Southern Literary Messenger

allows a reader to review a certain text or piece of literature but you only focus on the literary elements throughout the piece such as: diction, irony, metaphors, symbolism, paradoxes, etc. But like all approaches to literature or anything in life, there are pros and cons. Some good things about formalism is that it gives you an idea of the author’s intent, helps the reader understand figurative language, literary devices, and more of the writer’s techniques, is easier for the reader to…

Mapping Project: Fadlan and Battutah In Franco Moretti’s, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for Literary History, in a chapter titled, “Maps,” Moretti notes that “there is a very simple question about literary maps: what exactly do they do? What do they do that cannot be done with words?” and “Do maps add anything, to our knowledge of literature?” (Moretti, Maps, 35). In this essay, I hope to explain the significance of maps in both Ibn Battutah’s, The Travels of Ibn Battutah and Ibn…

thought of a forest into a whole new idea of peace and softness. Her main idea is to show how men view women in their full integrity through the correspondence of a dark forest and a woman. The speaker is portrayed as a male figure and uses multiple literary devices to reach the point of clarity that women are assumed to be scary and mysterious but overall very gentle and comforting. With the use of metonymy throughout the poem, Oliver gives multiple metaphors of the speaker, comparing the…

Archetypal Criticism in In the Time of the Butterflies Recurring symbols and themes can be found in just about any form of literature. These archetypes can easily be spotted when using a literary theory. A literary theory is used to analyze and interpret literature. Archetypal Criticism is a literary theory that focuses on common archetypes in literature. Archetypal Criticism claims that certain characters recur in literature, and there are no new stories (Davidson). Archetypal Criticism can be…

Mark Twain, O. Henry, and John Steinbeck all have very unique writing styles. Mark Twain uses regional dialect which is a language that represents the character and where they are from, like how they use grammar and pronunciation. O. Henry uses plot twist. Plot twists are when something just pops up out of nowhere. John Steinbeck uses social commentary. Social commentary is problems in society. All of these elements of style helped them write all of their amazing stories. Whitewashing the…

Guilt is an emotion associated with feelings of shame, regret, or responsibility for something a person has done. In Shakespeare’s Macbeth, the two protagonists, Macbeth and his wife Lady Macbeth, both suffer feelings of guilt for a heinous crime, the murder of their king. Guilt manifests itself differently in these two characters, as it does in every guilty person. Shakespeare uses blood imagery to develop the theme of guilt, as both characters struggle with and grow accustomed to the presence…

description of sources on the topic of the Freudian Psychoanalytic Theory of Literary Criticism. This theory of criticism is based off looking at literary works through a psychological perspective. I am doing research on this top to have a better understanding of the kind of concepts and theory’s of psychoanalysis that are behind the make up of this theory of literary criticism. Most of the concepts and theories of this theory of literary criticism comes from the psychologist Sigmund Freud, who…

A political allegory is when a book or a work of art, tells one story but actually is using that story as a metaphor to hide a political meaning underneath. A political allegory could be found in fiction, drama, paintings, films and music. The dictionary states that an allegory is a story, poem, or picture which can be interpreted to reveal a hidden meaning, typically a moral or political one, it is derived from the Latin and Greek word ‘Allegoria’ “meaning ‘veiled language’ or ‘figurative.’…

Shawn Khan Mrs. Mikowski Hamlit 11 1 Feb 2012 Literary Periods Text Analysis In the song “The Dog Days Are Over” by Florence+ The Machine, the text gives rise to the idea of Realism. Realism is generalized with having an objective narrator, and leaves the reader to interpret the story in his or her own way. This occurred after the Civil War when Post War writers focused on creating works that did not idealize people or like transcendentalism. Basically, writers wrote truthfully…

William Shakespeare, George Orwell, and Joseph Conrad compare and contrast different ideas to help bring together his or her thoughts. Light versus dark, Denmark and Norway, Memory and the Past, are examples how an author may compare and contrast situations that may be important to the meaning and understanding of their novels. Besides those meanings, corruption is also a very important theme within these novels too. It shows and explains that a certain act can happen in real life. The three…