All Questions
1,404
questions with no upvoted or accepted answers
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answer
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views
Does Auden's poem 'The Model' refer to any particular painting?
I re-read 'The Model' by W H Auden earlier today, and I was struck by how good it is. I've venerated Auden since I was sixteen, but I hadn't appreciated this poem properly until now.
I find myself ...
- 1,064
6
votes
0
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101
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What is the meaning of the cabdriver's retort in Chandler's "The Long Goodbye"?
In Raymond Chandler's 1953 novel "The Long Goodbye" the following exchange occurs:
I got into the taxi and we went the three-odd blocks to my parking lot and shifted to my car. I held out ...
- 161
6
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0
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80
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In Bradbury's short story, how can a city be built in the shape of the wind?
“The Golden Kite, the Silver Wind” is a short story by Ray Bradbury, first published in 1953. It tells the tale of two neighboring Chinese cites, ruled by emperors who continually attempt to foil each ...
- 11.7k
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52
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Children's novel about girl whose guardian is her elder brother
I've been trying to find the name and author of a "realistic fiction" children's novel (age 7-12-ish) written somewhere in the early 2000s (I read it in 2014) which takes place in a small ...
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6
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0
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159
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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' « ...
6
votes
0
answers
103
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Who or what is 'our God' in Swinburne's 'Ave atque Vale'?
The following is a bonus question to "Who is the 'pale Titan-woman' in Swinburne's 'Ave atque Vale'?", which I was advised to separate into its own question.
The twelfth verse of 'Ave atque ...
- 1,064
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0
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2k
views
What inspired the Vermicious Knids?
The Vermicious Knids are a type of dangerous alien creature in the works of Roald Dahl. They appear as primary antagonists in Charlie and the Great Glass Elevator and get passing mentions in other ...
- 72.6k
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91
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Does Faustus start with heroic dignity?
Does Faustus start out with heroic dignity in Christopher Marlowe’s play Doctor Faustus? Does he lose this dignity with his tragic error of making a terrible deal with the Devil?
I came across an exam ...
- 836
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0
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76
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What did Yeats in his late period think of his early work?
The poetry of W.B. Yeats is commonly seen as belonging to three rough phases. The first is a Romantic and pre-Raphaelite style of flowery verse which commonly invokes figures of Irish mythology. The ...
- 22.3k
6
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0
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110
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Story about a candidate who fails an audition because they were volunteering the previous day
Does anyone recognize this story? I think I read it some ~15? years ago and it's probably a classic of some kind, since it was translated. I don't remember the original language, but it was probably a ...
- 533
6
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0
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758
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Does Merlin in Le Morte d'Arthur have any kind of backwards aging or memory?
In T. H. White's The Once and Future King (1958), Merlyn ages backwards, remembering the future and constantly becoming younger himself. An old answer on another SE site claims that:
This view of ...
- 72.6k
6
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1
answer
762
views
Did Sara and Tsukuru finally get together?
Haruki Murakami's novel "Colorless Tsukuru Tazaki and His Years of Pilgrimage" follows the life of Tsukuru Tazaki and his relationships and bonds with people he meets in his life - the group ...
- 964
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0
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152
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How do I choose between a French translation and an English translation of a work written in a language that I cannot read?
Disclaimer: I have asked this question on both French and English Stack Exchange sites, and they both recommended that I ask it here instead. I hope it is on-topic, and apologize if it is not.
I can ...
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383
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Brideshead Revisited: Prince Rupert’s Horse
Hooper, in Evelyn Waugh's Brideshead Revisited,
was no romantic. He had not as a child ridden with Rupert's horse or sat among the camp fires at Xanthus-side; at the age when my eyes were dry to all ...
- 161
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310
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What is the significance of the name Bastian Balthazar Bux?
Apart from being triply alliterative (BBB), what is the significance of the name Bastian Balathazar Bux (or Bastian Balthasar Bux in the German original), the protagonist of The Neverending Story? ...
- 72.6k
6
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68
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Since when do the Portuguese regard The Lusiads as their national epic?
According to Wikipedia,
Os Lusíadas is often regarded as Portugal's national epic, much as Virgil's Aeneid was for the Ancient Romans, or Homer's Iliad and Odyssey for the Ancient Greeks.
The ...
- 44.6k
6
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0
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516
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What's the first "reverse" poem?
I recently discovered an interesting type of poetry. When read one way, it says one thing and when read a different way, the opposite, all with the same words.
