This essay examines how Mary Shelley critiques the destructive consequences of masculine ambition and unstable identity. While some feminist readings argue women are absent, this essay shows how Shelley critiques both masculinity and femininity within patriarchal structures, revealing the moral costs of creation and unchecked ambition.
Examines how Edgar Allan Poe’s Berenice, Charles Dickens’s Hard Times, and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World critique utilitarianism’s reduction of human beings into abstractions, showing how such thinking erases individuality, empathy, and humanity itself. It traces a literary lineage of warning against the dangers of replacing feeling with cold calculation.
Explores how industrialization and child labor in the Victorian Era deprived working-class children of education and literacy, despite the period’s broader rise in reading culture. Testimonies like those of Hannah Goode and Henry Mayhew’s watercress girl reveal how exhausting labor, poor schooling, and poverty reinforced class divisions and limited social mobility.
Examines the Victorian debate over Darwin’s theory of evolution, contrasting Thomas Huxley’s staunch scientific defense with Edmund Gosse’s faith-driven resistance. It argues that science and religion need not exist in opposition but can instead offer complementary ways of understanding truth, meaning, and existence.
A close look at Chapter 32 of Moby-Dick, where Melville blends science, faith, and irony. This essay explores how Enlightenment ideas shaped Melville’s view of knowledge and the human desire to understand the unknown.
By applying Freud’s psychoanalytic framework to Brave New World, this in-depth study shows how the World State’s eradication of psychic tension produces not happiness but the erosion of humanity itself.
Taking a close look at one of Victor Hugo's main antagonists in Les Misérables: Monsieur Thénardier and his sinful life. His malicious choices lead him down a path of no return, without the hope of being redeemed.