5989 samples of this type
The compositions left a profound trace in the literature of the XX century. Even though the stories are short, they contain significant ideas. The narratives are modernist since they describe the individual’s thoughts, not the social environment. The paper below represents a brief overview of the narrations. It also explains...
Introduction The central idea of the Recitatif by Toni Morrison is race and racism, the “black-white” conflict. It must be noticed that the author’s approach to this subject is nonconventional, and the first sign of it is that she makes the reader guess who between the two protagonists of the...
Introduction Both of the selected stories, Kawai Strong Washburn’s “What the Ocean Eats” and Bryan Stevenson’s “The High Road,” are interesting to read and focus on important topics resorting to one’s emotions and feelings. However, a detailed analysis of the two pieces allows noticing structural differences and making conclusions as...
Introduction King Lear is one of the most famous plays written by William Shakespeare. It is thought to be written in 1605-1606 and focuses on the character of King Lear developing madness after deciding to retire from the throne and dividing the land of Britain among two of his daughters....
The Tragedy of Hamlet is among Shakespeare’s notable plays which have been performed across the world. In the tragedy, the ghost of the King of Denmark tells his son, Hamlet, to avenge his death by murdering the new king who is Hamlet’s uncle. Hamlet pretends to be mad, envisions life...
Introduction Chinua Achebe is a renowned author not just in Africa but also in international literature. With the help of his writings, Chinua Achebe thrills readers across the globe with the creative application of language, structure, form, and precise insider accounts of modern African history and way of life. With...
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 Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is a research done by Rebecca Skloot to unravel the story of Henrietta and her family to know what she underwent because of her cells. Skloot reveals a scenario of one of the most significant inputs to the field of medicine in her book....
Among numerous contemporary writers, Carmen Boullosa occupies a specific place due to her fascinating use of metaphors and textual objects to convey deep underlying meanings. She is famous for many novels dedicated to the pressing problems of Mexican and American society. Still, she admitted in her interview that she had...
An outstanding piece of writing called Under the Skirt of Liberty is Giannina Braschi’s creation, which criticizes the American establishment for the loss of its previous values and goals. The author’s message is primarily focused on describing major pitfalls of the American system, and it reaches out and converses with...
“A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is a short story written by Ernest Hemingway, a prominent American writer. It describes the night’s late hours when an old deaf man is sitting in a café while two waiters are waiting him to leave as they want to close the place and go home....
Introduction Being one of the most prominent poets of the era does not necessarily make one’s works the most understandable to the public. T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” is a prominent example of such a paradox. Whereas critics consider the work outstanding and influential, many readers find it difficult...
The embodiment of the rival for Oedipus is Creon who does not represent the same interpretation that takes place in Sophocles’ Antigone. In Oedipus the King, this character does not want to obtain power and aspires rather a share of it. The chorus reaffirms the reliability of Creon’s words, as...
Introduction Jamel Brinkley’s “A Family” starts on a note that immediately raises concerns in the reader. Curtis, a convict who spent twelve years in prison, is discreetly following what appears to be a single mother with a teenage son under the pretext of being interested in the son. The two...
The plays, Oedipus Rex by Sophocles and Hamlet by William Shakespeare was written centuries apart but they share common themes, specifically that of a tragic hero, as shown by the protagonists in these two chefs-oeuvres. Both Oedipus and Hamlet seek to avenge the death of their fathers, but in the...
Introduction The Street is a novel by Ann Petry, an AAfrican American writer, whose other famous works include novels Country Place and The Narrows. The Street was first published in 1946 and sold more than a million copies. The main character of the novel, Lutie Johnson, decides to build a...
Introduction “Recitatif” is a short story written by Tony Morrisson, which depicts the experience of Twyla and Roberta. The story uncovers many themes, including child neglect and racial tensions of the era. The plot development allows seeing the relationship between two childhood friends and the different life experiences and views...
Introduction Short stories and reading overall sometimes seem to be simply a form of entertainment. However, in reality, characters in these writings often provide readers with answers to the questions of the meaning of life or the importance of various values. A story by Ernest Hemingway called “Hills Like White...
In the twentieth century, many artists paid great attention to existentialism. In addition, the theater of the absurd became a remarkable phenomenon, which described in colors all the strangeness and meaninglessness of life. A striking example of such a work is Endgame by Samuel Beckett. One of its theatrical performances...
Introduction The short story titled “Everyday Use” is written by Alice Walker. “Everyday Use” portrays the different understanding of African-American history. For some, it is a part of their daily lives, while for others – something they learn about from books and college lectures. The three main characters – Mama,...
