Hi there! My name is Megan Ferreira Fitzgerald and I am currently enrolled in the Medieval and Renaissance English Literature MA at UCC. I will be using this site as a space to express some thoughts of mine as the year progresses.
On this page you can get to know me and my
love of literature, and many other forms of art.
Nina Hagen
Nunmonksexrock
1982
I believe that all forms of art are connected and compliment each other, and my reading experience has always been involved with other mediums beyond poetry and prose. On this page you will find some of my favourite works of art, ranging from literature to music and the visual arts. Some of these mediums may be read in relationship to one another.
As you will see, my interests extend from Medieval and Renaissance to Romantics and beyond.
You could say I’m interested in Goths from the Medieval period to the 21st century. XD
At a young age I fell in love with stories, and the ways we tell them.
Rick Riordan, Percy Jackson & the Olympians, 2005-2009, Children’s Fantasy Book Series
Laocoön and His Sons, c. 30-40 BCE, attributed to Agesander, Athenodoros, and Polydorus, marble
Percy Jackson was one of my favourites as a child, and it was what first got me interested in Greco-Roman mythology. I remember sitting in my public library scouring books charting the lineage of gods and goddesses, becoming immersed in the lore behind the characters found in a popular children’s book.
I have fond memories reading these books as a little kid, and it was a great way for a child to get into the mythology without necessarily hearing the full lore, for all its violence, cruelty, incestuous and sexual misconduct, shall we say…
Nevertheless, I unknowingly equipped myself with knowledge that would later become extremely useful in my studies, Classical mythological references being pervasive throughout Renaissance literature and more.
Bronzino, Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time, c. 1545, oil on wood
There are many things that I love about this painting, from the bold colors and exaggerated forms of the Mannerist period, to the extensive allegorical work at play. I find the figure in the upper-left corner entrancing—a haunting, shadowy, figure whose form confounds the eye, being so mask-like yet human. It feels as if the viewer could grasp the face, feel flesh, and then peel it away from the hairline down. The anguish in the figure immediately below is so palpable, so arresting, despite being relegated to the margins.
Into the Void…
‘Hear the loud alarum bells—
Brazen bells!
What tale of terror, now, their turbulency tells!
In the startled ear of night
How they scream out their affright!
Too much horrified to speak,
They can only shriek, shriek,
Out of tune,
In a clamorous appealing to the mercy of the fire,
In a mad expostulation with the deaf and frantic fire,
Leaping higher, higher, higher,
With a desperate desire,
And a resolute endeavor
Now—now to sit or never,
By the side of the pale-faced moon.’
Images:
Edgar Allan Poe: Wikimedia (colours adjusted)
Candle: PNGTree
Raven: Pixabay (colours adjusted)
‘The Bells,’ by the Edgar Allan Poe, is the first poem I can remember that truly invigourated my spirit as I was reading it. The poem is simple in its machinations, utilising a delightfully enchanting rhythm and the sound of the language itself. The symbolism isn’t too convoluted, nor is there a litany of obscure allusions for a child to untangle. Just the pure joy of rhythm and color, broader strokes of emotion that affected me greatly at the time. Every time I reread the poem, I can’t help but be pulled into its whirlpool, my cadence accelerating, voice rising, plosives becoming ever more explosive, until finally the poem consumes me in the moaning and the groaning of the bells.
Encountering Shakespeare
Isles & Glaciers,The Hearts of Lonely People, 2010
‘These violent delights have violent ends
And in their triumph die, like fire and powder,
Which, as they kiss, consume. The sweetest honey
Is loathsome in his own deliciousness
And in the taste confounds the appetite.
Therefore love moderately. Long love doth so.
Too swift arrives as tardy as too slow.’
—Act II, Scene 5
Around the same time, I was absolutely obsessed with an EP called The Hearts of Lonely People. It made me think about art in a different way, as more of a cultural exchange throughout the centuries. I was looking up the lyrics to a song on it called ‘Cemetery Weather,’ which references Romeo and Juliet in the refrain. I wound up on a message board where people were talking about how the lyrics referenced Friar Lawrence’s ‘violent delights’ speech, my impetus to explore the tragedy. That was when I first fell in love with the works of Shakespeare. Years ago, I got a tattoo memorialising the lines. To this day, it’s one of my favourite monologues in any Shakespeare play.
