6078 samples of this type
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...
Literature is the means of expressing the feelings and emotions that human being perceive during their lives. It is the form of art that allows people depict the most tragic and the most joyful events in their life, the most necessary and dangerous experiences, etc. The significant occurrences in the...
Introduction Weapons of mass destruction (biological, nuclear, etc.) are primarily designed to kill large quantities of humans as well as destroy natural and man-made structures and the biosphere in general. In an age in which technology ranks superior, much emphasis is placed on the actual weapons as opposed to the...
Flannery O’Connor is best known for her obscure, but thought-provoking short stories unlike most of the other 20th century American writers. She makes use of tragedy and brutality in her works to create an atmosphere of terror to deal with the subject of spirituality. The theme of ‘A Good Man...
The story by Flannery O’Connor describes the particular event which was of terrific coloring. In this respect the term of murder is pointed out. The world of a man is not so easy to understand. Most of human beings are intended to believe in their righteousness more than to admit...
Introduction The play “Death of a Salesman” by Arthur Miller depicts life and destiny of an American family which dreams about prosperity and high social position in society. in this play, Fundamental in this play is the fact that Miller does not mask the analysis of social values and low...
Characters are the main issues in the understanding of the whole written work of any author. The author’s opinion, theme, and ideas are delivered through the characters of the story. It is significant to notice that characters are the main device in the author-reader communication, and an author usually tries...
Arthur Miller, the author of Death of a Salesman, is a well-known American playwright of the twentieth century. Through his works, he depicted characters that showed certain personal weaknesses due to their awareness of social realities. Death of a Salesman (1949) is considered one of his best works. It presents...
“The Great Gatsby” written by F. Scott Fitzgerald is the bestseller published in 1925. This book is a masterpiece in the writings of Fitzgerald. It’s a classic for the readers and most prominent in the American fiction. It occurred as the milestone as it has been reread by many readers....
“Literature is a reflection of the society” (Elements of literature, 2009). Literature is the representation of an individual, their language and culture. It reflects society in the framework of occasions, traditions, background, thoughts, and beliefs of that time. Literature helps the reader to understand about the experience by narrating the...
Introduction The book Liar’s Poker describes the personal experience of the author and his cooperation with Solomon Brothers. The book consists of 11 chapters devoted to different problems and periods in life of Lewis. The book describes bond sales and trade operations on Wall Street, relations between partners and their...
The books assigned for reading this week have made a tremendous contribution to my understanding of the way I should arrange reading classes for children. The books we were assigned to read are Essentials of Young Adult Literature By Carl M. Tomlinson and Entering the World of Children’s Literature by...
The short story “Young Goodman Brown”, written by an outstanding author, Nathaniel Hawthorne, is a remarkable literary work, the zest of which lies in the inimitable beauty of the prose that is masterfully created by the writer with the help of deep philosophic symbolism of the image of the hero...
Bruce Chadwick’s book, I am Murdered: George Wythe, Thomas Jefferson and the Killing That Shocked a New Nation is about the murder of George Wythe, who was a noted law professor. Wythe was a towering figure and had pupils such as Thomas Jefferson, Henry Clay and James Monroe. He died...
Description The book is set within the background of a country fighting for a life breath. A memoir tells several stories at once. Neighboring to the civil war-stricken Mozambique, Rhodesia was slowly moving towards a Nationalist regime. The country was a trap with road mines and guerillas around the corner....
Introduction The world of literature is very versatile in facts, characters, events, historical trends, settings, etc. Large deposits of literature heritage describe the wholeness of the literature world and a man, as a provider of creative thought in this art. In other words, people are apt to create something new...
Despite the fact that nowadays, the hawks of political correctness try their best to prompt people to think of Western civilization is being simply a local geopolitical phenomenon, the objective reality invariantly points out to something different – as of today, there is virtually no place left on this planet...
‘A Lesson Before Dying,’ written by Earnest J Gaines, tells the story of two men who have to fight hard to survive in a world that metes out suffering to them through racism and discrimination. Jefferson, one of the men, falls victim to the white people’s indifference when he gets...