Poems “We Old Dudes” by Joan Murray and “We Real Cool” by Gwendolyn Brooks are going to be the primary focus of this essay. It might be easy to draw comparisons between the pieces as the poem by Murray derives its leading themes and literary elements from “We Real Cool.”...
The importance of love and affection in literature is permanently reinforced by secondary ideas that emphasize the eternal influence of higher feelings on the human race. The idea of pure love has been investigated by many authors, and Shakespeare’s Othello and Kalidasa’s Shakuntala may be considered rather similar in terms...
Quinceanera is a poem by Judith Ortiz Cofer, published in 1991. The poem vividly represents the Hispanic tradition of celebrating a teenage girl’s coming of age. This transition is a rather troublesome and confusing experience, as the narrator balances between the polar opposite emotions. The author applies several literary elements,...
Summary On November 13, 2001, a group of three police officers, Ed Volz, Bill Jarmon, and Charlie Pudwill, watch a well-concealed scuba diving boat at the Puget Sound in the Pacific Northwest. All there are serving in the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, mainly investigating the cases of sea...
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” is a story about an octogenarian lady named Granny Weatherall. The woman suffers from a fatal disease and the whole narrative describes the process of her dying. The author of the story, Katherine Anne Porter, covers the topics of the strength of women, the dichotomy...
Introduction of the author Eliezer Wiesel is an American-Jewish writer, the author of 57 books, and the Nobel Peace Prize, winner. The list of his accomplishments and achievements is long and his life is full of memorable events and experiences. The most horrible one is, without a doubt, the experience...
For my literary research paper, I am going to write about “Sonny’s Blues” by James Baldwin. Analyzing this story, I will focus on the characters of two brothers: the narrator and Sonny, and their conflicts. Both brothers lived two completely different lifestyles and yet they both feel spiritually trapped. I...
Introduction Dawn Powell’s play “Big Night” portrays controversial relationships both within a particular family and in society in general. The author uncovers the sad but true reversal of values in 1930s America, when love, friendship, kindness, and other aspects of ordinary life were replaced by the desire to make a...
Over the years of its existence, Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein” may have lost its edge as a horror novel, yet it has entered the pantheon of horror classics due to the unique nature of its conflict. On the one hand, the story of an insane scientist trying to play God and...
The poem Howl by Allen Ginsberg was written in a highly peculiar period of the Beat Generation. The latter was comprised of a number of authors who reevaluated the established norms of society and adhered to non-conformism. Allen himself was highly opposed to repression, exploitation, and capitalism because he perceived...
The German fairy tale Snow-White and Rose-Red (German: Schneeweißchen und Rosenrot), just as the more famous Little Snow White, is one of the stories collected by the Brothers Grimm, who brought their version of the fairy tale in accordance with the moral norms of the contemporary German society. According to...
Run by Ann Patchett is a piece of fiction writing. The book deals with the life of an American family of a former mayor of Boston, Bernard Doyle, who recently lost his wife, Bernadette. Ann Patchett has chosen a very symbolic title for the novel, Run, for all the characters...
“The Scarlet Letter” by Nathaniel Hawthorne is an excellent piece of literature enabling to examine the way symbolism may be applied in order to reveal the most appealing ideas and address the most complicated issues of human life. This romantic work discusses a row of important problems existing within the...
Introduction The manner in which Eliezer struggles with his faith in God is portrayed throughout the novel. In the beginning, the faith he has in God is strong. This is evident when he asks himself, “Why did I live? Why did I breathe?” (Wiesel). This shows how absolute his faith...
The style of thinking, reasoning as well as acting changes with time during the process of development. Playwrights have resolved to address the changes or experiences that one encounters during his/her development. For instance, William Shakespeare in his Romeo and Juliet illustrates the process of development through Juliet, the hero...
Introduction ‘Night’ is an autobiographical story written by Wiesel Elie. The short story details the plight of a Jewish family during the holocaust. In the course of World War 2, the Nazi regime under Adolf Hitler unleashed unimaginable and horrifying atrocities against members of the Jewish community living in Germany...
Introduction Travel literature is a comprehensive genre that includes various categories, and one of the most popular is travel memoirs. Such works have been widely disseminated among readers who are interested in traveling to exotic countries. Two striking examples of this genre are presented in this work. They both describe...
The first two poems are good pieces written by Carl Sandburg. The First poem is titled “A Fence” and the second one “Onion Days”. The third poem is a very interesting piece by Robert Frost titled “Mending Wall”. The three poems have apt language of metaphorical compositions. The themes in...
