Exploring the Features of Pastoral Literature Having studied Shakespeare’s “tragicomedy”, The Winter’s Tale , I listened to Melvyn Bragg’s podcast ‘In Our Time: Pastoral Literature’ to provide some contextual background as to why Shakespeare’s injection of the features of the pastoral is so integral to the depictions of Perdita’s life as a shepherdess (primarily explored in Act Four). Whilst the supposed first written documentations of pastoral literature date back to Theocritus in the third century, its characteristics became a popular form of genre for the Renaissance writer, and so I thought it would be interesting to explore the contrasts between the urbanised aristrocacy that authorative figures such as Leontes and Polixenes are exposed to, with the liberated setting where characters like the Shepherd and the Clown are introduced. Below are some key findings I noted from the podcast, which I will use to then analyse the features of the Pastoral in a future essay-base...
A Long Long Way : The Gas Attack After reading Chapter Four of Barry's A Long Long Way (in which Willie Dunne's regiment face the detrimental effects of the chemical warfare released by the German opposition), I was set an essay task to explore the presentation of the gas attack through a close-reading of a selected extract. This exercise gave me the opportunity to focus on the linguistic and structural decisions of Barry and, in turn, produce an essay that was detailed and specific in conjunction with the points that I made. Explore the presentation of the gas attack. Consider: the presentation of nature, the presentation of the gas, and the men’s reactions to the gas. Throughout Chapter four, Barry depicts sheer annihilation through the German gas-attack whilst simultaneously characterising its sinister aestheticism. There is also a sense of constant rising tension as the gas becomes ubiquitous and silently destroys even the microscopic elements of nature, des...