Black and white imagery in Blood Wedding by Federico Garcia Lorca - publié le 13/01/2009
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 - publié le 13/01/2009
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...
The Wood-Pile - publié le 12/01/2009
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...
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...
The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
After reading disappointing reviews on The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde, nobody would be tempted to read it. On the contrary, it would be a missed chance to learn more about life and its superficiality and about the power of manipulation and its negative influences. It may be possible...
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...
Common reading proposal 'Tell them who I am: The lives of homeless women' by Elliot Liebow
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Many colleges and universities have implemented common reading programs for college freshmen. Many times, it is up to the libraries discretion as to what book is chosen for this program. Sometimes libraries themselves initiated the common reading program, other times it was a joint effort to...
The Last Leaf
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Henry O is the pseudonym of William Sydney Porter. He was born in 1862 in North Carolina and died in 1910 of cirrhosis because he was an alcoholic. In his youth, W. S. Porter exercised a lot of jobs and in 1898, he went to jail because a few years before, when he had worked as a bank clerk in...
In Affection and Esteem
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Mary Webb was born in 1881 at Leighton. She grew up in a large house in Much Wenlock. Mary Webb was the eldest of six children and began writing stories and plays for her brothers and sisters. At the age of twenty, she fell ill because she had thyroid disorder. During her convalescence, she...
"Answers to a questionnaire" by James Graham Ballard - publié le 02/12/2008
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Answers to a Questionnaire' is a short story which was written by James Graham Ballard, and published for the first time in the English literary magazine 'Ambit', in 1985. Ballard's style of writing is highly important to understand his works, he is a member of the 'New...
Jihad vs. McWorld: The new world disorder
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Jihad vs. McWorld was written by Rutgers University Political Science professor Benjamin R. Barber. The author is widely regarded one of the nation's foremost scholars on democracy. He has written Strong Democracy, in which he explains that economic liberalism is the basis for and cause of...
Out of the garden: Examining the true origins of Genesis
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
“And the LORD God formed man of the dust of the ground, and breathed into his nostrils the breath of life; and man became a living soul.” Genesis 2:7 (Holy Bible, King James Version). Ever since that first breathe, man has been questioning the ways of the Lord. Laws, teachings, and...
Racial stereotypes and their role in the concept of Manifest Destiny by Justin Herndon
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The modern connotations of the concept of “Manifest Destiny” are generally of two diverging camps; One is a romanticized image of devout pilgrims, such as the Mormons, who left the crowded and sinful cities of the East for the freedom of the West, hoping to find a new promised land, or...
How Kate Chopin's 'The Awakening' contributed to the evolution of feminism
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Kate Chopin was an integral part of the evolution of feminism, providing early 20th century readers with feminist literature that is still highly respected and studied today. Although it is easy to approach her work, and all such work, work with textual evidence supporting a claim of the author's...
Heaven and hell: Aldous Huxley opens the doors of perception
Book review - 9 pages - Literature
Unlike any other mammal on earth, man possesses the unique ability to traverse various levels of the mind in order to alter and create his own perceptions of reality. Unlike any author in modern literature, Aldous Huxley charts man's explorations into the realms of the mind in his books The...
The logic of justifying utilitarianism actions in Koestler's "Darkness at Last"
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
Arthur Koestler in Darkness At Noon, explores the utility of totalitarianism through the fictional life of Nicholas Rubashov, a lifelong, loyal member of The Party who has recently been hauled into jail under dubious charges. Rubashov has spent his entire life promoting the Utilitarian and...
The Road by Cormac MacCarthy
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The novel titled 'The Road' was written by Cormac McCarthy in 2006. Before studying the book, we have to learn more about his author. He was born in 1933 in Rhodes Island and he is now considered as one of the four major American novelists, along with Thomas Pynchon, Philip Roth and Don...
Establish a Chicano identity: Casares' Brownsville Stories
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Casares's Brownsville Stories is not just a novel. Instead of following one protagonist through a long series of events, the text presents the reader with a series of vignettes about multiple protagonists. Casares situates all of his anecdotes in the small Texas town of Brownsville, yet the...
The Bell Jar
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In the Bell Jar, Plath explores the marginalization of women. Her fiction, grounded in her own experience, permeates with that experience, revealing not only her commentary, but positions devolved into their most rudimentary parts, as to give the reader a backdrop to view them in greater relief....
Self reliance as a means to discovering identity
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
According to Ralph Ellison, identity is the American theme. This sentiment explains why his highly acclaimed novel, Invisible Man, features a nameless protagonist trying to discover who he is. Ellison also insists that “the nature of our society is such that we are prevented from knowing who...
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 the...
Homage to Catalonia, by George Orwell, 1938
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
At the end of 1936 George Orwell (Eric Arthur Blair was his real name) went to Spain to fight fascism. He got involved with the POUM militia and went to the battlefront of Aragon. He wrote his book ?Homage to Catalonia' just six month after returning to England. He wanted to relate his vision...
"The tortilla curtain", T. C. Boyle
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
To begin with, the author's purpose was certainly to show us the life of an immigrant in America. Thanks to their influence all over the world, the USA is very attractive to immigrants who are looking for employment. The USA represents for immigrants, prosperity and success. This conception...
Early existentialism in Julius Caesar
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
There is a saying among political scientists that the citizens of a nation deserve their leader. In other words a dictator or tyrant will never appear out of a vacuum, but as the result of countless historical events, and as an expression of the society's current values and priorities. As such,...
Inhabiting the Myth of Dune
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The structures of everyday life are embodied in patterns that align with an internal concept of the mythic. The extent to which all societies are guided by some sense of the mythic is proportional to a culture's dependence on language, religion, or historical foundation; for these structures that...
The feminine power in Spenser's "The Faerie Queene"
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout The Faerie Queene, there are female representations, the most prominent female characters are Una and Duessa, but there are also Errour, Lucifera, Night, Caelia and her three daughters. These female characters exude a certain form of power: Errour has physical power; Lucifera has power...