Introduction The books Scarlet Letter’ and ‘Moby Dick’ were the most engaging during the literature course. Both books are rich in themes concerning human nature. Although the books have been set in a different previous era, their contents are very appealing considering the similarity of human nature during that period...
Introduction The Great Gatsby is a literary novel written by Scott Fitzgerald in 1925. The story revolves around the American culture in the past and how it is expressed in the story of Jay Gatsby, a man who would place his full life around one heart desire of being reunited...
In the book Celia, A Slave by Merton McLaurin the question of slavery and oppression of women is raised. The laws of the land do not protect the women against atrocities committed against them in this patriarchal society. The book is set during the slavery era in America. Therefore, McLaurin...
Introduction The book, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is the work of Harriet A Jacobs. In this sentimental work that with sheer plain language manages to bring out the life of slaves in the slave-holding Southern states of the United States of America, Harriet has managed to...
No one wants to die. Understanding this fact is what enables a connection between seemingly opposite human viewpoints. Taking this extreme into consideration is most important now in struggles with the environment, because these struggles mean life or death for generations to come. “A study published in the journal Science...
Published in 1922, “Mother to Son” was one of Langston Hughes’ early poems. Simple language and a powerful message created by the author make it accessible and meaningful to all readers. While Hughes captures the inspiring persistence of an aging mother, he also represents the struggle of African-Americans inherent in...
The book ‘Montana 1948’ reflects themes of; the importance of family, loyalty, guilt, law, and order, and justice. The book is told from a third-person perspective of David Hayden, who recaps the events of his childhood Bentock, Montana in the summer of 1948. The issue of identity and decision-making are...
As it is well-known nowadays, a special artistic technique is meant under the term “defamiliarization”. Its main meaning is that the audience is forced to perceive the suggested things and actions from a distance, in an unfamiliar way, as if they were strangers there. The technique is aimed at the...
Introduction In 1739 a slave revolt took place in South Carolina. It is referred to as the Stono Rebellion or the Catos Rebellion. It is not clear what actually triggered the rebellion by the slaves in South Carolina. On the fateful day of 29 September 1739, the slaves in South...
Introduction The ancient Greeks were well-known for their tragedies. These tragedies played a big role in the process of carrying out investigations about the nature of man and the position man held in the world and also the powers that served to control man’s life. Tragedy in most cases involves...
A & P written by John Updike is a short story of a teenaged boy of 19 named Sammy who worked at a local grocery store called A&P. Sammy relates in first person the three young girls in swimsuits who entered the store. He appraises them sexually, until the manager...
Some people say that men are born to rule, while women must stay at home and raise children. Even nowadays, this idea is very popular with a lot of people, mostly men, but some women as well. However, women’s role in the society has been well discussed and grounded enough...
This story commences in Manhattan at the beginning of the 17th century but it is written from Paris. It is a very interesting story talking about an American setting with American characters. It has several themes including family betrayal, deception, truth, and imagination, and family domesticity among others. However, the...
Introduction Christian is the main character of the story The Pilgrim’s Progress written by John Bunyan. This young man is searching for a way to Heaven; this journey of a soul is presented as a physical journey from his native city of Destruction to the Celestial City under which the...
Author The author, Joseph John Ellis was born in 1943 and is currently professor at the Mount Holyoke College of History on the Ford Foundation. He wrote the Founding Brothers: The Revolutionary Generation in 2000 and received the Pulitzer Prize in History in 2001 for it. He received his PhD...
As the title shows, “The Red Convertible” is the main fulcrum of the story and the entire plot is built around it. It is used as a symbol of happiness with its color ‘red’ denoting passion and life. At the beginning of the story, the car belongs to both Lyman...
Introduction Elizabeth Bishop has often been portrayed as being detached from her poetry, partly because she often takes an exterior view. However, this is merely her artist’s eye coming through as she uses very co0ncrete imagery to convey her meaning and expects the reader to create most of the message....
Perhaps, the fear is one the most widely spread vices of society, as it provokes the intense and negative emotions. The fear and horror is usually generated when people face the Ugly as a social and aesthetic opposition to the Beautiful. Provoked by social prejudices and vices, social fears are...
In his article “The Beggar’s Opera as Opera and Anti-Opera,” critic Peter Lewis first analyzes the title of John Gay’s The Beggar’s Opera as something that was not originally intended to be an actual opera in the traditional sense of the word. In making this claim, Lewis is largely in...
What is the place of a woman in modern society? Should a woman be a classical housewife and the ‘mother of the family’ or a modern independent businesswoman with a strong position in the so-called ‘men’s world’? Today we have a right to choose. Today we have equal rights and...