The cover of the book “Into the Wild” by Jon Krakauer immediately acquaints the reader with the protagonist of the novel. It says: “In April 1992 a young man from a well-to-do family hitchhiked to Alaska and walked alone into the wilderness north of Mt. McKinley. His name was Christopher...
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...
The novel “The Confessions of Nat Turner” was written by an outstanding American writer William Styron. The most eloquent fact about this book is that it was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1967, but it would be just to state, that the response of the audience to the novel appeared...
Caryl Churchill is the Playwright of the famous Play ‘Top Girls’ which captures a charming and amusing approach of some of the famous women in history and the role of women in contemporary society. The story has been described on the thematic structure of feminist ideas of women’s role in...
Introduction The play Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare, as all the masterpieces of the prominent writer, raised the themes of love, hatred, betrayal, and honor; the performance transfers the reader into the atmosphere of religious oppression and human portrayal of the central character, villainous Shylock. The play remains relevant,...
The focal point of the paper is to present a Comparison and Contrast essay between the poems, “I Felt a Funeral in My Brain“, by Emily Dickinson and “The Widow’s Lament in Spring Time“, by William Carlos Williams. The paper would look into the parameters of the inner world of...
The story “The Crystal Frontier” of Fuentes is a wonderful narrative about the meeting of two people from different countries with different life situations – the way they found an ideal they imagined in each other and could not overcome the crystal frontier, which was not just a glass but...
Despite the fact that poems “Introduction to Poetry” by Billy Collins and “Poetry” by Marianne Moore are concerned with the same subject matter (poetry), they provide readers with diametrically opposite outlook on what, according to both poets, poetry should be all about. Whereas, Moore insists that the key to poetic...
Today’s world is full of so many flashy, noisy, and sometimes even rumbly forms of entertainment that it seems boring to spend a great deal more time and energy trying to read through the lengthy pages of a book. Reading has no sound, no pictures, and no possibility of shake...
Literature has a lot of different aims: to entertain, to inform, and to convince. The works of Judith Sargent Murray, Samson Occom, and Phillis Wheatley are very convincing, as they try to implement their ideas in society about religion and gender. Judith Sargent Murray is an American writer whose literary...
People should care about their personal spiritual development. Life without God is impossible as people should believe in something, as people should know that there is somebody who cares about them. People’s faith in God helps them to lead a normal life or to cope with problems that appear. There...
Introduction The contest between men and women has always been one of the main struggles in the world. Both, men and women want to take dominant positions in the society. The times were changing and the influence was also different in different times. Matriarchy and patriarchy were present in the...
The world of literature is the sphere of entire features and prospects that never die in peoples’ minds. The fact that the literature comprises the wholeness of the experience gained during thousands of years is apparent and presents many themes for discussion. The paper is dedicated to three works by...
Introduction Literary works dealing with serious subjects such as woman rights, discrimination and oppression can be completely different in genre and style, but nevertheless sharing a mutual theme, each approaching it from a different perspective. In Everyday Use by Alice Walker and A Jury of Her Peers by Susan Glaspell,...
The book ‘Further Along the Road Less Travelled’ written by Scott Peck is considered to be a real masterpiece of world literature; the author managed to contribute to the disclosure of personal psychological and spiritual growth to be reached by everyone in life. It is necessary to underline the fact...
The book ‘The Complete Pompeii’ by Joanne Berry brings to light the different archeological treasures of the city in terms of its civilization, and antiquities which have been left preserved for us to see. While many a research has been conducted on the city and the lives of the people...
Introduction The poem by Robert Frost “The Rod Not Taken” tells about a man who had a situation when in front of him two roads diverged. He tried to rally his thoughts and make up his mind what way to choose. First, he made an attempt to look narrowly into...
Introduction Symbols are the types of stylistic devices which writers use in order to extend people’s perception of the story. Symbolism is a very frequently used way of text representation. This special type allows the writer not to express his/her ideas directly. The expression of the plot and author’s thoughts...
People have various visions of changes and usually perceive them differently. Some react aggressively and do not want to communicate with anybody, the others begin to complain about their hard and unfair life. Some people like changes, they look optimistically at them and do not afraid, as think that changes...
