Analysis: Catherine Hall on Victorian domestic ideology
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
This chapter by Catherine Hall examines one particular factor she identifies as being crucial to the creation of the Victorian middle-class ideal of womanhood. Since the “angel in the house” was already established as a precept by the 1830s and '40s, the author seeks farther back in...
Tragic consequences: Themes of alienation in The Yellow Wallpaper and The Awakening
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
A contemporary Boston physician responded starkly to The Yellow Wallpaper. “Such a story ought not to be written,” he said. “It was enough to drive anyone mad to read it.” What is it about the descent into madness that is so disturbing to read? Accounts of people behaving...
Critical review: Terrorist
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
This story explores the roots (or some of the roots) of Muslim discontent in America, showing how people who are chafing at what is essentially a culture clash can internalize this into hatreds and resentments justified with polemic and intellectual rationales. The contrast between Islamic...
Charlotte Gilman and Victoria Woodhull
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Bookish Charlotte Gilman, with the deft turn of phrase, and flamboyant Victoria Woodhull, shunning social convention: on the surface these are two very different women. But in fact, they were near-contemporaries who influenced important issues of their day and helped fuel dialog and debate about...
Postmodern and psychoanalytical approaches to Lolita
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Considering how multifaceted Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is, it is possible to apply to it a variety of literary theories, all more or less fruitfully. In this paper, I will consider the postmodern and the psychoanalytic approach. We will find that Lolita is very much a postmodern text, despite...
A review of the book "Techniques of the Observer" By Jonathan Crary
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Jonathan Crary in Techniques of the Observer grants a theatrical still modern point of view on the ocular culture of nineteenth century. In this book he has re-approached the complications and plights of visual modernism and social modernity both. Extroverting conventional ideas the author has...
A Proppian analysis on the narrative of Jason's quest for the Golden Fleece
Case study - 5 pages - Literature
In the 1920`s Vladimar Jakovlevic Propp, the chairperson of the Department of Folklore at Leningrad University, examined a whole series of Russian folk tales and came to the conclusion that every story contains similar themes and each theme follows a distinct pattern. From this analysis, Propp...
The poems of Gary Soto
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Throughout the three texts, A Fire in My Hands, Neighborhood Odes, and Where Sparrows Work Hard, Gary Soto uses small and normally insignificant items as the focus of many poems in these texts, celebrating them with odes and sharing the stories behind them in narrative poems. He does this in...
Better than others: Eighteenth century reactionism, elitism, and paradise lost
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
The eighteenth-century adoption of Paradise Lost—and its continuing permanent position—into the canon of English “classics” is a testament to Milton's genius for subtlety and intertextuality. The combination of classical sources, contemporaneous politics, symbolism, sexuality...
The interplay of tragedy, comedy and the grotesque in the storm in King Lear
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Comedy and Tragedy, the two modes of Drama, are usually seen as separate and distinct. Philosophically, they are. Comedy unites; it brings characters into a greater sense of harmony with one another and the universe, rewards the virtuous, punishes the wicked, and upholds the cosmic order. Tragedy...
Time passes: Experience and expression in 'The Years' and 'To the Lighthouse'
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The present unfolds as I trace my way along the thin black lines laid across the page. Woolf writes; I read. We then assemble these fractured signs, these fleeting moments in our conversations to compose a unified “whole.” A scene passes. My eyes discern a pattern and then resume their...
East London love story
Thesis - 112 pages - Literature
They were both children of poverty, born into the dark slums of East London. Yet their worlds could hardly have been more different. Eric De Milo blessed with a loving Italian family and an artistic gift that gave him a chance for a better life. On the other hand, Helena Whitman who knew little...
The Siren and the domestic ideal
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Written during the Victorian age and in a strict society, Vanity Fair by William Makepeace Thackeray was a book all its own. It is mostly categorized as a satire; however, it speaks volumes about the realities of the time. Women were considered as a property, and the men laid down the law....
Hellenistic poetry
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Hellenistic poetry arose after the late Alexander period and heavily influenced other styles of writing to come. One contemporary writer of time was Theocritus. Theocritus was a Greek poet from Syracuse poetry in the early third century B.C. . He was considered by some to be a “remaker of...
The three-part structure of To the Lighthouse
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Virginia Woolf's 1927 novel, To the Lighthouse makes great use of introspective thought and philosophical questions infused within the prose. It is a novel in the modernist sense, wherein the plot is secondary to the emotional responses sparked by the heavy dialogue spoken throughout the story....
