The Victorian Gothic.

Hi my dear readers! If you have attended to my class presentation about the influence of the gothic in the Victorian Age, you must know what I'm going to tell you in this post because I will deal more or less with the same topic.

Although in the Victorian Age the Gothic fiction was not more the dominant genre, in many ways it was in a very creative stage at that time. For instance, Edgar Allan Poe was an important and innovative author in this period. Instead of the traditional elements of gothic stories, like the supernatural, prophecies and the rest of them seen in class, his stories focuses more on the psychology of his characters. A good example of Poe's Gothic would be his story "The Fall of the House of Usher", published in 1839.

Another innovative element was the introduction of the byronic hero that comes from the Romatic Period into the Gothic. The typical byronic hero is arrogant, cunning, disrespectful, intelligent, sexually attractive, sophisticated and educated among other characteristics. So the epitome of the byronic hero could be Dorian Gray, the character invented by Oscar Wilde in 1890.

The last innovative element I'm going to treat is the inclusion of topics like the ethics and the moral degeneration of the society. This fact happened in the 1880s and the Gothic Fiction dealing with themes like this was called Urban Gothic. In it, social structures of the time were questioned. One important book that portrays this was Stevenson's Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, published in 1836.

Well, to conclude I say that I hope you enjoy this post and also I hope that the aim of it will be realized. Obviously, the aim is to teach and to entertain ;)

Invented Words in Gulliver's Travels.

Dear and loyal readers! In this post I am going to write about the invented words that appear in Gulliver's Travels and I will give you some examples of these words.
Sometimes, Jonathan Swift created new terms in this book in order to cover up what he really wanted to mean, but most of time, the language invented by him is formed by nonsense words, not all of them have a meaning.
I will give you some examples of both, nonsense invented words, and invented words with meaning.
There are many examples of the first type. One of it is Glumgluffs that is located in the first voyage, the voyage to Lilliput, and for the context we can deduce that it is a kind of measure. In the voyage to Brobdingnag it can been found an invented expression, it is Relplum Scalcath that according to Gulliver means freak of nature, an exception to the general laws of nature. Also in the third voyage it can be seen invented words such as Flandona Gagnole, that refers to the astronomers's cave. To end up with the examples of nonsense invented words I take one of the last voyage, it is the word yahoo. With this word it is named a kind of humanoid creature who lives in the Houynhnhms land.
The examples of the second type are fewer. Lilliput itself could be a word with meaning. It could be formed by two separated words: "lilli" that could mean little and "put" that may have been from de Latin "putus" and means little boy. Another example of this kind of words is Brobdingnag that may have been formed as an anagram of big, grand and noble but without using the syllable -le. The last example I give you comes from the voyage to Laputa. In it appears two words, Tribnia and Langden, in order to refer to a kingdom visited by Gulliver. These words are in fact an anagram of Britain and England.
To end up I say that there are more examples of invented words in Gulliver's Travels but I hope you will enjoy these examples, and also I hope you will find this post interesting.

Third Post: Rebel Literary Works.

First of all I want to explain the title of this post. As all of you know, The Beggar's Opera is a ballad opera written by John Gay that satirizes Italian opera. So in my third post I'm going to talk about other literary works that emerged to satirize a specific literary genre or sub-genre, so in a way, they are rebel pieces.

The first work I'm going to deal with is The Rape of the Lock. As we have studied, this mock-epic narrative poem was written by Alexander Pope in order to parody the serious, elevated style of the classical epic poem–such as The Iliad or The Odyssey.

The second literary work is Gulliver's Travels, a novel written by Jonathan Swift. Although this novel has been treated as a children's story, it is in fact both a satire on human nature and a parody of the travellers' tales literary sub-genre.

The third work I'm going to deal with is The Tragedy of Tragedies or The Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great, which is a play written by Henry Fielding that satirizes the absurdities of bad, and even good, English tragedies, like for example Hamlet.

The last literary work is a Spanish one. Don Quixote is a novel written by Miguel de Cervantes that emerged to satirize the popular sub-genre of that time, the chivalric romance, a style of heroic prose and verse narrative work.

To conclude, I hope you enjoy this post and also I would like you to find it very useful and interesting. At least, I have learned a lot about "rebel" literary works.

Second post: The Rape of the Lock Vs. The Divine Comedy

Dear readers, I have decided to compare the two epic works that appear in the title of this post, my second post, and I hope you enjoy it. I know that all of you have read  The Rape of the Lock, our second reading, but perhaps you don't know very much about The Divine Comedy. This is an epic poem written by Dante Alighieri between 1308 and 1321. 

As you can easily infer, both of them are epic poems, so they share the typical characteristics of this kind of literary work; but the way these characteristics are presented is a little bit different.

The first feature is the invocation of the muse. In The Rape of the Lock the muse invoked is Pope's friend, John Caryll; while in The Divine Comedy, Dante invokes his love, Beatrice. 

The second feature is the division of the poems into cantos. The English poem contains only five cantos, very few if we compare them with the thirty- four cantos in which the Italian poem is divided.

The third feature is the account of a voyage. In Pope's work, the voyage is presented through the river Thames and in Dante's work it is presented in a more spiritual way: Dante starts his journey in Hell, then he goes to Purgatory and finally he ascends into Heaven.

The fourth feature is the participation of deities or spirits in the action. In The Rape of the Lock spirits like sylphs, gnomes and nymphs intervene in it, while in The Divine Comedy creatures like for example the harpies and the furies are the one who participate.

The fifth and final feature I'm going to deal with is the mentioning of mythological personages. In Pope's work appears Thalestris and in the italian work appears personages like Cerberus, Ulysses, Achilles, etc.

I would like to finish up by saying that both of them are considered masterpieces so, as you have studied The Rape of the Lock, I encourage you to read Dante's work, one of my favourite books.

First post: Imoinda's strength.

Dear readers, as you can see in the title, my first post is about Imoinda's strength. As you know, last week we took part in a discussion about our first reading, Oroonoko, and one of the topics we dealt with was the weakness of women. Some people thought that Imoinda is a weak woman because she is always obeying Oroonoko's orders and, in a way, she is always behind him, she does not think for herself. In my opinion, this is not true, and I would even say that she is stronger than Oroonoko. Now, I give you my reasons.

Firstly, she is doubly enslaved. Once, she is enslaved by her king, Oroonoko's grandfather, who falls in love with her and for this reason, he wants to marry her. And in this situation, Imoinda shows her strength by keeping her virginity until Oroonoko arrives at the Otan, although she knows that if the king catches them, they will probably die.

Secondly, she is the person who tries to kill the governor by shooting a poisoned arrow when the slave revolt takes place. Although she hurts him in the shoulder, she does not kill him because an Indian woman sucks the poison. This in an heroic act because even not Oroonoko dares to do it.

And finally, she is a strong woman because she is the only one who remains with Oroonoko till the end of her life and the only one who never betrays him. She shows her strength again when she agrees to be killed by her husband for not being a slave anymore.

To conclude,  I say that with these three reasons I think I have proved that Imoinda is not a weak woman but the opposite.

Reason for this name.

I have chosen the name of 'Ana-Imoinda' for a simple reason. I think that all of you know which is the reason for 'Ana', but I tell you just in case: obviously, it is my name! So, I will focus on the name of 'Imoinda'. Imoinda is a character of Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, the short story I think all of you have already read, haven't you?
Well, it is an exotic name that has attracted my atention and for this reason I have thought that it would be interesting if I put it as my blog's name.
See you soon!