6040 samples of this type
Captivity, specifically African Americans being trapped by society through racism, prejudice, and unfair laws, are an important theme in American poetry. Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” and Langston Hughes’s “I, Too” are both dedicated to these social issues. However, in my opinion, Paul Laurence Dunbar’s “Sympathy” is more hopeful than the...
Introduction For several years, novels, stories, and poems have been published daily. The field of literature has expanded significantly over time. Every novel is unique, yet they can share several similarities. The short tales “A Rose for Emily” by William Faulkner and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman have...
In Petals on the Wind, the second novel of V. C. Andrews’s trilogy, the story dwells on the life of Chris, Cathy, and Carrie after they manage to escape the attic and move to Florida. However, while at some point, everyone is convinced that going back to the place of...
Introduction 1001 Nights have several translations, many of which Western specialists make. The author of the collection is unknown, and it is unclear which short stories were included initially and which appeared in later versions. Most readers in Europe and the United States are familiar with Scheherazade’s tales through Western...
Many literary works assess various aspects of life, and Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll‘s House explores important social matters. Ibsen was born on the southeast coast of Norway, and his childhood was not particularly easy (Gundersen). His parents were relatively affluent and had five children, with Henrik being the oldest son...
Introduction From time memorial people worshiped deities considered to run the universe. Expectedly, religion has some social control function that discourages deviance, self-distractive behavior, and delinquency from establishing order (Hood et al. 413). However, some people may pretend that they observe the norm when in the presence of specific people...
Introduction The interconnectedness and the importance of the following concepts, totalitarianism, power of language, and class warfare, are hard to overestimate in “Animal Farm” novel by G. Orwell. They have become the cornerstone of the literacy techniques employed. In this respect, it will be useful to explore each of them,...
Introduction Literary works provide different perspectives on various aspects of life. For instance, Jack London’s short story To Build a Fire illustrates an individual’s fateful relationship with nature by describing how the main personage perceives the surroundings of his journey. London’s story is unique due to the use of literary...
“Not Waving but Drowning” was composed by British poet Stevie Smith in 1957. The poem consists of only three stanzas about a man who is drowning while the observers think he is merely waving hands and enjoys swimming. Even though the idea is clear on the surface, the text’s true...
Introduction In a 1962 speech at Scripps College, Rachel Carson helped kickstart mainstream environmental and conservationist movements. She focuses on how humanity has interacted with nature in historical and modern times. Carson uses her understanding of the man-nature relationship to establish the concept of the former against the latter. Carson...
Despite the seeming glamor and wealth, the character of Great Gatsby is deeply and inherently tragic. Striving to bury his deep discontent with his life in an attempt to recreate the past, he refuses to acknowledge that the people around him have changed. Furthermore, his pursuit of the material wealth...
The book “Teach Us Your Name” by Huda Essa is a story about diversity, and the author teaches children to pay attention to the cultural differences between themselves and their peers. This is achieved by outlining a lesson for children, where they ask other students to introduce themselves and discuss...
While segmentation between public and private identities helps preserve the character desired to be portrayed, the complexity of a divergent behavior trail renders it difficult to identify one’s intentions on the subject. This grim is attained through manipulating one’s character to match the qualities an observer anticipates. The dynamics of...
Pearl S. Buck’s story The Good Earth raised several significant problems in China. Exploitation, a desire for riches, family troubles, and contempt for elder Chinese culture are among the conflicts that the protagonists confront throughout the novel (Gupta 90). Wang Lung faces several challenges as he attempts to escape poverty....
In Joyce’s story Araby the main character, falls in love with a girl living next door. One day she asks him whether he wants to go to an Arabian bazaar. He is happy that she speaks to him and promises to bring her something if he goes there. His journey...
Homer’s Odyssey gives readers a heroic narrative about a protagonist on his quest to home from war. The protagonist Odysseus is far from flawless, and the reader explores his personality while he faces various opponents and his stupidity. The epic delves into themes of fate, revenge, humanity, and ferocious powers....
Langston Hughes raises a number of philosophical issues in his short poem ‘Mother to Son’. The poem itself, though seemingly small, is capable of surprising even sophisticated readers with its content. Everyone who reads the poem will be able to see themselves in it and try on the role of...
Krutch describes the beauty of snowflakes and crystals with delight and admiration. He describes their diversity and forms and says that only with a microscope he manages to understand what beauty means by looking at crystals. They capture his spirit and amaze his imagination, and it is not for nothing...
