I had a dream that I didn’t want the lion to eat the lamb and the lion came up and lapped my face like a big puppy dog and then I picked up the lamb and it kissed me. – Jack Kerouac
In her novel, Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter uses ideas of performance to discuss identity. Inherent in the narrative, there is the question of how identity can be created and restored: do we, the performers, control our own identities, or are we only who our audience perceive us to be? Today, I will discuss […]
If you’ve never heard of Eliza Haywood before, welcome (and you can thank me later)! Eliza Haywood is the lady whom Alexander Pope attacked in his satirical poem ‘The Dunciad’, and Jonathan Swift once famously called a ‘stupid, infamous woman’. Haywood wrote and published over seventy works during her lifetime including fiction, drama, translations, poetry, […]
In his poem, ‘On Everyday Theatre’, Bertolt Brecht, writes: ‘Somewhere between Dressing room and stage: An Actor leaves his room A king enters the play.’ The identity of the actor shifts as his body moves from dressing room, to stage. Between these two spaces, between the final act of the play and the curtain call, […]
In Byron’s poem, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage, the first two cantos of which were published in 1812, Byron does something very similar to his teasing in Lara, A Tale, tactfully using language to coax his reader into complicity with actions considered immoral and deviant in the time that the poem was written. In canto I, Childe […]
T.S. Eliot once wrote that ‘Byron added nothing to the language […] and developed nothing in the meaning, of individual words’. Even after putting my love for Lord Byron aside, I’m not sure that I agree. Lord Byron’s poetry is a poetry of suggestion and of withholding, of teasing and withdrawing. Particularly in his poems […]
Happy New Year! Here’s to a year of growth, success, love & good literature. All the best! ♡ This year I want to read more poetry so I’m kicking off 2019 with a post on William Wordsworth’s poem, ‘Three years she grew in sun and shower’. To speak of suffering in literature is hazardous; it […]
Edmund Spenser’s beautiful Sonnet 75 articulates the power of poetry. The speaker of the poem expresses the idea that while death is universally inescapable, through poetry, we can become immortal. Although this is something that is related to us in the narrative of the sonnet, this idea becomes resonant through Spenser’s employment of poetic devices […]
As you may have gathered by now, ‘Lamb, No Lion’ is about sensitivity, sentimentality and tenderness in literature. I have sought to find the softness and delicacy in literature and to share it here — I’ve discussed the light playfulness that exists in Joyce’s heavy novel, Ulysses and the infrequent moments of beautiful meaning in Hemingway’s The Sun […]
In September I travelled to the beautiful Spanish capital, Madrid, with my boyfriend to celebrate his 21st birthday. I thought there would be no better time to re-visit Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, which takes the reader from Paris, to Burgette, to Pamplona, and finally, to Madrid. With all the construction taking place in the streets, it was hard […]
HAPPY HALLOWEEN! I thought today would be the perfect day to discuss a chilling play, John Webster’s The White Devil. The White Devil is a bloody Jacobean revenge play. With its scheming, seduction, horrible murders and powerful female lead (the courtroom scene is incredible), Webster’s play is one of my favourites of the era. Today […]
Lamb, No Lion 