myurbandream reblogged

It’s INSANE to me how controversial romance novels are. Romance novels. Like, being openly a fan of them immediately opens you up to people constantly coming at you like “but don’t you think it’s ~limiting- and ~juvenile~ to have a genre of books with happy endings for women?”

Like.

No?

Why is it such a big deal to want to read stories where women have sex and then don’t die at the end? Jesus Christ.

Why is the concept of female characters being happy seen as less creative than female characters suffering? (Trust me, creating a world where women win in the end takes a lot more creativity and artistic vision lmfao)

Anyway, literary bros will pry my romance novels with their happy endings from my cold dead fingers.

jennyredford

Or die in the very beginning of the book. But no one calls out James Patterson for writing another formulaic thriller in which a woman is horrifically killed after getting laid and then some man solves her murder. Every. Damn. Time.

But hey, those romance novels where women get happy endings are so limiting, eh?

Real talk: realizing how common it is for female characters to be punished for on-the-page sex with death was a big part of my embracing the romance genre. Once I noticed it I couldn’t unnotice it. It’s everywhere. A woman having sex in literature or non-romance genre fiction is the literary equivalent of a red shirt on Star Trek.

It’s not just the sex thing, though that’s a key element. It’s that, in romance novels, the heroine gets to be cared for the way she normally would care for everyone else. It’s wish fulfillment in that her romantic partner will do emotional labor, spend a great deal of time thinking about her, or sacrifice his desires or fortune or reputation to be with her, or spend days nursing her back to health, or risking his life to save hers. In romance novels, you’ll find men taking care of children, talking about their feelings, putting effort into their appearance—even if they are adorably bad at it. Watch how many romance novel protagonists fall in love with a man who happens to be rich or handsome, but she didn’t give in until his behavior changed and he starts mentoring her, or providing for her, or being gentle toward her, nourishing her, listening to her, appreciating her… I suspect romance novels are looked down upon not for being juvenile formulaic “beach reads” but because they paint a fantasy world that leaves men feeling uncomfortable or even emasculated. But whether you’re a Midwest housewife or a big city CEO, women who read romance novels just want to read about men loving women the way women are expected love everyone else—with a nurturing and protective form of unswerving loyalty. Great sex they don’t have to die for is also a huge bonus, but the *romance* part of the novel is genuinely more about the woman being appreciated (for her beauty or spunk or intelligence at first, and then for all of her by the end).

codenamecesare

“women who read romance novels just want to read about men loving women the way women are expected to love everyone else—with a nurturing and protective form of unswerving loyalty.”

obsessionisaperfume

THANK YOU.

lyricwritesprose

According to the website smartbitchestrashybooks, which analyzes romance novels to a great degree, one common element of the average romance novel is what they call the grovel. That is, there’s a turning point near the climax of the book where the leading man says, in effect, “I hurt you. I had my reasons, but they don’t make it right. I am devastated that I hurt you, and I will do whatever it takes to make it okay again. Leaving you is completely on the table even though I find the prospect horrific.”

And that’s a very important fantasy. To have your feelings, your pain, be made so absolutely central to the narrative, to someone else’s world. You could call it a power fantasy, but I don’t think that’s exactly right. It’s a significance fantasy. A romance story is a story in which the woman is the most significant damn thing in the book.

And when you think of it like that, you realize why some people are really, really threatened by it.

#literature #literary analysis #romance novels #romance genre #feminism

myurbandream reblogged

elidyce

earendil-was-a-mariner

Ironic that Bilbo is so annoyed with the Sackville-Bagginses for stealing from him and trying to evict him from his house, when his whole adventure involves stealing from someone and evicting them from their house.

To be fair, he was essentially helping someone else get rid of their own Sackville-Bagginses

brawltogethernow

This is an absolutely world-rocking take on narrative parallels in The Hobbit. Like why yes those were equally petty property disputes, and your point?

pulmonary-poultry

Thorin: “The dragon Smaug is terrible beast who has invaded our home and taken the heirlooms of our people as his loot.”