The poem “Because I Could Not Stop for Death” was written by Emily Dickenson and it tells the story of a woman who has died. It seems to tell her story from the time she dies until the time she arrives in her grave. This sounds morbid, but it’s really...
Dai Sijie and his novel Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress provide a scope of huge intentions of two young men in China to provide their skills in learning foreign literature in a time when such perspective was banned by the government. The thing is that the events in the...
In his poem “Ithaka,” Constantine Cavafy encourages his readers to go off on a journey that will last most of their life. In the poem, he talks about how the journey needs to be full of adventure and discovery but he also warns against monsters like Laistrygonians and Cyclops, and...
Introduction “Atlas Shrugged” is a novel which was written by Ayn Rand in 1957. This novel operates with a number of notions which may puzzle the modern reader. It deals with the concepts of objectivism and human achievement exploring a number of other philosophical themes. “Atlas Shrugged” discloses different facets...
In the 1940s, the Nazi regime started an international program aimed at “purifying” the racial profile of the European population and establishing the rule of the so-called Aryan race. The powerful instruments of such correction were concentration camps, which combined the functions of labor utilization, development of science and technology,...
Introduction Stevie Smith’s “Not Waving but Drowning” (1953) and Karl Shapiro’s “Auto Wreck” (1942) differ from each other in form, style and subject. Smith’s poem relates the last thoughts of a drowned man while Shapiro’s reflects on a traffic accident. Smith’s poem is almost light-hearted in the way it reads...
Introduction The social conditions make people live according to the moral consent to behave “rightly” not to be blamed or condemned by others. A man still makes up his mind in the American society where to go when it is considered that you are not the same as others. The...
People make decisions all the time. Do you want steak or chicken for dinner? Should you go to work or stay at home? While some decisions don’t have any long-term consequences, others may change the course of your life. The decision to have steak today may mean you are having...
Introduction Life in South America had unique conditions. This was because of the unusual race relations, conflicts, problems and its history. Life was different for the descendants of the white aristocrats and of the poor whites. This paper will endeavour to discuss the South and Southerners as they appear in...
Discovering one’s identity is much more difficult than just understanding what society expects of you because it also involves understanding how you feel about yourself and what you feel is right. Although it is very rare that we really understand all the various elements of our life and understanding that...
As for epics of the oral tradition, Beowulf and Sir Gawain and the Green Knight never appeared in writing until many years after the story originated. Through the many retellings of the tale, it probably changed significantly over time; however, the essences of the society and the culture of each...
Introduction This is the story of a green super being that goes to a party with an ax and proposes a game. The Green Knight then demands anyone among the people in the party challenges him on the condition that he would return the blow in a year and a...
Introduction The article by Ina Rae Hark (1974) provides the comprehensive analysis of the epic poem Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. The major argument presented by Hark (1974) concerns the mentioned poems being an atypical example of the heroic literature of the early medieval period. The leading points that...
Both these epics of contain themes that fascinate us and keep us enchanted through the centuries. The basic plot of the two epic poems is the oldest theme in the history of literature, that of good vs. evil. However, we find that through the centuries there has been a change...
Introduction Analyzing Homer’s works, an interesting concept can be examined through the role of gods in his Odyssey and Iliad. This concept can be related to the sense of contradiction in the representation of gods, where on the one hand gods can be seen from the perspective of a believer-...
Edna Pontellier, the heroine of “The Awakening” by Kate Chopin, lives in the United States during the 1800s. During those days, men dominated U.S. society while women were considered inferior to them. The Feminism movement that demanded women should be treated equally as men, having the same political, economic, and...
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...
The poem’ the red wheelbarrow’ was written by William Carols Williams and is counted amongst the modern day literature. There can be numerous reasons for this but in order to understand them; it would require careful evaluation of the poem itself. The opening sentence itself begins with the use of...
In Alice Walker’s short story “Everyday Use”, the author places two sisters side by side for an afternoon of visiting. One of these sisters, Maggie, lives with her mother in a small, poorly built shack on the edge of the country and is planning to marry a somewhat unattractive but...
