All Questions

While spending one complete year each on the study of Japanese and Chinese literature (in translation), it was a pleasure to experience the cultural differences among the Western body of writings and ...

Yesterday, I asked a question about the relationship between the Ur-Hamlet and Fratricide Punished / Der bestrafte Brudermord. The Wikipedia page about Fratricide Punished says that the play was first ...

In La faute de l'abbé Mouret by Émile Zola, Jeanbernat threatens to cut off Frère Archangias' ear (book 3, chapter 5) and then does so (final chapter). Jeanbernat has clear reasons for hating ...

In S. Y. Agnon's short story "The Kerchief", there's an entire section (section 4) dedicated to a dream that the protagonist would have when his father was selling things in Lashkowitz: And ...

My college assignment is to write about parody in Beckett's Molloy and I need to write about the parody of human feelings in this novel too. I would appreciate if someone could tell me which sources ...

Author Brit Bennett's new novel has hit and stayed on The New York Times fiction best-seller list for months as of now. I have not been able to get a copy. Reading the reviews and synopsis makes me ...

Thomas Kyd (1558—1594) is best known as the author of The Spanish Tragedy, a play that shares several similarities with Shakespeare's Hamlet. These similarities include a ghost demanding vengeance, a ...

I'm a newbie in literary reading and I'm confused about narration. I have read Katherine Mansfield's short story The Little Governess, which is written in third person narration. But I am confused ...

In Ishay Ribo's song "Keter Melucha / כתר מלוכה" (Royal Crown), a song written about, essentially, COVID and lockdown, there's a stanza that goes like this: בין ויקהל לפקודי אין איש בעיר ...

So during the Korean Folktale Topic Challenge, I was actually searching for a specific story that I thought was associated with a mythical beast called "Haetchi" or a "Haetae". It'...

Symptoms of Being Human by Jeff Garvin tells the story of Riley, and the story of her navigating a new school, people bullying him, and being outed as genderfluid to their family. Recently on Writing ...

The classical Persian epic poem the Shahnameh was written over a millennium ago, 977-1010 CE, compiled in verse form from traditional mythology and history by the poet Ferdowsi. Wikipedia tells us ...

The central theme in the Japanese light novel/manga Toradora! (とらドラ!) around which the entire story unfolds is the love triangle between the male protagonist Takasu Ryuji and his two girl friends, ...

Neil Gaiman calls his "A Study in Emerald"* a Lovecraft/Sherlock Holmes fanfiction. And indeed it is exactly that: it uses the narration and story structure pretty characteristic to one from ...

It is somewhat of a cliché that Romantic literature is escapist or at least tends to be escapist. Here is an example: The study and understanding of reasons and nature of the presence of this ...

The classical Persian epic poem the Shahnameh (a compilation and retelling of previous mythological and historical Persian literature) is mostly credited to Ferdowsi, who spent over thirty years (977-...

Gigi, the female protagonist of Colette's novella Gigi (1944), is full of character. Independent and mischievous, and a little tomboyish, she leaves a lasting impression on the reader. I am wondering ...

Face to Face with Hon. Henry Litton GBM CBM JP, Former Permanent Judge of the Court of Final Appeal | Hong Kong Lawyer A good judge is also humble – they “see the world as the common man and woman ...

At roughly page 277 (I'm reading a translation) of The Two Towers, where Gollum is talking to himself as Frodo is sleeping, it says: Sam had lain still, fascinated by this debate, but watching every ...

From Finnegans Wake, What is the meaning of this word? In context: The fall (bababadalgharaghtakamminarronnkonnbronntonnerronntuonnthunntrovarrhounawnskawntoohoohoordenenthur- nuk!) of a once ...

In Third Girl (1966) by Agatha Christie, the character Dr Stillingfleet describes the condition of his patient: “She’s down at Kenway Court. Came like a lamb. Can’t tell you much yet. The girl’s full ...

The chorus of Halsey's song "Colors" goes like this: Everything is blue His pills, his hands, his jeans And now I'm covered in the colors pulled apart at the seams And it's blue And it's ...

I recently acquired a volume from the famous Bibliothèque de la Pléiade from an antiquarian bookseller. These volumes always have two fabric bookmarks and as you can see from the image below, the ...

In the first part of the Shahnameh, "The Shahs of Old", the Deev-influenced king Zohak has a dream in which he foresees his own downfall at the hands of Feridoun and his cow-headed mace: ...