Bilbo: *remembering the last time Lobelia Sackville-Baggins was in his house* “I know the type.”

#lotr #the hobbit #literary analysis #literature

myurbandream reblogged

morgynleri

blue-author

Anonymous asked:

I know it's fashionable to hate shakespeare for being a white cis male shitlord but calling his work trashy just displays your ignorance. there are reasons he still gets studied in school hundreds of years later. the man basically invented the english language as we speak it today.

blue-author answered:

I don’t hate Shakespeare.

I love Shakespeare.

In my opinion, the greatest disservice anyone can do to his work is to elevate it to some kind of highbrow high art literary thing. The reason he’s studied today is that his plays endured (plus or minus some changes in fashion over the centuries), and the reason his plays endured is because they were popular, and the reason his plays were popular is because he crammed them full of stuff that people wanted; i.e., lots of jokes focusing on the less refined features of the human anatomy and the things they get up to.

Perhaps you’ve had it explained to you that Hamlet’s talk of “country matters” was an uncouth pun, and his reply in the same conversation of “nothing” was a similar reference. Did you think that was a one-off thing?

If you’re aware that “nothing” was a euphemism for the vulva in Shakespeare’s England, have you ever stopped to marvel at the sheer audacity, the sheer brass somethings that a man would have to have to name a play Much Ado About Nothing?

Translate that into modern-modern English, and you’d get something like Everybody’s Up In Arms About Pussy. Though you’d lose the pun on “nothing/noting” in doing so… yes, that’s how far from highbrow Shakespeare is. He made the title of his play a triple pun.

And yes, Much Ado is not one of the Bard’s more serious works to begin with… but then, what is? We divide Shakespeare’s plays up into tragedies and comedies based on the dramatic convention of which ones have a happy ending versus a sad one, but they are all comedies in the modern sense of “things you go to expecting to laugh”. The country/nothing lines come from Hamlet. Heck, Hamlet is hilarious throughout. Any scene with Polonius in it is guaranteed to be comedy gold.

Of course, the people who want to call Shakespeare highbrow are probably the people who quote him in all blustering sincerity when he says “to thine own self be true”… or funnier still, when they paraphrase him as saying that “brevity is the soul of wit”.

Of course, hands down, my favorite bit in Hamlet is when he’s giving instructions to the players that basically amount to William Shakespeare pre-emptively bringing up every stereotype of Serious Shakespearean Acting we have today and saying, “This. This thing. Do not do this thing.”

Anyway, let’s talk about the idea that he “invented the English language”; e.g., he created so many hundreds of new words. Okay, well, first of all, we don’t know how many he invented. We just know there are words and usages of words for which the texts of his plays are the earliest surviving example. The thing is, all those words evidently made sense to his audience.

There’s a post that goes around Tumblr listing some of the words credited to Shakespeare, and one of them is “elbow”. The commentary attached to this post basically boggles over the idea that nobody in the English world had a name for “the bendy part of an arm” until an actor gets up on stage and says “elbow”, and everybody’s like, “Oh, yeah, that’s what it is.”

Except it didn’t happen like that. The noun elbow isn’t what is attributed to Shakespeare; the verb to elbow (as in “elbowing someone aside”) is. His character took a noun and used it to describe an action. That’s not a highbrow creation of language as some sort of received wisdom handed down from authority. That’s naturalistic language use.

Even if he was the first person to describe the act of “elbowing someone”, it caught on because it worked, because it made sense to vernacular speakers of English.

