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Topic: English
Page 1/7 | Showing results 1 - 21 of 129
In Seneca's tragedies, the Roman playwright and philosopher employed the concept of fate and fortune to structure the outcome of characters' lives. Frederick Kiefer notes in Fortune and Elizabethan Tragedy that the Senecan chorus primarily discusses the characters&... 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 »
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 »
In Plautus’ Roman Comedies, the stock character of the slave employs mistaken identity or a disguise to deceive his master and others to invert the social order of the play, characterizing the slave as intelligent, cunning, and deceitful. Michael Shapiro writes... Read Article »
Shakespeare’s comedies, at first glance, seem to uniformly end on a positive note, with the fulfillment of desires, the overcoming of obstacles, and the victory over malevolent forces. In Twelfth Night and Measure for Measure, however, this is not the case. The... Read Article »
Stephen Mitchell’s interpretation of the 3500 year old Sumerian epic, Gilgamesh, offers valuable lessons behind its monster-slaying, glory-seeking adventures. One such lesson explores the relationship between extremes and balance. Gilgamesh, the king of Uruk,... Read Article »
Born in 1830 to Calvinist parents in Massachusetts, Emily Dickinson is renowned as one of America’s greatest poets. Though her poems often focused on death, she in fact wrote on many subjects. Life, nature, love, science, heaven, hell, religion, writing, and... Read Article »
In the western history of human existence the event, idea, and act of war stands totemic in the landscape. Borders both physical and mental have been defined by its threat and execution, and its aura hangs heavily over the last century as the bloodiest in the entire... Read Article »
In The Catastrophist, Ronan Bennett draws on events in Ireland to frame the political situation in the Congo and depicts political parallels between the two countries. Simultaneously he uses the reporting of these events to attack the “culture of aloofness based... 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 »
Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest and Henry James' Daisy Miller seemingly differ greatly in style. The forms--play and nouvelle--are of course different. Earnest is 'one of the great comedies in the English language' (Cave 419). Daisy is filled with rich... 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 »
Perusing famous works of literature, one would be hard pressed to find a volume that does not concern itself with the relationship of a creation to its creator. It is a central concern of most religious texts, as well as much of the narrative literature that the academic... 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 Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita, the overriding force of the narrator, Humbert Humbert, is his need to prove himself master of everything: other people, his own desires, fate, and language itself. Time and time again through Lolita we see Humbert’s most extreme... Read Article »
The confluence of biography and fiction in Virginia Woolf's Orlando raises the question, of which the book is highly aware, of which genre facilitates the proper perception of the truth. As Woolf writes, “Life, it has been agreed by everyone whose opinion is... Read Article »
Aphra Behn’s 1688 novel Oroonoko leaves many questions unanswered.[1] In one of many seeming contradictions within the text, one wonders how Behn, personally victimized by Charles II and an economic system that sought to disenfranchise her,[2] would glorify a... Read Article »
“No damn cat, and no damn cradle.” (Vonnegut 66). This quote encompasses the satiric postmodern themes of absolute truth in Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle. There are several significantly strong postmodern concepts Vonnegut brings into view in this... Read Article »
The world in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World has one goal: technological progress. The morals and aspirations of the society are not those of our society today - such as family, love, and success - but instead are focused around industry, economy, and technologic... Read Article »
Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s novella Herland explores a separatist feminist utopia. Published in 1915, Herland begins when three men – a womanizer, a Southern gentleman fixated on woman as domestic angels, and a narrator who represents a neutral opinion &... Read Article »
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