John Everett Millais, Ophelia, 1851-52, oil on canvas
Next to my ‘Violent Delights’ tattoo, you can see a wee spider. I affectionately refer to him as ‘Malvolio,’ a reference to She’s the Man (2006). In this adaptation of Shakespeare’s Twelfth Knight, our Malvolio is actually named Malcolm (It is his pet spider who is called Malvolio).
Burnt Offerings
William Shakespeare, The Tragedy of Macbeth: Classic Collector Edition, 2026, Outcast Books.
Andrew Lloyd Webber, The Phantom of the Opera at the Royal Albert Hall, 2011
Francisco de Goya, Witches’ Flight, 1798, oil on canvas
While I love the Goth subculture for its spooky, supernatural feeling, I also love it for its campiness, its gender performance, and the process of expressing your unusual, beautiful, self. Progressive politics are a part of that as well.
’Fresh night, hounded by the head
Very dark placid sky hangs above
No moon shining like an untouched ass of the boy next door
Beginning to feel the first impressions of a strange drug
Set the leathery skin of a female, straddling a furnace
Illuminates in blue
Hands melt against the burning surface
But feel no pain, kiss the burner, lips fall away
Blood runs down the insides of her thighs
She tightens her grip in one last exaggerated movement
Then falls to the ground a pile of ashes
The burner stands triumphant over the mound
And next in line, a young boy approaches
And is assaulted by the flames
Shooting out like sharp tongues of hungry animals
Of a hungry animal
The disciple now crouches in the belly of God
His second skin removed, the boy lay sodomized and tired
Sodomized and tired
Pleasure-seekers abandon new disguises
Threatening our existence with their faces
In the corner of the room I sit and I pray
I wash dirt from my face with holy water
I wash dirt from my face with holy water
Drown in the shroud of you, Nazarene
You’re hiding behind walls I can’t see
I’m hiding behind walls you can’t see’
Christian Death, Only Theater of Pain, 1982
While I enjoy Shakespeare’s comedies, it was his tragedies that truly captivated my heart. Fortunately or unfortunately, I never did leave behind the melodrama of those teenage years. Not only did I become enamoured in the melancholic and the passionate, but the supernatural, as well. From the ghost of Hamlet and the witches of Macbeth, to Marlowe and Goethe’s versions of Faust(us), I am obsessed with all things spooky. This is also prevalent in the music I listen to, for instance deathrock band Christian Death, with the song ‘Burnt Offerings.’
Bauhaus
In the Flat Field
1980
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, Parts One and Two, 1808-32
Christopher Marlowe, The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus, 1620
This extends to punk music, to antifascism, to helping my local community. I’m not a perfect person and there is always more to be done, but I hope to do what little bit I can do to help the world. After I complete this MA, I want to do the PME course at UCC, and become a secondary school teacher. I know my teachers, and my English teachers especially, had a big impact on me and I would love to excite people about literature. Even if a student hates literature, just to be able to brighten someone’s day or give them a safe space to be is enough.
In King Lear, the Fool is a character who you could see as ‘speaking truth to power,’ displaying a trope that often casts fools as wiser than their Lords percieve them (and often wiser than the Lord percieves himself). Of course, placing a fool in a tragedy brings relief at times and produce jarring hilarity, but the fool is a powerful reminder of society’s flaws, its absurdity, and the fine line between order and chaos, delusion and sanity, between a faltering world and one beyond repair.
Dead Kennedys, Frankenchrist, 1985
Stars and Stripes of Corruption
Like a great eternal Klansman
With his two flashing red eyes
Turn around, it’s always watching
The Washington Monument pricks the sky
With flags like pubic hair ringed ’round the bottom
Jan Matejko, Stańczyk, 1862, oil on wood
Subhumans
The Day the Country Died
1982
Images: Pixabay, Wikimedia
Nina Simone
Wild is the Wind
1966
I can’t talk about revolutionary music without mentioning the talented and gorgeous artists Nina Simone and Billie Holiday. The album cover isn’t exaggerating when it claims ‘Four Women’ is ‘[u]nforgettable.’
Emotional Characters
A portrait of Mary Shelley, tattooed on my leg.
