Reading literature through the looking glass of theory.
Twelfth Night, or What You Will by William Shakespeare
There’s lots of gender-bending in Shakespeare’s comedy Twelfth Night. The heroine of the play, Viola, dresses up as a man (Cesario) after she’s shipwrecked on the coast of Illyria. Her disgui...
A Midsummer Night’s Dream by William Shakespeare
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is another Shakespeare comedy about confusing love objects and shaky gender norms. This one’s set in Greece and focuses on two pairs of Athenian lovers, a group o...
“Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey, on Revisiting the Banks of the Wye during a Tour, July 13, 1798” by William Wordsworth
Don’t let the title that’s almost as long as the actual poem get you down. Basically, this is one of the most famous Romantic poems, and in it the speaker takes this long walk to an area surrou...
Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness is about a journey into the Congo at the height of colonialism in the nineteenth century. It’s a controversial book, to say the least. It’s beautifully...
The Jew of Malta by Christopher Marlowe
A chapter of Stephen Greenblatt’s Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare is dedicated to Christopher Marlowe’s play The Jew of Malta. It’s a play about a rich Jewish merch...