Introduction Gender roles in Greek society were determined by social and cultural traditions, position of women in society and their significance as citizens. The position of women in society was determined by absence of political rights acquired by men. Many Greek plays portray women as canny and jealous. The play...
Introduction The journeys all over the world, which people retort to, are generally aimed to find the new, better life. People try to find other cultures, ways of life, wisdom that will never be met in the motherland. They may simply search for adventures if life is too calm. But...
The concise format of a short story often turns out to be an ideal way of creating sharp and concentrated narratives rich with meaning. The charm and fascination of short stories consist in their focusing intensely on one incident with a limited range of characters developing within a short period...
Introduction According to an estimate and study, the book “Who Moved My Cheese” by Mr. Spencer Johnson has become one of the best seller books in the Chinese market. With the main focus on the changes taking place in everyone’s life, the book highlights a brief story of the life...
Introduction Being a wife and a mother at the same time can bestow a lot of stress to a woman who is just starting up to fill those shoes. Doing a balancing act of being a mother and wife is sometimes too much too handle for a woman, what more...
Introduction The narrative that has been taken into consideration goes by the name of Old Angel Midnight and was written perhaps in the year 1959 and was written by the well-known author Jack Kerouac. This narrative can be considered as a consequence of Kerouac’s involuntary experiments of writing that he...
Introduction John Webster’s works give an idea that powerful women were an anomaly in the XVI and XVII centuries. Indeed, during the early modern period, powerful women were not welcome in society, they were considered to be unnatural and dangerous. Female dominance could not be accepted as it symbolized social...
The book The Yellow Wallpaper portrays the values and social traditions of Victorian women, their problems, and their social position in society. Gilman attempts to demonstrate care and love by freeing women from the individual home and developing a unique approach to domestic tasks, such as child-care, As a feminist...
The Yellow Wallpaper is a literary piece written from a feminist perspective. There is no need to elaborate on what feminism is all about except to say that the feminist movement wanted to empower women and this is related to the assumption that men are holding them back. One of...
“Nuts! Southwest Airlines’ Crazy Recipe for Business and Personal Success” is based on what can be referred to as the success story of Southwest Airlines. It is a guide towards how to achieve success in business, harsh as the business world today may appear to be. Southwest Airlines is the...
Introduction Jonathan Swift was popularly known as a satirical writer during his era. Aside from being a poet, essayist, and a political pamphleteer, he became the dean of Saint Patrick’s in Dublin. Swift was born on the 30th of November, 1667 and died on the year 1745. Most of his...
“Who controls the past controls the future. And who controls the present controls the past.” By the above quote, it is meant that Orwell claims those historians to be in power who govern our society. Only such historians who lead the society through their deeds or words are in a...
The fact unknown to most of people is that as inspiration of Anita Amirrezvani’s first novel “Blood of Flowers” served a Persian carpet her father presented her with when she was a teenager. Looking at that carpet every day she imagines the life of a carpet maker and always wondered...
The book Never to Be Forgotten is written by Beatrice Muchman and is an evocative and moving narration of a Jewish child’s life in Belgium while it was occupied by the Nazis. Beatrice Muchman and her family had come to Belgium from Germany after Hitler’s rise to power. In 1943,...
Introduction The poem “The Thread of Sunlight” written by Timothy Young is included in the anthology “Reading and Writing from Literature”, the 3d edition, by John Schwiebert where he raised the most important problems of humanity. The basic theme of the poem is the consequences of the war period and...
Introduction Ihara Saikaku is now viewed by many literary critics as one of the most prominent Japanese poets. He was the offspring of a prosperous merchant; when he was fifteen, he started to take interest in heikai and soon became very popular in this genre. However, the authors talent should...
Introduction The question of self-identity and personhood is one of the most important social issues shaped by cultural traditions and values. Self-identity defines the unique qualities of a person and his/her personal traits, life goals, and worldview. Emily Dickson vividly portrays that modern society is influenced by mass culture and...
