The House of Mirth
By Phin Upham In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton refers to New York society as a “great gilt cage.”(p59) Wharton gives us an intricate account of how Lily Bart, a beautiful, charming, sensitive young woman was debased and destroyed in that fashionable society in which she was born and reared. To some extent Lily ...
Crusoe’s abattoir: cannibalism and animal slaughter in Robinson Crusoe
Story via Annals of Science. By Jasmine Allen Abstract Robinson Crusoe (1719) is well known as a novel about cannibalism. Yet it is just as concerned with the slaughter of animals. This article argues that cannibalism and animal slaughter in Robinson Crusoe must be understood in tandem as highly politicised practices and considered in the ...
Fast Zombie/Slow Zombie: Food Writing, Horror Movies, and Agribusiness Apocalypse
Story via American Literary History. By Michael Newbury Abstract In Danny Boyle’s 28 Days Later (2002), the protagonist, Jim (Cillian Murphy), awakens from a four-week coma, disoriented in an abandoned London hospital. The camera initially shoots Jim naked from above, then shifts to other angles. Sometimes the shot is obstructed by plastic film, other times ...
Laughter and Forgetting, by Phin Upham
Milan Kundera’s The Book of Laughter and Forgetting is told through a series for strange, often surreal, vignette. An exile from Poland, a satellite of the Soviet Union, Kundera hardly ever directly attacks Communism. Instead he subtly shows how human nature is opposed to it, a more powerful condemnation of it than any diatribe would ...