The story The Death of Ivan Ilych, written by Leo Tolstoy, emphasizes the topic of life regrets. The main character Ivan Ilych, a member of the judicial chamber, and nobleman, has recently died. The story’s narration is centered on describing the character’s emotions during life and illness. The author strives...
“A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a fiction book and a collection of short stories written by Flannery O’Connor. In the short story with the same title, the author focuses on the story of a family’s vacation to Florida, during which this family meets a criminal named The...
Introduction “Night” is the first book in a trilogy written in 1960 by the prominent author Elie Wiesel, awarded the Nobel Prize in 1986. This work is based on Wiesel’s Holocaust experience, which he and his father, who died from the beating, got during the Second World War in 1944-1945....
“Atonement” by McEwan is an amazing in its sincerity chronicle of lost time, which is led by a teenage girl, in her bizarre and childishly cruel way, overestimating and rethinking the events of adult life. Having witnessed the rape, she interprets it in her own way – and sets in...
Tim O’Brien’s memoir If I Die In a Combat Zone narrates his journey months before his deployment into the Vietnam war, combat experience, and journey back to America. He started when he graduated from college in 1968 and received a summer draft notice, but he was reluctant to go due...
In literature centered on the heroic quest, the heroic character often becomes an embodiment of the most important ideas and perceptions of the society of the corresponding period in which the literature piece was written. Through defining the culture, the societies and nations established their moral values and virtues, contributing...
Devouring works written by renowned authors; people tend to forget that the actual lives of the writers might have been even more exciting than the fiction that they have created. The personal journey of Samuel Clemens, globally known under the pen name of Mark Twain, is in every way just...
Robinson’s Involvement in the Women’s Political Council As the first member in her household to finish college, Robinson accomplished her aspiration to become a teaching assistant. She tutored for five years in Macon, Georgia, while receiving her master’s degree from Atlanta University. She also studied English at New York’s Columbia...
Introduction Achilles enjoys a legendary status in Greek mythology due to his bravery on the battlefield. His ancestry played a significant role in his development into one of the most powerful soldiers of the Trojan War. He possessed extra toughness and invulnerability alongside his demigod status since his parents were...
Abstract The enormous variety of digital content encourages providers to engage users and consumers on their services. They use different recommendation systems in order to meet their customers’ expectations and preferences. Such methods direct clients according to their needs and requirements by analyzing vast information databases, such as prevalence, popularity,...
Alan Moore’s comic book Watchmen was a phenomenal breakthrough in the production of the comic. It was unexpected but a negative story about superheroes who, at the same time, reject the typical superhero canons and touch readers’ hearts. Many critics rightly consider Watchmen as an independent graphic novel, not a...
According to Rolston (2018), Edward Jones’s stories, mainly Old Boys, Old Girls, reflect how institutions and social circumstances shape the life and struggles of the African American male ex-convicts. Indeed, by portraying the life of Caesar Matthews, Edward Jones’ stories give insight into the African-American individuals’ criminal record complicate their...
An example of free indirect style in Atonement by Ian McEwan can be found in chapter six as the author describes the acts and thoughts of Emily Tallis. The author takes on Emily’s thoughts and expressing that she considered it important not to provoke the pain in his head lest...
In “Night,” Elie Wiesel describes the suffering of the Jewish people during the Holocaust. After reading this book, I realized how strikingly different the perception of the horrors of this period was between Jews and people of other nationalities. The fact is that in ordinary life, we do not think...
Introduction In The Cosmopolitan Canopy, Elijah Anderson (2004) presents the concept of a “cosmopolitan canopy,” a place where individuals set aside their diverse backgrounds and differences to communicate in more civil and cosmopolitan ways. He argues that people from different racial, ethnic, and class groups, engage in folk ethnography, whereby...
Being a part of the global community, with its incredible diversity and complicated history of relationships between different groups, is quite challenging, especially for those belonging to minority groups. In her poem “To Live in the Borderlands,” Gloria Anzaldua purports the emotional weight of the struggle that she carries as...
Most people believe they should organize their lives and make decisions. They continue choosing colleges, enhancing skills, and earning a living. In his “Where I Lived, and What I Lived For,” Henry David Thoreau breaks all rules and proves it may be enough to live a simple life and be...
Introduction Pride and Prejudice is a romantic comedy novel by Jane Austen during the Regency era in England. It is a romantic story that follows the character development of Elizabeth Bennet, who is the dynamic character of the narration. She learns about the aftermaths of hasty judgments and notes the...
Many bad things happen around; some are noticed and fairly discussed, while others remain neglected. In 2016, Katherena Vermette wrote The Break to show how dangerous and traumatic the human experience could be in a seemingly ideal community. One of its most outstanding issues is that there are no properly...