Pastoral images in poetic practice - published: 29/07/2009
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Pastoral “is a double longing after innocence and happiness,” its “universal idea is the Golden Age…it is based on the antithesis of Art and Nature; and its fundamental motive is hostility to urban life. ” As educational awakening started to filter into the consciousness...
Courtesan poetry of the Late Ming and early Qing dynasties
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The strength, talent and individuality of the courtesan poets of the late Ming and early Qing period served to help develop courtesan poetry into a unique and important genre of poetry. Courtesan poets were pioneers that forged a new path in both the social realm and the literary realm,...
Identity theft
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Don DeLillo's main character, Professor Jack Gladney, candidly remarks to his class “all plots move deathward,” and the plot of White Noise proves no exception. In the novel, Don DeLillo establishes a contemporary society where two kinds of people exist—killers and diers—or...
Old stories of love and tragedy - published: 22/07/2009
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet largely pulls from a traditional tale, written and copied for decades before Shakespeare took his pen with an effort to adapt. Shakespeare's version, unquestionably the most famous, tells the story of love but, more, it tells of the tragedies to which that love...
Scaling, airbrush, cropping and other ways to transform a portrait
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Tempora mutantur et nos mutamur in illis. The times change, and we change in them. In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus certainly transforms over time. At the core of this modernist novel lie issues of religion, art, aesthetic, and conversion. James Joyce brilliantly...
A subjective analysis of what one might term as a lighthouse
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Woolf could choose many ways to describe the Ramsay's to her audience. She could start with a description of their summer home, the price of their rent, or their family lineage in an attempt to engage the reader and establish some common ground on which to build from. But, as Woolf points...
Gremio and Echoes, Gremio and Echoes
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
What determines a character's worth? Are heroes more important than villains? Importance seems to vary subjectively, as does one's curiosity. In The Taming of the Shrew one may become identified with, intrigued by, or appalled by a number of characters, and as in much of Shakespeare's work, most...
Sugar and vice and everything nice: Examining the dual qualities of - The Fable of the Bees
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In what way should we approach this startling claim? Is Bernard Mandeville simply a cynical philosopher degrading humanity and encouraging depravity? If private vices do in fact lead to public benefits what effects will this have on religion, economy, and morality? These questions, among many...
Berlusconi's Italy: A critical review
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
E. Shin and John A. Agnew is in many ways about the notorious Silvio Berlusconi but it is actually more focused on Italy and its politics as a whole. It is about what the authors call the “followership” of Berlusconi more so than his actual leadership. This book review will discuss the...
The languages of modernity in "Paper Pills" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
Jean Francois Lyotard describes modernity as an era of irrevocable progress forward, a subtle movement onwards that is characterized by the centralization of authority and imposition of a teleological mentality, whereby every development is considered valuable from an evolutionary perspective....
Racism and Canada's marginalized members: A literature comparison
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Canadians are proud of the fact that they live in a tolerant and multicultural society, but this pride is often ignorant to the fact that racism has played a large part in this country's history, and in many cases it has been systematic and caused much hardship and suffering. Systematic racism...
Representations of social class in popular literature
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Many of the texts studied in literature portray Canada as a country that is divided by social class. Three of these novels in particular are Who Do You Think You Are?, The Wars and In the Skin of a Lion. The first of these novels is a set of small stories that chronicles the main character's...
Reaching for a Larger History: A comparative book review
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Hugh Kearney's The British Isles: A History of Four Nations and Gary Nash's The Unknown American Revolution both attempt to introduce an often missed dimension into their respective subjects. Although each book has a unique style and approach (because of differences in scope, audience,...
Dejection and the eighth deadly sin: A Christian-critical engagement with Coleridge's "Dejection: An Ode"
Thesis - 7 pages - Literature
For the ordinary reader encountering Coleridge's “Dejection: An Ode,” the poet's dejection may seem irrelevant. The most explicit reason proffered for his dejection is that visitations of affliction have suspended “what nature gave me at my birth,/ The shaping spirit of...
Framing Jane Eyre: The mystery of St. John's letter
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
In the final pages of Jane Eyre, one encounters a mystery more impenetrable than the madness of Jane Poole. As many have noted, Charlotte Bronte has given us a novel of character, rejecting plot as the driving force in her story. One reads Jane Eyre to watch the slow unfolding of the person she...