The Cure
Pornography
1982
Cold
‘Scarred, your back was turned
Curled like an embryo
Take another face
You will be kissed again
I was cold as I mouthed the words
And crawled across the mirror
I wait, await the next breath
Your name like ice into my heart’
Frankenstein, or the Modern Prometheus is one of my favourite novels of all time. I have a soft spot for gothic fiction, but Frankenstein’s monster stole my heart at a young age. I empathised with the monster a lot, often internally screaming at Frankenstein himself, but always getting wrapped up in Shelley’s sublime descriptions of the Alps and the abysmal, hallucinogenic finale through the Arctic.
I think Frankenstein’s monster is a great example of a character who exhibits Ralph Waldo Emerson’s concept of the Transparent Eyeball, at the very least at the beginning of his existence:
‘I become a transparent eye-ball; I am nothing; I see all; the currents of the Universal Being circulate through me; I am part or particle of God.’
It is a concept that has forever stuck with me. Unlike the gothic horror of lightning flashes and cadavers, the Transparent Eyeball stays with me as it is something that is harder for me to understand, even though I have felt that feeling many times. It is a similar feeling to sonder, but with an interconnectedness and loss of ego.
There are a lot of characters from texts that I relate with, too many to name, and some relating more or less to different chapters of my life. When I was younger, I resonated the most with characters who were quite miserable, and who found it difficult to align themselves with the seemingly arbitrary (or worse) rules of society. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve branched out from this stifling, melancholic atmosphere, but what can I say, I just love moody characters.
Edouard Manet, The Dead Christ with Angels, 1864, oil on canvas
The flatness of the skin is very cadaver-like, and the presentation of Christ in such a bleak, unornamented way is unique.
Pierce the Veil
Selfish Machines
2010
Besitos
You know the only real way to cure pain is to add a little more
Because everything new distracts the old
Femme Fatale
I am so beyond tired of the tragic heroine! Down with the damsel in distress! Teenage Meg resonated with Ophelia, Lavinia, and Sibyl Vane, classic portrayals of white femininity…. BYE GIRL! While I can’t denounce these characters completely, let’s agree that there are much better role models for young girls who like to read.
Giambologna, The Abduction of a Sabine, 1579-83, marble
Skinny Puppy
Bites
1985
Caravaggio, Judith Beheading Holofernes, c. 1598-1602
During my undergrad, I had to read the Old English poem Judith. I was surprised to find this type of female character in such an old text, a character that I would consider to be one of the OG femme fatales. One thing that I love about her character is that while she is highly religious, unlike other female saints who are able to enact violence, Judith does so in a distinctly feminine way. She can only perform this ‘masculine’ act of killing by using her feminine charms, by using Holofernes’ desire for her against him. Unlike Juliana and other violent female saints, Judith is never presented in an androgenous, sort of asexual way that is typical. She is a widow, not a virgin, and is grounded in her sexuality and agency.
Henry Wallis, Chatterton, 1856, oil on canvas
Andrea Solario, Salome with the Head of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1507–09, oil on wood
A bit of a problematic diva, but as they say:
Support women’s rights, and women’s wrongs!
Oh, how I aspire to be ‘a cautionary tale for men’!
‘Nine days they fell’
Illustration to Paradise Lost by Gustav Dore, 1886
Bernini, The Ecstasy of St. Therese, 1647-52, marble
Paradise Lost
John Martin, Le Pandemonium, 1841, oil on canvas
Rosso Fiorentino, The Deposition from the Cross, c. 1521, oil on wood
Paradise Lost is another one of my favourites of all time. I read excerpts of this epic poem for the first time when I was in High School, as a contextual exercise before our class read Frankenstein (something must have been in the air that year). My imagination lept afire at Milton’s descriptions of Hell, so I continued reading beyond those exerpts and my life was forever brightened with the presence of this story. I won’t harp on about it too much, as I will be writing my dissertation on this text, but needless to say, I’m a big fan of this work, so watch out for that! The world Milton crafted captured me then, and a decade later I’m still finding new details in it, and probably always will be!
The logo of La Dispute, on the back of my knee.
Woman (Reading)
‘You in the living room
You on a Tuesday afternoon
A breeze seen when the curtains move
You by the window with both feet up on the couch
Where you sit and you read and I watch you
From the office the sunlight frames your silhouette
I think of lighting fireworks, I think of pirouettes
I idly write down observations on the scene
Like do the blueprints name the rooms alone?
