poisonenvy's reviews
854 reviews

I first discovered Shiller in my History of Criticism class. Some letters from On the Aesthetic Education of Man were in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. Schiller has, so far, been my favourite of the critics we've read in that class, and so I decided to check out the rest of his letters. 

I was less interested in the purely philosophical ideas he put forth; they'll take a little more careful reading to parse than what I'm currently able to dedicate my time to. But there is a lot of stuff in these letters that is incredibly relevant todays world, to a shocking degree. 

It's a little frustrating, to be honest, to know how little we've come in more than two centuries. But I guess there's some comfort too there, to know that we can look back through the ages and see people grappling with the same things we are. 

Write for your age, but don't write if your age.  That seems like good advice no matter what your age is. 

The first time I read Treasure Island was immediately after watching Black Sails for the first time, and let me tell you, that was a fun experience. 

Reading it again now (for a pirate literature class) it was also fun (not as fun as after Black Sails when all the characters from the show were still fresh in my mind, but still very fun). The characters are fun, the book is adventurous, you're probably going to have a good time. 

I think this might be my favourite if the Wayfarer series so far. This book is soft, cozy in many ways -- though not entirely cozy; I nearly cried at some points and perhaps only didn't because those parts came while I was listening to it in public. 

Chambers has a gift for capturing truly human moments in unfamiliar settings and rendering them beautifully.  I really enjoyed every part of this book.  

I've done it again! I have once more read, completely, a book of essays where I had no idea what half the essays were talking about.  Terry Castle's essay collection, The Apparitional Lesbian, discusses lesbians -- and how often lesbians are tied with ghosts, or apparitions -- in literature and culture throughout history, from the 18th century to the modern day (which is uh... '93, when the book was published). Have I read a single novel that was discussed in this essay collection?  No.  Am I into opera at all?  Also no.  Did I still read this whole thing for some reason?  Yes.  Castle's writing is easy to read and sometimes lovely (and hey, I got a lot of interesting notes for some papers I'm writing this semester, so it's not like it was a complete waste of time). 

I should note too that this collection was written in 1993, and that Castle doesn't really seem to acknowledge the existence (or the possibility of existence) of trans men.  I've found this a lot in the queer theory that I've been reading recently which was published in the 80s and 90s -- just a lot of queer theorists won't acknowledge the existence of trans people. I <i>do</i> recognize that this is largely because transness just wasn't discussed very openly until recent decades, but it still makes this -- and other books I've been reading lately -- terribly dated.

A Polemical Introduction; or, The Ghost of Greta Garbo
Do I know who Greta Garbo is?  Not really, nope.  But this introduction was interesting all the same.  It discusses, a little, lesbians throughout history. It gets into some personal interpretations of things. It's both easy to read and interesting, even if you've never seen a Greta Garbo movie in your life.

First Ed
This is a personal essay discussing an incident that happened when Castle was a child (which I hope that she's misremembering, given the fact that it involves an adult giving intense eye contact to a child while she's undressing in a swimming pool change room that made me fairly uncomfortable to read)

The Apparitional Lesbian
The essay that gave the rest of the collection its title, and also seems to be the centre thesis for all other essays.  It goes through a number of queer, sapphic novels throughout history, showing them all with a common theme linking sapphic women with ghosts.  It's super interesting.

Sylvia Townsend Warner and the Counterplot of Lesbian Fiction
I don't remember a lot of this one, except that Castle snaps back against a lot of queer theorists that tend to ignore queer women altogether in their analysis. I've never read any of Sylvia Townsend Warner's stuff, and so a lot of this essay didn't really resonate with me and I don't remember much otherwise.

The Diaries of Anne Lister
And here, Castle claps back against female queer theorists who have, for some reason, decided that women in history didn't have sex with one another even if they were romantically involved, by pointing to the diaries of Anne Lister (which I actually have read, at least in part).  I did enjoy this essay quite a lot. 

Marie Antoinette Obsession
Did you guys know that there's a whole lot of historical theories about the fact that Marie Antoinette might have been a lover of women?  Because I sure didn't.  Anyway, all I want now is a sapphic historical romance featuring Marie Antoinette, but apparently this is an entirely untapped market and it makes me sad (maybe someday I'll write it myself).