Elizabeth could safely say that it was a great happiness where that was the case, and with equal sincerity could add, that she firmly believed and rejoiced in his domestic comforts. She was not sorry, ...

In Miss Julie (Fröken Julie), a seminal play and central piece of modern Swedish literature, the two main characters are named "Julie" and "Jean". Why "Julie" and "...

I was surprised to notice, when exploring Wikipedia's Epithets in Homer, that Agamemnon's individual epithet (or at least one of them) was "son of Atreus (Ἀτρείδης Atreídēs: also transliterated ...

Please do not look at the following if you haven't read Peril at End House, in case of spoilers! After reading this book, I had the following questions. I would feel very grateful if anyone can share ...

I am reading Agatha Christie's Peril at End House. Can anyone help me understand what "her face was innocent of make" means in the following paragraph? It was, I think, her appearance of ...

I recall a Sherlock Holmes mystery where the detective and his assistant are in their apartment and Watson is working over some decision that he has to make. Suddenly Holmes pipes in to give his ...

I wonder if either of these two scenarios ever happened: Author A: writes story Author B: This stinks. writes derivative work of A's work that fixes perceived weakness from the original Or Author A:...

I wasn't sure whether this should go here or on the TV stack. If better there, please move it. Rob Grant and Doug Naylor created the TV show Red Dwarf. They also wrote two Red Dwarf novels together ...

Piggybacking on this question, I am still curious about the mono no aware (物の哀れ) reading of The Tale of Genji. According to Wikipedia: Norinaga's most important works include the Kojiki-den (...

Scholars of Elizabethan theatre agree that the stage in Elizabethan playhouses could have a trap door, for example in the Globe Theatre (built in 1699) and the Red Lion. In his study Shakespeare: The ...

The original manuscripts of The Tale of Genji no longer exist. Royall Tyler writes in the introduction to his translation (Penguin 2003, page xviiii) that by the 13th century, the manuscripts of the ...

The search for literary sources has been inspired largely by the difficulty scholars have experienced in imagining that a work of the magnitude of The Tale of Genji could have been created without ...

The French playwright Jean Anouilh wrote the play Becket or The Honour of God / Becket ou l'Honneur de Dieu inspired by Archbishop Thomas Becket's conflict with king Henry II. (In 1964, five years ...

In Murder in Cathedral by T.S. Eliot, when Archbishop Thomas Becket returns from France, and sees the second priest scolding the women of Chorus, he says Peace. And let them be, in their exaltation. ...

Why Didn't They Ask Evans? is a novel by Agatha Christie. In the story, a dying man's last words "Why didn't they ask Evans?" inspires an amateur detective investigation, in which ultimately ...

I learned of a story in my high school time(sometime during year 2000-2002) as part of the English textbox. The story is about two men having a conversation in a train, one is a disabled man who lost ...

Congressman John Lewis, a noted American civil rights activist and politician, passed away on July 17, 2020. Jon Meacham wrote a biography of him that was published on August 25, slightly over a month ...

Donald Keene comments: [Murasaki Shikibu] dismissed as old-fashioned the kind of unreality present in The Tale of the Bamboo Cutter—the birth of a little girl inside a stalk of bamboo, or Kaguyahime’...

I am reading Oscar Wilde's poem "The House of Judgment" and it uses the phrase. I have seen it in other older texts. What does it mean? Here is a copy of the passage. The phrase is bolded. ...

The French author André Gide (1869 – 1951) was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1947. The author died in February 1951; in the following year, the Vatican placed his works on the Index of ...

I'm only two paragraphs in with The Age of Innocence and already I'm having trouble, specifically with this sentence: To come to the opera in a Brown coupé was almost as honourable a way of arriving ...

In "The Touchstone" in Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book by R. Austin Freeman, Thorndyke and his friend, Gervis, found a print of a boot with an iron toe-tip on loam soil, then they found another ...

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 ...

King Crimson's song "I talk to the wind" starts with: Said the straight man to the late man Where have you been? I'm pretty sure that the songwriter is creating a contrast (e.g., an ...

In "The Touchstone" in Dr. Thorndyke's Case-Book by R. Austin Freeman, Thorndyke went to an old disused chalk-pit, where a dead man found after he fall from above path, the edges of which ...

The Frankfurt School is a school of social theory and philosophy associated with the University of Frankfurt's Institute for Social Research (German: Institut für Sozialforschung, IfS). It is known ...