Author’s name: Flannery O’Connor This author has published a number of short stories apart from two novels. Her writing slants towards a compulsive Southern Gothic tradition with a strong narrative pace and most of her writings are based on old Southern styling. The readability of her works derives from the...
Ed McBain’s “Sadie When She Died” is one of the stories from the 87th Precinct series which he started writing in the mid-1950s. It presents the story about the officer, Steve Carella, who knew from the beginning the identity of the real murderer but lacked proof to accuse him of...
The first thing that is sure to burst upon the eye when one takes a look at the front cover of the book “My Year of Meats” by Ruth L. Ozeki is the eloquent quotation taken from the book review by Jane Smiley for ‘Chicago Tribune’ that describes Ozeki’s debut...
Almost every joke contains a hint of truth. For this reason, comedy can be the perfect medium to effect social reform. Clearly, Aristophanes understood this concept quite well when he penned his farcical-humored play Lysistrata. Lysistrata focuses on the story of a young woman of the same name who attempted...
William Faulkner’s short story “A Rose for Emily” is a story about a woman who is isolated from her town because of the attitudes and beliefs of the Old South social structure. Throughout the story, she is seen as a town oddity because she represents the ways of the Old...
Lord Byron is a romantic poet and Browning is a Victorian poet. Byron is a nihilist and pessimist. Browning, on the other hand, is known for his robust optimism. However, both are very great as poets. Their poems deal with various aspects of love, and their capacity to depict the...
Introduction A Rose for Emily is one of the shortest stories by William Faulkner and it tells the tale of a woman named Miss Emily Grierson living in the southern parts of the country with its depleting social structure. The author narrates his story from the point of view of...
Introduction Nora is the main protagonist in The Doll House, a masterpiece written by the Norwegian playwright, Henrik Ibsen. Nora is married to a struggling young lawyer, Thorvald Helmer, by whom she has three lovely children. The couple belongs to the middle class as shown by their home, described as...
There are several suggestions that perhaps Homer’s The Iliad is the product of a much longer oral tradition that Homer wrote down and passed along as an artist. An oral tradition can be generally thought of as a story that is passed down from one generation to another through oral,...
Bildungsroman is a German word/term which refers to a coming-of age novel. Coined by famous German philologist, Johann Carl Simon Morgenstern, the bildungsroman novel traverses the psychological, moral and social molding of the main, character/protagonist from childhood to adulthood. In most cases the impetus for such a journey is sparked...
Introduction When stories about Ilia Muromets, Dobrinya Nikitich, and Alyosha Popovich were told in Kievan Rus’ – the Slavic nation was dominated by the mighty city of Kyiv (modern Ukraine) from the ninth until the twelfth century. At this time old English poetry, or as it also called Anglo-Saxon was...
Hemingway’s “A Clean, Well-Lighted Place” is very simple story. An old man, aged about eighty years, tries to spend his night by drinking brandy in a Spanish café, but the young waiter becomes impatient, as he wants to join his wife at home and enjoy a sound sleep. At the...
Flannery O’Connor(1925-1964) is one the most acclaimed American short story writers of the twentieth century. She was born in Savannah and brought up in Milledgeville, both in Georgia. With 31 stories and two novels to her credit, she died at the age of 39, almost 12 years after she was...
Introduction Arthur Miller’s play “Death of a Salesman” is, to me, all about the dangers of defining happiness in terms of financial success. Charley sums up this idea when he says, “The only thing you got in this world is what you can sell” (97). For this reason, I plan...
Introduction To begin with, I should pay attention on Francis Scott Fitzgerald as one of the greatest American writers of the last century. Also we should admit his many-faceted talent in depicting the Post-World-War I society of the United States in his outstanding novel “The Great Gatsby”. This one is...
The collected poems of Emily Dickinson include joyful ones and despairing ones. Some two hundred of them are regarded as poems of despair, some of them about literary recognition, others about her inability to engage with formal religion but most are about the absence of love in her life. As...
Introduction In this paper, our task is to compare the works of such prominent English authors as Shakespeare, Milton and Keats. Overall, we can say that in their poems they explore themes, which have always been vital for any artist, namely, the fear of death, brevity of human life, love...
Introduction The novel “Midaq Alley” by Naguib Mahfouz is a novel with many characters that live in a poor neighborhood called Midaq Alley during the Second World War. Among the protagonists are Umm Hamida, a marriage broker and bath attendant, her daughter, who was pimped by Ibraham Faraj; Hussain Kirsha,...
The poem “Pool Players Seven at the Golden Shovel” discloses a bright and fashionable presentation of the main characters of the poem, namely the street boys whose fate depends upon their luck. In that regard, the poem is also a protest against the goodness of life, which came out of...
