The cliché that love is blind is most often applied to romantic relationships where love is enough to mask the flaws of one person. However, in the case of the mother-daughter relationships in the short fiction of authors like Sarah Meehan Sirk and Jamaica Kincaid love is blind the sense that very particular outpourings of […]
An element of the past is often central to fantasy texts, they are set in worlds where characters fight with swords rather than guns and cell phones are more impossible than magic, but the degree of history that slips in shifts a great deal with the author. Canadian writer Guy Gavriel Kay is praised for […]
One of the traditions of the stage is the curtain call, all the actors, still in costume, coming out one last time to be applauded by the audience, and if endings are about satisfying conclusions this doesn’t seem like the worst way to end a narrative. The endings of Robertson Davies’s Fifth Business and J.K. […]
Media outlets are often accused of partisanship and interest groups run video ads but the kind of direct relationship between the artist and politics is usually seen as one of commentary rather than true propaganda in the modern context. However, before the advent of new technologies the mediums of the artist and the medium of […]
When TV shows do a spin off series it often feels like a money grab, but when an author publishes a parallel novel to one of their existing works many readers are simply thrilled to access the narrative from another angle. This is a type of writing that is found most often in the speculative […]
Ray Bradbury’s work is most often discussed in the context of censorship and the restrictions in the flow of ideas. But it is also fundamentally a novel about book ownership, in fact this comes through just as clearly because of the physical nature of the book burnings that represent censorship in this text. Examining Bradbury’s […]
Figures of insanity are common in story telling, and perhaps especially so in the genres that depart from realism. They often serve as a counter point to the actions of the sane heroes of the story while also illuminating aspects of the world that are not accessible to those rational characters. In the case of […]
Somehow a deck of cards doesn’t seem like a medium that could create art. Cards are used for such low brow games as Go Fish while Bridge is about as complicated as it gets but even that is a far cry from painting or dance. However, the creative display of dexterity with playing cards has […]
C.S Lewis’s Chronicles of Narnia are steeped in Christian theology to a degree that even to a reader not searching for it some themes come through clearly. From the publication of The Lion the Witch and the Wardrobe in 1950 with its clear allusions to the crucifixion to The Last Battle’s end of days as […]
The Western art tradition is filled with repetitive motifs, that appear across many periods with variations and adaptions to fit current trends but are ultimately of the same event. Due to the development of Christianity alongside this art tradition Bible stories and religious themes are often the basis of those motifs. However, society has been […]
Res Gestae 