Trilogy: Series 3: essays to enlighten and entertain (Robinson Crusoe, Jane Eyre, Nosferatu) (Volume 3)

Trilogy, Series 3: essays to enlighten and entertain. In series 1, I explore how Sophocles uses imagery in Oedipus, how crime and punishment are related in Dante’s Inferno, and why Frankenstein offers a critique of the human condition. Series 2 investigates the storytelling traditions portrayed in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s ‘The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere’, and how they might represent a narrative of modernity; Bram Stoker’s novel, Dracula, is discussed in terms of how it conveys the anxieties of an emerging modernity at the fin-de-siècle, how tensions between tradition and modernity are revealed in the novel, and how the significance of new forms of transport and technology (e.g. trains, photography, typewriters) play a major role in the narrative; and series 2 concludes with an essay on the horrors of honesty in Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Series 3 begins by questioning the ideology behind Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe. The following essay discusses Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre and Thornfield’s significance as the physical and ideological setting where the development/deterioration in the characters of Jane, Bertha and Mr Rochester takes place. To end the trilogy, F. W. Murnau’s 1922 film Nosferatu and the very nature of cinema is assessed, in Nosferatu: the ghost of cinema itself. The author sincerely hopes that this trilogy of essays will be read with enjoyment, since they have been written to entertain as well as to enlighten.