Clearing a Path@@@Rule of Darkness: British Literature and Imperialism, 1830-1914

The Road to Wigan Pier

Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature

T HE PURPOSE OF THIS GUIDE is to help you write critical essays about books or other literary works. When you write literary criticism, you combine reasoned analysis with your personal evaluation of the work. Literary analysis and book reviews differ from the standard book reports you were assigned in earlier grades. A book report is a mere summary of a work that describes what happened in a text and when. However, in literary criticism and book reviews, you must bring your own critical skills to bear as you analyze a text. Your instructor will be asking you to evaluate and critique the work, not just summarize it. One of the exciting things about writing literary criticism is that you can share with others what you have learned and experienced while reading a poem, play, or novel. This personal experience is just that—personal—and is an essential ingredient for effective criticism and reviews. Nevertheless, although your work will reflect your individuality, there are some general approaches and techniques that can assist you in organizing your thoughts and creating your final report. The sections of this guide provide hints and strategies that will save you time and help you create a more thoughtful, well-written document. How to read texts critically How to locate and use outside sources of information to gain additional perspectives on a literary work How to organize and write the report How to write reports on nonfiction texts

I. Literary Criticism

Signal and noise

Europe, Refugees, and Nineteen Eighty-Four

By the late nineteenth century, achievements in cartography and unprecedented advances in transportation and telecommunications had effected a sense of the world as a smaller, more tightly-networked place. Conrad's fiction, this article argues, reveals his ambivalent response to this experience of spatial compression: on the one hand, Conrad's notorious obscurity attempts to re-mystify a world that has been thoroughly mapped and unveiled; on the other, his subversion of romance and his use of coincidence are textual strategies that register precisely what his obscurity tries to evade—the reality of a shrinking world. Conrad's formal innovations are therefore inextricably bound up with his spatial imagination.

The Spatial Imagination and Literary Form of Conrad's Colonial Fictions

Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism

The Colonial State and Transnational Welfare during the 1930s Depression

This essay gives a brief overview of the different ways in which literary criticism has understood modernism’s response to the crisis of liberalism that occurred in the early 20th century. Beginning with a historical explanation of the crisis and an account of its stakes for modernist art, the essay proceeds to discuss a central debate among critics that had taken place in the 1930s and that was particularly concerned about the ideological values of modernism during such a time of political instability. The essay shows how this early debate continues to frame and inform current criticism on the ‘politics of modernism’, which similarly seeks to analyze modernism’s relationship to the values of liberalism that had been so dominant for most of the 19th century. Focusing subsequently on contemporary criticism, the essay looks at two major thematic concerns that have shaped modernist studies from the 1980s onwards: first, the issue of how modernist aesthetics subverts forms of liberal subjectivity; and second, the issue of the extremist politics – invariably fascism – that modernist authors have frequently embraced. Both these concerns reflect a sense that modernism is fundamentally antagonistic to the 19th-century heritage of liberalism, imagining alternative models of consciousness from the liberal subject and repudiating the moderation of liberal politics. However, this essay concludes with more recent criticism which seeks to rethink modernism’s relationship to liberalism in more positive ways, focusing in particular on studies that examine modernism’s response to the transformation of liberalism from its classical Victorian form to the modern form of liberal democracy.

Janice Ho

Papers

Europe, Refugees, and Nineteen Eighty-Four

The Spatial Imagination and Literary Form of Conrad's Colonial Fictions

Writing British Muslims: Religion, Class and Multiculturalism

The Colonial State and Transnational Welfare during the 1930s Depression

The Crisis of Liberalism and the Politics of Modernism