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    “There can never come much happiness to me from loving … I wish I could make myself a world outside it, as men do”: Sympathy and Femininity in George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss

    “You have known Maggie a long while, and need to be told, not her characteristics, but her history … For the tragedy of our lives is not created entirely from within.” (Eliot 409) George Eliot, one of the biggest names in Victorian literature, was known for her realistic storytelling and her continuous goal to write literature with psychological insight and empathetic understanding. The Mill on the Floss, one of Eliot’s classic works, is the chronicling of the complete life of Maggie Tulliver as she progresses through a rebellious childhood, a painful middle period, and into the culmination of her adulthood through a difficult choice she must make between family and…

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    “The old way of love seemed a dreadful bondage”: Homoromanticism and Identity in D.H Lawrence’s Women in Love

    “‘You can’t have two kinds of love. Why should you!’ ‘It seems as if I can’t,’ he said. ‘Yet I wanted it.’” (Lawrence 481) D. H. Lawrence’s Women in Love tells the story of love and tragedy between two women struggling with their own circumstantial love affairs. However, separate from the changing values of modernist heterosexual romance, Lawrence’s classic novel, lauded for its portrayal of modernist attitudes as one of the best works of literature in the 20th century, explores a complicated homosexual love affair between Birkin and Gerald. The two male leads are contrasted against one another and in intimate duality with each other, breaching an ascension beyond the…

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    His Place in the Sky: Family and Loss in David Chariandy’s Brother

    “Toronto” by VV Nincic on Creative Commons What does it mean to grieve? That is the central question which David Chariandy’s 2018 novel, Brother, addresses. Living in post-pandemic 2021 can be so chaotic and fast-paced that the slow, careful nuances of everyday life are simply forgotten. Regardless, there is a certain something that sings between the lines of this careful, masterfully plotted book; something, that, during the free-spinning, reckless course of 2020-2021, has brought me back to the tale of Michael and Francis once more. “… [H]e, my brother, understood the old music, that heritage of love, because he felt it himself. He loved his family, and also his friends. He loved a young…

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    That Distant Black Flag: The Intricacies of Familial Love in Chang-rae Lee’s A Gesture Life

    “Japan” by YoTuT on Creative Commons “Let me simply bear my flesh, and blood, and bones. I will fly a flag.”(Lee 356) Chang-rae Lee’s novel, A Gesture Life, is a slow, emotional exploration of the complications that arise in the diasporic communities of the globalized last century. Chang’s quiet narrative hints at the darker complications of national loyalty and questionable morality, as readers are simultaneously led through the recollections of World War II and the peaceful everyday life of Franklin Hata, a Japanese-American immigrant who served as a medic in the Japanese army.  From the beginning, Franklin, or Doc Hata as the sleepy town of Bedley Run calls him, is…

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    Forgotten Voices: Death and Transformation in Lee Maracle’s Ravensong in Relation to Modern Epidemic

    Ravens on the trail” by Abhi Here on Creative Commons “Never again would wolf women serve men in quite the same way again.” (Maracle 2) Lee Maracle’s newly-revived novel, Ravensong, is a quiet but powerful recollection of the sociopolitical impact epidemic has on marginalized communities. Originally written by Maracle in three days, Ravensong was rejected by publishers, swamped out of print by the release of the high-fantasy works popular at the time, and forgotten by the general public for the better part of a decade. Despite its single-handed defeat by Harry Potter, Ravensong was brought back by dedicated fans who continued to push for its re-publication, feeling the necessity of…