A sub-type of these is known as the ...
- 1,914
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97
views
Does the warren of the snares function as a critique of a specific group or behavior?
While journeying to Watership Down, the Sandleford refugees encounter the warren of the snares. This warren has some distinctly odd ways of living, all stemming from how they accept that, in exchange ...
- 9,794
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130
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Why are there two characters named "Rose" in Rose Under Fire?
Two major characters in Rose Under Fire (by Elizabeth Wein) have names that mean the same thing. One is named Róża ("Rose" in her native language) and the other Rose. As far as I can ...
- 9,794
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92
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Why did Waley choose to transcribe the titles of some chapters as opposed to translating them in The Tale of Genji?
Arthur Waley seems to be a champion, practitioner, and repeat offender of domesticating translation. This Q&A tells us his translation of Journey to the West significantly abridges the original ...
- 1,386
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58
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Trying to locate source of a story about Japanese storyteller's apprentice who is mistaken for a master
I'm trying to locate the source of a story I remember, for an essay I'm writing. Not sure if the story is fact, fiction, or legend. It concerns an apprentice to a master storyteller in Japan (Rakugo I ...
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277
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Lack of Proper Ending in Stories by Old Indian Authors
I have read quite a few stories by old Indian authors who wrote in Hindi and Urdu in the early twentieth century.
I noticed a trend of them not completing their stories or providing an ending and ...
user7519
6
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0
answers
175
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Short story, maybe SF: non-neurotypical girl gets pregnant and older mentor (not the father) marries her
In this story there's a girl who is mentally fragile in some way -- I don't remember exactly how, and I don't think it's spelled out explicitly, but there's something about her that isn't entirely ...
6
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0
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265
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(How) have the interpretations of Macbeth's ending evolved over time?
I just attended a performance of Macbeth that ended on a much more ambivalent note than Shakespeare's original text. Instead of Malcolm and his posse picking up the shambles and Malcolm motivating his ...
6
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277
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Are the homoerotic hints in "La Reine Margot" intentional?
La Reine Margot by Alexandre Dumas can be read as the story of two guys, and their two girlfriends: the alpha couple is Marguerite de Valois (Margot), who's having a passionate affair with the ...
6
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0
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206
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Is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five an allegory of what would now be called PTSD?
Is Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five an allegory of what would now be called PTSD? Would ‘allegory’ be the correct terminology here?
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163
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Book about a kid that encounters a foreign girl during holidays and invents a new language
I am searching for a book I read around 10 years ago (in French).
The story was about a family going on vacation (I remember a sort of camping, near the sea).
The protagonist was a young boy (8-12 ...
- 61
6
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0
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84
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70s or 80s Novel, Low IQ man finds/rescues young woman adrift at sea
Probably read in 70s or early 80s. Probably set in the Caribbeans or Florida Coast, or Gulf Coast. The book may have been a mystery or thriller/adventure type story. It was in English
A low IQ man (...
- 305
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0
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90
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Tracking down a literary quote about grammar
I once read a quote that goes something like,
We should all be grateful to grammarians for saving us in fifty years
from a grievous error.
I think it's by Proust, but Google doesn't seem to ...
- 481
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105
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Do advocates of authorial intent theories consider conscious intent on the author's part mandatory for something to constitute literature?
Related: Does computer-generated poetry, stories, etc. fit in any common definition of literature?
And the associated reading challenge proposal that inspired the questions: https://literature.meta....
6
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81
views
How much of Fantastica remains the same between iterations?
Each time a human comes to Fantastica, the whole world is essentially 'rebooted'. We see this in chapter 13, where Bastian and the Childlike Empress start off in total empty nothingness, before he ...
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74
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In "The Old Man and the Sea" why doesn't the Old Man recognize that the fish is a marlin
When I read the book as a kid, I was certain that the "fish" is a narwhal. I'm rereading it now, many years later, and a quick Google search told me I was wrong all these years: the fish is a marlin.
...
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133
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Do we know Merlin enchanted the sword/stone thing?
In Malory's Le Morte d'Arthur it's very heavily implied that Merlin enchanted the stone and the sword in it so it only could be pulled out by the true king of Britain/Arthur:
the day came when the ...
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306
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In Finnegans Wake, surely the dreamer is this character?
