William Shakespeare

As often, Murdoch has a canonical text in mind for reworking: in this deeply unsettling novel it is Shakespeare 's Much Ado About Nothing. (One scene also recalls the book of Job.) But...

Her dedicatee was a bookstore owner in Nashville, Tennessee, where he involved himself in the Civil Rights movement in 1960. (His son Richard is known as a writer). RT uses three epigraphs: from St John of the Cross

The story begins where many novels end: with the happiness of the eponymous heroine as she reaches the age of eighteen as a virtuous, well-educated heiress, married by her own choice to Count Harton. Her...

According to Linden Peach , the writings of Bertolt Brecht and Mikhail Bakhtin influenced AC 's notions of theatre and the carnivalesque, which are central features of Nights at the Circus. However, Peach went...

In addition to its over-riding themes of colonialism and the marriage market, this novel, set in early British Calcutta (and incorporating a good deal of travel book material), is much concerned with literature and with...

Reading myths, she finds, she has equal difficulty inhabiting characters of hyper-masculine men and of oppressed women: she wants instead to read about women who love themselves, who are alive, who are not debased, overshadowed...

Some of these early poems engage with familiar British texts. Her playful To Wed or Not to Wed is based on the most famous speech by Shakespeare 's Hamlet, and is not without a trace...

Miranda and Ore try to understand the house's haunting in terms of the soucouyant, a Caribbean supernatural character that sheds skin and traverses boundaries. Ore describes the terror of the soucouyant as the danger of...

Fire, addressed to Yeats and headed with a quotation from Shakespeare (Does not our life consist of the four elements?), is a poem in the same style as Matrix. Like...

As the work opens, Cordelia, slight of body, determined of will, savvy of mind (who is to reappear later in another book, The Skull Beneath the Skin), is running a seedy detective agency...

The family attends the funeral of Mirabeau ; they are still in France at the onset of the dreadful events of September 1793: the beginning of the Terror. The medallion is...

The hospital poems in this volume present experiences of fear, pain, and alienation, with tirelessly exact observation and tireless compassion. The artist (that is, a typist concerned about the quality of her work) who speaks...

Its story relates in flashback the life of strong-minded, unsuccessful writerConstance Keating, who has always been something of a misfit to her Irish family. The book opens with a letter she sends to Jacob Weinberg...

The central plot features the relationship between two writers: Bradley Pearson, whose severe standards have caused him to suffer from writer's block, and Arnold Baffin, a more facile and popular author, discovered by Pearson. Baffin's...

But as in her previous novel, MS turns aside from a happy ending which is already within her reach. Ulrich has an affair with Viria, who gives him for Agnes what she claims is a...