Macbeth is called one of Shakespeare’s most “Greek” plays, and it represents a man who destroys his life through a row of sinful and unfair choices. However, there are several discrepancies between a traditional Greek play and Shakespeare’s Macbeth. For example, the majority of Greek plays are based on the...
Introduction Based on the poem The Song of Roland and its significance and relevance, French literature from the eleventh to thirteenth century is a crucial concept and topic for literature studies. The work is based on old French epics of the “chanson de geste” type and was composed in the...
Reyna Grande was born on September 7, 1975, in Iguala, Guerrero, Mexico, in difficult social and financial conditions. Today she is a famous author living in the United States and has received numerous awards and prizes for her books and novels. Grande, along with her siblings, grew up in poverty;...
A plot is a series of events in a story. The plot in the short story “A Rose for Emily ” is well–developed. A plot must be chronological or non-chronological; chronological means the events happened in order of their occurrence. Non-Chronological implies that there were regressions into the past from...
Anaxagorou’s poem Text Message is about the changes in the contemporary world, more so those brought about by technology. The persona, who is living in the modern world, describes how things have transformed and the resultant effect on humans and the entire ecosystem. For instance, the use of information technologies...
The given annotated bibliography will focus on the book titled Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow written by Yuval Noah Harari. The writing is an outstanding piece of humanity’s future possible development and challenges, which need to be overcome in order to achieve the primary objectives. The book is...
“Everyday Use” is a well-known story from the African-American writer and human rights activist Alice Walker. It is better known for the “not every day” and “non-routine” thoughts on the issue of cultural and national identity within the framework of modern society. Despite the apparent lightness and ease of narration,...
Introduction The Autobiography of Malcolm X, written by Alex Haley, is the story of a young African American boy’s rise from racial oppression to political activism. The cover features three portraits of Malcolm X in various stages of speech and concentration. The traumatic childhood of one of America’s most influential...
The poem “The Gamble” by Laura Hershey explores the concepts of gambling and risk as they manifest themselves in human life. The author claims that although people are taught not to gamble, they embrace the risks when their freedom is concerned. The short story “A Very Old Man with Enormous...
The question of what exactly a woman’s place in the marriage has long been a ground for heated discussions. Our society has come a long way from perceiving women as merely the property of men to today’s development of the feminist movement. However, even though nowadays, emancipation is a must...
Sexuality is a significant aspect of a person. It is never about who he or she has sex with or how frequently they have it. It is basically about one’s sexual feelings, ideas, interests, and behaviors towards other people. Both fiction and non-fiction contexts depict differences in matters of sexuality....
Holden Caulfield, the protagonist of Jerome Salinger’s The Cather in the Rye, may be many things, but responsible is not one of them. Be that himself or other people around him, he rarely has a concern for anything. By highlighting his irresponsible behavior, Salinger contrasts the character’s rather self-absorbed focal...
A Rose for Emily – William Faulkner’s Storytelling by Emily Grierson. The yellow wallpaper is a short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman about the young woman Jane. Both stories illustrate girls who became recluses in one way or another. If Emily did not let anyone into her house after her...
In the article by Best (2019) in the scene “play extempore” of Henry IV part I, the author, Shakespeare through deconstruction makes obesity fat. Shakespeare in the play put a crippled character to assume the role of a fat person. In the scene, “play extempore,” Prince Henry is supposed to...
Introduction Looking for a place to fit in and have an identity is a ubiquitous quest. Self-identity correlates with the individual or self: essentially what makes us human. Most people find belonging and comprehension of the self within societies of culture, race, or religion while others find it hard to...
Irony can be a powerful instrument for a poet aiming to reflect on the current state of humankind. Although some of the most notable poems were written more than two centuries ago, the poets’ deep understanding of culture remains highly insightful. The movement from religion to science always has concerned...
The themes of family relations, sister rivalry, traditions, heritage, and the struggle for civil rights intertwine in Alice Walker’s short story. The narrator is an African-American woman and the mother of two daughters. While this woman shows incredible strength in caring for her family, racial oppression has imprinted her not...
Reading James Baldwin’s Blues for Mister Charlie has been an exhilarating experience for me. The play encapsulates various tribulations of the Black community in the genesis of the Civil Rights Movement. Specifically, Act II portrays the explicit bigotry of white townspeople against the increasing number of newcomer black families (Baldwin,...
