Goblin Market Study Guide

Goblin Market Overview

Preview of Goblin Market Summary:

For more than a hundred years Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market has fascinated teachers and critics while enchanting readers of all ages. In remarkably simple, yet richly textured language, Rossetti creates a strange and haunting world inhabited by horrid goblin creatures who tempt the unwary to buy their magical fruit. The poem's human protagonists, two adolescent sisters, thoroughly engage the reader through their joys, suffering, and love for one another.

But Goblin Market is more than just an enjoyable, readable story. It offers intriguing insights into important human concerns. Rossetti illustrates through the goblin men and their magically appealing fruit the seductive nature of evil.

Through the effects of the fruit on Laura, Rossetti shows that evil, like drugs and other apparently pleasurable things, cannot long satisfy. She conveys the idea that those who embrace evil or selfish pleasure will suffer—and so will those who love them....
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