Ursula K. Le Guin is considered to be an American writer being well known for her outstanding trilogy A Wizard of Earthsea. This book is the depiction of the fantasy world in which the readers are involved through the adventures of Ged, a young wizard. The traveling across the countries...
Samuel Clemens better known by the pen name Mark Twain speaks best about the American experience through is distinctive literary voice, and through his classic writing skills. His familiarity with local culture and use of local dialect, and his life experiences in the heart of America helped make his writings...
Introduction Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born in Florida Missouri on November 30, 1835, is commonly known by his pen name or author’s alias as Mark Twain. Mark Twain is the author of the book “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn”. This novel accomplished the esteemed title of “The Great American Novel”. This...
The stories “The Gilded Six-Bits” by Zora Neale Hurston and “Babylon Revisited” by F. Scott Fitzgerald seem to be very different at the first sight. The first one is about the life of two young Afro-Americans who lived happily before meeting a rich white person named Otis D. Slemmons who...
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 The novella, Billy Budd depicts a unique character of Billy and his struggle. The form of the narrative is generated by the memory of the narrator. Several features of his narration contradict the closed-form of legal judgment which he tells about. Main body The narrator thereby reveals the dilemma...
Introduction Satire is one of the tools used by mark Twain to unveil social issues and changing values, new social relations, and self-understand of the main characters. Mark Twain’s satire can be characterized as moralistic and didactic aimed to teach readers. From a natural bent, Mark Twain is always interested...
Introduction The Afro American poets Countee Cullen and John Milton are closely connected with the so-called Renaissance of the African literature. The best known poem “yet, do I marvel” by Cullen is often been misinterpreted and consequently, it was regarded as just one more lament of a defeated soul as...
Among the African writers of world recognition one name that is often mentioned has been that of Nuruddin Farah. His work deals with effectively and in detail the social life and the characteristics of the culture in Somalia. All his works leave a significant impression of the life and culture...
In her short story “The Storm,” Kate Chopin was undoubtedly interested in presenting more to her audience than simple stories regarding simple country folk. Although there is little room in a short story for the full development of several individuals, significant insights regarding the multiple emotions of characters can often...
Introduction While analyzing any work of literature, especially prose, it is of the crucial importance to give extra attention to the role of the narrator, because, the reader perceives the events through the eyes of this person. As a rule literary critics single out several types of story telling, like...
Introduction James Patterson is one of very few authors, specialised in the genre of criminal thriller, who provides his readers not with merely the possibility to “kill time”, during the course of reading his books, but who also allows them to get an insight onto the fact that the concept...
The Story of an Hour by Kate Chopin is a short story that particularly focuses on the feminine gender’s side of such marriage struggles. Caged in a patriarchal society, women have been rightfully fighting for a life worth living. In this story, it takes an accident, particularly her husband’s death,...
The novel “Felicia’s Journey” by William Trevor presents a story of a young girl who had a tragic love experience in her life. She had a love affair with Johnny Lysaght who abandoned her when he found out that she was pregnant. Some readers keep to the point that the...
Introduction The character of Franklin Blake is depicted as a reliable narrator as he can explain some events of the party and can prove his innocence. Now it is certainly tempting to interpret this silence on Gabriel Betteredge’s birthday part simply as generosity and compassion. Thesis Franklin Blake’s story is...
This essay will analyze the article by J. Hector St. John Crevecoeur, “Immersion Journalism,” and the article by Edward Humes, “What is an American.” The common theme of these essays is implicit and implied. Both authors describe different topics and issues but construct their works on the opposition between the...
Morrie Schwartz Morrie Schwartz – one of the protagonists of the novel is the professor of sociology. It is stated, that he got this job by default, nevertheless, he is an excellent teacher. The action of the novel takes place for the time when he retires, as he starts losing...
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...
In the novels, Like Water For Chocolate by Laura Esquivel and One Hundred Years of Solitude by García Marquez, the authors depict an impotent role of women characters in the life of their families and destinies of the generations. Both worlds represent a unique mixture of reality and the spiritual...
Young Goodman Brown is a well-known short story written by an outstanding American writer Nathaniel Hawthorne. This story is considered to be deeply psychological and grabs readers’ attention by its symbolism and imaginative expression; the author managed to reflect the contradictory world of the good and evil humanity sides. It...
