Category: gothic literature

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Race in Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”

Last year, I wrote about Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil” and slavery. This semester, I taught the story again, and this time, I became more intrigued by the correlations between the Hawthorne’s tale and issues of race and abolitionism that circled around the nation during the period. The story originally appeared in the 1832 edition of The Token and Atlantic Souvenir; later, Hawthorne … Read More Race in Hawthorne’s “The Minister’s Black Veil”

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Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” and Slave Rebellion

Ever since I first encountered Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog, or the Eight Chained Ourang-Outangs,” I became intrigued by the issues Poe addressed through this Gothic story that takes place far away from American soil. The story first appeared in 1849, and we can read the story in an autobiographical manner, as some scholars have done. However, I would argue that we must also read … Read More Edgar Allan Poe’s “Hop-Frog” and Slave Rebellion

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Is Work/Life Balance Achievable in Academia?

For the first few weeks, I would walk into my eight o’clock class to bright faces and smiles from the students seated within the rows. About a month into the semester, and coincidentally around the same time that they had to turn in their first essay, the smiling faces turned to tired and haggled sleep-deprived visages that stared blankly back at me as I … Read More Is Work/Life Balance Achievable in Academia?

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Literacy in Octavia Butler’s “Kindred”

Note: For this post, I will use Duffy and Jennings’ adaptation of Butler’s Kindred. I have read Butler’s novel, but it has a been a few years. The adaptation closely follows the novel. On Tuesday, I wrote about the ways that Damian Duffy’s illustrations convey just as much emotion to the reader as Octavia Butler and John Jennings’ words in the graphic novel adaptation of … Read More Literacy in Octavia Butler’s “Kindred”

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Conveying Emotion in Duffy and Jennings’ Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s “Kindred”

One of the key aspects of reading comics and graphic novels is paying attention not just to the words but also to the visual images that accompany them. Both the words and the images work together to create an experience that, to me, resembles a melding of a printed text and movie. When I read the March trilogy and The Silence of Our Friends, … Read More Conveying Emotion in Duffy and Jennings’ Adaptation of Octavia Butler’s “Kindred”