Nicholas Taylor-Collins in front of a bookshelf

Nicholas Taylor-Collins

Literary researcher | Creative reader

Tag: mother

  • Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 1): finding a mother

    Anne Enright’s ‘Actress’ (part 1): finding a mother

    In this and my next blog (also on Actress), I’m going to focus on intertextuality. Intertextuality was described by Julia Kristeva as a mosaic of interaction between texts.[1] For Kristeva, this quite commonly takes the form of deliberate and explicit intertextual references—quotations, narrative nods, character types and names—but I am most interested in intertextuality that…

  • Personal politics and the modern English language: Mary Jean Chan’s ‘Flèche’

    Personal politics and the modern English language: Mary Jean Chan’s ‘Flèche’

    There’s too much to praise in Mary Jean Chan’s Flèche: the characterful depths it presents of its persona, the problems they encounter with queer becoming, the gentle lyricism that appears straightforward but is anything but. It is about family, about love—and also about fencing. Of the topics that I could cover, I’m going to examine…