Choderlos de Laclos's : Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses has been the object of four main cinematic adaptations, all very different from one another or from the source text itself. These films are Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (1959) by Roger Vadim, Dangerous Liaisons (1988) by Stephen Frears,...
The War (Marguerite Duras)
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Marguerite Duras was born near Saigon in Indochina in 1914. Her parents went to the French colony as teachers. She left Indonesia in 1932 to study political science and law in Paris. His childhood in Indonesia had a great impact on Duras and brought unity to her work. As she was living in Paris...
"The innocent anthropologist" Notes from a mud hut - a book of Nigel Barley By Penguin Travel Library (1983), Penguin Books
Book review - 12 pages - Literature
A respectable anthropologist, British Museum's curator, Nigel Barley is yet distinguishable by two aspects from his eminent colleagues. First he chose for his thesis to study "Old English material in published and manuscript form" (11), involving the disapproval of many ‘purists' of the...
Antony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare's criticism of the XVIIth century's anti-feminism
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
like in his other Roman plays like Julius Caesar, Shakespeare used in Antony and Cleopatra the description of the Roman society to describe his own society. But in this play the main point of analysis was not politics but the place of women in the society. During the XVIth and XVIIth centuries,...
Wuthering Heights - The Ending (An Attempt at a Commentary)
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
The passage, being at the very end of the novel, follows directly Heathcliff's death and stages the final events of Wuthering Heights. Prior to it, Nelly Dean gives her brief account of Heathcliff's death and funeral. Then, we are presented with her conversation with Lockwood who, in turn, puts...
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The scene takes place in a clearing, close to the Salinas river, “a few miles South of Soledad”, at dusk. Two men come (the two main characters), one following the other. The first one is George and the second one Lennie. They are ranch workers who travel together from a ranch to...
Commentary on an extract from O. Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" chapter 2
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
This passage takes place in the middle of chapter II, in which Lord Henry has just been introduced for the first time to Dorian by his friend Basil. During this scene of first encounter Lord Henry made an impressive philosophic speech about one's self and soul, moral influence, virtues and sins,...
Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis - The beginning
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
The beginning of the New Atlantis is, in the first place, an account of a long voyage across the Pacific, undertaken by a crew of 51 sailors. At the same time, it serves as a brief introduction to two different peoples - the sailors on the one hand and the Bensalemites on the other. The passage...
A comparative account of the French and the English versions of one Beckett's text
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Translation is usually studied from another language to ours, in order to consider changes that have to be made. With Samuel Beckett, it is interesting to analyze the process of translation from French, which is not his mother tongue, to English. In fact, Beckett was, in the 50's, one of the rare...
Place, race and identity in Langston Hughes' "A Toast to Harlem"
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
“A Toast to Harlem” is an extract from a volume of selections entitled The Best Of Simple which was published in 1961. The author, Langston Hughes, was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902 and died in 1967. He is known as one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem...
How does "Boating for Beginners" (Jeanette Winterson) use intertextuality to comment the world?
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Boating for Beginners is a novel by Jeanette Winterson which belongs to post-modern literature and can be defined as a re-writing of the Bible. In her text, she uses a literary device called intertextuality in order to make comments on what she thinks is wrong in our modern society and for what...
Barbara Blaugdone's An Account Of The Travels Sufferings & persecutions
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Barbara Blaugdone was born in England in 1609. Her journal entitled An Account OF THE TRAVELS; Sufferings & Persecutions was published in 1691. It is an autobiographical work where she relates her personal and perilous adventures, as a testimony of what she endured when she traveled both in...
"Go tell it on the mountain" of James Baldwin
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Go Tell It on the Mountain was published in 1953; it is James Baldwin's first novel and a real success. It took him ten years to complete this work, he was a very polyvalent writer and he published novels: Another Country (1962), short stories: Going to Meet the Man (1965) scripts and plays: The...
Symbolism of geography in Thomas More's "Utopia"
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Thomas More was born in 1478 at a time when England was in transition between Feudalism and the early Renaissance. More was a lawyer, a historian, a philosopher and became Henry VIII's chancellor in 1529. When Thomas More refused to convert himself to Protestantism, he was accused of being a...
Holocaust in American life by Peter Novick 1999
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
Peter Novick is a professor of History in the University of Chicago. After "The Noble Dream : The "objectivity Question" and the American Historical Profession" in 1988, in which he criticizes the idea of an ideal objective and neutral historical work, he published "The Holocaust in the American...
How is the traditional notion of subject challenged in "Boating for Beginners?" (Jeanette Winterson)?