Poetry is by far the most powerful means of expressing ones thoughts and ideas, although these ideas are not always explicitly stated. There is no aspect of human relationships that poetry cannot describe. The relationships between parents and their children have always been a subject of thorough analysis in psychology;...
Poetry has a beautiful ability to pull ideas and emotions out from the depths of one’s being with only a few short lines and a well-chosen metaphor. Through various literary devices, poets are able to paint pictures for their readers that more concretely define the feelings and beliefs that remain,...
Introduction It is a common knowledge that African-American experience due to its being sad and this is why dramatic always attracted attention of writers and playwrights as well as other people who could disclose to the world the reasons of oppression due to racial factor, depict, describe or portray the...
The place of Alexander’s Pope’s An Essay on Criticism in English literature is that of Boileaur’s Art Poetique in French criticism. Keeping in line with the neoclassical tradition, Pope gives a detailed account of his views on literary writing and the art of criticism. His essay has been seriously studied...
Introduction In the novel, The House of Mirth Lily’s development as a character is certainly not negligible to the novel, her primary role is as the means through which Wharton reads and writes this culture. Thus, The House of Mirth is not primarily the story of Lily; it is rather...
Introduction The effective use of perspectives and narrative techniques add beauty to short stories and provide them with new dimensions. A good story writer arrests the attention of the reader through his innovative narrative techniques and builds up tension or conflict in the minds of the reader and at the...
Introduction Gabriel García Márquez’s novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold, first issued in English in 1982, is one of the Nobel Prize winning writer’s shorter stories, but past and contemporary censors agree that the book’s small size conceals a huge work of art. The book’s supremacy is in the exclusive...
It is a rather specific matter when one has to write about the peculiarities of the culture of a certain nation because not always people are acquainted with the national customs and traditions. It becomes even more complicated when the cultural peculiarities are to be studied with the help of...
Introduction The Brothers K is a compelling story by David James Duncan about a family living in Camas, Washington in an America rapidly approaching the revolutionary 1960s. Though Camas is a small town still settled in the conservativism of the 1950s, the family soon faces the common division of the...
Introduction The term mateship as a specific Australian idiom can include various meanings in its essence. Its meaning can differ from the standard definition of friendship in a way that this form of relation or reference can be used between people who are actually not in friendship. This paper will...
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...
What do people seek when they go on a pilgrimage? I guess it might be either an edification or a strive for forgiveness. The author of the book “Pilgrimage to the End of the World” Conrad Rudolph, who origins in Poland, is going through a series of missionary journeys on...
Anton Chekhov is one of the most talented dramatists, whose plays are included in the repertoire of theaters all over the world. The depth of the thoughts, expressed in these plays, makes readers and watchers seriously think over world history, relations among people. Chekhov himself once wrote: “We have inherited...
Slave trading in southern Appalachia Aaron Purcell is the author of the article, “A Damned Piece of Rascality: The business of slave trading in Southern Appalachia” The article has laid focus on Meek, Hayne, and Company, a firm that dealt with slave trading in Southern Appalachia. The article, which was...
The three works Everyday Use by Alice Walker (Walker, 1994), This is our life by Dorothy Allison and Sonny’s Blues by Baldwin (Baldwin, 1993) bring to light certain ethereal and sublime interpretations of everyday objects. To put it simply, everyday use objects acquire a new meaning and connotations and we...
For many minority families, identity and self-determination have been the main problems since ancient times. The play Trying to find Chinatown by Hwang and the short story Brownies by Packer describe life struggle and hardships faced by minority people in America. Both stories describe strong religious values and ideals kept...
The focal point of the paper is to present a critical response on George Stroud in the “Big Clock” by Kenneth Fearing, published in 1946. This book is a social depiction of the influence of mass media through the protagonist George Stroud, who is the editor of a popular magazine...
Introduction Most feminist literature seems to argue against the traditional conception of woman as she has been envisioned in the white, middle-class suburban ideal. However, feminist issues extend well beyond this narrowly defined world into the lives of women of color, too, although there are slight amendments as to what...
