Reading literature through the looking glass of theory.
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë (1847)
In case you haven't read this classic, or seen any of its zillion movie adaptations, let's recap. The heroine and namesake of Jane Eyre is a young orphan girl who grows up with a cranky aunt a...
Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys (1967)
Let's keep things rolling on the Jane Eyre front by taking a look at Jean Rhys's humdinger of a re-telling of the story in Wide Sargasso Sea, written over a century later in 1967. Rhys was a Caribb...
Paradise Lost by John Milton (1674)
Rewinding to 1674, Paradise Lost might not seem like a text that feminist readers would want to pay lots of attention to, but don't you just love it? John Milton set out to "justify the ways o...
"Notes Towards a Poem that Can Never Be Written" by Margaret Atwood (1981)
Props to Canada for giving us Margaret Atwood, whose twisted imagination brought us The Handmaid's Tale, along with all sorts of poems about how the USA should get its nose out of Canada's business...
Dawn by Octavia Butler (1987)
Sci-fi! Galaxies far, far away; space battles and giant bug creatures; people with ears of every shape you can picture; and infinite universes to explore! What's not to love? Oh right, the threats...