It became a rallying point for royalists and a continuing subtle undercurrent in literature and the visual arts, a metaphor for the contention between the brute force of arriviste pretensions and the sublime culture of legitimate rule.
But, where Uncle Tom's Cabin is a simple tale with an explicit moral, intended to change hearts and minds, Harper Lee's only published book to date is a complex and subtle work of literature that has inspired and influenced generations of schoolchildren in the US and, most especially, in the UK.
Their respectful opponent, Mikhail Bakhtin, whom some consider the most original, far-ranging, and subtle theorist of literature in the 20th century, wrote Problemy tvorchestva Dostoyevskogo (1929, 2nd ed., 1963; Problems of Dostoevsky's Poetics) and essays about the relation of novelistic form to time, language, psychology, and ethics.
An equally subtle work of environmental literature was Robert Macfarlane's Landmarks, which celebrated links between language and ecology.
It's a subtle contribution to the literature of oppression, opposition and prison and to the never-ending discussion of art and its relationship to life.
The sad truth is that, for far too many students taking required literature courses, subtle allusions might as well be illusions.
Yet, an overview of the literature reveals subtle limitations and inconsistencies between studies, which has been largely attributed to sample-to-sample variation when testing these exquisitely flow-sensitive materials.
Among the genres that fell in favour, the old moral tale, if not a corpse, surely became obsolescent but raised the question whether it was being replaced by a subtler form of didactic literature, preaching racial, class, and international understanding.
Our results provide a framework for understanding disparate existing observations in the literature, elucidating a subtle competition of couplings and a key role for phase-transition kinetics in bilayer phase behavior.
Yet in no area of the American arts, perhaps, have the claims of the marginal to take their place at the centre of the table been so fruitful, subtle, or varied as in literature.
Understanding that every sentence has some form of joke in it, be it some esoteric reference to literature or a subtle pun, turns Ulysses into a very intelligent comedy.
