Between the Lines

An Early Modern Dildo Shop This week is Valentine's Day and I was reminded of the little known bawdy Valentine's Day poem written by Thomas Nashe. The Choise of Valentine s, or The   Merie Ballad of Nash his Dildo, is believed to have been composed around 1593 and exists in three extant manuscripts, but was not published in print until 1899. I first came across this poem while researching sex in Shakespeare and was struck by it's explicit language and humorous wit.  The poem is erotic in nature and sexually explicit, but is wrapped in humour and wit and framed in a classical style inspired by Ovid. The eroticism of the poem is very explicit, verging on pornographic, and accusations arose against Nashe for 'prostituting his pen'. While the poem is not of any significant literary value, it is an interesting insight into sex and erotic writing in the early modern period and is perhaps most significant for being the first known usage of the word 'dildo' in...

Nausea Jean-Paul Sartre Penguin Modern Classics (2000) ***(3/5) Written in 1938, Nausea (La Nausée in its original French) is the first novel of French existentialist philosopher Jean-Paul Sartre. This review is of the Penguin Modern Classics edition translated by Robert Baldrick. The novel is set in the town of Bouville, France (literally ‘mud town’) and is believed to be a fictional portrayal of Le Havre where Sartre was living at the time of writing. The novel takes the form of the diary entries of 30-year-old Antoine Roquetin as he suffers from strange and unexplained sensations of sickness that he refers to as ‘the Nausea’. I found Roquentin a difficult character to relate to as, on face value, he is man who seems to wallow through a comfortable, bourgeois life in which he has very little to worry about. For the last decade, Roquetin has been been researching the Marquis de Rollebon, a French aristocrat who lived during the French Revolution. Roquetin’s sickness begins...

I am very happy to have been offered the opportunity to study a masters in English Literary Studies at the University of Exeter. During the course, I will be specialising in an area that has always engaged me during my undergraduate degree; that of literary theory and criticism. Literary theory can be a daunting world of abstract thoughts and philosophies; so I thought I would begin a series of blogs in which I will break down this broad area of literary studies into easily digestible guides. In these guides I intend to provide an overview of the paradigms and debates that make up literary theory; providing the reader with a good basic introduction, and myself the opportunity to consolidate my own knowledge. Literary theory is a difficult term to pin down. It is a term that incorporates elements of cultural, philosophical and sociological studies, and is made of numerous different approaches, many of which will feature in future blogs. Essentially literary theory is the study o...

On a recent trip to a Wilko’s store, I was disappointed to see a range of children’s books both implicitly and explicitly divided by gender. Do we not give children books to engage their imagination, to expand their horizons and to bloom their creativity irrespective of their gender?  I was particularly drawn to two colouring books titled, The Boy’s Colouring Book and The Girls’ Colouring Book by publisher Buster Books pictured below. As is clear from the books covers, the books perpetuate stereotypical ideas of gender. Whilst we don’t fully know what effect the influence of books could have on children’s understanding of gender, the messages that these books send merely reinforce patriarchal ideas of gender, and by perpetuating these ideas we are preventing equal opportunities. They seem to suggest that only males have an interest in space travel, adventure, martial arts, cars and construction, where female interests are limited to fashion, motherhood and all thin...