"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...
Fitzgerald and modernism
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout periods of literature, Modernism has revolted against former social standards and subject matter that is both prohibited and restricted in conversation and literature alike. The early 1900s were a time when writers were determining for themselves what they deemed to be important and...
Compare and contrast Alan Paton's Cry, the beloved country and Chinua Achebe's Things fall apart
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart are both groundbreaking novels intertwining multifarious aspects of the human condition and human relationships to highlight the conflict between the white colonizers and native blacks in Africa at different points...
The duality of Holocaust literature
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
Other than the odd revisionist, the vast majority of sentient humans will attest to the horror that was the Holocaust. Unfortunately, those who can give first hand testimonies are few in number and quickly disappearing. The story gets even more muddled when psychologists protest that memory is...
Society vs. desire
Thesis - 5 pages - Sociology & social sciences
In America there is the idea that a person can be whoever and/or whatever they want and still have the chance to succeed. This is part of the so-called “American Dream”. This idea is often a theme in the American novel. However, in the American novel, despite a character's...
Temporal and Spatial divides and identity in 'Lucy'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Jamaica Kincaid's novel 'Lucy' illustrates the story of a girl with desperate desire to manipulate her personal identity. With motives so deeply ingrained in her determinedly expendable past and their manifestations in her present, her quest propels her obsessions divides past from...
A review of Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher
Book review - 11 pages - Literature
Tom Perrotta, the reigning bard of American suburbia, can inspire compassion for the most unlikely of subjects. In Election, he humanizes heartless, bitchy Tracy; in Little Children, he measures out kindnesses to Larry the violent racist as well as Ronald the convicted sex offender. But in his...
Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four: When the future meets the past
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
Freewill has always been an attribute of humanity that is to be protected at all costs, as freewill plays an important role in defining who we are. Brave New World and Nineteen Eighty-Four go to great lengths to show the effects of loss of individuality when governments take control of the...
Critical review of the series: Twilight
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
In Janice Radway's article, “Women Read the Romance: The Interaction of Text and Context,” Radway analyzes a group of suburban housewives who tend to read romance novels as an escape from their everyday lives as wives and mothers. Similarly, the popularity of the teenage vampire...
Middlemarch, Part 6, Chapter 56 - George Eliot (1871-1872) - How does George Eliot, through a posterior view and a description of fictitious events, manage to present the prejudices of the time on the progress?
Text commentary - 3 pages - Economic politics
In 1919, Virginia Woolf writes, about Eliot's contribution to English literature, that her masterpiece Middlemarch is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people". Indeed, Eliot's novel is known for its realism and its psychological insights on its different...
Treatment of time in Virginia Woolf's Work
Thesis - 4 pages - Literature
In her novel "Orlando: a Biography" published in 1927, Virginia Woolf evokes 'the extraordinary discrepancy between time on the clock and time in the mind' (Orlando p.91) and the opposition she expresses between this two conceptions of time is to be found, more or less obviously,...
To Kill a Mockingbird
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mocking bird," explains Miss Maudie in Harper Lee's...
Okonkwo's Telling Duality
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the definitive post-colonial, African novel, focuses on a character who is in constant struggle with his tribe and with himself. Okonkwo, a purveyor of masculinity in his society, has many reasons for his actions in the novel. The continuing...
Book review: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
All throughout time, since man was first given the ability to write, countless novels have been written on almost every subject conceivable. When it comes to literature on history, an infinite number of subtopics become available. Some examples include, war, peace, types of governments,...
The Question of Morality Film Noir
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Moral ambiguity is a central theme in John Huston's film The Maltese Falcon (1941) and in Billy Wilder's film Double Indemnity (1944) and James M. Cain's novel by the same title. The films and novel follow characters whose motives are questionable and morally problematic. This essay...
Style vs. Substance in The Sea
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Sea is no doubt, a difficult novel to read. John Banville's language can be quite strenuous, and at some times, enigmatic. No major events or plot points seem to occur in The Sea, that is, externally. There is not much of a linear plot, if any. Almost everything that happens in the...
Facing adversity : Women and religion in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Alice Walker's “The Color Purple” is one of the most well known novels in contemporary literature. This book places the author among the top literary canon of American writers. Since its first publication in 1982, the novel continuously gains both positive acclaims and...
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...
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...
Fahrenheit 451, Dandelion Wine and From the Dust Returned
Thesis - 2 pages - Literature
Having been told I had to choose an author and read three of their novels, I chose the strange and unusual author Ray Bradbury. Bradbury writes about science fiction which interests me. For this reason, I have decided to read Bradbury's novels as a basis for my paper. The...
Do androids dream of electric sheep: A review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Edward James states in his piece, Science Fiction in the Twentieth Century, that, “Because science fiction deals with imaginative alternatives to the real world, [it] also offers criticism of that world.” In Philip K. Dick's novel, Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep, that...
Commentary Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck is known as one of the author's most powerful novels. Even though the story is completely imaginary, the plot takes place in a very precise historical and geographical context: 1930s California. Moreover, one of the main themes of the novel is...
'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison: A comment
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
'Invisible Man' by Ralph Ellison is a novel detailing an unnamed African-American's journey from the south to the streets of Harlem. The reader sees the main character attempt to find his place within the world, as well as within himself. In this novel written in 1947,...
Symbolism in Obasan
Case study - 2 pages - Literature
Throughout the novel Obasan, Joy Kogawa uses symbolism to communicate short but important messages to readers conveying the various themes of the novel. One main idea expressed through images and symbols includes the deterioration of conditions for the Japanese Canadians as they are...
Magic realism in 'The Enchantress of Florence'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Salman Rushdie's novel 'The Enchantress of Florence' is a powerful and multi-dimensional expression of the incarnation of globalization in literature. Important themes arise as relevant to globalization through the technical advantages of magic realism, which Rushdie employs as the...
Response Essay to Middlemarch by George Eliot
Case study - 2 pages - Literature
The novel Middlemarch by George Eliot is primarily a Victorian novel but incorporates features of modern novels. Eliot, in his works, portrays the hatred for women novelists. In those eras, women were confined to writing the stereotypical fantasies of the conventional romance...
The Search
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Through the evolution of the vampire novel, the search for knowledge and information remains a unifying theme that characterizes the genre. In Bram Stoker's Dracula, Stephen King's Salem's Lot, and Anne Rice's Interview with the Vampire, this quest for understanding about vampires and...
Claireece Precious Jones
Case study - 2 pages - Philosophy
In Sapphire's Push, the reader is immediately pulled into the harsh life of Claireece “Precious” Jones, a sixteen year old girl who lives in an abusive household with her two children, suffering rape and incest by her father as well as sexual and physical abuse from her mother....
Gambling Art: A Psychoanalytic Interpretation of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Custom-House Introduction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In the preface of the second edition of The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne discusses the “unprecedented excitement” generated by the publication of his novel (5). Ironically, this public excitement, and more importantly, the ensuing public discontent, originated not in the...
The parallel tragedies of Lily Bart and Tess Durbeyfield: An examination of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles are powerful examples of the American and British realist novel. Both depict the harsh Victorian society in which women were held to unattainable standards of perfection, and both are social commentaries about...
