who is that pip with pizzazz?

When dressed, I sat a long time by the window, looking out over the silent grounds and silvered fields, and waiting for I knew not what. 

― Charlotte Brontë, Jane Eyre

WEIRD, USA VOL. 1 COVER REVEAL!

Art by the glorious Hannah Jones, of Hannah Jones Illustration. After ten years of work, this supernatural road trip through Americana will be available in the next two weeks! (Stay tuned for official release date.) Hope y'all are excited!

David Foster Wallace-Infinite Jest (via my-mind-is-playing-a-trick-on-me)

Guillermo Del Toro talks Brontë with Rookie

He speaks our language guys!

@zombeesknees

Everyone always wants to talk about Hook or Pan. Everyone always wants to debate which one is good and which is evil - who we’re supposed to follow and who we aren’t. The Peter Pan mythos has pretty much shrunk down to nothing but Hook and Pan (Hook, SyFy’s Neverland, Pan, OUAT, etc). Occasionally Tinkerbell factors in (Hook, Disney’s Tinkerbell, OUAT, etc). There’s one character, however, that always gets sidelined - which is puzzling since they are the main character of both the play and the book. That character is, of course, Wendy Darling.

Peter Pan is Wendy’s coming of age story. Wendy who decides to run away from home. Wendy who realizes that she must grow up - and that there’s no shame in that. Wendy who sees Peter as deficient and sees Hook as empty and decides that, no, she doesn’t want to be a part of that. Wendy gets the adventure she’s always wanted and she turns away because she realizes that it’s lacking. She’s the only one who truly sees the hollowness of being young forever. Barrie even says “You need not be sorry for her. She was one of the kind that likes to grow up. In the end she grew up of her own free will a day quicker than other girls.”

People always debate on who the hero is. When they learn that Peter could be horrid they assume it has to be Hook. Of course, the answer is that neither of them are the hero. Wendy is the hero of the story. You’re not supposed to be like Peter, who kept every good and bad aspects of being a child and can’t tell right from wrong. You’re not supposed to be Hook, either. He let go of everything childish and loving about him and became bitter and evil. They’re both the extreme ends of the scale. You’re supposed to fall in the middle, to hold onto the things about childhood that make it beautiful - the wonder, the imagination, the innocence - while still growing up and learning morality and responsibility. You’re not supposed to be Hook. You’re not supposed to be Peter Pan.

You’re supposed to be Wendy Darling. 

literature aesthetic ⇨ modern alice + wonderland

okay, most of what i do re: harry potter is criticism, and hp is flawed in such a number of ways, but sometimes i just sit here and

i mean, you all have a comprehension of just how drastically harry potter changed literature, yeah? like. it revitalized it. it blew the literary scene apart. the new york times had to create a separate bestseller’s list for children’s lit just because harry potter existed. harry potter changed reading.

so many people on tumblr were born in the ‘90s. when the first book came out, most of us couldn’t read. but we grew up in a world where everyone, everyone, everyone was reading harry potter, no matter how old they were; we grew up in a world where the most popular story in the entire world was a fantasy children’s book.

it’s sort of difficult to grasp, sometimes, the extent to which harry potter is not just a book. the extent to which what is basically a series of fun, interesting, and fairly good novels is such an enormous, enormous part of our lives, a cultural touchstone, a truly universal reference point, something so many people have shaped their lives around, a foundation for all of the stories we would read and watch for the rest of our lives– for so many of us, the first books we ever loved

the extent to which so many of us can’t call ourselves “fans” of harry potter, because it would like being a “fan” of, like, having lungs.

it’s not even about liking it or disliking it. it’s just a part of us.

Jean Rhys

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Wide Sargasso Sea

(via

wordsnquotes

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modern lit: bertha mason

the madwoman in the attic

Jane Austen, Northanger Abbey (via austenchanted)

#me at parties

How To Be A Heroine: Or What I’ve Learned From Reading Too Much by Samantha Ellis

Jeffrey Eugenides, The Virgin Suicides (via wordsnquotes)

Why are people so obsessed with Mr. Darcy when Mr. Knightley exists?

Mr. Tilney, tho

Mmm, yes, I do love me some Mr. Tilney also.

give me a Hamlet who believes he must be cruel to be kind

a Hamlet whose “I loved you not” is choked out like the lie it is. whose words to Ophelia begin stumbling and contradictory but build to viciousness, tears in his eyes barely in check. Hamlet, whose attacks upon her femininity are calculated and careful, hitting her where it hurts most. a Hamlet who tragically mistakenly believes aiming for her most intimate insecurities, betraying that trust born of a tender love, will make a cleaner break of it all and keep her away from him, away from the doom that he sees settling over Elsinore like a black cloud.

give me a Hamlet who acts, as he always does, from a sense of necessity. Hamlet who protects those he loves by betraying them. Hamlet whose mistake was acting too much on his own, making true the isolation and single-minded purpose he promised the ghost of his father. Hamlet who walks away from Ophelia disgusted with himself, self-loathing and heartbroken but that’s nothing new. 

give me a Hamlet whose lamentations and rage at her graveside don’t feel hypocritical. a Hamlet who loved her and hates how he failed to keep her away from all this death, driving her to it instead. a Hamlet who sees that the pain he caused with good intentions only continues to build.

give me a Hamlet quietly begging that, in Ophelia’s orisons, all the sins he is about to commit against her be remembered.

William Shakespeare, As You Like It (via whatahdisaster)