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Looks Aren’t Everything, Just Ask the Loathly Lady: How Dame Ragnell Reconstructs Feminine Beauty Standards and Sex Hierarchies In a Male-Dominated Space

Dame Ragnell combines her sexuality with the grotesque to refigure the text’s male perspective on women, teaching men to prioritize respect over physical beauty and to prize women’s sovereignty. 

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Playing Devil’s Advocate: An Archetypal Analysis of the Soul in The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus

For Doctor Faustus, the antithetical quest for a return to an integrated being is irrevocably linked to the soul: the immaterial content of his character, which allows him to determine his fate.

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The Archives of Women’s Intertwined Homefront Traumas in Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway

Through the lenses of Mrs Dalloway, her 1926 essay “On Being Ill,” and her 1923 short story “Mrs Dalloway in Bond Street,” Woolf interrogates the archive of traumas deemed worthy of heroization and remembrance within the cultural imaginary and acknowledges the unspoken traumas survivors were forced to bear alone.

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“A Long Road Home”: The Prodigal Daughter of Claire Keegan’s Foster

Through the young girl’s departure and return to her home in Foster, Claire Keegan presents an ironic retelling of the parable of the Prodigal Son, critiquing the traditional authority afforded to the father of the Irish family. 

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What’s Inside An Empty Suit? Great Expectations, Capital Interconversion, and Barack Obama’s Summer Reading List

Cunningham’s simultaneous evocation and minimization of political specificity acts as an exploration of Obama’s cultural iconization, while at the same time producing the conditions for Great Expectations’ success within the literary field.

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 “The Bog… Their Last Earthly Bed”: Death, Hospitality, Nationalism, and Resistance in Frank O’Connor’s “Guests of the Nation”

“Guests of the Nation” distorts boundaries between guest, hostage, and host, as the “guests” of the story are, ultimately, colonial powers, and their ejection comes with the sacrifice of Irish hospitality.

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Laboured Breathing… Then Comes the Release: Musical Screaming in MacLaverty’s Grace Notes

As an externalization of Catherine’s postpartum depression and the emotional struggles she must confront, her symphony issues the cathartic scream Catherine needs to let out in order to escape the cycle of abuse she has been trapped in for years.

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