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Literature
The keyword Literature is tagged in the following 37 articles.
Zora Neale Hurston is the author of the acclaimed short story Sweat. The story was published in 1926, an incredible accomplishment considering the obstacles faced by black female authors at the time. Viewing the piece through the lens of feminist literary criticism... Read Article »
In James Kirkup and Ernest Jones’ English translation of Camara Laye’s 1953 autobiography, The Dark Child, there is a significant stylistic decision in the final sentence. Kirkup and Jones’ version reads: “Later on I felt something hard when... Read Article »
English Literature is all-encompassing: it ranges from societal utilitarianism of the didactic through to the celebration of individualism embodied in post-modern work. Literature, as part of a larger cultural body, is both instructive and entertaining, and has the... Read Article »
The 2005 film Pride & Prejudice opens with sound rather than picture, but it is not the expected man-made musical score that fills the air. Rather it is nature’s music: the song of birds, particularly blackbirds. As Lydia Martin’s article “Joe... Read Article »
Published in 1767, The Female American, Or, The Adventures of Unca Eliza Winkfield claims to be the spiritual autobiography of an Unca Eliza Winkfield. Like Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, this narrative is peppered with bits of true historical details and events in... Read Article »
Domestic fiction reigned in women’s Literature during the nineteenth-century. These narratives defined ”True Womanhood,” where the female exemplified four pillars: piety, purity, domesticity, and submissiveness. They are meant to reject the public... Read Article »
The 18th century was one in which exaltation of wit and reason came to the forefront of Literature in the form of both Horatian and Juvenalian satires, which, through keen observation and sharp nimbleness of thought, exposed the superficial follies and moral corruption... Read Article »
Jazz is not a solitary art. Its form does not only reveal itself in the music. Jazz finds manifestation in many other forms of expression, including the powerful narratives encompassing jazz Literature. In all of its modes, jazz narrates a people’s emotional... Read Article »
Published in 1954, John Ronald Reuel Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings is a follow-up to his 1937 book, The Hobbit. An epic fantasy novel originally published in three volumes (The Fellowship of the King, The Two Towers, The Return of the King), The Lord of the... Read Article »
The historic 1962 conference at Makerere University in Kampala, Uganda brought together scholars and writers from various parts of the continent to discuss the state of African Literature: who should write it, what it should depict, and – of central importance... Read Article »
In two postcolonial novels, The God Of Small Things by Arundhati Roy and Secrets by Nuruddin Farah, both authors use the politics of families to paint a vivid picture of the social, cultural and political conditions of their nations. Roy and Farah both write about... Read Article »
Ahab, the monomaniacal ship captain of Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, is a man plagued by revenge. Searching the seas for the whale who took his leg and along with it, his ability to effectively assimilate into society, Ahab continually shows himself to be a man... Read Article »
Rebecca West’s 1918 novel The Return of the Soldier dissects the socioeconomic and psychological tensions wrought by the upheaval of the First World War. In a nuanced reiteration of the typical trope of a soldier’s return, Christopher Baldry is dispatched... Read Article »
In the Aeneid, Virgil depicts the struggle of the newly displaced Trojans to find a new home, under the leadership of Aeneas. The Trojans, having only recently lost the Trojan War to the Greeks, travel in search of a new home, eventually settling in Italy−to... Read Article »
Based on his own definition of the term in “Godzilla vs. Post-Colonial,” Thomas King has created a piece of associational Literature in his 1989 novel Medicine River. He has done so not only through his focus on daily, seemingly mundane human interactions... Read Article »
Reading Greek plays provides valuable insight into the relationships between gods and humans. While both gods and humans have fairly similar personalities Greek gods have a certain amount of power that, given motivation from an arrogant mortal, they are all too willing... Read Article »
High school science textbooks are quick to point out that virtually everything in existence today was at some point formed by the intense heat, pressure and combustion of past stars. All the elements heavier than hydrogen and helium are formed in stars and, during... Read Article »
F. Scott Fitzgerald, as quoted by Matthew Bruccoli, recognized the importance of his own novel and its artistic achievements: “Gatsby was far from perfect in many ways but all in all it contains such prose as has never been written in America before. [&hellip... Read Article »
In the society that Giovanni Boccaccio’s The Decameron is set in, women generally are held in a lower social standing than men. As with most societies until relatively recently in history, women were not allowed to have a significant role in society, other than... Read Article »
