Tennyson

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Tithonus

  • Dramatic monologue --> maybe aimed at Aurora
  • Tithonus' point of view
  • Ambiguous narrative structure
  • Iambic pentameter suggests love, represents a heartbeat and shows his despair that he wants to be human and alive again
  • Archaic language shows his age and that he's stuck in stasis
  • "Give me immortality" - Imperative, suggests he was impulsive, past tense shows that this has changed.
  • Line 5 "Me own cruel immortality" = enjambment to show he cannot die
  • Refers to himself in 3rd person, suggests he's lost his identity, links to "if I be he that watch'd"
  • Metonyms present Aurora in sexual way (lines 35-40) suggest that she tempted him in his youth
  • Personification of time and indirect criticism of Aurora "strong hours indignant work'd their wills, and beat me down and marr'd and wasted me"
  • Second to last stanza is retrospective --> contains semantic field of sex/bodies etc
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The Lady Of Shallot

  • Ballad (archaic form of poetry) or arguably a subverted fairytale
  • Refrain is used, common feature of the romantic and shows that it's a ballad
  • Omniscient extradiagetic narrator
  • Supernatural elements in part 2 show it's a fairytale --> "by night and day" - she doesn't sleep, "magic"
  • Archaic language/syntax to set the scene "She knows not"
  • Sentences start with conjunctions, suggests her life goes on and on
  • "she hath no loyal knight and true" --> foreshadows the coming of Lancelot and suggests she wants to fall in love, could also suggest that she has had a relationship outside of marriage but he abandoned her, so she is in the tower as a punishment
  • Relies on stereotypes to create atmosphere= abbots, shepherds, knights etc
  • Links to Sirens in Greek mythology- "Tirra lirra" by the river sang Sir Lancelot
  • Dynamic verbs show change/fast action
  • "Glassy countenance" --> links to the broken mirror/glassy eyes when you die/glass coffins in fairy tales
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Mariana

  • Lyrical narrative (a type of narrative exploring how somebody feels at a certain time) --> "My life is dreary, I am aweary, I would that I were dead!" direct speech shows her despondancy and despair proving it's a lyrical narrative.
  • Third person, extradiagetic narrator 
  • Most of the poem is iambic tetrameter - suggests that her life has slowed down, she is in stasis and she wants to die.
  • Every 10 and 12th line is iambic trimeter - she's slowing down
  • Pathetic fallacy - she's been abandoned by society and the grange where she lives has been abandoned
  • "A sluice with blackened waters slept" --> "blackened" - her virginity is gone
  • "cometh" archaic language shows that she's stuck in the past
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Other texts

  • The Kite Runner:

- Bildungsroman novel with tragic elements

- Intradiagetic narrator (unreliable?)

- Loosely circular/episodic narrative with epistolary style

  • The Great Gatsby:

- Unreliable intradiagetic narrator

- Great American novel

- Episodic narrative

  • The Rime Of The Ancient Mariner:

- Episodic narrative, omniscient narrator (God?) and intradiagetic narrator, Gothic text/Christian allegory

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