Introduction Epic is a significant combination of the style and the theme in the poem reproduction reflecting the flow of historical or legendary events. The world literature contains a lot of examples of famous epics covering the main features of this genre and highlighting the major moments of history. The...
Introduction English literature contains wonderful works related to royal families as well as common individuals that teach the readers ethical principles, moral lessons and codes of leading a dignified life on the one hand, and wide-open new horizons of intellect and wisdom to them on the other. The same is...
Introduction The Poem Dulce et Decorum Est and the story The Things they Carried are both about war, but more than fifty years apart. The geography and the weapons have changed, but the conditions are not that different. The men are much the same and war is as brutal as...
Introduction The leading females in Oedipus Rex and Death of a Salesman are submissive characters who are unable to avert the imminent tragedies of the dominant protagonists in both the plays. In fact, both works tell the stories of the tragedies that the women characters themselves have to undergo; however,...
Introduction The novel “The Great Gatsby” by F. Scott Fitzgerald can be called a bitter satire to the American dream, which according to the ideas of the majority implies the heap of the happiness, which is missing to many, and in reality gold outer shell is converted into the empty...
Dystopia is the common setting in Julia Alvarez’s In the Time of the Butterflies and Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby. The Great Gatsby paints a depressing picture of the corruption of the American Dream during the roaring 1920s. On the other hand, In the Time of the Butterflies is the...
Themes Fate is apparent in life and everyone has to work hard to realize it. The alchemist is a novel that has the story of a boy called Santiago who had a dream of going to the pyramids to look for treasures. His dream turned out to be true after...
Rita Dove was born in Ohio in 1952. Their family was neither rich nor poor and had four children. Rita’s father had a master’s degree and worked as a chemist for the Goodyear Tire and Rubber Company in Akron. When she finished school she was put on the list of...
English Literature has witnessed the formation of four great fictional icons in the nineteenth century. They are Shelley’s Frankenstein, Melville’s Moby Dick, Stoker’s Dracula and Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus is rendered in opulent Gothic prose. It delves into the intricacies of the human mind...
Introduction While studying literature of the first world civilizations, such as the civilization of the Tigris-Euphrates area, and Ancient Greece civilization, I was interested in two epic books: The Epic of Gilgamesh and The Wanderings of Odysseus. I was really impressed with the two main characters of these books: superhuman...
Introduction Cardinal Sins, are those which lead to other greater sins. For example, Greed for gold may lead one to steal or even kill to acquire more gold. The Lotus-eaters or Lotophagi was a group of people that Odysseus encountered in his 10-year odyssey to return home. This paper will...
Introduction One of the most common themes in short stories is the theme of coming of age. While this is the chief concern of several writers, John Irving expands outside of this theme just far enough to explore other elements of this critical process of maturation. Children grow not only...
The great poet and critic Mathew Arnold belongs to the Victorian period of English literature. He was very much influenced by the age he lived in. He was a staunch believer of religion. The religious disillusionment of his time pained him too much. His fear and anxiety in people’s loss...
Detectives and investigators, described in the writings of the corresponding genre of mystery novel, are usually experienced and competent specialists, but modern authors introduce novice detectives increasingly more often. These young explorers are normally children, teenagers or very young adults, who are enthusiastic and determined enough to find the core...
Introduction The War of the Roses, speaks of the period between 1455 to 1485 when two powerful dynasties in Britain fought to gain the throne of England. The two houses were the House of Lancaster with King Henry VI as the head and The House of York with King Richard...
Introduction To a person who is reading Gertrude Stein’s Three Lives, for the first time, there is usually a predominant question in the mind: is the book really what it is: (an account of the lives of three people) or is there some deeper meaning hidden between the lines? The...
Introduction The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudiah Equiano depicts personal courage a man who escapes slavery and fights for personal freedom and human rights. The narrative addresses many themes including slavery, religion, oppression, kidnapping, business relations, ideas of liberty and freedom, economic status of African countries and their...