The generation gap is one of the popular themes addressed in the literature, as the lack of understanding between the older and younger family members often causes conflicts and life dramas. Cathy Song’s poem “The Youngest Daughter”, however, is distinguished for its delicate depiction of the relationship between the narrator...
Introduction LaBute’s play The Mercy Seat was one of the first key theatrical rejoinders to the September 11, 2001 assaults. Set on September 12, it disquiets a man who worked at the World Trade Center but was absent in the office while the attack took place – with his love...
Introduction The complexity involved in the working of the human mind is beyond explanations. The flow of thoughts in an individual is Brownian at a superficial level but looking at it from the perspective of a philosopher one realizes the implicit presence of ‘The Stream of Consciousness’. Throughout the history...
It is a common knowledge that people always thought of something that would make their life easier. Charms and topics related with them have always attracted the attention of different writers who created stories and fairy-tales where people achieved everything they wanted by means of magic not even lifting a...
Introduction If there is a novel that can be closer to haiku, in terms of deep meanings that can be extracted from descriptions and short ordinary phrases, this would be “Snow Country” – a novel by Yasunari Kawabata that tells the story of love between a man visiting hot springs...
Introduction In Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, the main character Marlow continuously calls into question the modern assumptions that are made by his listeners as well as his readers, blurring the lines between inward and outward, civilized and savage and, most especially, dark and light. The bulk of the book...
“The Barrelmaker Brimful of Love” is a short story written by a famous Japanese poet Ihara Saikaku. In this work, the author addresses several issues: first, the relationships between love and religion, in particular Buddhism. Secondly, he explores the conflict between individual happiness and general welfare within the context of...
Introduction The issue of insanity has often been uncomfortable, for the average human being as well as for the writer. It often provides a fascinating subject for drama, as has been demonstrated brilliantly by William Shakespeare as insanity plays a key role in Shakespeare’s tragedy Hamlet. In this play, the...
Introduction To Kill a Mocking Bird by Harper Lee is one of the most vehement novels that break the tradition of ‘ part pour l’art’ and proceeds to provide some strong lessons. Racism and classism are one of its major themes, and in course of exploration of such a theme,...
Introduction Antoine de Saint-Exupery, to certain extent, can be compared to Leonardo Da Vinci, who, as one knows from the history, succeeded in painting, architecture as well as in exact sciences. Similarly, Saint-Exupery’s giftedness manifested itself in a number of directions: he studied architecture, worked as a sales manager and...
Fitzgerald’s magnum opus The Great Gatsby raises an important question about the legitimacy of the American Dream. The novel centers on Jay Gatsby, a millionaire who came from humble beginnings and spends his time trying to reunite with his former lover, Daisy. Gatsby’s warped perception of success makes him see...
Nowadays, it is being commonly assumed that name, the Christian worldview defines the essence of Western civilization, as we know it. However, the close reading of the earliest Scandinavian and Anglo-Saxon poetical pieces, such as “Beowulf”, “The Seafarer”, and “The Wanderer”, provides us with insight into the spiritual foundation of...
On Theme “The man who makes an appearance in the business world, the man who creates personal interest, is the man who gets ahead. Be liked and you will never want”… – Willy Loman, Act 1 (Miller, 1998) “The American Dream” is the highlight of this story. There is a...
The story Araby is included in the series of the so-called Dubliners written by James Joyce. The series still fascinates its readers with epiphany, used in each story. The use of the device of epiphany means that the end of the story is unexpected and abrupt while the plot of...
The essay focus on the poem “Ode to the west wind”, by Percy Bysshe Shelley, who was born in 1792, educated at Eton and University College, Oxford. In 1811 he was expelled from Oxford for circulating a pamphlet, “The necessity of Atheism”. In same year he married the under-aged Harriet...
The Hollow Men is a soliloquy by one of the hollow men, representing a modern generation of rootless, faithless, lonely, and aimless wanderers. The hollow men are bewailing their lot in the modern Waste Land. They are in Death’s dream kingdom from which they cannot cross to Death’s other kingdom...
Introduction The book “Life of Pi” by Canadian writer Yann Martel, winner of the 2002 Booker Prize narrates delightfully, the story of Piscine Patel, who shortens his name to Pi. An elderly man in Pondicherry, India, tells the author that he has a story that can make him believe in...
Hope is an ambiguous feeling to describe. It is the shining candle in the gloom and the final sprite released from Pandora’s Box to mitigate the swarm of gloom that Pandora inadvertently released. When Flannery O’Connor makes this statement, she speaks with a conviction of a person who knows the...
