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What do written criticisms of The Monk reveal about the political, moral, and religious attitudes of England in the late 1790s? I will contend that there was much more at stake than the literary merit of a popular novel: anti-Lewis rhetoricians used the novel to advance social critiques that chastised irreligion, moral depravity, and the corruption of the aristocracy within the context of a conservative reaction to the French Revolution in England. 

Dancer from the Dance is a tragic novel, in part because of Malone’s condition as a doomed queen. He is unable to exit the circuit, slow down, and “grow up” because he finds it irreconcilable to live in the heteronormative world of production and stability, and the world of queer hedonism, at two different speeds.

The Conjuring reveals its true horror: the idea that women are the conduits of evil, and men have been right to try to save them from themselves for centuries. 

When Edna finds herself in nature she is taken back through memory to her childhood, a time in which she was free of external pressure and could be most genuinely herself. It is this journey that highlights Edna’s driving motivation throughout the novel: to preserve her basic sense of self.

“The End” likewise portrays an account of old age marked by infirmity and decay; however, Beckett’s modernist aesthetic suggests that decay has revelatory functions, and therefore, old age uncovers existential truths, which otherwise remain concealed.

The act of recovery, when juxtaposed with The Lost World’s purported driving forces of scientific discovery and colonial expedition, reveals the illusory and unstable nature of knowledge in both the scientific and the colonial contexts. 

Cohen’s poem “The Last Dance at the Four Penny” demonstrates the Montreal Jewish community’s connection to their heritage in the aftermath of immigration, the Holocaust, and assimilation into Canadian culture.

With the bloody endings of ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore and The Duchess of Malfi, in which both women are killed by their brothers, the playwrights suggest that incestuous male desire stems from a selfish and possessive impulse, resulting in vengeful acts of violence against their sisters.

Melville comments on the self-gratifying element of charity that reveals the donor’s interiority; the indulgence of the donor’s interior desires demonstrates a disconnect between the giver and receiver of charitable acts.