Circumstance in Jane Austen's early novels
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Circumstance and money figure heavily in Jane Austen's first two novels—Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice—particularly in the way these social and financial considerations impact marriage. They can cause multiple problems, thwarting passionate romance, such as in the...
A Byzantine Novel Drosilla And Charikles
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The theme I select to examine in A Byzantine Novel Drosilla And Charikles, is the power of love. Love in the time of Drosilla and Charikles was an entirely different concept. Especially from what we are accustomed to today. Loving someone fifty years ago, isn't even close to how we...
The Nineteenth Century's Middle Ages: Representation of the Middle Ages through nineteenth century novels or arts
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Henry Adams, Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres (1913). In Mont Saint-Michel and Chartres, Henry Adams depicts several well-known monuments and old sights of France, all of which were built during the Middle Ages. In this book, published in 1913, Adams comments on those monuments as he is looking...
Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley (1818)
Text commentary - 2 pages - Literature
The text studied is an abstract from the novel Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus, written by Mary Shelley and published in 1818. Its genre is fantastic, or horror novel. It is sometimes considered to be a gothic novel.
Jane Eyre - Franco Zeffirelli (1996) - The issue of adaptation
Artwork commentary - 18 pages - Film studies
Zeffirelli had to combine several, sometimes contradictory constraints: he had to update the text, to maintain a specific filmic transcription of the novel, and to negotiate a delicate balance between recognising the influence of the source text and the need for a specific creativity in...
Jane Eyre - Charlotte Brontë (1847) - How important is time in the work of Charlotte Brontë?
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The novel was published in 1847 under the male pseudonym of Currer Bell. The historical context is the Victorian era, during which the British Empire was at its height with possessions all over the world. The literary context of the work coincides with the beginning of the Romantic...
Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus - Mary Shelley (1818) - How does Mary Shelley transition from the time Victor Frankenstein was very excited and joyful about his project, to realizing it was a foolish and horrific idea?
Tutorials/exercises - 2 pages - Linguistics & languages
Frankenstein is the most famous novel by Mary Shelley; it became a classic of literature and has been adapted many times since its creation. During her lifetime, Mary Shelley wrote around ten books, including poems and novels. Frankenstein is her second work, and also the most...
West African Anglophone Literary Productions
Course material - 21 pages - Literature
By and large, the objective of this course is to get students in the humanities to cast a meaningful glance at the landscape of the aesthetico-social and political realities which have affected the continent, ever since slavery days through colonization up to the contemporary stage, in the prism...
A Lesson before dying - Ernest J. Gaines (1993) - Reader's response essay
Text commentary - 4 pages - Literature
'A Lesson Before Dying' is a touching novel created by Ernest J. Gaines, a remarkable African-American writer whose works illustrate the lives of the rural Southerners in the era of segregation. This novel is set in a small Louisiana town in the late 1940s where the topics...
Junky - William Seward Burroughs (1953) - Is Junky merely the story of the narrator's drug addiction?
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Junky, the first novel of W. BURROUGHS, was published for the first time in 1953. It deals with the story of drug addiction, through one example: William LEE, the narrator. It is a major work relating the lifestyle of drug addicts during the 1950s. He employs a laconic tone, but he always...
The House of Mirth (Edith Wharto, 1905) and Passing (Nella Larsen, 1929) - Women identity issues in the early twentieth century
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The House of Mirth (Edith Wharton) and Passing (Nella Larsen) are novels presenting female characters struggling to fit into the 20th century society. At the time, women were not very independent and had almost no means to earn a living. In The House of Mirth, Lily Bart's parents died...
Catcher in the Rye - J. D. Salinger's (1951)
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
This novel is often considered to have been the bible of the postwar young, the story of Holden Caulfield, an upper-middle-class adolescent schoolboy just on the edge of losing his presocial and presexual innocence - which he is able to express, like Huckleberry Finn, in his own vivid...
Beloved - Toni Morrison (1987) - Black people's conditions in the seventies
Book review - 2 pages - Sociology & social sciences
Beloved is an American fiction novel by Toni Morrison, published in 1987. Its story's plot is based on the notorious real adventure of Margaret Garner, an African American slave who succeeded into escaping to Ohio, murdering her last child rather than offering a new slave to the world....