Introduction “Antony and Cleopatra” is one of Shakespeare’s most dramatic plays; however, it has not been staged nearly as many as plays such as Hamlet or Macbeth because it is such a hard play to produce due to its enormous variety of content. However, the mere strength of the characters...
Introduction Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, the work of the unknown poet written approximately in the late 14th century, contains multiple topics for a discussion. The poem is referred to as an alliterative verse and medieval romance. Special interest of the work is the notion of the magical creature...
Introduction The novel All quite on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque was one of the first novels in modern European literature to present another side of the war which was rarely disclosed earlier in literature. Earlier war was mostly presented as a heroic glorious and patriotic event, described...
Charlotte Perkins Gilman The Yellow Paper in The Yellow Paper and Other Stories. Oxford University Press, USA, 1996. This short story portrays oppression of women and negligence her husband which lead the main character to psychological distress and madness. Gilman underlines that women have no freedom limited by false social...
There are many instances in the novel “Antigone” that shows the relationship of cause and effect. It is particularly important to recognize such causes and effects for they are simply the highlights of the novel itself. Theses causes and effects are what makes up the novel and without them, the...
Achilles and Hector are two heroic characters in Homer’s classic Iliad and both these fearless warriors display honour and virtue in their characters. The personal resolve, decisions, behaviour, valour and the commitment shown by these two act as the key to the development of the plot of the book. Both...
Introducion An epic is a long, narrative poem written in a noble, dignified style and telling of exploits perfumed by great heroes. It differs from other narrative poems in that it has greater dignity and sweep and presents more lifelike characters, Beowulf, the national epic of the Anglo-Saxons, relates how...
Introduction The most discussed subject in the works of Chaucer and Jane Austen is the topic of marriage. It is still a hotly debated subject. What kind of relationship a husband and wife should have, how the domestic duties are to be shared, and whether both are equal, or whether...
Introduction Geoffrey Chaucer and Jane Austen belong to two different remarkable periods in English Literature. Chaucer was born in 1334 and Austen in 1775. The birth of the English language and literature in the fourteenth century provided a proper atmosphere in England for the growth of new trends and tendencies...
Introduction The genre of a detective novel always attracted a large audience with its suspenseful premise and a satisfactory and often revelatory ending. One can argue that this genre has a set of traits that were established once and had not changed significantly since then (Rosenheim 81). Many short stories...
Introduction This essay will compare and contrast two classic American short stories. The comparison will take the point-by-point approach where one idea will be discussed fully before moving on to the next idea. The two stories that will be analyzed are “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, which was...
Introduction John Steinbeck’s The Chrysanthemums focuses on the theme of gender roles and the discrimination of women based on their gender. The author tells the story of Elisa, who is trapped in her roles and responsibilities of being a perfect wife and housekeeper that is expected to take care of...
The Main Idea of I, Rigoberta Menchú The book titled I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala is an autobiography of Rigoberta Menchú that is written in the form of the testimonio. The narrative was dictated by Menchú during interviews and then transcribed by Elisabeth Burgos-Debray. Rigoberta is a...
‘The Last Night of the World’ is a short story by Ray Bradbury written in a genre of speculative fiction. It presents an evening dialogue between spouses who are drinking coffee and watching their daughters play on the rug. It is an entirely ordinary evening except for the dream they...
Introduction In her memoir, Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat narrates her life experiences in Haiti and in the US without following any chronological order of events. The book’s title could be interpreted as the pain that underlines the stories it recounts. Family separation, suffering in a foreign land, becoming refugees,...
Introduction Moby Dick: Or, the White Whale by Herman Melville, or just Moby Dick, is an unusual book. It was written contrary to all the existing ideas about the laws of the genre and is not similar to any work of world literature. Melville combines the features of adventure, science...
Dreams of fantastic technologies of the future usually border on an incredible catastrophe that threatened humanity with extinction. Typically, such ideas are beautifully depicted in dystopian novels. The problem of the post-apocalyptic planet is often reflected in the works of fiction writers, which is typical for the work of The...
Introduction One of the most famous plays created by William Shakespeare is Hamlet. The play deals with multiple themes. However, the most dominant theme that overshadows everything else in the play is the theme of revenge. The issue of revenge is questioned from the point of view of violence. This...
The Pittsburgh Cycle The issue of race was especially problematic for the U.S. in the early 20th century due to the legacy of the rampant racism that plagued the previous era of U.S. sociocultural development. The challenges faced by African American people in fighting against oppression and promoting equality were...