Haunted by Olive Chancellor
This essay discusses two novels I've never read!  One of them is by Henry James, who apparently may have had a lesbian sister (and was apparently gay himself?  I had no idea!).  Anyway, I still read this despite everything going over my head. Again was interested. Again, it pointed me toward some critical techniques that I may not have considered before and may or may not come in handy at some point. 

The Gaiety of Janet Flanner
Who's Janet Flanner?  No idea!  Okay, well, I do now. I believe she was a journalist of some sort.  Again, an interesting essay that likely lost a lot due to the fact that I had no idea what it's talking about.

In Praise of Brigitte Fassbaender (A Musical Emanation)
This is one essay that had the most transphobic phrasing in the entire book of essays which...wasn't great.

I'm not an opera girly, I'll admit. I never have thought too much about how every gay opera is, though pretty much as soon as it was mentioned I was like "Oh yeah, gay women and gay men are super attracted to the opera, aren't they?" This essay didn't really require any real solid understanding of opera though, and is more about fans and diva-worship, which is something I have a little more solid grounding on (who doesn't recognize celebrity worship, after all?).  

You know what's better than vampires? Lesbian vampires. And I've been wanting to read about the lesbian vampires of Carmilla since I first discovered them when I was a teenager. 

Lesbian vampire continue to be dope af and I very much thought that aspect of the story was great. 

The rest of it is kind of eh? It's certainly not bad in any sense of the word. But there really wasn't much that stood out to me at all apart from how gay it was. It seems more or less pretty rote overall other than that one exception. 

Monster Theory is a collection of essays that was published in 1996, and at times it shows its age.  While its hard for me to know exactly how groundbreaking it was when it was published thirty years ago, now a lot of the concepts were things I was already aware of (mostly because I took a class on Ghosts, Monsters and Demons in 2019 which heavily influenced how I look at them). 

I, for some godforasken reason, decided to read every essay in this book, even ones where I hadn't read the primary text it was discussing.  Why?  Because I'm insane, I guess. I don't fucking know.  I only really had to read the preface and the introduction for the paper I'm intending to write.  There's a couple other essays that I thought might have touched on other papers I'm considering writing, but I learned pretty quickly that they didn't so I could have just skipped them.  Did I? No.  No, I decided to give myself extra reading, which is definitely what someone needs to give themself in a semester where they're taking five high-level English classes.  Go me, I guess  (To be fair, this was an Interlibrary Loan, and I felt bad that my library summoned it all the way from BC if I wasn't going to make full use of it.  And <i>something</i> useful might have cropped up! You never know until you try). 

There were two essays that discussed conjoined twins and birth defects, and I'm not entirely sure how I feel about them being included in a collection of essays about monsters (though I recognize that historically birth defects were historically called 'monstrous births,' especially since I wrote a paper about Richard III last semester.  But I guess it was the 90s so....)

Monster Culture (Seven Theses) by Jeffrey Jerome Cohen

Definitely the most useful chapter in terms of my "Pirates as Monsters" term paper I intend to write. This is just seven short theses, a couple paragraphs each, and while I have absolutely nothing to base this on, I suspect that this essay is where most of Monster Theory as we know it today arose from.  I really nice overview of what monster theory is in general. 

Beowulf as Palimpsest by Ruth Waterhorse

I have read Beowulf! I read J.R.R. Tolkein's translation of it last year!  Unfortunately, most of this essay went over my head anyway. I'm definitely not a Beowulf scholar, that's for sure.  But it was still pretty interesting, comparing Beowulf's monsters to modern day monsters such as Mr Hyde and Dracula (both books I'm also reading this semester for my Horror class).  I generally enjoyed this one!

Monstrosity, Illegibility, Denegation: De Man, bp Nichol, and the Resistance to Postmodernism by David L. Clark

This essay is written in extremely difficult academic language, and is analysing a few texts which I didn't even know existed, let alone had read. It discusses the concept as language in and of itself as being a monster. It was pretty interesting, the things I was able to understand.  Unfortunately, most of this essay sailed way above my head. 

