Paris mornings
The Secret History by Donna Tartt
Little Women by Louisa May Alcott
The Picture Of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
Circe by Madeline Miller
To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee
Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
Recitatif by Toni Morrison
The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
The Lord Of The Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck
Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman
Adapted from a workshop I did at my high school Writing Center. One of my more helpful powerpoints; let me know if you need any clarifications. This is all my original work; please don’t remove the source.
i really like being pretentious and all but what i actually like even more is that i'm genuinely so invested in this hunt for knowledge that i'm on. like,,,, i do wanna know every work of shakespeare by heart and i do wanna read the night away draped over second hand philosophy books and a worn out volume of the illiad and i do wanna quote french poetry and oscar wilde at social events and i wanna be what history would call an intellectual and i wanna live and breathe these things i care about because i have a deep and consuming passion for them and i want to be as immersed in them as possible.
omg i’m crying i can’t believe i found some valid information on what has been disturbing me for such a long time. i felt like i didn’t belong to the language i speak and.. jeez here it is, i’m not alone
All I can think abt is that one quote that basically just describes that you can’t be your true self in your native language bc there’s too much emotional attachment, but that second languages allow speakers to be truly free with their words
booty shorts with “does such a thing as 'the fatal flaw,' that showy dark crack running down the middle of a life, exist outside literature? i used to think it didn't. now I think it does. and i think that mine is this: a morbid longing for the picturesque at all costs” on the ass
sometimes i can’t believe how dreamy this city is! ✨🌙
something about this decade really sings to me. I find in particular, nearing the end of the nineteenth century, so much was happening on around the world in terms of arts, politics, technology, colonization. world events and global news don’t personally reach the day-to-day lives of the everyday folk, but they are an important part in gauging what life, thought, and society was about—what things were important then and now?
basically for myself, reminding me of notable things that occured during the 1880s—some thematic, some of relevance to context and characters, and the rest just ?? interesting and/or wild?
cocaine is a hot new cure for everything and anything. perscribed, sold in foods and more. heroine introduced as a lesser-addictive substitute for morphine…
lots of developments in fields of psychology; many experiments and happenings; Freud starts his work 1886.
1880-1914 had +twenty million immigrants to the United States: Germany, Ireland, England, China had the most arrivals.
William Dorsey Swann, the first self-proclaimed drag queen, organizes a series of drag balls in Washington, D.C. 1880-1890s.
Jack the Ripper claims his “first” victim in 1888 White Chapel, London. big scare.
Sherlock Holmes first appears in Arthur Conan Doyle’s A Study In Scarlet as part of the British magazine’s Beeton’s Christmas Annual in 1887.
Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson is published in 1886. Gothic fiction, drawing from emerging fields of science and psychology. & Treasure Island was published earlier in 1883 by him too!
Mark Twain drops The Prince and the Pauper (1881), Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court (1889).
Bel-Ami, Guy de Maupassant’s second novel is published in 1885. about a man who seduces and manipulates high society French women in the French colonies for power and wealth. MOVIE WAS ADAPTED IN 2012 STARTING ROBERT PATTINSON LOL
western European art movements very romantic and swirly and pretty: Monet, Debussy xoxo.
meanwhile, African American ragtime music becomes the “pop” music across the pond here.
North Dakota (1889), South Dakota (1889), Montana (1889), Washington (1889) become states.
train segregation laws flag beginning of Jim Crow; Civil Rights Movement of 1875 voided, making discrimination in private is not illegal, and prohibiting state intervention to personal or commercial segregation. l*nching continues throughout the south. slavery may be over on paper, but indentured labour is legal.
1882 infamous O.K Corral gunfight.
Gold Rush continues, all over the world—South Africa, to British Columbia, to California, to Argentina, to Russia-China borders.
centuries of American “Indian” wars continue.
American Dawes Act of 1887 granted American government authorization to regulate indigenous lands, including creating and assigning and enforcing reservations.
Sitting Bull’s 1883 speech of the atrocities experienced at the hands of white American settler colonists.
