Kim by Rudyard Kipling
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The theme that interests us is the quest for identity in Rudyard Kipling's novel Kim. The book was written in 1901 and the plot takes place in India during the time of the British colonization. Kim presents several quests: a quest implies that the protagonist has to seek something noble,...
"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...
Heteroglossia and Shelly's Frankenstein
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to M. M. Bahktin, heteroglossia is the use of different novelistic modes of expression (authorial speech, narrators, inserted genres, speech of characters, dialogue, etc.) to express and represent the diversity of social speech types and a diversity of individual voices. Mary Shelly's...
Rushdie: A Bend in Indian History
Essay - 3 pages - Modern history
Salman Rushdie has been in hiding for over a decade due to assassins who are out searching for him because of his “anti-Islamic blasphemy, belief and disbelief, anti-Thatcher politics, and pro-Western propaganda” (Kuortti 1999: 15). Even though Iranian leader, Khomeini, who initially...
'We don't live here anymore': The historicity of what was once the deserted house
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Historically, women in industrialized societies are placed at a double disadvantage; in addition to occupational workloads and/or the rigor of citizenship, they are also responsible for the daily maintenance of the domestic sphere. In regarding women's experiences in Stalinist-era Soviet Russia,...
Revolt against blandness: Language, sexuality and idealism in The Catcher in the Rye
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
J.D. Salinger's novel, The Catcher in the Rye, was published in the early 1950's, a time of refinement and standardized ways of living. Salinger experienced firsthand the terrors of World War II, as well as life in America during an uncertain time. Salinger's early influences at school...
Austen Literary Essay
Case study - 3 pages - Literature
Jane Austen frequently uses the ironic narrator in her novels to give her stories more depth. Instead of having stories where the outcome is obvious to reader, Austen incorporates ironic narrators whose points of view get mixed into our own. But writing with an ironic narrator is nothing...
Darwin and darwinian infuence on Thomas Hardy (Jude The Obscure) and Lewis Carroll (Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and through the looking-glass)
Dissertation - 58 pages - Literature
Charles Darwin's theories upon “Evolution” had a great impact on the scientific world in the nineteenth century, and contributed to change with respect to mentalities in a well-established Victorian society. He is mostly remembered for his conception of Evolutionism based on his theory...
"The Odd Women" by George Gissing
Case study - 2 pages - Literature
The novel, “The Odd Women” by George Gissing is a refreshing novel of upcoming feminist movement involving the workplace. The novel has two prevalent themes presented in the beginning chapters concerning financial means and the idea of marriage. The novel...
Quicksand, Identity and Women's Experience
Case study - 2 pages - Educational studies
The thesis explores how issues related to class, race, and gender intersect to help shape Crane's struggle towards attaining autonomy and social stability in the 20th century (French and Allyson 457). It shows how class, race, and gender connect by paralleling the plight of Quicksand as a...
Catch-22 : black comedy or satire ?
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Catch-22, often considered as one of the literary masterpieces of the twentieth century, is also often analyzed as being either satirical, or characteristic of the theater of the absurd, or even both. At first sight, this appears to be totally irrelevant, given the subtle but still significant...
The theme of duality in "The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde"
Case study - 3 pages - Literature
The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde written by Robert Louis Stevenson examines the line between fact and the scientific unknown. Stevenson was an intellectual who like many others in his day, was intrigued by the origin of man. He was a close supporter of Charles Darwin, a scientist who...
Good vs. Evil in both Macbeth and Lord of the Flies
Case study - 4 pages - Literature
In William Shakespeare's Macbeth, the once fearless and courteous Macbeth encounters three witches that foretell his future as the new King of Scotland. Intrigued by their prophecies and driven by the desire to become King over Scotland, the ambitious Macbeth along with his manipulative wife...
"Do I Dream?": The Role of the Nightmare in Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
According to Elizabeth MacAndrew, author of The Gothic Tradition in Fiction, the gothic novel is “[. . .] a literature of nightmare. Among its conventions are found dream landscapes and figures of the subconscious imagination” (3). Maggie Kilgour, author of The Rise of the...
Disgrace : Gender inequalities
Essay - 5 pages - Sociology
Historically in most societies that exist or have existed in the world equality between the genders is a mere ideal. Even in the present world societies still have a strong element of patriarchy within them. In J.M Coetzee's novel “Disgrace” Coetzee depicts a South African...
