Best Questions & Answers from 1st Quarter of 2018

Question

It's almost April, and time for yet another in what's now becoming a grand old tradition of gathering collections of particularly good Literature Q&A to get some easily available links to show off to people.

Now that Literature has a community-run Twitter account, one obvious use for this post will be to gather links for tweeting. But it's also useful for any kind of site promotion - if we want to show off the site to literary friends, it'll be much easier if we have a list of particularly great posts to point to.

Please nominate some exemplary Q&A from the first quarter (Jan/Feb/Mar) of 2018.

• When choosing nominations, please remember the primary purpose: to showcase our site to people elsewhere in the hope of maybe tempting them to come here. Let's try to focus mainly on great questions with great answers, and perhaps also great unanswered questions (which we can advertise as "hey, why not come and answer this"), but not anything with subpar answers, which will tend to give a bad impression and defeat the purpose.
• Remember that votes don't necessarily reflect quality, and the purpose of this is to promote quality over score. Highly-voted posts are easy to find, underappreciated gems less so.
• Getting a wide range of different stories represented in our list here would also be nice, but not strictly necessary - feel free to nominate a bunch of Q&A about the same book, if you think they're all outstanding. But don't nominate questions just because they're about your favourite book.
• Multiple nominated posts per answer here is fine.
• Feel free to nominate either some of your own posts which you're particularly proud of, or posts from other people which really impressed you.
• Ideally, some explanation of why the nominated questions and answers are so good would be useful - constructive feedback might give people ideas about what to aim for in the future.

Answer 1

I particularly appreciated:

• Fabjada’s well-argued and referenced essays on Liza-Lu and the anti-Tess position with respect to Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles.
• kimchi lover’s diligent interpretations of Byron’s recondite phrases "faithful to the tomb"; "the pig who sees the wind"; "all game and bottom"; and "now bore his".
• Matt Thrower’s investigation into the Islamic influence on Dante’s Divine Comedy.
• Rand al’Thor’s disentangling of content from context with respect to the Byzantine epic Digenes Akrites.

Answer 2

Same as last time, I'm going to focus on newer users posting great content in the relevant quarter. (Not that our more veteran users haven't also written good stuff - again, of course, nothing is implied about anyone who's not included in this list :-) )

Gareth Rees

His first answer was posted in February 2018, but it didn't take him long to become known as one of the best answerers on the site. All of his answers have been good, and many of them truly outstanding: often very long due to their exhaustiveness, drawing on many types of evidence, and often supported by multiple links to further reading and information. It's very hard to pick the 'best' among so much great content, but here are some of those that most impressed me:

• Where is the start of Treasure Island set? This answer successfully convinced me that what I'd always thought was the correct answer actually isn't.
• Where was the Odyssean Ithaca? Some truly impressive sleuthing, examining a very old question from several angles to draw a convincing conclusion.
• What does this passage about the atmosphere blowing in Cyprus and the Galilee mean in "Jude the Obscure" mean? Again, approaching the question from many different angles and unwrapping the layers of context around this somewhat obscure metaphor.
• Does D'Hubert rape the maid at the beginning of Joseph Conrad's 'The Duel'? Yet again, considering various different angles and types of evidence.

Fabjaja

This user was already mentioned in the last quarter, but deserves another mention for more outstanding answers in the first quarter of 2018:

• What justifies the anti-Tess interpretation of "Tess of the d'Urbervilles"? Excellent answer, with great delicacy in discussing some unsavoury topics and opinions.
• Who's this 'certain obliterator of historic records' in "Jude the Obscure"? This answer, like another mentioned above, convinced me that what I'd assumed to be the right interpretation actually isn't.
• What does the Malvolio subplot add to Twelfth Night? Another exhaustive answer which examines several different ways of viewing and justifying this issue.