Questions tagged [title]
Questions specifically about the titles of literary works: their meaning, purpose, reception, significance, etc. Do not use to ask for the title of a work you partially remember; use [identification-request] instead
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Why is Pechorin a hero of our time?
In Mikhail Lermontov's A Hero of Our Time (Герой нашего времени), the main hero is Grigory Pechorin, a cynical noble army man, an example of superfluous Byronic hero.
The title of the novel has to ...
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Are Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence actually songs? Or is the word song a metaphor?
William Blake's Songs of Experience and Songs of Innocence have the word "song" in their title. Why is that? Are they actually songs? Or is the word "song" a metaphor for something else.
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What is the literary effect of dropping articles from titles?
Quite a few novels and films have titles which, if they appeared as phrases in everyday speech or writing, would normally have to be preceded by an article or other determiner. Some examples: Animal ...
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Why rename Kipling's poem "The Beginnings" to “The Wrath of the Awakened Saxon”?
Several white nationalist and neo-Nazi websites have published a modified version of Kipling's poem "The Beginnings." In the new version of the poem, the title was renamed to "THE WRATH ...
user111
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Why did Arthur Waley change the title in his translation of Journey to the West?
Journey to the West is a 16th-century Chinese novel whose original title 西遊記 means (according to Wikipedia) "West-Wandering Chronicles". In Arthur Waley's well-known 1942 English translation, he ...
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Why the title Far From the Madding Crowd for the Thomas Hardy novel?
The title of Thomas Hardy's novel Far From the Madding Crowd presumably comes from this famous phrase in Thomas Gray's poem "Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard", but I can't really see the ...
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Where did Boccaccio refer to Dante's Comedia or Commedia as the Divine Comedy?
The English Wikipedia article about Dante's Divine Comedy contains the following paragraph, which contains a statement that has no source (emphasis mine):
The work was originally simply titled ...
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How was Jude obscure in Thomas Hardy’s Jude the Obscure?
I have recently completed the novel Jude the Obscure by Thomas Hardy and as always the title left me baffled. In the whole novel it was Sue who seems (if one just uses one's own viewpoint and judges ...
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