Dickens the Master Author
Dickens is an author who can make you realise what reading is for .  Great Expectations  was on the reading list for teenagers in their...
Writing and Goals
Obviously you’ve got goals for your writing - right?  Not just the goal of penning a best-seller and being able to retire on the...
The Friendship of Lewis and Tolkien
It was several years after I had first read The Lord of the Rings  that I realised that its author, J.R.R. Tolkien, was a close friend of...
An Incomplete but Useful Glossary of Literary Terms
An incomplete but workable glossary for anyone pursuing an interest in literature: Â Adventure novel: Â A novel where exciting events are...
Pied Beauty
Gerard Manley Hopkins was born in 1844, the eldest of nine children. Though he had won a poetry contest at school, he was devoutly...
Passion in Austen
Passion? Austen? What does that even mean? Passion in terms of a love between heroine and hero, and how it is presented to the reader by...
The Modes of Fiction: An Introduction
Taking Aristotle as his starting point, Canadian academic Northrop Frye, in his ground-breaking book Anatomy of Criticism , classifies...
Challenging the Female Template in Fiction: Sarah Jane Smith in 'Doctor Who'
Examining female characters in fiction, one can hardly escape noticing a particular pattern in many of them. Ranging from figures such as...
The Power of Tropes
As we have seen in How Stories Really Work , there are four basic genres, each growing out of the kind of effect a writer wants to...