Early Twentieth-Century Fiction
English 358:358, Spring 2021
“To Janie’s strange eyes, everything in the Everglades was big and new. Big Lake Okechobee, big beans, big cane, big weeds, big everything.”
Hurston, Zora Neale. Their Eyes Were Watching God. 1937. New York: Harper Perennial, 2013.
Janie is anticipates life in the Everglades. The repetition of the word “big” in the list of descriptions show for how vast and hopeful the land is. Perhaps this description foretells the massiveness of the hurricane that hits the Everglades in ch. 18.
“Stephen Dedalus is my name,
Ireland is my nation,
Clongowes is my dwellingplace
And heaven my expectation
… That was he: and he read down the page again. What was after the universe? Nothing” (Joyce 12).
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Oxford University Press, 2000. Edited with an Introduction and Notes by Jeri Johnson
“He sat and stared at the sea, which appeared all surface and twinkle, far shallower than the spirit of man. It was the abyss of human illusion that was the real, the tideless deep.”
-James, Henry. “The Middle Years.” H. James Complete Stories 1892-1898, The Library of America, 1996, page 335.