Despite its shortness, the story “Young Goodman Brown” by Nathaniel Hawthorne contains a number of educative lessons. One of them is the possibility to understand the nature of evil better. On the one hand, all people are free and happy due to many options and choices. On the other hand,...
Joseph Conrad, an English-Polish author has made a considerable contribution to the artistic scene of Great Britain. As a writer, Conrad was noted for his unique writing style, accentuated by the fact that English was not the man’s first language. Having lived during the period of rapid discovery and societal...
The works of Russian classical literature have gained a great deal of popularity around the world over many years. Their main characteristic is the stimulation of intense, often ambiguous feelings in the reader, which make him think. Leo Tolstoy’s “The Death of Ivan Ilyich” was just such an example. The...
Summary Future and self-imagination go hand in hand. Whether or not to take a step to the next level is a personal decision that requires a cognitive evaluation. For instance, Coyote’s journey is the book that indicates the outcome of the next step, which is often uncertain in the real...
Introduction Slave narrative developed as a distinct form of written literature, characteristic of North America. The period from the early 1830s to 1865 was marked by a wave of abolitionism, which was embodied in the writings and speeches of several former slaves. They spoke eloquently and convincingly about the need...
King, Eric S. “African Americans and the Crisis of Modernity: An Interpretation of Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun”. Ethnic Studies Review, vol. 41, no. 1-2, 2018, pp. 53–60. The article raises the severe question of relationships between people of different races, but it primarily describes interracial conflicts, attitudes,...
The inevitability of the life cycle and procreation has been the subject of several interpretations of “Rapunzel’s” moral. Other versions of the narrative emphasize the conflict between the young and the old. Rapunzel is imprisoned in a tower in the midst of the forest by the old witch at one...
Character development is vital in literature as it helps readers to understand their various aspects. One of the characters used by Alexie in Pawn Shop is Jackson. He is homeless, which limits his chances of being an active member of society. Jackson said, “one day you have a home and...
Introduction Upon reading Yellow Woman for the first time, I was amazed by how much the author keeps the story interesting, especially when she connects myths and reality. Leslie Marmon Silko has maintained an appreciation of history and culture and thus the Laguna Pueblo. What she goes through and what...
Introduction Slavery is undoubtedly one of the darkest stains on U.S. history, the effects of which can be felt in society to modern day. The slavery institution was cruel and criminal, resulting in the abuse of many fundamental human rights. Women were especially vulnerable, having even less rights and lack...
Introduction Sam Shepard wrote the play Buried Child in the year 1978. The play is an extraordinary piece of work, and it received the Pulitzer award in 1979. Buried child is part of a family trilogy by Shepard, and it gives us a clear glance into a broken American family....
The fight against the segregation disease turned out to be successful for the US’s people of color. However, at the time of the debut of A Raisin in the Sun in 1959, the movement for the rights of black people led by Martin Luther King had not yet won its...
Poems are recognized as one of the earliest literature forms that have significantly influenced the field of communication. Since pre-colonial times poems have been used to bring people together, warn, encourage and inform. One of the essential features of poems is their form and structure. While some poems lack a...
And Tango Makes Three is a real-life story that was shaped into the literary form by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell. The book tells the readers the story of two penguins from the Central Park Zoo, who hatched an egg together and practically gave birth to another penguin named Tango....
In chapter 8 of The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C.S. Lewis, Mr. Beaver talks about the experiences of Tumnus. He explains that Tumnus was arrested by Secret police under the White Witch’s spell (Lewis, 1950). Children, to whom Mr. Beaver was talking were scared and wanted to...
The history of the world’s culture has seen a colossal number of seminal works of art and literature. However, even the list of the most renowned cultural achievements demonstrates certain works that hold special significance, and Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy is one such piece. This 14th-century poem has become fundamental...
Interpretation and understanding of truth is a very ambiguous thing. Everyone has their own unique opinion regarding what is true and what is false. The reason is that language is not a perfect instrument for communication. The language is limited because we can only hear the words. When people listen...
“A Hunger Artist” is a short story focusing on a performer who sits in a cage and refuses to eat for forty days while the viewers observe his efforts. This short story is dystopian because it shows the degradation of society’s perception of art, which should be a way of...
Introduction Helen Thorpe’s work Just like us: The true story of four American girls coming of age in America made a significant contribution to the development of literature and politics. The main problem of this book revolves around the topic of illegal immigration to the United States. This story is...
Introduction “A Worn Path” is a short story written by Eudora Welty in 1941 which describes the journey of an old African American woman. The Hunger Games is a novel by Suzanne Collins first published in 2008 that depicts a dystopian world. At first, these two books can be considered...
