The figure of Bartleby The Scrivener is one of the most enduring characters in American Literature. He features as the title character in Hermann Melville's short story. Throughout this story he is employed by a lawyer on Wall Street to copy out legal cases and transcriptions; which he occasionally completes...
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Maya Angelou's autobiographical novel: 'I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings” deals with her childhood and youth and her experiences as a woman of colour in the United States. The novel itself deals with religion, sexuality and the discovery of specific modes of African American artistic expression. One of the...
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Defining literature can often be difficult. Defining “literature related to the humanities” is even more difficult. In order to accurately define the second term, one must first define literature, as well as define humanities. Some would argue that the term involves any work that involves the written word. This is...
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Frankenstein is a critically acclaimed and historically important novel written by English author Mary Shelley about the story of a young scientist who creates Frankenstein, a green grotesque monster from parts of corpses from an unusual scientific experiment. Mary Shelley’s novel is also a representation of 18th century Europe, industrialization,...
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The play "Death of a Salesman" by Arthur Miller is a story filled with sadness and despair as well as pity for those, who have lost the understanding of the American's Dream initial concept. The play also delves into how the Dream is regarded by different generations and how their...
959 words | 4 page(s)
Goodnight Desdemona (Good Morning Juliet) is the kind of play Virginia Woolf’s Judith Shakespeare would have written – had she been allowed to. Woolf writes that if Shakespeare had had a sister that when she attempted to act, the men at the stage door would have laughed at her. “She...
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The story about a family which fell victim to an escaped criminal is greater than the simple sentence that summarizes it. There are two ways to enjoy the story. It can be a suspenseful thriller to read or a short video to view. Either way, there are some similarities and...
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Guy de Maupassant’s short story “The Necklace” is a clear critique of a materialist lifestyle. The entire narrative revolves around Mathilde Loisel’s materialistic world-view: she has high social ambitions, which lead to her husband trying to satisfy these desires. Loisel ultimately is invited to a high-class party, but is unsatisfied...
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Edgar Allan Poe was one of the earliest gothic American writers. His works were almost always dark in theme, usually involved either murder or supernatural events (sometimes both), and his stories and poems seldom had a happy ending. His story “The Black Cat,” written in 1843, is a perfect example...
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Southern Gothic is defined as a style of writing that uses extreme events to examine the morals and social values of the Southern States. This is specific to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Anolik et al, p. ix). Several writers such as Kate Chopin, Walker Percy and others...
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The metamorphosis of the spirit as depicted in Thus Spoke Zarathustra is one of the most important passages in contemporary philosophy. In order to understand it fully then it is necessary to pay attention to the way in which its elements interweave and how they all relate to particular conception...
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Published in 1999, Homeward Bound is a personal essay by Janet Wu that primarily focuses on her relationship with her grandmother. Wu argues she and her grandmother could not have come from more different times as her grandmother is one of the last Chinese still carrying the burden of bound...
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This interesting short story by John Updike is the chronicle of a few minutes that pass in a grocery store on the northeast coast of the United States, told from the perspective of a young clerk named ‘Sammy’. It is primarily occupied by Sammy’s observations of three young women in...
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John Updike’s short story “A&P” takes place entirely within one of the most universally recognized structures across the length and breadth of the American landscape. As a thematic device, the grocery store acts an institution that filled with symbolism related to capitalism as an economic system dependent on marketing empty...
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Reading the book Zodiac: The Shocking True Story of America's Most Bizarre Mass Murderer should not be attempted late at night. While author Robert Graysmith successfully provides readers with a chronology of events that occur during the period when the Zodiac killer was at his peak, from beginning to end...
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English is a descendant of Germanic languages that evolved over thousands of years into West Germanic, Anglo-Frisian, to Anglic and English. As such, a significant percentage of words in the English language have a Germanic provenance. Angle and Saxon tribes descended on England beginning in the fifth century, filling the...
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The best stories demonstrate a characters growth over time. Flat characters do not change and instead remain static throughout the course of the story. However, dynamic characters change in how they think, feel and act. Because real life is dynamic in nature, many readers tend to appreciate fluctuation within the...
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The systems of masculine oppression represent a common thematic thread that unites many works of literature. Charlotte Perkins Gilman's "The Yellow Wallpaper" is just one of the many examples of feminist writing. At the center of Gilman's story is a young lady, who experiences all kinds of obvious and hidden...
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In Sylvia Plath’s “Blackberrying”, the speaker narrates a journey down a path that is lined with blackberries on the way to the seaside. The literal journey is described with vivid imagery that gives the reader an idea of exactly where the speaker is in physical proximity to the blackberries. However,...
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Pietro Spina, the hero of Ignazio Silone’s classic story of disillusionment and return, faces an internal conflict with the most lasting and powerful institution in his native Italy: the church. A communist, Spina returns from exile abroad to the fascist Italy of Mussolini, a place fraught with danger for him...
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Ernest Hemingway is one of the most acclaimed American writers, primarily due to his unique writing style, laconic and profound at the same time. However, there is still an ambivalent attitude to the themes he developed in his novels and short stories. Thus, André Maurois resolutely described Hemingway's works as...
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Edgar Allan Poe often seems to be a writer obsessed with blurry intersection of mentally disturbed exhibitions of violence and sheer, unadulterated evil. Is the narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” really as guilelessly driven by guilt as he seems…or is he a something of a prototype for Keyser Soze, leading...
652 words | 3 page(s)
Mary Shelley's “Frankenstein” is one of the most important novels of the 19th century. It displays several key themes that relate to both the private and the public world. Within the first volume of the novel, however, it can be argued that the most important theme that is present within...
924 words | 4 page(s)
The Tale of Sohrab and Oedipus Tyrannus have a theme of fate and free will in common. This theme is the main one in both plays. In The Tale of Sohrab, Sohrab is searching for his father. However, his father, without knowledge, kills his son. He, later on, comes to...
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The two decades of 1940-1960 shaped the growth of African American historical literature writing. During this period, a group of exceptional writers emerged who were very talented. It was due to their works that this period was considered crucial in the development of the African American writing. Some of the...
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