The Odd Couple: Gargantua and Tom Thumb by Anne Lake Prescott

I haven't actually read anything this essay covered, but it's basic English folklore, so like... osmosis haha.  It discusses giants and extremely tiny people (like Tom Thumb, a man as tall as a thumb), and how they're often partnered together.  I generally enjoyed this essay, and had some fun with it. It even gave me tiny plot bunnies that will probably never amount to anything but are happily hopping around in my brain anyway now.  It also, weirdly, might have given me something for an essay I may or may not write this semester; it is the only essay besides the preface and the "Seven Theses" that did.

America's "United Siamese Brothers": Chang and Eng and Nineteenth-Century Ideologies of Democracy and Domesticity by Allison Pingree

This isn't about literature per se, and more about the historical case of... well, America's first set of "Siamese Twins," conjoined twins who were whisked away from their homeland of Siam so that they could be paraded around the UK and America and shown off for money in "Freak Shows" in the early 19th century. It discusses a lot about what conjoined twins say about American ideals, such as individualism and law (at one point, one of the twins punched/assaulted someone, but they could not be arrested because the other twin was innocent, and so it was a matter of "do we let the guilty man go free or do we lock up an innocent man"), as well as family values (they both got married, but how would the American public see that?  Is it incest when they have sex with their wives if the other twin must be present? Is it homoerotic?).  Overall, it was a generally interesting essay, even if it did see Chang and Eng more as a concept than as humans. 

Liberty, Equality, Monstrosity: Revolutionizing the Family in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein by David A. Hedrich Hirsch

I have also read Frankenstein! In fact, am reading it again for my Horror Class.  This was one of the essays I thought might help in one of my papers I might need to write.  But, it mostly looked at Frankenstein through a historical lens of a piece of history I know about (the French Revolution) but do not know about that particular aspect of (how it revolutionized how families were seen).  Probably interesting to someone who's both stoked on the French Revolution and <i>Frankenstein</i>, but that person is not me.

"No Monsters at the Resurrection": Inside Some Conjoined Twins by Stephen Pender

This is the second essay in this collection (seriously, why are there two essays in a book of 14 essays that is about this) that is about conjoined twins and birth defects, this time gazed at through a medieval religious lens. Didn't really interest me too much (and yet I still read the whole thing). 

Representing the Monster: Cognition, Cripples, and Other Limp Parts in Montaigne's "Des Boyteux" by Lawrence D. Kritzman

An essay about a piece of literature I've never read and know nothing about.  I read it.  Most of it flew right past because I had no idea what it was talking about.  Why am I like this?

Hermaphodites Newly Discovered: The Cultural Monsters of Sixteenth-Century France by Kathleen Perry Long

I have never read the book that this essay was about (Mostly <i>Isle des Hermaphodites</i> by Artus Thomas, though it also discusses the court of King Henri III which I knew nothing about but now know was probably extremely gay).  Despite not having read the source material, this essay was still very easy to follow and understand, and I found it extremely interesting. It discusses gender norms and societal constructs and constraints, and overall I enjoyed it quite a lot. 

Anthropometamorphosis: John Bulwer's Monsters of Cosmetology and the Science of Culture by Mary Baine Campbell

A lot about xenophobia and making other cultures monstrous through fiction.  Overall, I found it fairly interesting. 

Vampire Culture by Frank Grady

This was the second essay I thought might be an interesting resource for a paper I might write, but discovered very quickly that it did not apply, but I finished it anyway.  It starts off discussing Dracula as a discussion of capitalism, and then shifts to Interview with a Vampire (which I also have not read) as the same, plus some feminist critques as well.  Overall, fairly interesting, even if I only know of Interview with a Vampire through Cultural Osmosis.

The Alien and Alienated as Unquiet Dead in the Sagas of the Icelanders by William Sayers

I don't know anything about Viking Family Sagas, but they sound cool.  I'll admit that I didn't read this essay especially closely (it was late at night and I was tired), but from what I gleamed it seemed fairly interesting.

Unthinking the Monster: Twelfth-Century Responses to Saracen Alterity by Michael Uebel

An essay about Islam as a monster in the twelfth century.  Extremely interesting.  I wonder how or if this essay would have changed had it been written post 9/11.  Overall, I was very interested in this one.

Dinosaurs-R-Us: The (Un)Natural History of Jurassic Park by John O'Neill

Well, this guy certainly has a.... angry?  writing style which could have been interesting if I could have at all figured out what he was trying to say.  Is this a critique about capitalism? The family?  Something about abortions?  Children?  Sexuality?  I have no fucking idea.  But whatever O'Neill was trying to say, he said it with a whole lot of passion.   

