With today being Mother’s Day (traditionally known as Mothering Sunday) in the UK, my thoughts went to mothers in literature and the extent to which they are portrayed as food providers and cooks for their children. Continue reading “Mothers and food”
Tag: Jane Austen
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”
Dangerous women
In Thomas Middleton’s play Women Beware Women (c.1623-24), which I wrote about here, women are presented as their own worst enemies. At the centre of the play is the character Livia, who engineers the downfall of two young women, Bianca and Isabella, persuading them to embark on dangerous sexual relationships (Bianca’s adulterous and precipitated by a rape, Isabella’s incestuous) which bring about their downfalls and ultimate demise. In her dying breath Bianca, realising what Livia has done, laments ‘the deadly snares / That women set for women’. Continue reading “Dangerous women”
Metafiction and intertextuality
Metafiction – fiction about fiction – sometimes also referred to as ‘self-conscious fiction’, is usually associated with the postmodern movement in literature (c. 1950s onwards). In metafiction the writer takes delight in alluding to the fictional nature of the work the reader is reading and to their own role as writer or compiler of that work. Continue reading “Metafiction and intertextuality”