Do we name them on our own?
We hardly live in there
You with a book propped on your knees
A breeze seen in your coffee steam
I’m in the office thinking back to rules of poetry
It’s fourteen lines, the last two rhyme, what does pentameter mean?
You in the living room
Legs bent at forty-five degrees
I write AB AB, try to find your rhyme scheme
I look for objects on the desk with which to sculpt your image best
What would I name this could I paint it “Woman (reading)?” “Girl (at rest)?”
I remember it so well watching you shifting your weight,
Turning the page, I can see it all there
Inside a living room where only I live and never go in
A role in name alone
And I pause where I am for a second when I hear your name
Sometimes I think I see your face in improbable places
Do those moments replay for you?
When I’m suddenly there and then won’t go away
When you’re sitting in the living room reading for the afternoon
Do you put your book down look and try to find me there?
Sometimes I think of all the people who lived here before us
How the spaces in the memories you make change the room from just blueprints
To the place where you live
When you leave here
When you go from a home
You take all that you own but the memories echo
On hardwood floor in the living room
Tore the carpet the scratches below that we found
And the wine stain on the couch
We got drunk and decided we’d still try to move it around
And I can’t tell what the difference is between
The ones that we made and the ones that we didn’t make
They all conjure images still
Where you sit and you read in the sunlight aware that I watch
And I live alone now
Save for the echoes
I live alone now
Save for the echoes‘
It’s not all epics and tragedies, though, there’s realism to this romance! From genre paintings that portray the everyday life of the working class, scenes on the farm, on the production line, or at the market; to the lyrics of one of my favourite bands, La Dispute, that describe everyday life vividly, mundanely, these kinds of works make me reflect on the moments of the in-between. Not the dramatic ending of a relationship by suicide, but the horror of a relationship that slowly fades into nothingness with every turn of year. Not the complicated machinations of some infernal being wrought upon humanity, but the toil of a person bored and trying to find their place, not scared of a demon but of simply what comes next. Sometimes there’s no need for any shock-value or supernatural intervention, when the mundane has already crept upon us.
La Dispute
‘Said the King to the River’
Somewhere at the Bottom of the River Between Vega and Altair
2008
‘And to the glorious past:
You’ve opened my window but broken the glass.
And I beseech thee, ‘shed thy beauty.’
For as a child leaves the womb and learns the cold,
you have taught us perils in the present,
and you will bring us peril in our surely-soon-to-be. Unless…’
Joachim Beuckelaer, Fish Market, 1568, oil on wood
The first time I saw this painting was when visiting the MET in New York as a teenager. The painting is quite large in real life, and I was captivated by the flesh of the salmon, so life-like. The colour is truly gorgeous, and those smelly fish definitely steal the show!
From a small age, I found myself enthralled not only by Medieval courtly life, but by the everyday life of the peasantry. Thanks to the dedication of artists and scribes, we can glean some insights into what life may have looked like. What did people wear? What did they eat? How did they speak, how did they go about their lives? Reading material from huundreds of years ago, only to find similar sentiments, fears, and humorous proverbs, instills a profound feeling of connection in me. It reminds me that at the end of the day, people are just people, whether they are contemporaneous or medieval. We are connected by our human nature: our need to love and be loved, our uncertainty of the future and romanticisation of the past, the need, as an artist, to create. When reading medieval literature, we are not reading strange, unconnected glimmers from the ‘dark ages.’ We are reading about ourselves, how we got here, and are reminded of the beauty in simply being alive, in witnessing, and being witnessed by others.
Congrats! You’ve made it to the end!
A token for your company
Ferdinand Hodler, The Kien Valley with the Bluemlisalp massif, 1902, oil on canvas
Gustave Courbet, The Woman in the Waves, 1868, oil on canvas
This is the only painting I have ever encountered that depicts a woman with body hair, aside from Frida Kahlo’s self-portraits, which display facial hair.
Thanks for spending some time to get to know me through art (what better way?)
Cheers!
All images of paintings and manuscripts on this site are in the Public Domain, and I have reproduced photographs here with permission from the author (Erin Plaice, Conor Bradley).
Other images have been taken from websites such as Wikimedia, Pixabay, Vecteezy, etc., and are in the Public Domain
Some images have been taken by myself
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