The magician's nephew: Perception shaped by the imagination
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
C. S. Lewis wrote seven stories that made up The Chronicles of Narnia. All of the seven stories have characteristics that pertain to “perception shaped by the imagination”, a subheading of Colin Duriez's A Field Guide to Narnia. Of the seven stories I am going to focus on The Magician's...
The Lion King on Broadway
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
The lights went out and everyone grew immediately quiet. Music from the side of the theater began to play. With the first note I was all Goosebumps. Suddenly an orange/yellow circle appears from the center of the stage. It rises perfectly as though it is the rising sun. A single voice is heard...
Gwendolyn Brooks
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Gwendolyn Brooks is one of the most influential poets known in the African American community. She challenged minds to expand, by writing truth and real-life situations based on her own experiences. Brooks in a sense helped cope with face to face struggles during the time when racism was high....
Evil and ugliness in Frankenstein
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
“Only bad witches are ugly.” That is the famous phrase uttered by Glinda, the Good Witch of the North, after Dorothy reveals that she has “never seen a beautiful witch before.” Stereotypical roles of the beautiful heroine and ugly villain are so common in drama and writing,...
A take on tears
Tutorials/exercises - 2 pages - Literature
The thing that irks people about Allen Ginsberg is that he doesn't care who he offends…or, for that matter, if he offends. He wants to awaken emotion in people, and he doesn't care whether the emotions are good or bad—just as long as they're there, and they're strong. His poem...
A view of a view
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Elizabeth Bishop's poem “View of the Capitol from the Library of Congress” possesses profound imagery and, when it is read, the reader immediately gets transported into the speaker's serene vision. Bishop takes the reader on a journey with her words, and through this journey a speaker...
Marvell's "Horatian Ode": Conflicts and ambiguities
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Analyzing the poem “An Horatian Ode Upon Cromwell's Return from Ireland” by Andrew Marvell was difficult, because the poem is constantly undermining its own constructions. Also, reading the poem in the Broadview Anthology, one cannot help but glance at the footnotes, to gain further...
An American as a melting pot
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
A definition such as this is rare, especially among early American literature. To clearly state an exact concept so simply is difficult, however defining what is an American is near impossible. J. Hector St John de Crevecoeur was one of the exceptions. In his book, Letters From an American...
The imagination's art
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Art is life and life is art. There is no difference, at least not when literature is at hand. Three key elements exist in the realization of a written work of art. There is the author who gives the unintentional start to the creation of literature as an art form. Also there is the reader who...
Summary of Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
Galapagos by Kurt Vonnegut is the fictional story told by Leon Trout, the ghost of a man who died during the construction of the ship “Bahia de Darwin.” Trout observes the passengers of this ship as they make their way on the “Nature Cruise of the Century.” Excited to travel...
Comparison and contrast between Rober Lawell's "Man and Wife" and Gretel Ehrlich's "A match to the heart"
Essay - 1 pages - Literature
It was 1959 when Robert Lowell completed an amazing set of poems included in a collection named “Life Studies”. The most conspicuous among them - “Man and Wife”, tackles the problems of personal tragedy. The main accent is put on the troubled marriage, as the author reviews...
The nature and the role of women in Shakespeare's Macbeth
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
William Shakespeare's Macbeth is among the few of Shakespeare's plays where a female character plays a catalytic role. The female characters in this play are Lady Macbeth, Lady Macduff, the Three Witches, and Hecate. Lady Macbeth and her husband, Macbeth are the chief protagonists of the play....
On Chrétien de Troyes' The knight of the cart
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
In The Knight of the Cart, after Lancelot disposes of an opposing knight and saves a fair damsel, she offers a place of refuge so long as Lancelot sleeps with her. However reluctant, Lancelot agrees and to kill the time between dinner and sleep, he roams around outside the house. When he returns,...
Rationale behind silence and Queen Eufeme's Chaste Kissing
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
What a scandalous scene in Silence when Queen Eufeme and the protagonist, whom the story is named after, come close, very close to sleeping together. It is such an emotionally charged scene: a predator chasing its unwilling prey. Will Silence succumb to the Queen's advances to keep up...
Doing gender: Reasserting masculinity
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Gender is a socially constructed status. Based on how others perceive us we are labeled as men or women, the only two genders recognized in Western society. Walking to class I notice everyone is ‘doing gender,' or they display evidences of masculinity or femininity. I see a heterosexual...