Canadian Pacific Railway 1881-1885. foreign labourers were hired to do a lot of heavy, dangerous, unwanted work. in America, more than 100,000km of tracks were laid by majority Chinese, Irish, Scandinavian workers.
America’s Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 and Canada’s Chinese Immigration Act of 1885 was officiated, enforcing law of a Head Tax to be paid for every Chinese person entering North America. over the course of the next couple of decades, the fee of $1,500 was doubled to $5,000 was increased 500% to $25,000 in today’s currency—per person. this had devastating and lasting impacts on generations and societies of Chinese living both overseas and already in North America. propaganda at this time created many racist myths that persist today: there are too many Asians, they are taking our jobs, (the men) are gross and effeminate and a threat to (white) women, they shady and scheming people. these were the first and only major federal legislation to explicitly suspend immigration for a specific nationality in American and Canadian history. (I study Asian Canadian history, I can go on about this all day)
Tong Wars (1883-1913) had Chinatown gangs and factions in violent street wars across America, San Fransisco to New York.
large, targeted, and repeated anti-Jewish rioting (pogorm) and antisemitism rampant throughout Imperial Russia, 1881-1882 had more than two hundred anti-Jewish events alone. Jews continue to be racialized and othered.
fuck ton of colonization happening in Africa and the Middle East, Southeast Asia. Berlin conference 1884-1885 literally chopped up Africa to distribute to European powers.
Irish nationalist efforts to push forth Home Rule bill of sovereignty is defeated in British Parliament. Irish are not “white”, they are “othered” in Europe and in Americas.
use of photographic film pioneered by George Eastman, who started manufacturing film. his first camera (Kodak) was ready for sale in 1888.
Thomas Edison gets lit in New York 1883 with first electrical power station. next several year sees major cities being lit up with street lamps and public lighting with the science and works of a Nikolas Tesla (1886-1893).
hell of a lot more inventions in the works and patents being claimed. Hertz and radiowaves, Bell for telephone services.
“Between the years of 1850–1900, women were placed in mental institutions for behaving in ways the male society did not agree with”
way too much history to cram, obviously. here are some keywords for further research oki
prison industry / spiritualism / opium epidemic / irregular and uneven “modernizations” in rural vs. urban areas / class and poverty gaps / morality scares, checks, comparisons, gaps / new businesses and gadgets, products, tech to help with anything / fascination of the (colonial) Other; side shows, “freak shows” and other human zoos
Physically? I'm here but mentally I'm on a one way train to a mysterious city where nobody knows my name after just leaving an omnious note for my friends and family
#cancer #autumn #professor #englishliterature
reblog this with your star sign, favourite season, and dream career in the tags.
messy handwriting and even messier notebooks, doodles of skulls with sunflowers dangling from their eyes
burning the corners of pages, an older look given to them, the smell of ancient given to your room
wearing the cheapest, largest brown sweaters and the most comfortable, softest cream skirts
classical music softly bouncing on each one of the walls in your room, a list of your favorite composers pinned to your wall
a black ring on your finger, your hands wrapped around a warm cup of tea
your eyes closing softly from spending too much time reading, a candle to keep you company
the wet tip of your finger, the turning of yet another page
soft brown on your eyelids, gloss on your lips
long studying session in the library, you’re curled up on your chair, seven academic books are sitting next to your side, three articles are waiting to be read
stains around the edges of your nails, your skin painted with ink
a book in your bag, a pen used as a bookmark to annotate everything that makes your hands shake
a leather belt around your waist, your old grandpa’s sweatshirt tucked in has not gone to waste
standing right in the centre of a museum, sketching the outline of a sculture, scribbling down everything there is to know about a painting – in this, your hands are still stained
letting the rain softly caress your hair, carrying an umbrella to match your velvet trousers
a smile on your face when writing an essay, a yawn from your mouth when you finally go to sleep – after your eyelids are closed, psychedelic, dark and soft dreams are reaching your mind
dark academia | xxi | ♂| INFJ-T | oct.24 — active
192 posts