From the earliest times stories have been translated into other languages, adapted into different contexts and rewritten to suit a new place, time and readership. From Chaucer borrowing from the works of the Italian writers Boccaccio and Petrarch for many of his Canterbury Tales to Shakespeare’s plundering of historical records and ancient tales, where stories are concerned there is ‘nothing new under the sun’. Continue reading “A literary and culinary translation”
Category: American literature
Food and generosity
In my last post I blogged about Maggie O’Farrell’s latest novel, The Marriage Portrait, inspired by My Last Duchess by Robert Browning, a poem which I taught frequently during my career as a secondary school English teacher.
The text that inspired this post – Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird – was also one I taught frequently (as well as also studying it when I was at school). Continue reading “Food and generosity”
Lucy Barton: the hungry woman
In Spring 2021 I wrote a post about Elizabeth Strout’s Pulitzer-prize winning novel Olive Kitteridge (published in 2009) and the protagonist’s hunger that acts as a metaphor for unresolved desires and issues. Continue reading “Lucy Barton: the hungry woman”
Racial passing
As well as exposing the continued ill-treatment and oppression of people from black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds, the Black Lives Matter movement also served as a reminder – to me and countless others – of the huge range of black-authored literature which is often overlooked by white readers and critics alike. Various websites and booksellers published lists of must-read BAME authors, and I was certainly glad to be pointed in the direction of a number of great books (both non-fiction and fiction), some of which I’d not even heard of, let alone read. Continue reading “Racial passing”