In her poem, “God works in a mysterious way,” Gwendolyn Brooks reflects on how religion has been subverted and replaced by a growing focus on the material world in the modern age. She even suggests this movement towards the modern is a necessary consequence of religion's inability to provide any kind of physical security or aid, and is representative of humanity's denial of external controls in favor of “assuming sovereignty” for itself.

Introduction

Shakespeare’s Hamlet provides a close look at a son’s relationship with his parents, particularly the way a man’s bond with his mother changes after his father dies. Hamlet, the Prince of Denmark, is haunted by the violence of his father’s death and the unthinking way in which his mother chooses to wed her dead husband’s brother, the new King Claudius. From his first conversation with the ghost of his father, Hamlet learns that Claudius murdered his father and he grapples with the consequences of this knowledge for the rest of the play.

Oliver Goldsmith’s novel, The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), centers around a vicar, Dr. Primrose, and his family, tracing their fall from relative privilege and wealth at Wakefield, their home parish, to a much more modest life on the lands of one Squire Thornhill. The novel chronicles their myriad adventures and steadily worsening misfortunes that finally give way to a happy culmination in which the vicar’s daughters get married and the family’s wealth is restored.

Text can both make and tell a life. Laurence Sterne’s The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman heavily utilizes text in order to tell the life that one experiences. Tristram’s Uncle Toby lives his life constantly recreating the memory of the Battle of Namur through both text and physical fortifications. Outside in the yard, Toby and Trim spend their days building defenses to reenact the battle in which they both fought and experienced injuries.

“Trauma, in order to be communicated and integrated into one’s personal knowledge of the past as well as that of the collective, must be narrativized.”—Ilka Saal (459)

Taking into account the strict codes of both play-making and gender that abounded in Renaissance England, it may be surprising to consider how much cross-dressing and gender bending occurred in the theater. In John Lyly’s late sixteenth-century play, Galatea, we see two women, played by boy actors, disguise themselves as men and fall in love. Given Galatea’s plot, it is unsurprising that the gender issues of the period pervade it.

Imagining his own epitaph as written by a Chinese man of letters, eighteenth-century author Oliver Goldsmith once described himself as “justly styled the Sun of Literature and the Confucius of Europe” (Spence 73). As generous a designation as it is, why Goldsmith would liken himself to the figure of Confucius is somewhat unclear. Perhaps it had something to do with Goldsmith’s widespread celebrity or his advocacy of certain social and political mores.

William Faulkner’s literature can be seen to operate thematically around a close attention to names and naming, as a way of highlighting issues of memory, lineage, objectification, and identity in the antebellum and post-Civil War South. The war shredded all notions of permanence of objects and places by giving former property legal personhood, turning wealthy plantation-based communities into ghost towns, and renaming counties in honor of Southern nationalists.