Peyton Place: The Author, the bestseller and the legacy
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Artistic masterpieces can evolve from any genre. Pablo Picasso's abstract paintings are revered by some as just Leonardo Da Vinci's telling portraits are. The same principle can be applied to works of literature. Frontier adventure stories and political solutions written in the form of science...
Reflections of race and American culture in the 'Tom' show
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
In Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York, the two main characters-Amsterdam Vallon (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Bill "the Butcher" Cutting (played by Daniel Day-Lewis)- attend a 'Tom' show (a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin) in New York City. In this scene,...
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...
History, Memory, and Relationships with the Past in James Joyce's Ulysses
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The past can be a daunting thing. From personal memory to history at large, the past has the power to bury those unable to establish a healthy relationship with it. One can easily become trapped - paralyzed - in the past through guilt, regret, or nostalgia, emotions generated based upon...
The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
The Bluest Eye contains a number of autobiographical elements. It is set in the town where Morrison grew up (Lorain), and it is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old girl, the age Morrison would have been the year the novel takes place (1941). Like the MacTeer family, Morrison's...
The Necessary Female Perspective in To Kill A Mockingbird
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
If a producer was to make an adaptation of Harper Lee's, To Kill a Mockingbird and wanted to extricate Miss Maudie's role from the film, not only would the dynamic of the characters be irreparably damaged, but the film would also be excluding one of the most powerful humanizing forces in the...
Points of intersection: A handful of dust and St. Mawr
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
In Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust as in D.H. Lawrence's novel St Mawr, a common rhetorical layer discusses the search for life's meaning, which in many aspects mirrors Ellington's experience of finding agreeability in music, as well as the sensation of childishness. In A...
Female protagonists in the sound and the fury and as I lay dying
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
“The following Ralph Ellison quote is often found on the book jackets of William Faulkner's novels: “For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness...
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,...
1984 contemporary politics
Case study - 3 pages - Educational studies
Literature has a mysterious way of predicting certain events. The fact that history tends to repeat itself amplifies this phenomena. The novel, 1984, George Orwell seems to make certain predictions that are evident in our current political system. Censorship and government surveillance are...
The master book
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Creating a novel can be one of the most frustrating tasks for a writer to do. In the essay below, I will concentrate on the writing styles of six writers' from different writing genres, including technical writing, academic writing, and fiction writing. Comparisons will be drawn in...
Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The theme that interests us is the quest for identity in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim. The book was written in 1901 and the plot takes place in India during the time of the British colonization. Kim presents several quests: a quest implies that the protagonist has to seek something noble,...
Frankenstein and the problem of visual representation in film
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly is a classic novel that was written nearly two centuries ago. The title of the book is a reference to the scientist in the novel, Victor Frankenstein, who creates this creature that has the likeness of a human, but is larger and stronger,...
The theme of duality in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
Case study - 3 pages - Literature
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written by Robert Louis Stevenson examines the line between fact and the scientific unknown. Stevenson was an intellectual who like many others in his day, was intrigued by the origin of man. He was a close supporter of Charles Darwin, a scientist who...
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Chronicles the life of Okonkwo
Essay - 4 pages - Logistics
Introduction Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart chronicles the life of Okonkwo, a clansman and leader of the Umuofia clan in Nigeria. Okonkwo is granted considerable fortune in the early part of the novel, but is soon beset with problems beyond his control. In the end, Okonkwo's problems...
Elsie Venner: A destiny of obscurity
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In it's own words, the novel Elsie Venner, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, has been called “A Romance of Destiny” (Title), “a medicated novel” (Preface 1), and a “test [of] the doctrine of ‘original sin' and human responsibility” (Preface 1). I...
Darwin and darwinian infuence on Thomas Hardy (Jude The Obscure) and Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass)
Dissertation - 58 pages - Literature
Charles Darwin's theories upon “Evolution” had a great impact on the scientific world in the nineteenth century, and contributed to change with respect to mentalities in a well-established Victorian society. He is mostly remembered for his conception of Evolutionism based on his theory...
'We don't live here anymore': The historicity of what was once the deserted house
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Historically, women in industrialized societies are placed at a double disadvantage; in addition to occupational workloads and/or the rigor of citizenship, they are also responsible for the daily maintenance of the domestic sphere. In regarding women's experiences in Stalinist-era Soviet Russia,...
Catch-22 : black comedy or satire ?
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Catch-22, often considered as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century, is also often analyzed as being either satirical, or characteristic of the theater of the absurd, or even both. At first sight, this appears to be totally irrelevant, given the subtle but still significant...
Austen Literary Essay
Case study - 3 pages - Literature
Jane Austen frequently uses the ironic narrator in her novels to give her stories more depth. Instead of having stories where the outcome is obvious to reader, Austen incorporates ironic narrators whose points of view get mixed into our own. But writing with an ironic narrator is nothing...
Rushdie: A Bend in Indian History
Essay - 3 pages - Modern history
Salman Rushdie has been in hiding for over a decade due to assassins who are out searching for him because of his “anti-Islamic blasphemy, belief and disbelief, anti-Thatcher politics, and pro-Western propaganda” (Kuortti 1999: 15). Even though Iranian leader, Khomeini, who initially...
Disgrace : Gender inequalities
Essay - 5 pages - Sociology & social sciences
Historically in most societies that exist or have existed in the world equality between the genders is a mere ideal. Even in the present world societies still have a strong element of patriarchy within them. In J.M Coetzee's novel “Disgrace” Coetzee depicts a South African...
Quicksand, Identity and Women's Experience
Case study - 2 pages - Educational studies
The thesis explores how issues related to class, race, and gender intersect to help shape Crane's struggle towards attaining autonomy and social stability in the 20th century (French and Allyson 457). It shows how class, race, and gender connect by paralleling the plight of Quicksand as a...
Good vs. Evil in both Macbeth and Lord of the Flies
Case study - 4 pages - Literature
In William Shakespeare's Macbeth, the once fearless and courteous Macbeth encounters three witches that foretell his future as the new King of Scotland. Intrigued by their prophecies and driven by the desire to become King over Scotland, the ambitious Macbeth along with his manipulative wife...
"The Odd Women" by George Gissing
Case study - 2 pages - Literature
The novel, “The Odd Women” by George Gissing is a refreshing novel of upcoming feminist movement involving the workplace. The novel has two prevalent themes presented in the beginning chapters concerning financial means and the idea of marriage. The novel...
Revolt against blandness: Language, sexuality and idealism in The Catcher in the Rye
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
J.D. Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published in the early 1950's, a time of refinement and standardized ways of living. Salinger experienced firsthand the terrors of World War II, as well as life in America during an uncertain time. Salinger's early influences at school...
'Train to Pakistan', 'Cracking India', and 'The Inheritance of Loss'
Essay - 5 pages - Political science
Throughout “Train to Pakistan”, “Cracking India”, and “The Inheritance of Loss”, there are two narratives: we are shown the character's personal narrative, and the narrative of the nation. In each of these novels, we are shown at least one, if not many,...
"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...
Heteroglossia and Shelly's Frankenstein
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to M. M. Bahktin, heteroglossia is the use of different novelistic modes of expression (authorial speech, narrators, inserted genres, speech of characters, dialogue, etc.) to express and represent the diversity of social speech types and a diversity of individual voices. Mary Shelly's...
"Do I Dream?": The Role of the Nightmare in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
According to Elizabeth MacAndrew, author of The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, the gothic novel is “[. . .] a literature of nightmare. Among its conventions are found dream landscapes and figures of the subconscious imagination” (3). Maggie Kilgour, author of The Rise of the...
