In depth study in literature

[Fog]

Hi!

I’m a Norwegian student currently studying English and American literature.
I have an in depth study in literature that I need some help with. I'm supposed to choose a novel and compare it to a poem, a short story, a movie, ect. The novel and the literary work I choose to compare it with have to be from the same time period. Additionally, I have to discuss how the author(s) represents this period in his/hers work.

I find it really hard to decide which time period I want to study, which novel I should read and what work I shall compare it with. However, I have been considering choosing Modernism as time period and reading one of Hemingway’s novels and comparing it to one of his short stories…

Any suggestions / ideas?

[mayneverhave]

I would encourage your choice of the modernist period - it being my area of greatest concentration.

A good novel might be Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, as compared to (thematically) with Eliot's "The Waste Land". Both are from the 1920's.

You might also compare Joyce's Ulysses with The Waste Land, but that would require significantly more work.

[Fog]

Thanks a lot! I guess if i I'm taking Hemingway I want to read "The Sun Also Rises" or "A Farwell to Arms". As to Eliot's "The Waste Land" - we have worked with it in class so I'm not allowed to choose it :( .

I’m also considering reading something by Twain - "Huckleberry Finn" for instance and comparing it to something by Whitman

And by the way, I see that you're a Faulkner fan, wasn't he a modernist?

Suggestions?

[mayneverhave]

Stylistically yes, Faulkner was a modernist. I'm not sure you can thematically link him to Hemingway, however.

I'd encourage any reading of Faulkner - especially his major novels, The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, Light in August, and Absalom, Absalom!

You might examine the way in which Faulkner borrows and expands upon the stream of consciousness style made famous by Joyce and Woolf.

[PoeticPassions]

I like the Romantic era... It would be interesting to compare Mary Shelley's Frankenstein with any of the following: The Rhyme of the Ancient Mariner, William Blake's Marriage of Heaven and Hell, and Milton's Paradise Lost. I once wrote an essay comparing Coleridge's work to t Shelley's... there is a lot to be drawn from the two.

[kelby_lake]

Thanks a lot! I guess if i I'm taking Hemingway I want to read "The Sun Also Rises" or "A Farwell to Arms". As to Eliot's "The Waste Land" - we have worked with it in class so I'm not allowed to choose it :( .



Could do 'Ash Wednesday' for Eliot. I thought that was very good.

[mayneverhave]

Could do 'Ash Wednesday' for Eliot. I thought that was very good.

It is, and that's the thing about modernism. There is so much inter-textualization that you could pretty much choose any text from the 20s-30s and compare them.