'Train to Pakistan', 'Cracking India', and 'The Inheritance of Loss'
Essay - 5 pages - Political science
Throughout “Train to Pakistan”, “Cracking India”, and “The Inheritance of Loss”, there are two narratives: we are shown the character's personal narrative, and the narrative of the nation. In each of these novels, we are shown at least one, if not many,...
Fitzgerald and modernism
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout periods of literature, Modernism has revolted against former social standards and subject matter that is both prohibited and restricted in conversation and literature alike. The early 1900s were a time when writers were determining for themselves what they deemed to be important and...
Compare and contrast Alan Paton's Cry, the beloved country and Chinua Achebe's Things fall apart
Thesis - 6 pages - Literature
Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country and Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart are both groundbreaking novels intertwining multifarious aspects of the human condition and human relationships to highlight the conflict between the white colonizers and native blacks in Africa at different points...
A review of Tom Perrotta's The Abstinence Teacher
Book review - 11 pages - Literature
Tom Perrotta, the reigning bard of American suburbia, can inspire compassion for the most unlikely of subjects. In Election, he humanizes heartless, bitchy Tracy; in Little Children, he measures out kindnesses to Larry the violent racist as well as Ronald the convicted sex offender. But in his...
Temporal and Spatial divides and identity in 'Lucy'
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Jamaica Kincaid's novel 'Lucy' illustrates the story of a girl with desperate desire to manipulate her personal identity. With motives so deeply ingrained in her determinedly expendable past and their manifestations in her present, her quest propels her obsessions divides past from...
Middlemarch, Part 6, Chapter 56 - George Eliot (1871-1872) - How does George Eliot, through a posterior view and a description of fictitious events, manage to present the prejudices of the time on the progress?
Text commentary - 3 pages - Economic politics
In 1919, Virginia Woolf writes, about Eliot's contribution to English literature, that her masterpiece Middlemarch is "one of the few English novels written for grown-up people". Indeed, Eliot's novel is known for its realism and its psychological insights on its different...
To Kill a Mockingbird
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
"Mockingbirds don't do one thing but make music for us to enjoy. They don't eat up people's gardens, don't nest in corncribs, they don't do one thing but sing their hearts out for us. That's why it's a sin to kill a mocking bird," explains Miss Maudie in Harper Lee's...
Okonkwo's Telling Duality
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart, the definitive post-colonial, African novel, focuses on a character who is in constant struggle with his tribe and with himself. Okonkwo, a purveyor of masculinity in his society, has many reasons for his actions in the novel. The continuing...
Book review: All Quiet on the Western Front by Erich Maria Remarque
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
All throughout time, since man was first given the ability to write, countless novels have been written on almost every subject conceivable. When it comes to literature on history, an infinite number of subtopics become available. Some examples include, war, peace, types of governments,...
Style vs. Substance in The Sea
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Sea is no doubt, a difficult novel to read. John Banville's language can be quite strenuous, and at some times, enigmatic. No major events or plot points seem to occur in The Sea, that is, externally. There is not much of a linear plot, if any. Almost everything that happens in the...
Facing adversity : Women and religion in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Alice Walker's “The Color Purple” is one of the most well known novels in contemporary literature. This book places the author among the top literary canon of American writers. Since its first publication in 1982, the novel continuously gains both positive acclaims and...
How is the traditional notion of subject challenged in "Boating for Beginners?" (Jeanette Winterson)?
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Boating for Beginners is the second novel published by Jeanette Winterson in 1985. It deals with the growing up of Gloria Munde, who seeks her way in the world. The resemblance between Gloria Munde and Jeanette Winterson is striking and some elements of Gloria's life echo...
The duality of Holocaust literature
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
Other than the odd revisionist, the vast majority of sentient humans will attest to the horror that was the Holocaust. Unfortunately, those who can give first hand testimonies are few in number and quickly disappearing. The story gets even more muddled when psychologists protest that memory is...
Society vs. desire
Thesis - 5 pages - Sociology
In America there is the idea that a person can be whoever and/or whatever they want and still have the chance to succeed. This is part of the so-called “American Dream”. This idea is often a theme in the American novel. However, in the American novel, despite a character's...
Representations of social class in popular literature
Thesis - 3 pages - Literature
Many of the texts studied in literature portray Canada as a country that is divided by social class. Three of these novels in particular are Who Do You Think You Are?, The Wars and In the Skin of a Lion. The first of these novels is a set of small stories that chronicles the main...
