G. Wells’ Kipps and Charles Dickens’ Pip can we draw a conclusion regarding parallels between the works?

Considering the example H.G. Wells’ Kipps and Charles Dickens’ Pip there are obvious parallels between these characters and their respective stories. (For example, both are orphans brought up by ...
schweppz's user avatar
  • 1,004
1 vote
0 answers
50 views

Why was a time of war described as "good"?

The poem Ivan Pidkova by Taras Shevchenko (in The Complete Kobzar) contains the following lines: There was an age - that trouble Pranced about Ukraine, Grief quaffed honeymead Like rebels in a tavern....
EJoshuaS - Stand with Ukraine's user avatar
2 votes
1 answer
102 views

Are the events in Thomas Bernhard’s “Correction” autobiographical?

Someone told me today that in “Correction” when Rothaimer “pursue[s] his project of constructing an extraordinary habitation, the Cone” (Wikipedia), that this is based on actual events in Bernhard’s ...
Cerulean's user avatar
  • 123

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