Maggie, A Girl of the Streets - Stephen Crane - Maggie is impossible to weep over
Text commentary - 3 pages - Literature
Individuals are determined by heredity and their social category (which covers the place they live in and their standard of living). Maggie, the protagonist of Stephen Crane's novel Maggie, A Girl of the Streets published in 1896, is modelled, shaped, and ultimately determined by her...
The Figure in the Carpet - Henry James (1896) - The meaning of art and literature
Text commentary - 2 pages - Literature
The narrator, a young book reviewer, is asked by Corvik, one of his colleagues, to write a review of a well-known author's (named Vereker) latest book. Having read the review, Vereker seizes the opportunity, when he meets the narrator, to tease him by revealing that he has missed the most...
The Great Gatsby, Chapter III, Excerpt - Francis Scott Fitzgerald (1925)
Text commentary - 3 pages - Literature
In this excerpt from Francis Scott Fitzgerald's novel The Great Gatsby, the narrator, Nick Carraway, offers a reflective account of his life as a young bond salesman during a summer in New York. After having described the dazzling and opulent parties held at Jay Gatsby's mansion,...
Bleak House - Charles Dickens (1852) - Examination of Dickens's Social Commentary on Poverty and the Class System
Text commentary - 3 pages - Sociology & social sciences
The dense, gloomy fog in the first scenes of this novel by Charles Dickens symbolizes more than just the physical weather; it stands as a profound metaphor for the dark and fog-shrouded Victorian era, with fog so thick one cannot see and no lodestar to follow. The use of such a gloomy...
Dune - Frank Herbert (1965) - Studying a Pivotal Scene
Text commentary - 3 pages - Literature
In a pivotal scene in Frank Herbert's novel, Dune, the evolvement of Paul Atreides from a noble man of a desert planet into a prophesied Kwisatz Haderach undergoes a turning point. Transfiguration is approaching its critical point, as Paul, along with his mother, is subjected to a...
Runaway, Trespasses, Extract - Alice Munro (2004)
Text commentary - 3 pages - Literature
'Every man must define his identity against his mother. If he does not, he just falls back into her and is swallowed up' wrote the American polemist Camille Paglia. Everything is also a question of identity in Alice Munro's short story collection Runaway, published in 2004. The...
Three English essays
Essay - 4 pages - Educational studies
Children's stories often evoke the importance of family for the happiness of children. It can be demonstrated through the presence of strong parental figures in the stories, but on the contrary, by showing the lack of love resulting from broken or absent families. In this case, it is common...
The Thing Around Your Neck - Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2009)
Text commentary - 2 pages - Literature
The whole story is narrated in the second person by Akunna, a young Nigerian woman who has just immigrated to the United States of America. Akunna seems to be different from everyone else around her since almost everyone she engages with asks questions regarding her ethnic background, her accent...
Secret Life of Bees- for women in matters of love and self-liberation by Sue Monk Kidd's
Case study - 3 pages - Educational studies
Described by critics as a must have guide for women in matters of love and self-liberation, Sue Monk Kidd's novel “The Secret Lives Of Bees,” tells the narrative of a motherless fourteen year old girl Lily Owens, desperately yearning for love, yet trapped by her father's cruelty....
The Appointment in Samarra - W. Somerset Maugham (1933) - Encounter with Death
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Terrorising and scary, death has always been a threatening subject. Although nobody wants to think about dying, we all wonder when Death is going to take us. In the fable "The Appointment in Samarra" by W. Somerset Maugham (1933), the author demonstrates that humans cannot avoid their fate. When...
A Golden Age - Tahmima Anam (2007) - Prose Fiction Essay
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
A golden age refers to an era of achievement and an age of sacrificing honour before peace and happiness are awarded. By naming her book 'A Golden Age' (2007), Tahmima Anam signalled to readers the subject matter of her novel. The novel deals with the liberation of...
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...
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...
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...
"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...
Madness Redefined: Plath's Demystification of Insanity in 'The Bell Jar'
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Sylvia Plath's 'The Bell Jar' depicts the mental-breakdown of a privileged and educated young woman in 1950s American society. To this day, the literary merit of the novel remains a topic of intense debate. The majority of critics seem to take the stance that its overall worth lies...
Horace Walpole vs. Clara Reeve: The role of the Gothic
Case study - 5 pages - Literature
Gothic novels are seen as the beginning of modern horror fiction. Many devotees believed Gothic novels have inspired pleasant horror in its readers. The genre is generally accepted to have been started by Horace Walpole and his novel The Castle of Otranto. Although Walpole...
