Humour in Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Canterbury Tales"
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The English Middle Ages are often thought of as bright times, when, except for a few brief periods of discontent, people were satisfied with life, wore bright clothes, drank beer and sang in cozy pubs. In short, England was merry. It is very easy to paint such a glamorous picture of the times and...
How satiric is Jonathan Swift's "A Modest Proposal"?
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Satire, as defined by Bennett and Royle, is “the humorous presentation of human folly or vice in such a way as to make it look ridiculous” . It generally retains the appearance of rigorous logic, buttresses premises and arguments supported by formally correct proofs and eventually leads...
Paralytic People: Paralysis in James Joyce's "A Little Cloud"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Tourists visiting New York City have one major complaint: the rudeness of everyone in the city. The tourists are not entirely to blame, though. The skyscrapers, steam rising from the streets, and the immense amount of concrete would make any non-New Yorker uncomfortable. Observers of New Yorkers...
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,...
Book review: He She It, by Marge Piercy
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In her novel, He She It, Marge Piercy questions ideas of gender and gender roles in a futuristic society. Piercy sets the stage of her story in a temporarily safe haven called Tikva, a Jewish slum where matriarchy holds a subtle but evident power. The story's central character is Shira...
The complete English tradesman, by Daniel Defoe, 1926
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Daniel Defoe was an English fervent supporter of trade: to him, trade was a natural feature of the English nation, and the English people were the best people at trading in the world. Indeed, in the 18th century, the State is a means to promote trade, the English empire is all about trade; the...
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, like the...
On patriotism, by John Bolingbroke, 1730-1754
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
This text is the analysis of an extract from the book On Patriotism, written between 1730 and 1754 by John Bolingbroke. Bolingbroke was a politician and thinker: he participated to the political life in Britain and was particularly MP in the Tories' party, Secretary of State and Minister of...
Short Story Review
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Readers love the story of the predator and the prey, regardless of where or with whom the sympathy falls. A tale of survival or near-survival keeps us craving more, and if the creator or messenger of that story can secretly divulge wisdom along the way, then both reader and author benefit....
King Lear, by William Shakespeare: My experience of reading Shakespeare
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Reading in Original version a Shakespeare play was in my mind a kind of challenge. I read quite a few of Shakespeare's plays in the past, but they were translated in French. I had heard so much about Shakespeare's wonderful style, the beautiful English language he used that I wanted to...
Book Review: Women in the Viking Age
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Women in the Viking Age by Judith Jesch is a detailed and informative publication that discusses women during the Viking Age through the close examination of a vast amount of resources. Judith Jesch is currently teaching at the University of Nottingham, and has extensive experience in a variety...
Six feet of the country, by Nadine Gordimer - publié le 06/12/2007
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
How does Nadine Gordimer denounce Apartheid in this short story? Judging from this text, do you think she uses literature as a political weapon? In “Six Feet of the Country”, a short story written in 1956, the South-African white author Nadine Gordimer tells the story of a white man and...
Symbolism of geography in Thomas More's "Utopia"
Book review - 5 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...
John Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath": Chapter 3
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The chapter under study is an extract from John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath. Situated at the beginning of the novel, chapter 3 offers a very detailed description of a land turtle trying to reach the other side of the highway. Its journey is described as a very slow and painful one, full...
"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...
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...
How is the traditional notion of subject challenged in "Boating for Beginners?" (Jeanette Winterson)?
Book review - 5 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...
Barbara Blaugdone's An Account Of The Travels Sufferings & persecutions
Book review - 7 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...
Place, race and identity in Langston Hughes' "A Toast to Harlem"
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
“A Toast to Harlem” is an extract from a volume of selections entitled The Best Of Simple which was published in 1961. The author, Langston Hughes, was born in Joplin, Missouri in 1902 and died in 1967. He is known as one of the most important writers and thinkers of the Harlem...
"Dancing with Dogma. Britain under Thatcherism" by Ian Gilmour - publié le 21/11/2007
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The document under study here is extracted from Dancing with Dogma. Britain under Thatcherism, a book by Ian Gilmour, a Scottish leading figure on the liberal, or "wet", left-wing of the Conservative party, essentially under the governments of Heath and Thatcher. The piece of writing concentrates...
Know Your Neurosis: An Analysis of Frank Bruno's It's OK to Be Neurotic
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
I picked It's OK to Be Neurotic: Using Your Neuroses to Your Advantage by Frank Bruno from the bottom row on the third book case in the self-help section at Barnes & Noble because the title on the spine was so obnoxiously bold and it was shelved at the wrong end of the alphabet. They say not to...
Father, Forgive Them: A Review of Simon Wiesenthal's The Sunflower: On the Possibilities and Limits of Forgiveness
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
There is a basic purpose to the literature of Holocaust survivors: to bare witness. Many believe they survived to perform such a duty, to fulfill such a debt to those who did not. As witnesses, they record living history, for they record the history of their own lives. But what happens when a...
Alumni Magazines: Content Contention
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Alumni magazines have long been a source of debate among both their producers and receivers. What information should they include, and what is their real purpose? For the institutions that produce them, they are usually considered a way to interest potential donors, and raise awareness of events...
SELF: A Magazine at its Best
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
SELF is a monthly women's fitness and lifestyle magazine published by Condé Nast Publications. Founded in 1979, its mission statement declares that it is “the first-ever magazine of total-well-being, incorporating beauty and health, fitness and nutrition, and happiness and personal style...
Book Affair
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
So Many Books, So Little Time: A Year of Passionate Reading is a humorous memoir about reading. Sara Nelson, editor, mother, wife, and friend decides to spend a year reading a different novel every week. She admits, in a favorite quote of mine, that she was not always a reader: I wasn't, in...
Review of Sarah B. Pomeroy's Book: Families in Classical and Hellenistic Greece: Representations and Realities
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The study of social history is not a new phenomenon, but some of today's leading historians are shedding some new light on the history of the family. Such is the case with the social history of classical and Hellenistic Greece. Many historians have devoted their time to the issues surrounding the...
"Wonderland as a poetic world"
Book review - 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...
Book Report: Wise Blood
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
The Flannery O'Connor novel, Wise Blood, is a tragic story set in the declining south. The characters of the novel, the main character, Hazel Motes, in particular, struggle with their religious identity and suffering throughout the course of the plot. What follows here is a report on the book's...
Homoerotic Desire in Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
“What if someone wrote a novel about homosexuality and no body [sic] came?” Ed Cohen writes of Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray (75). Actually, at the time the book was written, the term “homosexuality” was nonexistent. Wilde, himself, became one of the leaders of...
Mother Jones Magazine
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting founder Jeff Cohen once said, “If it's in the New York Times today, it was probably in Mother Jones six months ago” (4). Contrary to what one might believe, the staff at Mother Jones thoroughly enjoy their status as the magazine the media giants get...
