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...
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...
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...
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...
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 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...
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....
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...
Structure and texture in the "Good Soldier" by Ford Madox Ford
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
The Good Soldier is a novel written in 1914 by Ford Madox Ford and published in March 1915. This novel is considered as the best book of pre-war period. It is also considered as a modernist work, and in fact, many modernist innovations, as well as impressionist ones, are present...
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...
The Americanization of High Fidelity
Essay - 4 pages - Film studies
Many feel that a film adaptation needs to be completely faithful to it original written format. “When viewing the film version of a novel or play they know, they want to find in the film what they valued in the literary work, without asking whether this is the sort of thing film can...
Bakhtin's Dialogism In The Big Sleep
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Mikhail Bakhtin is a philosopher and theorist who defies easy categorization. He has been associated with Marxist Literary critics, Russian Formalists and structuralists. While he has elements in common with all three, he also differs greatly from them in fundamental ways. His works and...
Peyton Place: The Author, the bestseller and the legacy
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Artistic masterpieces can evolve from any genre. Pablo Picasso's abstract paintings are revered by some as just Leonardo Da Vinci's telling portraits are. The same principle can be applied to works of literature. Frontier adventure stories and political solutions written in the form of science...
Vision in the prologue and battle royal scene of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man
Book review - 8 pages - Literature
The most predominant theme in a noel full of them—Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man—is that of vision. More specifically, in Ellison's novel, how characters in the novel see the world reflect the prejudices and inaccurate perceptions of the society in which the protagonist...
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...
Artistic harmonious balance between the reader's mind and the author's mind
Thesis - 15 pages - Literature
Vladimir Nabokov boasts an impressive resume. As a writer, critic and scholar, he perfected both his own craft, and his ability to analyze the work of others. Similarly, within his texts, he focused a great deal of energy on the manipulation of his readers own reactions, earning him a reputation...
History, Memory, and Relationships with the Past in James Joyce's Ulysses
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The past can be a daunting thing. From personal memory to history at large, the past has the power to bury those unable to establish a healthy relationship with it. One can easily become trapped - paralyzed - in the past through guilt, regret, or nostalgia, emotions generated based upon...
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...
The Bluest Eye, by Toni Morrison
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
The Bluest Eye contains a number of autobiographical elements. It is set in the town where Morrison grew up (Lorain), and it is told from the point of view of a nine-year-old girl, the age Morrison would have been the year the novel takes place (1941). Like the MacTeer family, Morrison's...
Reflections of race and American culture in the 'Tom' show
Thesis - 10 pages - Literature
In Martin Scorsese's 2002 film Gangs of New York, the two main characters-Amsterdam Vallon (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Bill "the Butcher" Cutting (played by Daniel Day-Lewis)- attend a 'Tom' show (a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom's Cabin) in New York City. In this scene,...
Female protagonists in the sound and the fury and as I lay dying
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
“The following Ralph Ellison quote is often found on the book jackets of William Faulkner's novels: “For all his concern with the South, Faulkner was actually seeking out the nature of man. Thus we must turn to him for that continuity of moral purpose which made for the greatness...
The master book
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Creating a novel can be one of the most frustrating tasks for a writer to do. In the essay below, I will concentrate on the writing styles of six writers' from different writing genres, including technical writing, academic writing, and fiction writing. Comparisons will be drawn in...
Frankenstein and the problem of visual representation in film
Thesis - 3 pages - Film studies
Frankenstein by Mary Wollstonecraft Shelly is a classic novel that was written nearly two centuries ago. The title of the book is a reference to the scientist in the novel, Victor Frankenstein, who creates this creature that has the likeness of a human, but is larger and stronger,...
Postmodern and psychoanalytical approaches to Lolita
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Considering how multifaceted Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita is, it is possible to apply to it a variety of literary theories, all more or less fruitfully. In this paper, I will consider the postmodern and the psychoanalytic approach. We will find that Lolita is very much a postmodern text, despite...
The Necessary Female Perspective in To Kill A Mockingbird
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
If a producer was to make an adaptation of Harper Lee's, To Kill a Mockingbird and wanted to extricate Miss Maudie's role from the film, not only would the dynamic of the characters be irreparably damaged, but the film would also be excluding one of the most powerful humanizing forces in the...
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart Chronicles the life of Okonkwo
Essay - 4 pages - Logistics
Introduction Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart chronicles the life of Okonkwo, a clansman and leader of the Umuofia clan in Nigeria. Okonkwo is granted considerable fortune in the early part of the novel, but is soon beset with problems beyond his control. In the end, Okonkwo's problems...
Points of intersection: A handful of dust and St. Mawr
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
In Evelyn Waugh's novel A Handful of Dust as in D.H. Lawrence's novel St Mawr, a common rhetorical layer discusses the search for life's meaning, which in many aspects mirrors Ellington's experience of finding agreeability in music, as well as the sensation of childishness. In A...
Elsie Venner: A destiny of obscurity
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In it's own words, the novel Elsie Venner, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, has been called “A Romance of Destiny” (Title), “a medicated novel” (Preface 1), and a “test [of] the doctrine of ‘original sin' and human responsibility” (Preface 1). I...
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,...