In 1985, the American playwright and Pulitzer Prize winner August Wilson published the play Fences. This work was published as part of the ten-part Pittsburgh Cycle, which recounts the complexities of African-American life in different decades of the twentieth century. Fences is a theatrical play that raises acute social problems...
Introduction There are several prominent themes raised in Henrik Ibsen’s A Doll’s House, including the discussion of feminism, freedom, happiness, and dignity. However, a significant topic to analyze within the play is that of marriage and the causes of its failure. Whether Torvald respected Nora due to his views on...
Introduction The novel The Age of Innocence written by Edith Wharton presents a critical or even satirical description of the social norms and values adopted in the upper-class society of New York at the end of the nineteenth century. In particular, the author focuses on such a concept as innocence,...
Today’s nurses are faced with the challenging task of delivering culturally competent care to a large number of patients with different ethnic backgrounds. Among other things, a culturally tailored approach requires overcoming prejudice and racial stereotypes, which have shown to have a negative impact on patient health (Perkins, 2014). The...
Introduction Fences, a play by August Wilson, was published in 1986. The play details the African-American experiences and deals with the themes of racism, infidelity, and forgiveness. This paper explores how Cory, son of Troy and Rose, has avoided following in his father’s footsteps and learned to manage his anger...
Introduction Plato was one of the outstanding Ancient Greek philosophers. Most of his teachings were based on his conception of the ideas, which explained human nature, life, soul, relationships, and the state. Plato expressed his philosophy in the dialogues, among which the Phaedo and The Republic take a very important...
In both Shakespeare’s Othello and Garcia’s Chronicles of a Death Foretold, the themes of love, passion, and death are connected. In most cases, death occurs as a result of the violence that is ignited by passion, which seemingly originates from love. However, a critical reading of the texts begs the...
Introduction “A Good Man is Hard to Find” is a short story written by Flannery O’Connor in 1953 and is mostly known for its controversial and grim ending. O’Connor, being a Southerner, has been mostly using a Southern Gothic style in her writings; this genre is usually referred to as...
Chedgzoy, Kate. Shakespeare, Feminism, and Gender: Contemporary Critical Essays. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Recently, feminist criticisms of Shakespeare’s works have greatly expanded. Chedgzoy notes that the modern field of feminist criticism is not as obsessed as it once was on whether Shakespeare’s works were feminist or proto-feminist, or in the...
Introduction Even though the two plays; ‘Antigone’ by Sophocles and ‘A Doll’s House’ by Henrick Ibsen were written in completely different times, they share certain thematic elements when it comes to the portrayal of the female characters. For instance, the characters “Antigone” by Sophocles and Nora in “A Doll’s House”...
Introduction The poem “The Blind Men and the Elephant” by John Godfrey Saxe depicts the actions of six blind men in their attempt at trying to discern what an elephant is like based on their perceptions. The result is a series of rather humorous descriptions wherein each man ascertains the...
“Rip Van Winkle” is a symbolic story, its author, Washington Irving, used a fictional and unrealistic event to be able to portray the difference between the same places of America before and during the Revolutionary War. The story of a mysterious situation when a character skips a long period without...
Introduction Wiesel’s book Night can be regarded as a story of dehumanization and lost hopes. However, it is also a story of affection and desire to remain a human in inhumane conditions. There are different themes in the book, but the father-son relationship is one of the central and most...
Introduction Elie Wiesel exhibits his struggle in religion and faith in a unique manner. As a Jew, Eliezer was brought up to be a staunch believer in God. However, the same is not evidenced throughout the book. Eliezer grows up believing that God is absolute and omnipresent. He is a...
Modern Hebrew and Yiddish literature are extremely versatile in terms of subjects. Nevertheless, the themes of Jewish tradition, history, and culture pervade many of the pieces written by Hebrew and Yiddish authors. As stated by Miron, art and literature often serve to strengthen the collective identity of the communities that...
Introduction Molière’s Tartuffe is a perfect example of the critical yet satirical exploration of the theme of religious hypocrisy in the Enlightenment literature (TheatreHistory par. 1). A symbolic capital of praise and admiration that the play has accrued over the centuries speaks tellingly of its theatrical worth as well as...
The Yellow Wallpaper by Charlotte Perkins Gilman is one of the best examples of Gothic literature. Being considered as the scary writing at the times when the story was written, however, some time passed and the story has been interpreted from different perspectives involving various angles of consideration. A close...
Introduction Humans have always been fascinated about the future. This fascination coupled together with limitless imagination led to the development of the science fiction genre, both in print and on the screen. The industrialisation period that began in the 1900s inspired a new form of science fiction that mainly dealt...
