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...
Wilfred Owen: Anthem for Doomed Youth, 1917
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The text to be commented upon is a poem written by Wilfred Owen in 1917 entitled Anthem for doomed youth. It is a petrarchan sonnet, a sort of diptych with two different parts which hinges upon lines 9 and 10. The title is a key for the interpretation of the sonnet which is an ideological poem, a...
Artaud's theatrical principles
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Artaud stated that ‘theatre is first ritualistic and magical, in other words bound to powers, […] and whose effectiveness is conveyed through gesture, directly linked to the rites of theatre which is the very practice and the expression of a hunger for magical and spiritual...
Structure and texture in the "Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
The Good Soldier is a novel written in 1914 by Ford Madox Ford and published in March 1915. This novel is considered as the best book of pre-war period. It is also considered as a modernist work, and in fact, many modernist innovations, as well as impressionist ones, are present throughout the...
Analysis of Samson Occom through 'A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The book A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue is an aid to learning the Hebrew language, bettering one's ability to speak, read, and write. As the first book he owned, A Grammar of the Hebrew Tongue was especially significant to the Mohegan Samson Occom. Occom purchased the book on a trip to Boston in...
Vision in the prologue and battle royal scene of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
The most predominant theme in a noel full of them—Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man—is that of vision. More specifically, in Ellison's novel, how characters in the novel see the world reflect the prejudices and inaccurate perceptions of the society in which the protagonist lives. The...
Transformations of literature: Augustine's 'Confessions' and Virgil's 'Aeneid'
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Both St. Augustine's Confessions and Virgil's epic The Aeneid marked a new direction in literature for the West. Each one was inspired by the works of previous authors, but was willing to forge a new literature for their times. In the Aeneid, Virgil established Rome as indebted to the...
The theme of isolation in Kafka's 'The Metamorphosis'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis concerns a traveling salesmen named Gregor Samsa who “[awakens] from unsettling dreams one morning” and “[finds] himself transformed into a monstrous vermin” (Kafka 7). Gregor is late for work, and he gripes about his joyless job; he...
Unity and divergence: The literary philosophy of Samuel Taylor Coleridge in opposition to the English romantics
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Many of the words used by S.T. Coleridge to express his critical philosophy of literature are familiar. He writes of metaphysics as well as aesthetics, beauty and pleasure, and above all, unity. His definitions of these terms, however popular the terms were, are in many ways remarkably different...
Reasonably wrong: The underground man's inferiority complex
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
In Fyodor Dostoevsky's Notes From Underground, desire is shown to be a more important force of human nature than reason by observing how the Underground Man makes decisions. Understanding that he suffers from an extreme case of inferiority complex is instrumental in being able to decipher the...
The effects of knowledge on happiness and freedom
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Upon reading The Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, Oedipus the King, The Crying of Lot 49, and Dostoevski's “The Grand Inquisitor on the Nature of Man”, I find that a common theme links their ideas together. As the four stories progress, the main characters all receive...