Henry V is one of the famous war plays by William Shakespeare. The play can be presented to be both anti-war and pro-war. The play is pro-war; this is because a part of it glorifies war through Henry’s speeches where he urges his troops into battle and through the chorus...
The literary world experienced many challenges, especially during the 17th and 18th centuries, many voices were suppressed. Majorly, the male sentiments found their way into the mainstream due to the societal values that exalted men and despised women’s efforts (Luken 2). Educated males dominated the world of literature depicting the...
Introduction Modern advances in psychology allow us to take a fresh look at fairy tales known to everyone from childhood, finding new meanings and interpretations that differ from the usual ones. The moral of the story is much more contradictory, complex, and ambiguous than the usual interpretation. In the article...
Anne Bradstreet, born in 1612 in England, was married to Simon Bradstreet and graduated from the University of Cambridge at 16. A couple of years later, after moving to America and having eight children, she became one of the first poets in the American colonies. Phillis Wheatley Peters was a...
Synopsis The Red and the Black is a novel by Stendhal, and it is also called The chronicle of the XIX century. The book reveals the tragic story of Julien Sorel, “in whose soul there is a struggle between natural nobility and dangerous ghosts of ambition” (Stendahl, 1967). The plot...
The literary canon concept is used to describe the most valuable and influential texts of a particular time. The current paper argues that a short story “A Man of the People” written by a Nigerian novelist, Chinua Achebe, should be included in the literary canon to be taught as part...
Introduction As a concept, patriotism has been subjected to multiple interpretations, which range from quite neutral to outstandingly positive to downright negating its significance. The perception of patriotism, has become particularly complicated over the past decade due to the rise in political tensions among representatives of different countries, as well...
Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been was written by American author Joyce Oates who refers to real serial murders. This story that belongs to the coming-of-age genre was published in 1966 and talked about a fifteen-year-old girl named Connie, who lived with her parents and older sister during...
After finishing the short story by Edgar Allan Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the reader may be left wondering about the validity of the events that took place during the narration. That hypothesis can only be tested through the assessment of clues that Poe leaves for the...
Dulce et Decorum Est is a poem written by Wilfred Owen in 1917 and then published in 1921 after the author’s death (Muttaleb and Hamadneh 3). Its title is the reference to Horace’s words, who once said, “It is sweet and fitting to die for one’s country.” In his poem,...
Sherman Alexie’s book The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian is a narration about a 14-year-old Arnold Spirit Jr., called Junior in his family and community. The subject of the book is interesting and edifying because it focuses on the coming-of-age story and the feeling of belonging and community....
The poem “The Dignity of Ushers” by Al Maginnes discusses the effects of modernity on the eponymous profession. In this context, the term means people who stand at a church’s doors and open them for people who attend sermons. They also direct visitors to seats to minimize confusion and ensure...
A Good Man Is Hard to Find by Flannery O’Connor presents controversial themes and topics that are quite unusual to the reader. The short story is dark and mystical at times, with a variety of symbolic elements, which subsequently create various interpretations. O’Connor creatively uses debilitating and morose leitmotifs in...
In Albert Camus’s The Plague, a classical masterpiece, a deadly outbreak begins with rats and spreads to humans, decimating half of Oran’s population but sparing the least likely: Joseph Grand. Readers meet Joseph early in the novel, just about the same time news breaks about rats supposedly having an epidemic,...
In “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke, the waltz is used as a metaphor for describing the relationship between a father and his son. The readers are introduced to a visual flashback from the speaker’s childhood as to a night his father came back home intoxicated and proceeded to dance...
Arthur Miller’s The Crucible, which was published back in 1953, remains one of the most notable plays of English literature because it is full of themes that transcend time and are still relevant today. For readers to understand the intentions behind the story, it is imperative to dig deeper into...
There are two most likely reasons why the author is telling this story. To begin with, since it is a semi-autobiographical drama, the events described in it may be divided into those that happened to Hwang and those that did not. Thus, creating this play is a unique way for...
Shakespeare’s last plays belong to the genre of tragicomedy – plays devoid of genuine tragedy, which, while slightly disturbing for the audience, were still mainly intended to entertain them by delivering a sharp and entertaining experience. Nevertheless, Shakespeare brings an exceptional tone to them, switching them into the fairy tale...
The exploration of friendship is a widespread literary issue for authors. This theme is a leitmotif for Mark Twain’s novel, The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. In this story, Twain recounts the friendship between Tom and Huckleberry Finn, who go about their mischief and pranks. The book tells about true friendship...
