Every four years, two children from the village of Gavaldon are kidnapped. They’re taken to the famed School for Good and Evil, where they are trained to be either storybook heroes or villains. The lovely but arrogant Sophie can’t wait to be kidnapped. She knows...
Neil Gaiman’s books feature young protagonists who are not like other ‘normal’ kids of their age. The protagonists are precocious, naturally curious to explore. Neil Gaiman’s books have a fairy tale aspect combined with dark themes and follow a similar pattern. In Neil Gaiman’s book...
A mermaid is a creature that is half woman and have fish. The literal meaning of “Mer” means “the sea”. The male version is called a merman. Legends of the Mer go back thousands of years. There are even some skeptics who say that once...
In West African culture, Anansi is a cunning god, who takes the shape of a spider. He is known to be a trickster and very deceitful. He is considered the god of all knowledge of stories. In other words, Anansi owns all stories. In Anansi...
What is a Witch? A witch, in the most simple form, is a woman believed to have magic or supernatural abilities and that these powers are used for evil or nefarious purposes. Many people accused of being a witch were thought to be associated with...
Ransom Riggs, an American filmmaker and writer, first got his idea for a novel with pictures when he randomly ran across some sinister-looking vintage photos. Ransom recalls, “the photos suggest stories even though you don’t know who the people are or exactly when they were...
I think it’s fascinating that a children’s story that is more than 90 years old can be so popular and beloved to this day, becoming an important part of children’s reading history around the world. For this paper, I will be analyzing A.A. Milne children’s...
Octavia Butler’s Kindred involves two central themes of time travel and slavery. Published in 1979, the novel focuses on many issues during slavery in the 1800’s including the abuse of power, gender hierarchy, and the outcome of racial conflict. The novel features a twentieth century...
Green Girl is a fantasy story written by Cyan Abad Jugo. Although it may sound like a story for children, the story is actually not meant for kids. Green Girl is actually a story that raises the issue of gender and social criticism. However, as...
Is the real beast the patriarchy? From a story where beauty becomes a beast, underlying issues of femininity, identity, and society are questioned, years before Disney upheld traditional notions of a female’s role through their portrayal of Beauty and the Beast. The Tiger’s Bride by...
I give the book Becoming the Dragon (The Dragon Inside Book 1) 3 out of 4 stars. It’s not my typical genre, but I have really enjoyed reading this. The reason I gave it 3 stars instead of 4 stars is because when the book...
Being overcome with feelings of anger, sadness, happiness, joy, worry, disgust-whatever it may be, with fingers dry from flipping pages like they have got a mind of their own, and eyes frantically scanning for sentences and words-for whatever happens next. Sometimes being so transfixed with...
The movie I have chosen to talk about is titled “The Wizard of Oz”. Over going each genre and carefully selecting which genre this movie falls under, I picked the Fantasy Genre. One scene in the film that sticks out to me in specific is...
Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls, which appeared in 1982, depicts key themes such as feminism and oppression throughout history. Through the main character, Marlene, we are able to see aspects of individualism, as Marlene abandons her own daughter, Angie, due to her own career aspirations....
The 1980s were a decade of unfettered capitalist excess in the United States. It was a time when Gordon Gecko’s mantra, “greed is good”, was the status quo. A former Hollywood actor, Ronald Reagan, was the president. The failure in Vietnam and Jimmy Carter’s administration...
“Once upon a time….” the ideal beginning that conceives every child to know there will be a happy ending in a story. Fantasy is a gift that is given to us as a child and is lost as an adult, what we do not realize...
A home is one of the places in which an individual feels the most safe and enjoys spending a lot of their time. In Octavia E. Butler’s novel, Kindred, the concept of home is complicated by the clashing emotions of the characters Dana and Kevin....
Everyone has his or her own idea of literature and what separates a work of literary fiction from a work of popular fiction. Generally speaking, a work must adhere to literary traditions, convey a deeper meaning, and present conventional themes in order to be recognized...
The biggest difference that I noticed between the French version of Beauty and the Beast and the Disney version is the Disney version’s character development. In the French version, it talks about Beauty’s story and how she had to leave her father and fall in...
“The cradle rocks above an abyss, and common sense tells us that our existence is but a brief crack of light between two eternities of darkness.” Vladimir Nabakov often told stories of men and women destroyed by unknowing forces and desires driving them to madness....
Growing up means growing up with stereotypes and gender roles following behind like an annoying friend. They mature, starting from being expected to playing with and nursing dolls, or destroying toys and playing in the mud, and from there never seem to end. As a...
During his search to find his missing twin sister, Will Cleary gets drawn into a mysterious crystal-like world parallel to his own. This world is populated by Echoes, a reflection of the Sounds residing in the living world. When a person (or Sound) dies, his...
E.T.A. Hoffmann never reveals the true nature of his protagonist Nathanael’s childhood incident, and thus by design creates ambiguity within The Sandman. This ambiguity leads to two possible interpretations of the story, one of reality and one of fantasy. Neither of the interpretations dominates the...
E.T.A. Hoffman’s “The Sandman” could easily be read as a satire that rails against meek, docile women. However, when looking at the form of feminism in this story, one finds that the protagonist Nathaniel seems to struggle with an abstract mind, while the women who...
In “The Sandman” by E.T.A. Hoffmann, Nathanael composes a letter to his fiancée’s brother Lothar recalling the terror of the legendary Sandman who would steal the eyes of children who wouldn’t go to bed and feed them to his own children in the moon. From...
Reader response criticism is a school of formal literary theory that focuses on the reader and their experience of literature. A prime thematic or style that can be found in many of Neil Gaiman’s novels is his manner of taking the unknown and mysterious and...
Gwenhwyfar’s Counsel ‘She Igraine, mother of Arthur could do nothing but wait. It was a woman’s fate to sit at home, in castle or cot — it had been so since the Romans came. Before that, the Celtic Tribes had followed the counsel of their...
In 1955 C. S. Lewis wrote and published The Magician’s Nephew, a high fantasy adventure story set in early 20th century England, a prequel to the other stories in The Chronicles of Narnia. In the story, Digory Kirke, a young boy, travels to a strange...
When it comes to works of fiction, it is always most interesting to see where the author draws inspiration for the major characters from and what the underlying message of the story at hand. Disillusioned from faith as a child, C. S. Lewis would find...
As Course Hero’s infographic on Beowulf shows, pop culture has borrowed extensively from the poem — sometimes directly referencing Beowulf (as in Star Trek and in Xena ). More often, we’ve seen Beowulf shaping literature and film through monster outcast and dragon characters (e.g., Godzilla,...
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