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The immense popularity of Dan Brown's The Da Vinci Code may be traced to several factors, among them good suspense writing, an intriguing mystery, and popular anti-Catholicism. This essay, however, focuses on its themes of masculine conspiracy and misogyny. In the widespread folktale 'The Swan Maiden,' a man subdues and weds a mythical female. Her eventual murder of her husband and escape into freedom exposes underlying tensions between the genders. This essay compares the plot of The Da Vinci Code with a 'Swan Maiden' myth from New Guinea, where men's fear of women has led to the creation of secret men's societies. That similar themes are found in an American best-seller and a myth from Melanesia indicates that they are widespread if not universal masculine concerns. Keywords: Dan Brown, The Da Vinci Code, Donald Tuzin, Swan Maiden, Misogyny, The Cassowary's Revenge, Gidion Kambapwi lay dying of cancer. He had lived a good life that had offered many unexpected pains and pleasures. Among the latter, Gidion counted his strange friendship with the [...]

Margaret Laurence employs references to masks to convey character in her African and Canadian fiction and nonfiction. Curiously, this significant element of her writing has not yet been explored. Because [...]

This article presents a comparative reading of two folktales that are also characterised as children's stories (one from Venda folklore and the other a popular European narrative) in order to [...]

A fiction writer describes her experienced in writing realistic fiction for children. She had set some limits on reality since she finds it hard to strike a balance between carefree, authentic, uncensored, realistic writing and age-appropriate writing. She also examined the five story elements based on questions posed by her young readers.

Abstract: Dacia Maraini's short story includes the various recurring themes we have witnessed throughout literary history: love, fiction vs. reality, gender, and migration in less than 3,000 words. Keywords: Dacia [...]

The author addresses the grammatical ambiguity of the word 'Him' in the dying speech of the Duke of Guise and the possibility that the word refers to either God or King Henry. He cites two French dramas dealing with Guise's death as the possible source for Marlowe's use of the equivocal syntax.

Theocritus' construction of the fictionalized character of Polyphemus in Idyll 11.25-7 dialogue with the Homeric tradition is discussed. It is found that the traces of the 'inverted' re-impersonations of Homeric roles operating in Idyll 11.25-7 are another piece of Theocritus' masterful technique of allusion.

An interdisciplinary study of archive and text reveals that archive-text are interrelated and are never fully separable from each other.

The author analyzes the similarities in writings of James Joyce's 'Finnegans Wake' and Georges Bataille's notions of sacrifice and sovereignty.

The author examines the story titled 'The Boarding House' from James Joyce's collection of short stories 'Dubliners'. The story symbolizes the national and domestic crisis and defies established notions of women's sexual purity.

Hija de la fortuna by Isabel Allende is a mix of romance, travel and adventure with the romance novel providing Eliza Sommers the protagonist the perfect background as she escapes the confines of bourgeois domesticity to complete an epic quest for adventure and full personhood.

The momentary insight that comes from a variant, distanced perspective on the subject that focus on the irony, historical context, gendered points of view, form and practices of reading are presented.

The reception of E. Talbot Donaldson's ironies are analyzed, his own use of irony and the critical vocabulary he shares with Chicago school is assessed. An argument about his insight into this central term is presented.

The 16th- and 17th-century noun 'back' offers a variety of figurative meanings, many of them with erotic significations. The male back as a metonymy for 'phallus' and 'copulative strength' is definitely a part of the language, an expression that came up in the 1590s but fell out of use in the later 17th century.

Thomas Hoccleve, a clerk of the Privy Seal, had to maintain a playful tone in 'Regiment of Princes', a textbook of advice to the future Henry V in order to avoid angering the prince. Hoccleve achieved it by using allegories of the game of chess, and appropriated his games using chess-puns of the various meanings of the word 'draught' to express radical social ideas throughout the Prologue.

Colette's writing for the periodical press, particularly her writing on fashion is discussed in terms of its capacity to affect the high purposes of satire. Colette's writing has made everyone laugh at the fact that fashion affects not only clothes, but bodies, and that style fashions the body and hence the self.

The vocatives in the 'Theognidean Sylloge' have some peculiar features, that is, in the majority of verse groupings, the vocative is given without an accompanying verb or pronoun or pronominal adjective in the second person singular. It appears that much of the Sylloge is a hodgepodge of elegiac verse of multiple and often undetermined authorship and most scholars agree that the only poems that are the work of Theognis contain the vocative Kappaupsilonrhonuepsilon.

The intertextuality contained in both the large-scale narrative structures and in individual references in the works of the eighteenth century novelist Henry Fielding is examined. An attempt is made to initiate research on the literary dimension and narratological functions of classical quotations and allusions in his works.

Article discusses David Hume's thoughts on literary and dramatic tragedy and the reader's or audience's response to suffering as set forth in his essay 'On Tragedy'. Parallels are drawn between Hume's views and Aristotle's discussion of spectacle in his 'Poetics'. It is argued that the author's aesthetic treatment of tragedy manipulates the spectator's emotions.

Burton's Anatomy is built around a coherent analysis of melancholy and presents a consistent explanation of the properties and pathology of melancholy relating these to a lucid model of mind-body interaction, which also accounts for the disease's self-propagating nature. Burton's differentiates between those who are merely disposed to and those who have become habitual to melancholy and that distinction makes good sense of the relationship between the anatomy's preface and the treatise proper.

The English of James Joyce's texts reminds readers of the words as historical and geographical artifacts, changing shape in space and time. The readers of his work are non-native speakers of English and as they cross the linguistic thresholds in reading Joyce's texts, these readers understand the way words transfer meanings.

Byline: LAWRENCE BIEMILLER The exclamation points -- how could I have forgotten the exclamation points? Two in the first two sentences, 10 on the third page, seven in a mere [...]

Sonallah Ibrahim's novel Zaat, named after its protagonist, is also about Egypt as the name 'Zaat' stands for 'Self' in Arabic. The novel combines extracts from Egyptian newspapers alternating with [...]

The World Tossed at Tennis, a masque performed by Prince Charles's Men in 1620 features a woodcut depicting some of the characters. This playtext may be unique in being marketed with portraits of more than one of its performers even though only two of its actors can now be identified.