Measure for Measure is one of Shakespeare’s most controversial plays, as it raises politically sensitive topics such as justice, morality, and corruption. The collision of power, religion, and sex can be perceived utterly differently over the course of time. Even though many literary critics have tried to find the pitfalls...
The spirit of renaissance stirs through many literary works from the last quarter of the 20th century, rejuvenating African American’s will to defy an oppressive system. One such invigorating creation is Maya Angelou’s Still I Rise. This paper analyses how Angelou’s poem criticizes racism and marginalized conditions that have perpetually...
Humanity has been striving for knowledge for centuries which became possible with the appearance of writing and books. Although even primary education was limited in many parts of the world in the past, people still sought education. Dai Sijie’s novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress tells the story of...
Pride and Prejudice is one of the popular and audience’s favorite works written by Jane Austen. The novel’s title intrigues and forces the reader to solve the mystery of who of the heroes is full of pride and who of prejudice. The plot draws attention to how such qualities affect...
The Misfits depicts a group of friends rejected by others, known as the Gang of Five, despite having only four members. They are Bobby, Joe, Skeezie, and Addie, the only girl in the circle. Each has a distinct personality and certain reasons for being ostracized, and later the quarter joins...
Aguiar, Christian. Living class in John Updike’s “A&P”. The Explicator, vol.78, no. 2, 2020, pp. 58-61. Some analyses identify the specific variation of the short story interpretation referred to as the “living class” concept of Beverly Skeggs. It is known as a classism perception in A&P Story, another metaphoric tool...
Introduction Jane Austen’s work occupies one of the leading places in British literary history and remains relevant from the Victorian era to the present. The novel “Pride and Prejudice” describes the love story of a young lady Elizabeth Bennett and an aristocrat Mr. Darcy, developing in the complex context of...
Summary The poem, “My Last Duchess” was written by Robert Browning in 1842. The work can be described as one that’s the prime example of a dramatic monologue in the form of a poem. The dramatic monologue, as a genre is a self-conversation that is presented from a particular character’s...
Introduction Scientific fiction constitutes a fictional genre that addresses the effect accrued to imaginative innovation(s) which occur in science/technology, and several times in settings that are futuristic. It is different from fantasy within the story context due to the fact that its component of imagination is to a vast extent...
Introduction Human society is founded on the fact that luck in life is a goal that everyone wants to achieve. From this perspective, in two dramatic short stories, “The Lottery” by Shirley Jackson and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” by D.H. Lawrence, the philosophical conflict between luck and its consequences is clearly...
Introduction Stephen Aron is a historian specializing in the history of the American West. He has published several books and essays in various magazines and collections. In particular, the collection of essays American History Now is devoted to the modern view of historians on American history. The purpose of this...
Common themes connect many seemingly unrelated works of art and literature. This is true for The Illegal by Lawrence Hill, The Step Not Taken by Paul D’Angelo, and the song Get Up Stand Up by The Wailers. Although they revolve around entirely different stories, the two works of literature and...
Introduction and Thesis This literary analysis delves into “The Story of an Hour” by the American writer Kate Chopin. The story follows Louise Mallard, a married woman with severe heart health problems. At some point, the news surfaced that her husband had died in a railroad accident. Louise’s sister and...
Introduction Autobiographical works often cause public resonance and critics’ interest due to the personal nature of such stories and unique plots that took place in authors’ lives. Junot Díaz can be cited as an example of a writer whose books are largely imbued with the narration of personal experiences. His...
Introduction The Odyssey is considered one of the first adventure novels in the history of humankind and a kind of encyclopedia of geographical representations of the ancient Greeks. Odysseus, in folk memory, is represented as a famous and even archetypal traveler. However, often readers forget that the legendary king of...
Beowulf is an old English story drawn from their native oral literature. Though the author is anonymous, its influence is still felt up to today in many of the works of contemporary writers. The protagonist exhibits all the character traits of a tragic hero as defined by Aristotle. According to...
Introduction The novel Paradise was written in 1997, and it was Morrison’s first book after winning the Nobel Prize in literature in 1993. Paradise stresses the affection of God, and it is the author’s third novel focusing on various kinds of love. All the chapters in the book are dedicated...
In his book, “Who moved my cheese?” Johnson (1998) explores change by narrating the story of four characters searching for cheese. He also depicts how each of the four characters goes about finding cheese. All four characters live in a maze where they are searching for cheese. According to Johnson...