Introduction Mastery, Tyranny, & Desire is a book written by a historian Burnard Trevor and published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2003. The book addresses the subject of slavery, white privilege, and abuse of power by white plantation owners in Jamaica in the 18th century. The author...
Literature has always served people to convey their feelings and emotions. It is a very powerful remedy which helps authors show their attitude towards some issue and make people think about it. That is why it is obvious that much attention in the literature is devoted to the issue of...
Comparison “The Necklace” and “The Rocking-Horse Winner” At first glance, The Necklace by Guy de Maupassant and The Rocking-Horse Winner by D. H. Lawrence are very different stories. The former is set in 19-th century Paris, while the latter is set in England after the First World War. However, both...
Introduction While the textbook offers a wide range of captivating, deep poems, fully of effective and meaningful symbolism, few of them are as captivating and current as the poem “Road Not Taken” by Robert Frost, which is rightfully one of his more popular works (Frost). This is a narrative poem,...
“The Necklace”: Analysis In One of the Opening Paragraphs of the Story, We Are Told that Mme Loisel “Suffered Intensely.” Why Did She Suffer? As someone who had the appearance, demeanor, and ambitions of an upper-class woman, yet belonging to a comparatively less wealthy class, Mme Loisel must have felt...
Comedy of Errors has been traditionally critiqued as a comical unfolding of laughable incidents. However, closer examination of the text reveals that the root of the plot and the contexts demonstrated in the drama associates closely with the politics involved in the church-state discourse. Shakespeare has used the form of...
A tragedy is an act of human suffering. This act invokes feeling in viewers’ hearts which seem to enjoy the process of someone suffering. In view of culture, tragedy refers to a form of drama in a given tradition. The term drama in the context of tradition has been the...
The War Prayer Analysis: Essay Introduction Mark Twain, officially known as Samuel Langhorne Clemens, is a celebrated American author whose work and practice both in academic and political fields contributed immensely to shaping American literary history, socio-political environment, and global academic development. The author, a critic of American discriminative leadership,...
Introduction “Riders to the Sea” was written by John Millington Synge as an attempt to create a play based on his experiences of life on Aran Islands. It became a success and led to the creation of further plays based on that region. This paper will examine this play from...
Introduction The era of progressivism has given birth to several innovative ideas and offered support and leverage for many more. Feminism can be categorized as the latter, as it gained substance and refined many of its ideas during this historical period. Women and Economics by Charlotte Perkins Gilman are often...
Abridged Production History The history of British dramaturgy cannot be discussed without mentioning Ben Jonson’s comedy Volpone, as such that represents a particularly high dramaturgic value. In its turn, this can be partially explained by the fact that the themes and motifs, contained in this play, did not only correlate...
Introduction The present paper is a review of two stories written by Flannery O’Connor – A Good Man Is Hard to Find and The River – regarding their depiction of the concept of death. The two readings incorporate the concept of death in very different ways, and it is apparent...
The subject of the Poem The poem The bean eaters deals with a seemingly simple subject, which is a scene of two old people having dinner and eating beans. However, a closer look at the narrative will show that it addresses an array of social issues, poverty being the main...
St. Louis Shakespeare’s production of Shakespeare’s The Tempest was staged in 2010 and performed at the Grandel Theatre in St. Louis, Missouri. The play was directed by Jerry Vogel, the stage set by Cristie Johnston. The cast of this critically acclaimed performance includes Robert A. Mitchell as Prospero, Betsy Bowman...
“Th’ infernal Serpent; he it was, whose guile Stird up with Envy and Revenge, deceiv’d 35 The Mother of Mankinde, what time his Pride Had cast him out from Heav’n” (Milton Lines: 34-37) The monster created by Mary Shelley in Frankenstein (henceforth mentioned as Frankenstein) and the character of Satan...
Introduction Thomas Stearns Eliot and Wystan Hugh Auden belong to the brightest representatives of the American literature of the twentieth century. The unmatched virtuosity of each poet deserves particular attention and admiration from the audience. In their work, Eliot and Auden rise such crucial topics as love, war, faith, death,...
Oedipus Rex is a Greek tragedy play written and directed by Sophocles who lived many centuries ago. The play is a classic master piece of Greek talent in theatre and drama and has generously contributed to modern forms of theatrical arts. The play revolves around the tragic fate of Oedipus...
Introduction In almost every environment, there exist mentally ill or physically impaired individuals. Cases of maltreatment to such people have continually been evident within societies but no one is watchful to such situations. On the other hand, people have always had wrong perceptions that riches are capable of making such...
