“Hwæt wē Gār-Dena in geār-dagum / þēod-cyninga þrym gefrūnon, / hū ðā æþelingas ellen fremedon” translates to “So. The Spear-Danes in days gone by / and the kings who ruled them had courage and greatness. / We have heard of those princes’ heroic campaigns” (ll. 1-3). Thus begins the Old English poem Beowulf, which offers one of the few remaining glimpses of Anglo-Saxon culture.

How does one articulate a slave’s continual pain? Which compositional medium best conveys a lifetime of misery? What last-minute omissions can a publishing company make to encapsulate the emotional onslaught felt by millions of voiceless sufferers? With all things considered, can the written word ever authentically illustrate a life enslaved?

Throughout much of Western literature, the shepherd has endured as a versatile and complex poetic figure. In his subsistent relationship with nature and distance from the urban, the shepherd has traditionally functioned as a lens and mouthpiece through which history’s poets have examined and voiced their social criticism. From the bucolic poems of Theocritus, to the Old Testament’s Book of Psalms, to Shakespeare’s As You Like It, shepherds have come to symbolize an unpolluted understanding of the world in which truth lies in simplicity.

Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice confronts readers with the question of religious conversion, a complicated issue that runs throughout the play. When the Prince of Morocco comes to win Portia, he says, “I would not change this hue/ Except to steal your thoughts, my gentle queen” (2.1. 11-12). The word “except” suggests that, in the event that Portia were to require it, the Prince would in fact “change his hue” or convert his blackness into some fairer shade.

Among the most intricate of William Faulkner’s works, Light in August (1932) dramatizes not only the economic and racial conditions of the post-bellum South, but also the fraught search for meaning that was so central to the modernist project. In exploring these themes, critical discussions of the novel have often focused on the split psyche of Joe Christmas. The ambiguity of his race, lying purportedly between ‘black’ and ‘white,’ fosters in Christmas an internal struggle between two irreconcilable identities.

 The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay occupies an immense historical space, extending from the streets of Nazi-occupied Prague to a solitary base in Antarctica, to pre-World War II Manhattan and its post-war suburbs. The novel’s main protagonist, Josef Kavalier, traverses nations, genres, and ideologies in an attempt to find a stable home and a defined Self. He and his cousin, Sammy Clay, help bring about the golden age of comic books with their fantastical creations and innovative designs, only to become disenfranchised with the figures they created.

In “The Future of the Novel,” D.H. Lawrence lamented the “self-consciousness” of the modern novel, complaining of characters “absorbedly concerned with themselves and what they feel and don’t feel,” and dismissing such work as “awful” and “childish” (152). To Lawrence, the then-fashionable stream-of-consciousness experiments of other early modernists, namely James Joyce, lacked a vitality that only engagement with the objective—the real, physical world—could provide. Two years later, however, Virginia Woolf expressed a seemingly opposite sentiment.

In early modern London, rising consumer culture and rising tension about gender roles generated a heated discourse around the commodification of beauty, its definition, and the gendering of its production and consumption. The conceptualizations of beauty at the time privileged the male gaze and revealed cultural anxieties about the legibility of gender and the female subject/body.