Despite multiple attempts at addressing injustices observed at historical, systemic, and structural levels, the problem of race and the struggles that people of color face persists vehemently in the U.S. social context. The tragedy of the African American community is reflected impeccable in August Wilson’s 1985 novel Fences, which delves...
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 Self-consciousness, as a significant part of personal identity, largely determines not only the views on certain concepts but also the ability to adapt to society within the framework of specific living conditions. Those communicative, religious, and other beliefs that a person follows are the background for the perception of...
First of all, it is necessary to mention, that the novel, written in 1984, and describing the epoch of the VIII century touch upon the matter, that had been fluctuated humanity for centuries. The striving for immortality and eternity occupied the minds of the greatest philosophers and alchemists. While viewing...
Introduction The pursuit of truth and justice is usually an essential part of the mystery novel; ‘Anil’s Ghost’ and The Lovely Bones approach the themes of truth and justice in unusual ways. The two stories have deep seated relationship regarding truth and justice. These qualities have been promoted, hidden, denied...
Coming across the line “They also serve who only stand and waited” in the well-known sonnet, a reader might wonder whether the modern tramps of Beckett’s Waiting for Godot would have been in Milton’s view the supreme servants of God. Intelligence, to prevent that murmur, would then remind the reader...
“Don’t worry. I’m all right now and I think I’ll be all right. But I can’t forget-where I’ve been. I don’t mean just the physical place I’ve been, I mean where I’ve been. And what I’ve been.” – Sonny. Kicking the habit of taking in drugs – in this case,...
The current essay deals with a difficult but quite important topic tied with the role of race in Shakespeare’s Othello. As Alvin Kernan remarked Othello is probably the most perfect plays by Shakespeare in terms of the formal and structural design of its composition. Structural elements are organized in a...
Introduction Literary devices constitute certain elements of the story, without which literature would make little to no sense. One of the centerpieces of any story are their characters, since they are the driving factors behind certain events as well as the eyes and ears, through which the readers are allowed...
Looking into the history of the cultures at large, it becomes evident that all human societies, from the most primitive to the most modern, have been divided into different groups, communities and strata. This stratification is on the basis of caste, class, clan, community, race, region, religion, ethnicity, gender, age...
Introduction In the early novels of Thomas Mann, the readers can often follow the rethinking of Friedrich Nietzsche’s postulates. The influence of philosophical attitudes can be traced concerning the art of dance in the novel Death in Venice, written in 1911. In this story, Thomas Mann addresses his favorite topic...
In Barn Burning, Faulkner manages to explore different themes related to family, authority, violence, and justice. Told from the perspective of a child conflicted by his moral obligations, “Barn Burning” illustrates the dichotomy between two exertions of power – Abner Snopes and Major de Spain. Even though Abner as the...
It is generally agreed that different symbols tend to be used as the way of the author’s ideas’ interpretation. In case of Faulkner’s “Barn Burning”, blood might be one of the metaphors which is reclaimed as a reference for either genetic relationships or committed crimes and their consequences. That is...
At first glance, Faulkner’s artistic world appears to be emphatically masculine. It is filled with sullen, stern male characters doing rough and hard work, but at the same time, there is a certain place for female characters in his prose. “Barn Burning,” Faulkner’s short story of a mendicant American family...
Despite Guy de Maupassant’s ‘The Necklace’ being written in the late XIXth century, this story successfully transports its moral lessons to modern life. The author engages symbolism around the main object of the story, the diamond necklace, and the deep character portrayal of two heroines to reveal the common deceptiveness...
Introduction William Faulkner is a master craftsman in the history of novel tradition who spins the masterful artistic pieces by conjoining very similar parts of the whole tied together to form the strong webs in the form of novels that attract the readers to rule their fictional world with the...
The beauty of literature is that it is one of the disciplines able to reveal already existing characters from different angles. King Arthur is present in many literary works and has become a cult character. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight is a Middle English poem by an unknown author...
As portrayed in the first two parts of Sir Gawain and The Green Knight, Sir Gawain, a legendary member of Arthur’s knight, is a paragon of virtue and modesty. He describes himself as the least of the knights both in mental and physical prowess, and at the first glance appears...
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...
