From the category archives:
One response to my earlier question is to say that all texts – stories, music, whatever – are re-tellings of something else. There’s no new story to tell.Two interesting books on this subject: Vladimir Propp – Morphology of the Folk Tale (includes the 31 functions of folk tales) Christopher Booker – The Seven Basic Plots [...]
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You might know that I am interested in the relationship between photographs and memory. There was a time when people thought of memory as “capturing” the past as photographs claim to. We’re not so naïve now, about either process. Millicent, Margaret Forster’s fictional “ordinary woman“, writes in her diary: It’s become so impossible to believe [...]
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Margaret Forster is a biographer and novelist, and in Diary of an Ordinary Woman she merges the two forms. Presented as the edited diary of Millicent King, born in 1901, the book is, in fact, Forster’s invention. An author’s note explains that, having been promised the diaries of a real-life ‘Millicent’ that never materialised, Forster [...]
In Peckham Blue, Susie Gordon employs the inherently ambiguous nature of poetry to explore the inevitably unstable sense of personal history arising from having been adopted.
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