So many of his words fit this model: they are butchered foreign words, they are slangy applications of English words, they are colorful metaphors or synecdoches. In short, he was writing in what we call “Buffyspeak”. If he had an unusual talent for doing it memorably, it still ultimately worked because it reflected the language of the time.

ansiblelesbian

This is your daily reminder that ‘some are born great, some achieve greatness, and some have greatness thrust upon them’ is a dick joke.

classicalmonoblogue

Also, in re the whole “white cis male shitlord” aspect: One of Shakespeare’s favourite things was to take an existing bigoted play that was really popular (often a comedy), and tweak it into a tragedy where the audience was forced to empathise with the person they’d been hating, and recognise their humanity. Merchant of Venice is a retelling of the Very Standard conversion play, except the standard version of the play is a comedy! And when the miserly Jewish antagonist is converted at the end, he’s super happy at being saved! But Shakespeare’s version has one of the most gut-wrenching monologues about the humanity of the othered, and presents a very reasonable man driven to distraction by abuse. He takes the original “miser” stereotype and shows a fully realised human whose concerns about being robbed and left without a way to survive in a hostile city are realistic and sympathetic. He keeps the conversion ending, but shows the violence of it, and Shylock is destroyed by it, not “saved.” Othello was based on an older Italian play that revelled in the evil of its title character, and the tragic innocence of the nice white girl taken and defiled and murdered by a savage black man. Very popular. So he took the same premise, and wrote a play that spends c. four hours examining the manipulation and gaslighting and psychological abuse it would take to drive a good and honest and trusting and caring husband to such violence. In Shakespeare’s version, there’s no violence rooted in Othello’s blackness, no “aha” moment where the fact that he finally succumbed to Iago’s machinations is blamed on something wrong in Othello’s nature, it is heavily and repeatedly shown and stated that his character is DEEPLY good, and then works to show how someone this good can be abused and manipulated into doing something they so TERRIBLY regret. Romeo & Juliet was based on a play that was all about how teenage sluts ruin everything and deserve to die, but Shakespeare’s play tells technically the same story, but his moral is kinda more that cultures of hate and families which dehumanise their enemies set up future generations for horrible and unnecessary misery.

#shakespeare #literary analysis #literature #literary criticism #language #learn something new every day

myurbandream reblogged

punsbulletsandpointythings

Twilight series theory - Twilight as a tragedy rather than a romance.

now who wants to write fanfiction emphasizing this point

This was so good oh my god. I’m actually so tired of people hailing Twilight as a love story and this was the most accurate thing I’ve ever read on the matter.

clefunable

omg i really want this mixed with actual gore and horror

from a post on reddit:

Let’s put problems with spelling, grammar, narrative flow, plot structure, etc. aside and just look at the story and, in particular, the character arc of Bella Swan.

At the beginning of the story, she is moving from Arizona to Washington on her own volition - she has decided to give her mother and her step-father some time and space and to spend some time with her father. At this point in the story, she is, admittedly, a bit of a Mary Sue, but an endearing one. She is sensitive to the needs of others (moves to Alaska for her Mom’s sake, helps her Dad around the house, is understanding and tries to give the benefit of the doubt even when the other students are somewhat cruel to her when she first arrives), clumsy, out-of-sorts, and a little insecure. She’s not a girly-girl or a cheerleader type, doesn’t get caught up in the typical sorts of high school behavior, and in general functions as an independent person.

It’s worth noting that if Tyler’s van had smashed her, she would have (at that point) died as a fairly well-rounded, empathetic individual. We certainly wouldn’t say she died in need of redemption, at any rate. Instead, Edward ‘saves’ her - and this supernatural ‘salvation’ marks the beginning of a journey that ultimately destroys her.

As she gets more entangled with Edward, she becomes less and less independent, more and more selfish. She is accepting of his abusive behavior (stalking her on trips with her friends, removing parts from her car so that she can’t go see Jacob, creeping into her window at night, emotional manipulation) to the point that when he completely abandons her (walking out on the trust and commitment they’ve built together, in spite of having vowed to remain with her no matter what), she is willing to take him back. Edward is clearly entirely morally bankrupt.

