Art of the Sentence: Zinzi Clemmons
“I’ve often thought that being a light-skinned black woman is like being a well-dressed person who is also homeless” (p.31). So responds Zinzi Clemmons’ narrator...
Loving the Gothic Novel
Of the Gothic texts spanning an approximately 75-year period that we explored this semester--Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Maria (1792), Radcliffe’s The Italian (1797), Austen’s Northanger Abbey...
Art of the Sentence: Jenny Offill
“Once, as I lay in bed, a bright red sun appeared in the window. It bounced from side to side, then became a ball. Life...
Madwomen in Northanger Abbey and Frankenstein
Gilbert and Gubar’s feminist examination of female-authored literature, The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), draws its title...
Sublime v. Human Gothic Villains
The trope of the Gothic villain ranges from the most explicit—arguably Ann Radcliffe’s Schedoni, the ultimate personification of the Gothic sublime that she articulates in...