As I see it, Finnegans Wake has two main sections, namely Section A (“dreamland” [1-617.29]) and Section B (“anna’s interior monologue” [617.30-628]). Section A and Section B are my terms and there is ...
- 1,943
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98
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Is there anything positive about Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire?
Is there anything positive about the character of Stanley in the play A Streetcar Named Desire? I vaguely remembered that he supported Blanche to meet with that man... Is there anything more about ...
6
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0
answers
45
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What prompted Du Bois to change "Jew" to "Immigrant" in "Of the Black Belt"?
In my copy of The Souls of Black Folk, the essay "Of the Black Belt" references Jews as the inheritors of much property and land in the deep South.
A footnote in the book, however, reads:
In ...
user80
6
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0
answers
755
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Were the three slogans in Orwell's 1984 partly inspired by Kipling's poem "The White Man's Burden"?
George Orwell did not like Kipling at all. I quote from this essay by Orwell:
Kipling is a jingo imperialist, he is morally insensitive and aesthetically disgusting.
But this essay also shows that ...
- 12.5k
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133
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Gorilla family gets attacked by hunter for circus
I am trying to identify a story that is about a family of gorillas which gets attacked by hunters.
The book starts by focusing on a male gorilla and his two mates, and their offspring. They live in a ...
- 69
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254
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Is my controlling idea for my poem analysis accurate?
This is my current controlling idea of my essay on the poem "On Pleasure":
"The speaker challenges the idea of pleasure in the minds of the
audience, and argues that pleasure is an ...
- 61
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0
answers
73
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What was the structure of Hermogenes’ ‘Art of Rhetoric’ prior to the 6th C CE?
In her book, Hermogenes and the Renaissance, Annabel Patterson cites a paper by George Kustas (‘The Function and Evolution of Byzantine Rhetoric’ in Viator, University of California Press, Vol I, 1970)...
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152
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Is this quote from Flatland a reference to Plato's Cave analogy?
Flatland opens with the following paragraph:
Imagine a vast sheet of paper on which straight Lines, Triangles, Squares, Pentagons, Hexagons, and other figures, instead of remaining fixed in their ...
6
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92
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What qualities have led to the enduring popularity of The Legend of Sleepy Hollow?
The short story The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Washington Irving has remained extremely popular. Wikipedia lists 24 film and TV adaptations including the well known Tim Burton film and, perhaps more ...
- 22.3k
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What is the real "Consortium" as mentioned in Dan Brown's Inferno?
On the "FACT" page of the book Inferno by Dan Brown:
"The Consortium" is a private organization with offices in seven countries. Its name has been changed for considerations of security and privacy....
6
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0
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50
views
Why is the Actor Kipps, and Kipps the Actor?
The stage directions for Mallatratt's The Woman in Black indicate that the middle-aged man, "whose name is Kipps, will not be referred to as 'Kipps' but as 'Actor'--even though he clearly isn't one," ...
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Identify a historical romance/drama where a young woman has an affair while on a beach holiday
My girlfriend is trying to find a story she once read (in 2004, when the book was not new). If anyone can help me earn a few relationship-points it would be greatly appreciated.
The story is set some ...
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81
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Novel about the future of communication, everything becoming shorter and shorter
Years ago, roaming around in a library, I stumbled across a short novel about the future of communication. I think that it was written in the 70s.
Starting from the first appearance of the Reader's ...
- 169
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60
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Do the stories in "The SEA is Ours" accurately portray the essential aspects of South-East Asian culture?
The SEA is Ours is this month's topic challenge. The purpose of these challenges is to increase the diversity of the literature that we discuss on this site. This is important for a number of reasons, ...
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81
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What was Max Beerbohm's literary relationship to Dostoevsky?
I'm currently reading Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson.
When the Duke suddenly pours out his soul to Zuleika, his regrets and love so exaggerated that readers can't help but cringe and laugh, I thought ...
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320
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Symbolism of Occam's death in Straight Man?
In Richard Russo's novel Straight Man, the protagonist Hank claims to be a philosophical disciple of William of Occam, and applies Occam's razor to his approach to deduction many times. As I recall, ...
- 1,053
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95
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Why is the 'a cat may look at a king' quote relevant for when Dr. Rohmer is looking at the man on the podium?
In The View From Saturday, chapter 2 (page 22 in my copy), there's this quote:
On her left sat Dr. Roy Clayton Rohmer, the District Superintendent for Clarion Academy. Both Dr. Rohmer and Mrs. ...
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