Her father, Charlie Swan, is sort of the Jimminy Cricket of the story. His intuition is a proxy for the reader’s intuition, and he’s generally right. He doesn’t like Edward, because he can sense the truth - not that Edward is a vampire, that doesn’t matter in particular - but that Edward is devoid of anything approximating a ‘soul’ (for those strict secularists, you could just say Charlie can see that Edward is a terrible person). Bella is warned by numerous people and events throughout the course of the story that she is actively pursuing her own destruction - but she’s so dependent on Edward and caught up in the idea of the romance that she refuses to see the situation for what it is. Charlie tells her Edward is bad news. Edward tells her that he believes he is damned, and devoid of a soul. He further tells her that making her like him is the most selfish thing he will ever do. Jacob warns her numerous times that Edward is a threat to her life and well-being. She even has examples of other women who have become involved with monsters - Emily Young bears severe and permanent facial disfigurement due to her entanglement with Sam Uley.

Her downward spiral continues when, in New Moon, she turns around and treats her father precisely as Edward has treated her - abandoning him after suffering an obvious and extended severe bout of depression, leaving him to worry that she is dead for several days. She had been emotionally absent for a period of months before that anyhow. Charlie Swan is traumatized by this event, and never quite recovers thereafter. (He is continuously suspicous of nearly everyone Bella interacts with from that point on, worries about her frequently, and seems generally less happy.)

Her refusal to break her codependence with Edward eventually leads them to selfishly endanger Carlisle’s entire clan when the Volturi threaten (and then attempt) to wipe them out for their interaction with her - so she is at this point in the story willing to put lives on both sides of the line (her family and the Cullens) at risk in favor of this abusive relationship. Just like in a real abusive relationship, she is isolated or isolates herself from nearly everyone in her life - for their safety, she believes.

Ultimately, she marries Edward, submitting to mundane domesticity and an abusive relationship - voluntarily giving up her independence in favor of fulfilling Edward’s idea of her appropriate role. Her pregnancy - which in the real world would bind her to the father of her children irrevocably (if only through the legal system or through having to answer the kid’s questions about their paternity) - completely destroys her body. The baby drains her of every resource in her body (she becomes sickly, skeletal, and unhealthy) and ultimately snaps her spine during labor. Her physical destruction tracks with and mirrors her moral and psychological destruction - both are the product of seeds that she allowed Edward to plant inside her through her failure to be independent.

Ultimately, to ‘save’ her (there’s that salvation again), Edward shoots venom directly into her heart. Let me repeat that for emphasis: The climax of the entire series is when Edward injects venom directly into Bella Swan’s heart.

Whatever wakes up in that room, it ain’t Bella.

I’ll refer to the vampire as Bella Cullen, the human as Bella Swan.

Bella Swan was clumsy.

Bella Cullen is the most graceful of all the vampires.

Bella Swan was physically weak and frequently needed protection.

Bella Cullen is among the strongest and most warlike of the vampires, standing essentially on her own against a clan that has ruled the world for centuries.

Bella Swan was empathetic to the needs of others before she met Edward.

Bella Cullen pursues two innocent human hikers through a forest, intent on ripping them to pieces to satisfy her bloodlust - and stops only because Edward calls out to her. Not because she perceives murder as wrong. (Breaking Dawn, p.417). She also attempts to kill Jacob and breaks Seth’s shoulder because she didn’t approve of what Jacob nicknamed her daughter (Breaking dawn, p.452). She no longer has morals .

Bella Swan was fairly modest and earnest.

Bella Cullen uses her sex appeal to manipulate innocent people and extract information from them (pp.638 - 461) - she does so in order to get in touch with J. Jenks.

In short, her entire identity - everything that made her who she was - has been erased.

This is powerfully underscored on p. 506, when Charlie Swan (remember, the conscience of the story) sees his own daughter for the first time after her transformation:

“Charlie’s blank expression told me how off my voice was. His eyes zeroed in on me and widened.

Shock. Disbelief. Pain. Loss. Fear. Anger. Suspicion. More pain.”

He goes through the entire grieving process right there - because at that moment, he recognizes what so many readers don’t - Bella Swan is dead.

The most tragic part of the whole story is that this empty shell of a person - which at this point is nothing more than a frozen echo of Bella, twisted and destroyed as she is by her codependence with Edward, fails to see what has happened to her. She ends the story in denial - empty, annihilated, and having learned nothing.

holy shit

Source: reddit.com

#never not reblogging #twilight #meta #literary analysis