This is exactly what the title proclaims it to be: a very short introduction to horror.  It touches on a variety of different flavours of horror: Monsters, occult, body horror, psychological horror, and scientific horror, and gives a brief overview of them from a critical analysis perspective. 

It is just a brief introduction, so none of the analysis goes super deep. But newbies to analyzing horror through a critical lense will find if useful, and even oldbies might find something useful in the pages. If not, it is, at least, extremely readable; it is not bogged down with academic writing, and even if you haven't read or watched everything it discusses, you can still understand the central arguments (but it's even better if you have). 

A Marriage Below Zero is one of the very first novels in English literature to feature a same-sex, male/male relationship in it. 

In it, the young Elise falls in love with Arthur, a charming young man who is the very close friend of Captain Dillington. They are, in fact, so close that they are known jeeringly as Damon and Pythias. 

Her marriage is not happy, though, and though she suspects another woman, all she finds is Captain Jack Dillington.

Elise is sometimes funny, though often caustic, and I suspect that Alan Dale/Alfred Cohen has never really spoken to a woman (not seriously, at least; the book is filled with thinly veiled misogyny). And it's not exactly a pro-gay, either. But it's not as egregious in either front as one might expect from a novel written in the Victorian Era, and it still managed to entertain me throughout. 

Angela Carter is an... Interesting author. She switches between tenses and POV (sometimes jumping from first person to third person within the same paragraph) apparently without rhyme or reason (I mean, I imagine there's some reason; I have not done a close enough read for any story to know that for sure). A lot of the time I came out of my first read of a story (none of them have been given second reads just yet) not knowing exactly what happened.  Some of her lines are breathtakingly beautiful, some of them are very funny. She's an author who likely needs to be read with fairly close attention. Anyway, I enjoyed this collection a lot. 

"The Bloody Chamber" 4*
Look, Bluebeard is my favourite fairy tale. This runs pretty close to the original fairytale, with some key differences (I had, for some time, considered writing a paper on what these differences are. That paper topic ended up getting cut though since there are other papers in this class I'd rather write more) 

"The Courtship of Mr Lyon" 4*
This is a Beauty and the Beast retelling which I enjoyed quite a lot. 

"The Tiger's Bride" 4* 
A lot of the same themes of the precious story; is also a Beauty and the Beast retelling. Also something I liked a lot. 

"Puss-in-Boots" 5* 
10/10. A+ story. The perfect amount of asshole licking.  Bravo. 

"The Erl-King" 3.5*
This was one of the stories that flips pronouns and perspective pretty confusingly (all of them do it to some extent, this one felt like the worst offender). I'm not super sure what happened here. It probably requires a second read, which I'll get to eventually. 

"Snow Child" ????
A Snow White retelling. One that reminded me a lot about Kaori Yuki's Snow White retelling. Anyway, my entire review can be summed up in three words: 

What. The. Fuck.  

"The Lady of the House of Love" 4.5*
You know, I'm not 100% sure I know what went on here but I'm here for the vibes and the vibes are immaculate. (Might possibly get worked into a Dracula paper about Monster Theory as applied to vampires about female sexuality)

"The Werewolf" 4* 
Little Red Riding Hood retelling 1. It was alright. Pretty straight forward. On the docket for a paper I might write in conjunction with female persecution, the witch trials, and Elizabeth Bathory. We'll see how that goes. 

"The Company of Wolves" 3* 
Little Red Riding Hood retelling 2. Trigger warning for weird sexual assault stuff.  

"Wolf-Alice" 3.5* 
This just gave me Assassin's Quest vibes. I'm here for it. Likely requires a second reading. 

What can I say? I really love these Wayfarer books, which are cozy and poignant and all found-family-y. 

A Closed and Common Orbit follows an AI named Sindra, a human named Pepper, both of whom are introduced in the previous book, and the family they have made. It's really good, very touching: I nearly started crying mid-work and it was only by the greatest strength of will that I avoided sobbing in public in the middle of my shift (but like, not a devestrating cry. A touched, warm crying).  

Chambers makes very good use of character voice to differentiate the characters too. Overall, an extremely enjoyable experience and I am sad I need to wait for a few weeks before I can start the next.