Is there a version of Snow White where her name is a longer description?
TVTropes says:
Snow White. Her real name is "Lips Red as Blood, Hair Black as Ebony, Skin White as Snow" based on the wish her mother made. Everyone just calls her Snow White because it's easier. This is even carried over t...
@Randal'Thor I know :) Was looking for something I might be able to solve in a few hours with the benefit of a librarian and my vast university collection
@bobble Yes, congratulations and good luck with your studies!
As for questions that could be answered in a few hours with a library, I'm not sure. Digital archives are so convenient (being searchable) that the only need to visit a library is when you want to read a particular work and it is not available online. I have access to a university library just fifteen minutes cycle away and I hardly ever go!
For this answer I wanted to read Janet Porta's 1988 Ph.D. thesis, "The function of biblical allusion in Jude the Obscure", but who knows if it would even have been relevant.
For this answer I wanted to read Manfred Gorlach's The Textual Tradition of the South English Legendary (1974). In fact, I bought a copy from the University of Leeds! But it is the work of more than an hour or two to understand and summarize it.
For this answer I would have liked to find a digitized manuscript sermon with a biblical epigraph from before 1400. This is kind of a specialized query — not many libraries have medieval manuscript collections.
@Bookworm Will the Hot Network Question (HNQ) melt Snow White?
@Bookworm I have not close-voted the question about Rumi's "The new rule" because it is probably an interpretation question. Interpretation questions are on topic on this site.
@GarethRees OSzK and Akadémiai Kvt both have mediaeval manuscripts, but they also have special rules on who can access them and how and I'm not familiar with those rules because I never need books that old. I assume you searched for scanned versions on the internet first.
@b_jonas Manuscripts degrade with handling so it's better to work with digitized copies if at all possible, or to pay for a digitization specialist to scan the manuscript and add it to one of the many online archives
In the Glück question, the whole poem has been quoted despite being in copyright, no maybe it's not the best example to show new users. In the Moore question, I was careful to quote one one stanza out of seven, which I think is justifiable as fair use
I've edited the Glück question to remove the full text of the poem, while clarifying that the link is to a page where it's reproduced in full with permission.
@Tsundoku I think it would be better to showcase answeredinterpretation questions, to convince people not only that such questions are OK for this site, but also that they can be reasonably answered within the scope of Stack Exchange. (A reasonable argument against them might be that they're so open-ended that an answer would be book-length and too long for SE.)
@bobble There's a useful post on meta with links to resources in the answer. But of course there is a lot to learn about each kind of resource and what it is good for, and this takes practice
@bobble Here's an example of using various search tools to write this answer to find scholarly ideas about the meaning of the name "Jude" in Hardy's Jude the Obscure.
I guessed that this might be something that literary scholars have published papers on. So I started at scholar.google.com and put in the query "the name jude" "jude the obscure" (the former because it seems a likely phrase to appear in the publications I am looking for, and the latter to avoid false positives).
On the second page of results, I found a citation to Jeffrey Berman's book Norman N. Holland: The Dean of American Psychoanalytic Literary Critics where the snippet for page 14 includes the fragment, "Holland analyzes in depth the characters’ names (including the name Jude)" which sounded like the kind of work I was looking for.
So I went to the book in Google Books and tried to see if I could get it to show me enough context from page 14 to identify the reference from Holland. Eventually I searched within the book for "Jude" and the results suggested that the paper was likely to be called "Jude the Obscure: Hardy's Symbolic Indictment of Christianity".
So, I went back to Google Scholar and put in the title, and that gave a link to the paper on JSTOR where luckily it was open-access.
This is a kind of quick go-around to find a work on a topic — in the case of the Jude answer, it was plenty, but in a longer answer I might have continued by reading the paper and needing to follow references or idea to other books or papers. In this answer about handwriting in Beowulf, you can see that basically all I did was follow up chains of reference
It is often worth being persistent with chains of reference. Until you reach primary sources, you can never be quite sure that you're not being misled by secondary and tertiary interpreters. In this answer about Joyce's opinion of Hamlet there was an untrustworthy middleman, and in this answer about the mythical "Aullay" there were some surprises along the reference chain.
@Randal'Thor yup! I think I announced in a few other chatrooms, must've missed this one. studies going along swimmingly, though I don't have any classes which require extensive English essays... yet.
I've also recently passed the $500 mark for self-made income \o/ tutoring on the side
What subject are you studying? (If you don't mind the question.)
By the way, libraries aside, even being on a university IP can be really useful in researching stuff. There's loads of journals and papers which are freely accessible only from academic IPs or for people willing to pay.
I actually collected information about all the main characters for answering this question, pinged the OP about whether they would like it to update their answer, and then forgot about it...
Though the ping was in chat. I may try a comment now.
this one is a candidate for looking up in the school library. I know we have a decent selection of foreign literature.
@bobble I seem to have lost my notes on this... :(
Not when their idea of studying a language is parroting the exact conversations/sentences that they drill into us.
Recently at least they taught enough grammar/sentence structures that we can plug-and-chug ideas out, but not anything interesting. And it's frustrating since I already know more but am not allowed to use it.
The textbook has cultural notes, but they always make me feel icky because of how sweeping they are. "The Japanese do X", for example, as if they're all some monolith. I also much prefer "Japanese people" to "The Japanese", for reasons I can't fully articulate.
My university library system does indeed have both the Japanese original and English translation of Beauty and Sadness.
I've put in a request for the Japanese one and should be able to figure out this question - online translation tools + knowledge that it's at the start of Chapter 7 + my rudimentary understanding of punctuation etc.
Requesting an analysis of the poem "Vespers" from #TheWildIris by #LouiseGlück https://literature.stackexchange.com/q/15927/17?stw=2 | #Poetry #LiteraryAnalysis @LouiseGluck
Should I add a disclaimer "Not a homework question, just for interest" to this Tweetable message?
At first glance it might look like someone trying to get ideas for an assignment, to people unfamiliar with our site's interpretation tag.
@Randal'Thor I wouldn't. Twitter users who are unfamiliar with SE will likely not understand how homework is relevant to that question.
The Tintin et les Picaros tweet has not attracted any answerers, apparently.
@bobble @GarethRees On Language Learning SE, we have a meta post for Resources for Researching Language Learning Questions. Something similar for Lit SE may also be useful. But we may add some guidance on how to get started, rather than just listing and describing resources.
Haldane MacFall's novel The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer (1898) has a lead-in quotation that puzzles me. No author is indicated; the quotation is ascribed to a work, 'Nature Nods', but no amount of searching on Google or ABE has brought 'Nature Nods' or its author to light.
The quotation reads in ...
A two-year-old review on One Minute Reviews is still pinned on the StackLiterature Twitter page, although there've been seven reviews since then. @Mithical can we unpin or switch the pin? (pinging you since I think you know how to handle Twitter stuff)
Quarterly best-of posts for the second and third quarters of 2021 are still unpopulated. Anyone feel like nominating some favourites?
"Haldane set his first novel The Wooings of Jezebel Pettyfer in Jamaica and, unusually for the time, it had a West Indian hero." the-wooings-of-jezebel-pettyfer Source: Wikipedia
