Literature

• 'the play for which briony had designed the poster programmes and tickets'

  pg 3
• 'conveyed in a rhyming prologue'

  pg 3

  like Romeo and juliet
• 'The pages of a recently finished story seemed to vibrate in her hand with all the life they contained'

  pg 7

  shows the power of literature
• 'Richardsons Clarissa'


  pg 21

  One of the longest novels in the English language
• 'hows Clarissa?... id rather read fielding any day'


  pg 25

  couple had a link through literature
• 'a story was direct and simple allowing nothing to come between herself and the reader'

  pg 37

  briony uses literature for controll
• 'written her way through a whole story of literature beginning with... folk tales through drama'

  pg 41

  older briony reflecting on her writing style almost a coming of age moment for briony
• 'drowning herself would be punishment'

  pg 30

  maybe a reference to Virginia Woolf whose writing is compared to cyril conelly in part 3
• 'A proposal of marriage... She herself had written a tale in which a humble woodcutter saved a princess from drowning and ended by marrying her … It made perfect sense.'


  pg 38

  briony first thought when thinking of romance is marriage her tales are very much like fairy tales she only knows about romance from what she has read in stories
• 'she could write this scene three times over from three different points of view'

  pg 40

  this is precisely what she does within the novel
• 'Six decades later she would describe how at the age of thirteen she had written her way through a whole history of literature, beginning with stories derived from the European tradition of folk tales, through drama with simple moral intent, to arrive at an impartial psychological realism which she had discovered for herself, one special morning during a heat wave in 1935.'


  pg 41

  older Briony reflects on her writing styles within the novel these all link to moments within the text
• 'Beyond the compass were his copies of Auden’s Poems and Houseman’s A Shropshire Lad … Ten typed-up poems lay beneath a printed rejection slip from Criterion magazine, initialled by Mr Eliot himself.'


  pg 82

  auden and hausmen write about death morality for youth in rural England

  robbie and Cecilia live this
• 'Surely Freud had something to say about that in Three Essays on Sexuality. And so did Keats, Shakespeare and Petrarch, and all the rest, and it was in the Romaunt of the Rose...which had seemed no more than literary conventions.'

  pg 84

  Robbie mixes between medicine and literature

  Shakespearean and petrachan are the two forms of sonnets

  Keats is a romantic poet and is famous for his love letters; which is how robbie and Cecilia communicated for much of the novel
• 'The study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlour game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilised existence'

  pg 91

  literature is not all-consuming but simply a helpful addendum for life

  links to appearance vs reality
• 'There was a story he was plotting with himself as the hero'

  pg 91

  Robbie relates his plan for his life to a story (much as Briony confuses life with fiction -> a hint about the narrator). This draws attention to the fictitious nature of this moment.
• 'The study of English literature seemed in retrospect an absorbing parlour game, and reading books and having opinions about them, the desirable adjunct to a civilised existence'

  pg 91

  literature is not all-consuming but just as a helpful addendum to life
• 'Also stacked would be books by the thousand … his third-edition Jane Austen, his Eliot and Lawrence and Wilfred Owen'

  pg 92

  Robbie cannot imagine a future without literature. There is an explicit link to Austen here. The mention of Wilfred Owen is foreshadowing of Robbie’s fate; Owen was a soldier who died in the First World War and is now renowned for his anti-war poetry. Owen wrote about the experience of the soldiers in the trenches, showing what it was really like, in contrast to Jessie Pope’s patriotic propaganda. Part Two can be read as an Owen-esque view of the Second World War.
• 'He would be a better doctor for having read literature … Birth, death, and frailty in between. Rise and fall – this was a doctor’s business, and it was literature’s too'

  pg 93

  importance and power of literature
• 'Throw the baby of fictional technique out with the folk-tale water' pg 313
• 'A childlike desire to be told a story, to be held in suspense to know what happens' pg 314
• 'What did poets know about survival?' pg 40