Tess of d'Urbervilles: The dark shadow of death
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Thomas Hardy's novel Tess of d'Urbervilles tells the story of a young girl named Tess Durbeyfield who is seduced by, Alec d'Ubervilles, her distant relative. The loss of her virginity, and the birth of a child, haunts her and makes it impossible for her to succeed in marriage with the man she...
Postmodern American literature: Transformation and commodification within The Crying of Lot 49
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
A prominent theme among the writings of many postmodern analysts in characterizing postmodernism is the notion that the age of post-modernity is essentially the age of commercialism and commoditization. In his book The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, Jean- François Lyotard contends...
Freedom and the self
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Michel Foucault's book Discipline and Punish, “The Body of the Condemned” is a section dedicated to the concept of power and its relationship to modern punishment, which focuses primarily on the soul of the criminal, a sharp contrast to the punishments aimed to inflict pain on the...
Heroism in Beowulf and Macbeth
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Grendel first appeared in Herot, the mead hall of the king of the Danes, Hrothgar. Disturbed by the feasting and celebration taking place in the evenings by Danish warriors and heroes, who often met in the hall to tell exaggerated tales of glory and drink mead, Grendel stole in during the night...
Literary analysis of "The Dead"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
James Joyce was born on February 2nd, 1882, in Dublin. His lifelong obsession with his own Irish culture, and the local city of Dublin, inspired many of his works. In particular, Dubliners, a collection of short stories taking place in Dublin, published in 1914, testifies to this obsession....
Domination and submission in Jane Eyre: An essay on power play
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In a manner of speaking, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre reinvents the concept of romance. One hardly expects a sordid tale of domination and submission from a sickly country girl, yet Bronte dabbled experimentally with the idea of feminism and power play in her hugely successful first novel. Jane...
In the hands of Yankees: Fitzgerald's "The Ice Palace" as a Northern American captivity narrative
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The effective removal of the American Indian from North America failed to kill off the American tradition of captivity narratives established by the primarily female Anglo-American authors of Indian captivity narratives. In these memoirs of life among the “other,” Anglo-American women...
The Church's Grasp: Captivity in Joyce's Dubliners - published: 12/04/2010
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
It is easy to recognize when one is held captive by the unfamiliar, but the crippling effect of familiar forces is not so easily realized. Throughout American captivity narratives, typically female Anglo-Americans are ensnared by Native Americans, the “other” of early Anglo-American...
Renaissance Literature is indebted more to emblematic and allegorical modes, than to modern forms of realism
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
The aftermath of reformation, mid 16th.Century, left the art and literary world in upheaval. The former art of Catholicism which had been figurative and vivid, depicting the saints in all their glory, was redundant and even despised. Many reformers believed that to idolize the saints and to...
The prose style of an author
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
What is so compelling about Faulkner's work is his gloriously bold approach toward form and content. He embraces the dark side of humanity, through the characters of Jason, Caddy and Quentin, refusing to deny or disguise its existence and in doing so redefines despair, it is no longer, '...
Representations of history and regeneration by Pat Barker
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Barker has chosen to tell the tale from the viewpoint of the patients and staff of a war hospital, which treats mainly psychiatric injuries caused by battle. Straight away we are dealing with issues of masculinity. These patients have been discharged, not for receiving injuries in the line of...
What role did women play within Anglo Saxon culture?
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout history, the position of women in society has fluxed dramatically. It seems quite clear from looking at historical evidence that most of this movement has been a decline, rather than an improvement in the social attitudes towards women. In Anglo- Saxons times, women were valued members...
How is the notion of woman represented by 18th century writing?
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout the 18th century, we see gender as a site of much anxiety. At this time, women were emerging as key contributors to both political and popular writing, through works such as Oroonoko, by Aphra Behn, and A Vindication of the Rights of Man, by Mary Wollenstonecraft Godwin. This feminine...
Willy Loman and the death of an American dreamer
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a portrait of a man who wrestles with his own delusions of success and happiness within the business world. One of the main themes of the story is how the main character has attached his success and failures in other areas of life to his self-image as a...
The things they carried: Time O'Brien
Book review - 1 pages - Literature
This book is, debatably, a memoir of the Vietnam War. By debatably, I mean to say that it is written in the form of a memoir, although the author denies that many of these events actually took place. This book includes the stories of Tim O'Brien and the soldiers that he knew in Vietnam during the...
