Laura Deneke – författare

Seminar paper from the year 2004 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0, University of Freiburg, course: Modernism and the American Novel, language: English, abstract: Romance in connection with materialism is a recurrent theme in F. Scott Fitzgerald's novels and the vast majority of his short stories. The heroes and heroines of his works strive for love and money with tenacity and desperation. Fitzgerald repeatedly tells the story of a poor young man falling in love with a rich and beautiful girl who rejects him for his poverty and lack of status. The author's biography provides him with enough experience in the matter to make these accounts credible and entertaining. In the run of his career, however, Fitzgerald expands and changes his view on materialism and love. This paper works out the ambiguity with which Fitzgerald treats both subjects and the way he gradually changes his attitude towards them. Love and money, glamour and disillusionment are interwoven and make a great part of the author s life story. I will point out that the young worshipper of the glitter and glamour of high society turned into a sharp critic of that same world and finally, towards the end of his life, loses his obsession with the topic.

Seminar paper from the year 2005 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Literature, grade: 1.0, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, course: The Victorian Afterlife, language: English, abstract: Bertha Mason in Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre is a character without history or personality. She is depicted as a mere beast, bent on destroying her husband. The reader knows -and dreads- her from both Jane's and Rochester's perspective. Rochester claims that Bertha's lunacy was the sole trigger for the disaster that followed, but the narration reveals hints that suggest other factors may have contributed to the destruction of their marriage. Jean Rhys proposed a past for Bertha and her husband. Her novel Wide Sargasso Sea creates a life for Bertha, on the background of which her madness is neither surprising nor inevitable. Whereas there is no doubt that she does become insane at the end of Rhys's novel, the reason for this is not her evil nature but a destructive relationship along with her transportation away from everything she ever knew into the cold of England. Wide Sargasso Sea is more than a prequel to a famous Victorian novel. It speaks out not only for Bertha but for all the other West Indian women who found themselves in similar situations.