A review of Mead's God and Gold
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Walter Russell Mead's text God and Gold : Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World is a difficult work, especially in terms of contemporary criticism, because it is revered by both right-wing conservatives and some socialists. The book explains (and to some degree may even argue...
The theme of "incomprehension" in The Secret River, by Kate Grenville
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
According to one review, The Secret River “invites us to examine flawed human lives and to reflect on a tragedy of mutual incomprehension.” Discuss how this theme of “incomprehension” is explored in the novel. One of the main themes of The Secret River, a historical novel...
Spanish literature: The Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The Celestina and Lazarillo de Tormes, books written at the outset of Spain's golden age, are extremely important works. The Celestina is a love story, while Lazarillo de Tormes is one of the first picaresque novels. Despite this major difference, they are similar in that they are both critiques...
The Russian novel: the narrator's role in Tolstoy's Anna Karenina
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
“Death”(Part 5, chapter 20) is the only chapter of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina with a title. It is not the only death in the book; Anna's suicide at the end of the novel is arguably the story's most important death. Although the death of Nikolai Levin by no means drastically alters the...
Shakespeare's plays illustrated by Blake and Fuseli: The artists as critics
Essay - 11 pages - Literature
It has judiciously been pointed out that “pictures from Shakespeare account[ed] for about one fifth -some 2 300!- of the total number of literary paintings recorded between 1760 and 1900” (R. Altick). As a matter of fact, the renewed interest in nineteenth century British art in the...
Order and disorder in Robinson Crusoe
Book review - 14 pages - Literature
“Necessity is the mother of inventions” could undoubtedly be regarded as one of Daniel Defoe (1660 - 1731)'s favourite proverb, and indeed, he employed the maxim in his History of Trade, writing: “Necessity which is the Mother, and Convenience which is the Handmaid of Invention,...
Ernest Gellner: Nations and nationalism
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Ernest Gellner's Nations and Nationalism , which was published in 1983, is a core reading for the study of eighteenth and nineteenth-century European history for it cleverly conceptualizes notions -namely nationalism and nation-state- that are essential components of that period. The course...
Is "To Kill a Mockingbird" (by Harper Lee) a novel about racism?
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Writing To Kill a Mockingbird, Harper Lee has chosen to make a description of the Deep South during the Great Depression of the 30's through the eyes of a young girl, leaving us uncertain about the qualification of this novel. Indeed, reading the biography of the author, the reader realizes that...
Dr. Seward's blind rationalism in Bram Stoker's Dracula (1897)
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
Seward, young British physician and unreliable narrator, embodies late-Victorian scientism and rationalism in Bram Stoker's Dracula. Irony in Seward's portrayal reveals much of the author's criticism of the late-Victorian scientific establishment. Although Seward sees himself as...
Literature review on virtual tour technology
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
Numerous developments in virtual technologies show up in modern world creating for people more and more comforts and possibilities. Different kinds of visions that we may see with the help of virtual tour technology, have elevated the status of virtual environment to the level of pop...
Incidents in the life of a slave girl, by Harriet Jacobs
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The novel Incidents in the life of a slave girl is an autobiography written by Harriet Jacobs in 1861. In this book, she relates various events of the life she had when she was a slave in South Carolina. She confides in the reader and gives details of the difficulties she had to face in her...
King Lear, by William Shakespeare: My experience of reading Shakespeare
Essay - 4 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...
Essay on Hemingway's book: "The Sun Also Rises"
Book review - 2 pages - Literature
Published in 1926, The sun also rises is considered as one of Hemingway's best novels. It depicts the circle of American expatriate writers living in Paris in the 20's. Through drinks, rides in Montparnasse, fiestas in Spain, the relationship between Brett and Jake and the remaining...
The emotional and psychological reader's response in "The Yellow Wallpaper" and "The Blue Hotel"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
"The Yellow Wall-paper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman and "The Blue Hotel" by Stephen Crane are two short stories which, beyond the colour references in the title, try to develop certain psychological responses within the reader. I will attempt to show how through two different points of view for...
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...
Discuss the portrayal of city life in a group of works
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In this essay, we will look at how artists portray city life, how they make the most common things in our lives becoming special and how they transform reality into art. Indeed, everyday, ordinary life often becomes special under their brushes. Some of them like Degas or Toulouse-Lautrec liked...
The Fantasy in 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' by Robert Louis Stevenson
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, written by Robert Louis Stevenson, was an immediate success and had been revisited a number of times since its first publication in 1886. It can be considered as the Gothic tale par excellence. The Gothic genre started in the middle of the Eighteenth...
Choderlos de Laclos's : Les Liaisons Dangereuses
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Choderlos de Laclos's novel Les Liaisons Dangereuses has been the object of four main cinematic adaptations, all very different from one another or from the source text itself. These films are Les Liaisons Dangereuses 1960 (1959) by Roger Vadim, Dangerous Liaisons (1988) by Stephen Frears,...
The War (Marguerite Duras)
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Marguerite Duras was born near Saigon in Indochina in 1914. Her parents went to the French colony as teachers. She left Indonesia in 1932 to study political science and law in Paris. His childhood in Indonesia had a great impact on Duras and brought unity to her work. As she was living in Paris...
"The innocent anthropologist" Notes from a mud hut - a book of Nigel Barley By Penguin Travel Library (1983), Penguin Books
Book review - 12 pages - Literature
A respectable anthropologist, British Museum's curator, Nigel Barley is yet distinguishable by two aspects from his eminent colleagues. First he chose for his thesis to study "Old English material in published and manuscript form" (11), involving the disapproval of many ‘purists' of the...
Antony and Cleopatra: Shakespeare's criticism of the XVIIth century's anti-feminism
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
like in his other Roman plays like Julius Caesar, Shakespeare used in Antony and Cleopatra the description of the Roman society to describe his own society. But in this play the main point of analysis was not politics but the place of women in the society. During the XVIth and XVIIth centuries,...
Wuthering Heights - The Ending (An Attempt at a Commentary)
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
The passage, being at the very end of the novel, follows directly Heathcliff's death and stages the final events of Wuthering Heights. Prior to it, Nelly Dean gives her brief account of Heathcliff's death and funeral. Then, we are presented with her conversation with Lockwood who, in turn, puts...
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The scene takes place in a clearing, close to the Salinas river, “a few miles South of Soledad”, at dusk. Two men come (the two main characters), one following the other. The first one is George and the second one Lennie. They are ranch workers who travel together from a ranch to...
Commentary on an extract from O. Wilde, "The Picture of Dorian Gray" chapter 2
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
This passage takes place in the middle of chapter II, in which Lord Henry has just been introduced for the first time to Dorian by his friend Basil. During this scene of first encounter Lord Henry made an impressive philosophic speech about one's self and soul, moral influence, virtues and sins,...
Sir Francis Bacon's New Atlantis - The beginning
Book review - 7 pages - Literature
The beginning of the New Atlantis is, in the first place, an account of a long voyage across the Pacific, undertaken by a crew of 51 sailors. At the same time, it serves as a brief introduction to two different peoples - the sailors on the one hand and the Bensalemites on the other. The passage...
A comparative account of the French and the English versions of one Beckett's text
Thesis - 8 pages - Literature
Translation is usually studied from another language to ours, in order to consider changes that have to be made. With Samuel Beckett, it is interesting to analyze the process of translation from French, which is not his mother tongue, to English. In fact, Beckett was, in the 50's, one of the rare...
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...
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...
Barbara Blaugdone's An Account Of The Travels Sufferings & persecutions
Book review - 8 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...
"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...