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Boating for Beginners is the second novel published by Jeanette Winterson in 1985. It deals with the growing up of Gloria Munde, who seeks her way in the world. The resemblance between Gloria Munde and Jeanette Winterson is striking and some elements of Gloria's life echo Jeanette's: both...
"The Madonna of Excelsior" by Zakes Mda: The Garden Party
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
"The Garden Party" is the second chapter of Zakes Mda's fourth novel The Madonna of Excelsior which was published in 2001. The author was born in Hershel in 1948 and grew up in Lesotho where his family emigrated for political reasons. He left South Africa in 1963 for the United States where...
Saqiyuk - Stories from the lives of three Inuit Women by Nancy Wachowich
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Saqiyuq is a collection of stories from the lives of three Inuit women: Apphia, Rhoda and Sandra. It consists of biographies and accounts from these three generations. This book enables the reader to see the great evolution of the Inuit lifestyle during the twentieth century. The author, Nancy...
"Wonderland as a poetic world"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Published in 1865, Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland offers us a story characterized by humour, fantasy and nonsense. Originally entitled Alice's Adventures Under Ground, it tells how the young Alice dreams she follows a White Rabbit down to a rabbit hole, and how she strolls in a...
The Clash Of Civilization Samuel Phillips Huntington
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Sixteen years ago Gorbatchev announced on television that he resigned as the President of the USSR, the Soviet flag was lowered over the Kremlin and on December 26th 1991, the Supreme Soviet Court recognized the extinction of the Soviet Union: the USSR was no more. After more than fifty years of...
"No artist tolerates reality" - Nietzsche. To what extend is this true in the work of Yeats and Eliot?
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
"No artist tolerates reality", as far as this quotation of Nietzsche is concerned, it is true that artists - and therefore writers - cannot tolerate reality, and that is the reason why they often aim at changing this reality through their art, and in the case of writers, through their written...
Beckett's 'Waiting for Godot': Between Modernism and Postmodernism
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Samuel Beckett's most famous play Waiting for Godot was first written in French in 1948 and translated in English in 1952, that is to say shortly after the end of World War II. At that time, the threat of the Cold War, the recent horror of the concentration camps and the invention of the...
Literature review and qualitative analysis
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
When doing my project, I will first have to gather information about the chosen topic from different resources. Books, articles, periodic literature, Internet, university publications will all together define my knowledge about the topic and give an idea of the previous research that has been...
Works of literature often contain a secret which is eventually revealed with great dramatic effect
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Henrik Ibsen in his drama A Doll's House vividly shocked his contemporary audiences of 1879, unaccustomed to the radical and novel insights on the relationship between husband and wife he displayed through his heroines' emancipation, from her role of a self content wife in a superficial marriage...
Black and white imagery in Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
When analysing Lorca's use of black and white imagery in Blood Wedding, a first observation would tend to show that the colour white is much more present throughout the play than black, the white being used, not essentially in the characters' clothing as black is used, but also in totally...
"The Tempest", William Shakespearean - Prospero's relationship with the natives
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In Shakespeare's play The Tempest, Prospero is presented as the colonizer, and Ariel and Caliban are seen as his «colonized subjects ». These two Natives had to accept this newcomer twelve years ago, and we rapidly learn that both didn't react the same way. Ariel feels grateful towards Prospero...
Function of the Requiem in "Death of a Salesman"
Thesis - 9 pages - Literature
Arthur Miller (1915 - 2005) once revealed as regards his writing of Death of a Salesman that he “wished to create a form which, in itself as a form, would literally be the process of Willy Loman's way of mind”, and in this respect, the setting of the whole play actually stands for a...
The Wood-Pile
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Frost presents to us here a rather enigmatic poem. Upon a first contemplation the reader may experience the feeling that he has read a poem about nothing, and may read and re-read it, endeavoring to discover some hidden meaning. And indeed “The Wood-Pile” is virtually about nothing, a...
Terror and Horror in the Fantastic Novels: Walpole's The Castle Of Otranto, Shelley's Frankenstein and Stoker's Dracula
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The concepts of terror and horror are key factors in the Fantastic and Gothic novel. This literary genre appeared with Walpole's The Castle of Otranto in 1765 and then flourished until 1830; it mainly developed during the historical period of the Enlightenment and can be seen as an alternative to...
Cleopatra: Shakespeare's analysis of women's alienation
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to Yves Bonnefoy Shakespeare wanted to do with Antony and Cleopatra more than a political analysis of Rome. Indeed, Shakespeare analysed in this play the place of women in the Roman society, in order to make a comparison with their role in his own society. At the beginning of the XVIIth...
