novels Archives - Page 2 of 2

L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque nationale de France – A Student’s Perspective

October 3, 2023March 22, 2022 by Gale Ambassadors

|By Rob Youngs do Patrocinio, Gale Ambassador at University College London|

Gale’s rich and exciting archive collection L’Enfer de la Bibliothèque national de France, which is part of Gale’s Archives of Sexuality and Gender series, holds an impressive assortment of approximately 2400 printed works, published mostly in French. Enfer quite literally translates into English as “hell”. The name is remarkable and has certainly contributed to the collection’s historical infamy. When it was opened, the collection was classified and unavailable to the wider public due to its obscene and outlandish nature, and the perceived vulgarity of the content – but perhaps unsurprisingly this only roused interest and curiosity in the collection! Students of today will undoubtedly be equally curious to explore this historically “out of bounds” collection.

How Gale Primary Sources Helped Me with My Dissertation – and Can Help You Too!

October 3, 2023February 20, 2020 by Gale Ambassadors

│By Lily Deans, Gale Ambassador at the University of Birmingham│

Writing a dissertation is undoubtedly daunting, no matter how competent or confident you may feel by the time you proudly hand in the 12,000-word masterpiece! Just like writing a good essay, it is not just your own opinion that gets you the marks, but the opinions of others – and the way you use these opinions to either substantiate or contradict what you have said. So, naturally, the wider, more varied and unique the sources are that you use, the better awareness you will show of the existing discourse, and thus the more convincing your argument will be. “Ah yes,” I hear you say, “but where can I find these unique sources?” Well, with Gale Primary Sources, of course! This blog will show briefly the quantity and variety of sources I have found in Gale’s archives as I have been researching and writing my dissertation.

When the Past Comes A-knocking – Why We Shouldn’t Forget About the Wars

October 4, 2023December 12, 2018 by Gale Ambassadors

By Rebekka Väisänen, Gale Ambassador at the University of Helsinki

The Book Thief, by Markus Zusak, was one of the most captivating novels that I have had the pleasure of reading, so when the time came (last year) for me to finally write my BA thesis, I set to work brainstorming topics in which I could get away with re-reading and analyzing this novel in a seminar geared towards cognitive theory. The field I settled in was historical fiction. The Book Thief is set in the 1940s, in a small fictional town in Germany that is shaken by the rising power of Hitler and the conflict which later became known as the Second World War. The book opened my eyes to the horrors of war in a totally new way, and I started looking for more channels of entertainment-but-also-history through which to usefully procrastinate. I noticed that the Second World War has recently become a popular setting in mainstream media as well, with TV series based on ‘true stories’ emerging from a variety of viewpoints, including German (Hotel Adlon, Unsere Mutter Unsere Vater / Generation War, Babylon Berlin), British (Homefires), Irish and American (My Mother and Other Strangers).