The personal universal: Pronouns and identity in Emerson's 'Self-Reliance'
Dissertation - 5 pages - Literature
Ralph Emerson's individualist essay, “Self-Reliance”, is an open forum of what is necessary to be independent and skeptical of the ideas of others. Emerson seems obsessed with what truly defines the character of a man, but this obsession seems to stem in part from his own example....
Murdering the past: Influence and immortality in the writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Dissertation - 7 pages - Literature
On first reading, the majority of Edgar Allan Poe's short stories are concerned with death in a variety of different forms. Whether Poe is describing murder, the fear of being killed, characters previously deceased who return to life, or those who still live being buried prematurely, the subject...
Critical review of the series: Twilight
Dissertation - 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 book...
Artistic harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind
Dissertation - 15 pages - Literature
Vladimir Nabokov boasts an impressive resume. As a writer, critic and scholar, he perfected both his own craft, and his ability to analyze the work of others. Similarly, within his texts, he focused a great deal of energy on the manipulation of his readers own reactions, earning him a reputation...
Life as a weed
Dissertation - 14 pages - Literature
On a bright sunny day in Brooklyn is where our story starts, where heat dazzles its inhabitants, where street thugs and hustlers hide in their street shops and apartments to avoid the blazing sun. Schools are closed; it is mid-July, the heat of New York City streets boiling even the most...
Reading in the dark, Seamus Dean Chapter six
Text analysis - 3 pages - Literature
The chapter is from the third part of the novel and it is sixth chapter which runs from page 225 to page 227. The extract, as the title suggests, is dedicated to the narrator's father. The narrator describes in the previous chapter the failed relationship with his mother with whom he can no...
Analysis: Catherine Hall on Victorian domestic ideology
Dissertation - 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
Dissertation - 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
Dissertation - 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
Dissertation - 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
Dissertation - 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...
Ernest J. Gaines, A lesson before dying
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
"A Lesson Before Dying" was first published in 1993. It was written by E. J. Gaines. He is a Southern writer. Most of his novels are historical fictions and also a social commentary from an Afro centric point of view. His novels often deal with alienation and search for dignity and masculine...
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
Dissertation - 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
Dissertation - 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...
Monsters in Beowulf
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The Beowulf poem is one of the most important heritages from the historical sources of the Middle-Ages. Unfortunately we still don't know who wrote it, maybe was he a poet in a royal court or an erudite monk-poet. Moreover, we cannot date the text more precisely than between the seventh and...
East London love story
Dissertation - 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
Dissertation - 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
Dissertation - 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...
The Voyage, by K. Mansfield (1921)
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
In 1923 one of the most famous New Zealander writers of the colonial period Katherine Mansfield died. She had gained renown as a modernist storyteller for her symbolic short stories, in which she displayed her admirable mastery in depicting human feelings and psychological tensions, such as...
Courtesan poetry of the Late Ming and early Qing dynasties
Dissertation - 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
Dissertation - 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...
