Literature overtakes history, for literature gives you more than one life. It expands experience and opens new opportunities to readers.
Alienation
Countless literary characters feel painfully alienated from the social institutions that surround them. Some, like Jake Barnes in Ernest Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises, feel alienated from their own communities. Others, like Caddy Compson in William Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, feel alienated from their closer connections, including family members and loved ones. Still others, like Stephen Dedalus in James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a … Read the rest
Abandonment
The origins of the word abandon, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, demonstrate that it has not always had the wholly negative connotations it does today. In the Middle French, for instance, metre à bandon could have meant both “to proscribe” and “to release from proscription.” Thus, the term might apply equally to an outcast shunned from society and to the former outcast being welcomed back. Both are being … Read the rest