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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities

Claude Mckay's Protest Sonnets, Lily Jensen Aug 2023

Claude Mckay's Protest Sonnets, Lily Jensen

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

The sonnet tradition is rich with change. It is a genre forged in strict conventions: fourteen lines, iambic pentameter, a volta (or even multiple turns), and themes of praise and unrequited love. Because of these rules, sonneteers from Petrarch to Shakespeare, Donne to Rosetti, and Hopkins to Hughes have used this form and bent it to their own personal uses. The sonnet has an intense social, cultural, and political history. This paper analyzes how Claude Mckay both used the conventions of the sonnet tradition and broke from the sonnet tradition in the poems “If We Must Die” and “The Lynching” …


Exploring The Matriarchal Past To Forge A Modern Identity: Maternal Origins In Woolf And Ihimaera, Kirsten W. Burningham Aug 2023

Exploring The Matriarchal Past To Forge A Modern Identity: Maternal Origins In Woolf And Ihimaera, Kirsten W. Burningham

Criterion: A Journal of Literary Criticism

Though the writings of Virginia Woolf and Witi Ihimaera are “incommensurable” in many ways, I find “commesurablilities”––the kind of commensurabilities the Susan Stanford Friedman seeks out across the planetary landscape of modernism––in the way they negotiate a new creative identity in a modern environment with the bang clash of history and present ringing in their ears. I see this commensurability in at least three key features: 1) Woolf and Ihimaera each gave birth to new literary movements: Woolf was mother to high British Modernism with experimental techniques such as free indirect discourse and the relegation of plot to the background; …