http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/keyword/literary-criticism Inquiries Journal provides undergraduate and graduate students around the world a platform for the wide dissemination of academic work over a range of core disciplines. en-us Sun, 24 May 2026 17:28:28 -0400 Sun, 24 May 2026 17:28:28 -0400 http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1958/the-relationship-between-gender-and-trauma-in-donna-tartts-the-goldfinch By Katie K. Strubel - The Goldfinch (2013) by Donna Tartt is a novel that explores the conditions of grief and escalating lengths characters will go to survive the traumas and mysteries of life. This story of guilt and loss—intermixed with love and longing—is far detached from the traditional coming-of-age trope. I argue that one of the most tantalizing aspects found in this piece of literary fiction is the fascinating and sometimes questionable relationship between main characters, Theodore Decker and Boris Pavlikovsky. Reading this novel through a queer/gender studies lens and the use of a dialogic journal... Mon, 19 Sep 2022 02:37 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/1958/the-relationship-between-gender-and-trauma-in-donna-tartts-the-goldfinch http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/892/visibility-for-women-in-the-works-of-george-eliot-and-virginia-woolf By Emily Caliendo - When examining the works of both George Eliot and Virginia Woolf, many critics are quick to assess the credibility and quality of characters based on how they react to the external experiences they are faced with in their imaginary worlds. However, this way of thinking serves as an injustice to both authors. Rather than finding truth in what goes on externally in these imagined worlds and judging characters’ perceptions by their relative proximity, readers should instead understand that Eliot and Woolf’s works demonstrate that subjective experience determines reality. These authors... Mon, 28 Apr 2014 09:38 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/892/visibility-for-women-in-the-works-of-george-eliot-and-virginia-woolf http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/588/racial-uplift-acculturation-to-the-dominant-culture-in-contending-forces-by-pauline-e-hopkins By Aisha Rees - Domestic fiction reigned in women’s literature during the nineteenth-century. These narratives defined ”True Womanhood,” where the female exemplified four pillars: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. They are meant to reject the public sphere for more spiritual gains: true women were the moral compasses of society. Their influence in the home was supposed to project outward into society because of the true woman’s role as a wife, a mother, and a teacher. Amy Kaplan, in her work “Manifest Domesticity,” denotes that the “private feminized space... Thu, 27 Oct 2011 03:00 EDT http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/588/racial-uplift-acculturation-to-the-dominant-culture-in-contending-forces-by-pauline-e-hopkins http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/54/viewing-four-vonnegut-novels-through-the-lens-of-literary-criticism By Lindsay D. Clark - I like Kurt Vonnegut because he’s innovative and unique, his literary voice speaking out of a time period I love, when he “was actually helping to breathe life into a new genre—modern, pop fiction,”[1] according to critic Tom Verde. Even though he himself isn’t a radical, and in fact most of his beliefs (according to him) stem from a childhood spent during the Great Depression, the unrest of the sixties and seventies allowed him not only liberation in what he could write about—science in an age of dizzying technological advancement; religion, sex, and tradition... Tue, 17 Nov 2009 05:55 EST http://www.inquiriesjournal.com/articles/54/viewing-four-vonnegut-novels-through-the-lens-of-literary-criticism