Tragic heroes often embrace unconscious irony, leading to their downfall. In any literary work, it becomes fascinating when some of the characters are self-denial after engaging in different heinous actions unknowingly and later face the consequences after realizing the truth. Denotatively, unconscious irony is when various characters within the play...
Introduction The problems of public life and power are central in any culture, and their poignancy is expressed throughout the history of literature: literary forms are often seen as a safe place for ideas to dwell. The desire to achieve a lawful legal order and a moral and ethical climate...
The aria “Ev’ry Valley” by Handel is an oratorio with both biblical and historical context, and it can be considered a classic of the modern-day. It fits in the theme of the Messiah because the piece glorifies the fact that no mountain or valley can be a barrier in his...
Belonging to entirely different cultures and addressing quite different social and psychological issues, “Oedipus, the King” and “Hamlet” might seem quite distant from each other. However, with the advent of psychoanalysis and the development of the psychoanalytical theory, parallels can be drawn between the emotions by which Hamlet and Oedipus...
Introduction In any normal setting, family and society conflicts are inevitable, whereby people misunderstand one another. People have different perspectives on how they view different life instances. Notably, what seems to be correct to one might be wrong to another, leading to a conflict. In playwriting, developing a conflict is...
The play by Taylor Only Drunks and Children Tell the Truth conveys the journey of a lady with Indian roots who was adopted into a white family. Several characters help in the development of the story and define the genre. Tonto is the crucial character in the work who plays...
We all have a friend who yells during a movie that this moment was shown differently in the book. At the same time, another friend says that he or she is bored with reading and would rather wait for the movie adaptation. Both of these friends can be right, since...
The play “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller is a story of a salesman, Willy, who is trapped by his daydreams. The story revolves around flashbacks of Willy’s dreams and reality, which reveal a lot of symbolism about Willy’s failure to fulfill the American dream. In the “Death of...
Introduction The sea is frequently the central theme of many authors’ compositions. The poem “On the Sea” by John Keats (1800) illustrates the incredible power and subtlety of the waves, as well as their capacity to treat troubled eyes and torn ears. It demonstrates freedom and solace that can be...
Today, an Akkadian epic poem, the Epic of Gilgamesh is regarded as the earliest surviving great literary work. The poem describes the life of Gilgamesh who was an actual historical king of an ancient Sumerian city-state of Uruk, deified post-mortem by its citizens. Of special interest for scholars is the...
The plot of “Barn Burning” by William Faulkner involves Colonel Sartoris Snopes or Sarty, a little boy from a poor family, whose father decides to burn barns of the people he works for. The setting of the story is early spring in rural America in the end of the 19th...
In essence, chapter 8 of the book focuses on the value of fear and anxiety and how defensive pessimism can be more beneficial than strategic optimism. It is stated that darts throwers who envisioned their potential failure were 29 percent more accurate than strategic optimists (Grant 213). The main idea...
Introduction A special place in world literature is occupied by works belonging to the genre of utopia and dystopia. The authors of utopian novels tried to predict a beautiful future, promising immense universal happiness and social harmony. Anti-utopians have debunked the myth of the possibility of global equality, brotherhood, criticizing...
“The brain is fundamentally unlike the hardware in our digital computers. Instead, it’s “liveware”. It reconfigures its circuitry. Although the adult brain isn’t quite as flexible as a child’s, it still retains an astonishing ability to adapt and change” (Eagleman, 2015, ch. 6). The quote by the book’s author David...
Shirley Jackson’s Lottery is one of the jewels of classic American literature of the twentieth century. This work made a massive contribution to the development of the genre of mysticism. Although the Lottery is a short story, it contains an amazingly detailed and colorful description of the American hinterland. Even...
Insanity in Gothic Literature Gothic authors submerge their readers into the dark and depressing atmosphere as they slowly lead the characters through the traps of their minds. In many cases, the heroes are experiencing some forms of insanity, imagining or seeing the scary phenomena while others do not. Description of...
On the surface, it is most likely that a reader may understand ‘The Interpreter of Maladies” as one of the simplest stories about a family of five on vacation in a foreign country. However, the introduction of Mr. Kapasi, who is portrayed as a lonely tour guide, makes the short...
Mental health is an important aspect of people’s lives that requires immediate attention and careful consideration. However, the topic of mental illnesses has been a taboo to discuss and portray for many years. Today it becomes more and more acceptable to talk about one’s health freely, especially in art. The...
It is very early on a chilly morning that you wake up from bed and take a warm bath in the bathroom with water running out from the shower filter. You dress up in your cotton made clothes and decide to have a cup of brewed coffee before going to...