William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom! begins in the year 1833, when the stranger, Thomas Stupen, rides into Jefferson, Mississippi, and promptly begins building himself an empire. He builds a plantation named Stupen’s Hundred, takes a wife, Ellen Coldfield... Read Article »
The introduction of Christianity to England in 597 established a structured, uniform faith among a people accustomed to different branches and pockets of polytheistic paganism. Over the next seventy-five years, the burgeoning country quickly grew unified under the... Read Article »
North and South is a novel defined by the resolution of binary conflicts: heroine Margaret Hale is presented with a number of divisions of sympathy, between industrialists and the working class, between conflicting views of Mr. Thornton, and even between her conflicting... Read Article »
Every person has a birthplace, a starting point that offers a sense of identity for an individual. Through this start, this receding to the roots mentality, one examines their present in terms of their constructed past. Salman Rushdie touches upon this concept of past... Read Article »
Bohumil Hrabal was born in 1915, and lived through some of the most tumultuous years of Czech history. Hrabal grew up in the time of the First Republic, when Literature moved away from nationalism to a more aesthetic view. In this frame, Hrabal likely grew up reading... Read Article »
If Bulgakov is a well know name, the same cannot be said for Matos, who was a literary man considered one of the Croatian masters of Modernism, and a key persona in the country’s culture. He was not only a writer, but also a poet, a journalist, and an essayist... Read Article »
Despite both being the leading female characters in their respective pieces, Christabel from Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Christabel and Madeline from John Keats’ The Eve of St. Agnes have many striking similarities. Throughout both poems, the two women are... Read Article »
Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” is about a man on a voyage by ship, who in one impulsive and heinous act, changes the course of his life – and death. The Mariner faces an inner struggle over the crime he has... Read Article »
In Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, the author characterizes each woman as passive, disposable and serving a utilitarian function. Female characters like Safie, Elizabeth, Justine, Margaret and Agatha provide nothing more but a channel of action for the male characters... Read Article »
Jean-Baptiste Clamence in Albert Camus's The Fall and the mysterious Ancient Mariner in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner each experience something that radically shifts his worldview and his view of himself. Arrogant and overly confident,... Read Article »
The attacks of September 11th have frequently been characterized as unimaginable, capable of inflicting confusion and emotional trauma beyond the scope of other historical events. On September 12th, 2001, N.R. Kleinfeld of the New York Times asserted plainly that the... Read Article »
The number of ancient sources available to the readers and playwrights of Elizabethan times was truly immeasurable. These sources could be reached both as original texts in Greek and Latin, and in French and English translations. Popular indirect sources were translations... Read Article »
Children’s Literature in the context of this research paper (and hopefully too in the eyes of the majority) is the ultimate escape; it is neither box nor leash nor constraint of any sort. It is the one genre of Literature that does not hold itself to a predetermined... Read Article »
When considering historical Literature that is based upon people who once lived, readers often ask where the details are taken directly from historical accounts, and where they differ. This is a perfectly valid lens through which to view the work, but one should not... Read Article »
Even in fairy tales and fantastical legends, the trespassing of the breathing upon the domain of the spirits is rare. It is a disturbing idea; when the dead visit our world, we can at least find comfort in numbers. Yet the hero Odysseus braves the unknown and looks... Read Article »
The language of religion plays an important part in the novels Brown Girl, Brownstones; The Farming of Bones; and In the Time of the Butterflies. In Brown Girl, Brownstones, the author presents the intricate Silla as a woman who is weary of her work and calls on the... Read Article »
Why raise the curtain on this 45 day by 45 night saga? In a story whose ending everybody knows already, why choose these actions of these characters to expound upon? The Iliad is not a war tale one might tell in which friends love friends, who in conjunction hate... Read Article »
That wars are fought by the young for the old is a universally known truth. It is an ancient argument, a tired anti-war theme. Tired not in that it is hackneyed or obsolete, but in that its hollering admonitions have for all of time fallen on ears consistently deafened... Read Article »
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