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 the last title in Proust's "Search For Lost Time" not consistently translated as "Time Found Again"?
Marcel Proust wrote a seven-volume French novel called A la Recherche du Temps Perdu. The original French title of the last volume was Le Temps Retrouvé.
It seems to me that in these titles Proust ...
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Why is "warm" removed in the translated English title of Eberhardt's "In the Shadow of Islam"?
Isabelle Eberhardt's book Dans l'Ombre Chaude de l'Islam has a title whose direct English translation would be "In the Warm Shadow of Islam". My guess is that the word "chaude", ...
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Why does Petrarch's sequence of poems to Laura have three different titles?
Petrarch's celebrated sequence of 366 poems to Laura goes by three different titles. As far as I can tell, they're used interchangeably:
Il Canzoniere, The Songbook
Rerum Vulgarium Fragmenta, ...
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Why was the title of Mark Twain's jumping frog short story changed so much?
I just learned from another question about a short story by Mark Twain entitled "The Notorious Jumping Frog of Calaveras County", which, when I looked it up online to find a copy-pastable ...
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Is Hemingway's poem entitled MITRAILLIATRICE or MITRAIGLIATRICE?
I read -- a few months ago -- Hemingway's juvenilia poetry & short-story collection stoically entitled Three Stories & Ten Poems. It was published in the early 1920s -- I think 1923, but I've ...
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Why the title "Agunot" for S. Y. Agnon's short story?
S. Y. Agnon's first influential story is "Agunot" - in fact, his chosen name "Agnon" comes from the same word.
The word "Agunot" is the plural form of the word "Agunah", which is the term for a woman ...
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Do sign-language works typically have native sign-language titles?
While doing some looking into sign language literature for a current topic challenge, I noticed that all the works I was coming across, while entirely in sign language themselves, were given English/...
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Why was Pygmalion retitled to My Fair Lady?
George Bernard Shaw's play Pygmalion has been adapted many times for different media, but most notably as a musical entitled My Fair Lady. This musical was so popular that some screen adaptations have ...
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What is the significance of the title "You Should Have Seen the Mess" by Muriel Spark?
What is the significance of the title of Muriel Spark's short story "You Should Have Seen the Mess"?
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Does Muriel Barbery's title "The Elegance of The Hedgehog" reflect knowledge of Archilochus' aphorism?
Does Muriel Barbery's title The Elegance of The Hedgehog reflect knowledge of Archilochus' aphorism? Is there information or proof that Barbery had Archilocus' aphorism in mind?
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How do the lyrics of "上を向いて歩こう" relate to its English title "Sukiyaki"?
The English title of the Japanese song 上を向いて歩こう is a head scratcher.
The lyrics:
上を向いて歩こう
涙がこぼれないように
思い出す 春の日
一人ぽっちの夜
上を向いて歩こう
にじんだ星をかぞえて
思い出す 夏の日
一人ぽっちの夜
幸せは 雲の上に
幸せは 空の上に
上を向いて歩こう
涙がこぼれないように
泣きながら ...
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Why would "Bareface" be mistaken for a Western?
From the Wikipedia page on C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces:
C. S. Lewis originally titled his working manuscripts "Bareface". The editor (Gibb) rejected the title "Bareface" on ...
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What if it were named '*The* Animal Farm'?
This question was inspired by a recent comment to a previous question of mine. In that question, I asked about the literary effect of dropping the articles from titles of novels and films. Even there, ...
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Justifying the title of Shaw’s play “Arms and the Man”
The title of Bernard Shaw’s Arms and the Man is a reference to Virgil’s work, but why the reference? What similarity do they have?
The title seems quite consistent if it is seen through the events of ...
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Why was The Bastard of Istanbul translated into Turkish as "Father and Bastard"?
The novel The Bastard of Istanbul was originally written in English (by a Turkish author, and set largely in the eponymous city in Turkey). It's been translated into various other languages, as listed ...
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