Book Review: The Arcades Project.
Walter Benjamin had collated The Arcades Project [Das Passagenwerk] between 1927 and 1940. It is very much a book that …
Tag Archives: Literary criticism
Book Review: The Indian in the Cupboard.
If you are taking your government-permitted exercise in the south of Edinburgh these days, you will sometimes see boxes of …
Book Review: Catch-22.
For many people, the COVID-19 pandemic will make death come alive again. With the escalating fatalities and the decimation of …
World War Correspondents: Tietjens, Crouchback and Yossarian.
[When I began researching “World War Correspondents” in 2013, it was with the intention of writing a series of articles …
Book Review: Flights.
Jasmine, the nice Muslim woman I’d spent the whole evening talking to, was telling me about her project: she wanted …
Book Review: Harry Price, The Psychic Detective.
Harry Price was a notorious psychic investigator who had haunted the UK’s tabloid newspapers, and wreaked endless mischief on them, …
Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris versus Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Dynamiter.
INTRODUCTION. THE INFLUENCE OF THE ONE THOUSAND AND ONE NIGHTS. THE INFLUENCE OF SCHEHERAZADE. THE INFLUENCE OF SAMUEL SMILES’ SELF-HELP. …
Did Bram Stoker Suffer from Fleas?
Academic studies of Bram Stoker’s extraordinary vampire novel Dracula (1897) are today like so much landfill. Modernists and postmodernists, Freudians …
Reading Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris in light of The One Thousand and One Nights.
Eugène Sue’s serialised crime novel The Mysteries of Paris (1842-3) begins with a device that had been treasured by contributors …
TV Review: Martin’s Close.
“A Ghost Story for Christmas” is not merely a minor subgenre of the BBC’s drama output. It is in fact …
Christmas with Washington Irving.
Today the Christmas material in Washington Irving’s The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. (1819-20) encompasses a jovial and expansive midsection …
Putting a Value on Eugène Sue’s The Mysteries of Paris.
The central plot-line… is that of a mystery-of-kinship story whose basic literary shape derives from the mystery-romances of Gothic and …
One Great Man On Another.
“This is the dilemma that confronts partisans of resentment: either they must deny Shakespeare’s unique eminence (a painful and difficult …
The Place of Bitters (Pique-Vinaigre) in The Mysteries of Paris.
[Here are some notes on the names that are used in this article.] Almost a thousand pages into his serialised …
Book Review: Dracul.
[The following contains spoilers.] You cannot understand Count Dracula without first getting the lie of the land. One of the …