Introduction William Shakespeare’s play, Othello, the Moor of Venice, describes tragedy using Othello as the protagonist. Othello is a Moorish soldier in the Venetian army who is highly qualified and respected. In the play, he finds himself in several tragedies resulting from racial discrimination, envy, love, and infidelity. Other characters...
The Masque of the Red Death is a horror story by E. A. Poe that talks about Prince Prospero and his masquerade ball during the Red Death plague spreading. The disease symbolizes Tuberculosis, an illness common during the writer’s lifetime (Jones, 2017). In the film, it is possible to see...
Introduction Parenthood is one of the central elements of personality socialization, which lays the child’s primary skills in communication and interaction with the environment. For this reason, it is so important to provide effective and pedagogical education and training that stimulates the child’s successful and harmonious development. Otherwise, a parent...
The plays of Moliere’s Tartuffe and Henrik Ibsen A Doll’s House are some of the most famous literary works. Both plays explore the all-consuming topic of money and the obsession with money, which are still relevant in modern society. A Doll’s House and Tartuffe depict the influence of money on...
Opportunities to convey one’s ideas to society through literature are effective tools that allow not only leaving a personal mark on history but also indicating an individual position on a specific topic or issue. However, when taking into account modern social norms and foundations, not all the categories of the...
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a long poem that tells the story of the adventures of the brave knight Sir Gawain. This story is a fairy tale that shows the bravery and courage of the knights, which were popular at the time of its writing; however, it also...
Introduction Religion is a contemporary issue influencing civilization, morals, laws, and cultural societies globally. The American Born Chinese written by Gene Luen Yang’s narrates the experiences of immigrants in America using three different tales. This book conveys three major morals, which are resisting the urge to be assimilated, not denying...
Jane Austen authored the title Pride and Prejudice in 1797 for ten months. However, the novel was published in 1813. To help in her writing, Jane Austen used personal experiences of the happenings during that era as the story describes the middle-class life in England. Jane Austen hails from a...
Introduction Alien presents a short science fiction regarding a strange individual being returned to Earth after supposed abduction by a UFO. Told from the perspective of a blogger that encounters and connects with the man by accident, the short story offers a lighthearted but also tragic narrative of someone being...
Introduction The theme of patriotism and honor is a crucial element in understanding the literature and film created to depict World War I. The poem “The Absorption” in particular focuses on the ideas of patriotism because Sassoon contrasts the horrors of wartime with the soldier’s changing attitudes towards the battlefield...
Introduction Philip Barry wrote Holiday in 1928. The stock market crashed in 1929 leading to the Great Depression of the 1930. Perhaps these events brought out better what Barry’s work criticized about the American society of that time – the affluent and nobles had a false face. Additionally, the play...
‘The Laughing Man’ is a fictitious story told by Chief John Gedsudski to the Comanche Club members, a twenty-five-member group of baseball players, in between breaks from their regular sports. The Laughing Man was an only child to a rich missionary couple, abducted in childhood by Chinese bandits. His parents...
“The Raven” is one of the most well-known poems by Edgar Allan Poe. This work of art can be seen as a hymn to remorse and emotional distress. The story starts with a description of a man who is “weak and weary” whose negative emotions and despair intensify with every...
Introduction Love, passion, and romance have always been an inherent part of human history, influencing individual lives and the stories of entire populations. The exploration of various sides of romantic relationships, therefore, lies at the core of the humanities’ research – it helps one understand how people acted towards each...
Despite the endeavors of Gilgamesh and Enkidu to be similar to gods, the two heroes overestimated their power and neglected the fact that they were both mortals, which led to tragic consequences. By the end of the epic, it becomes evident to Gilgamesh that every human being is bound to...
The poem Richard Cory by Edwin Arlington Robinson is one of these works which overthrow readers’ expectations. At the very beginning, the main character is presented as a successful and wealthy man who can afford anything he wants. Richard is envied by people he meets every day in the streets...
The fascination with death, darkness, and moral corruption seems intrinsic to the human experience. Macabre areas of life attract substantial attention, especially in works of fiction – Joyce Carol Oates’s “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” belong to this category. The explanations for the phenomenon could be found...
Social class and status were extremely important during the Victorian era. People did not have a chance to climb to the top if they were born into a lower class. Poor and less educated people remained the members of their class for life. A person’s belonging to a certain social...
In Fences, the character of Troy Maxon initially seems like a representation of a hardworking man, a breadwinner, who gives up on his ideas of happiness and well-being to ensure that his family has financial security. However, Troy had dreams previously, with society pushing him into that niche once the...
