The themes of misinterpretation and passivity are threaded throughout Beroul's text "The Romance of Tristan": characters often misread signs and events, as well as each other. There are several key misinterpretations in the story that reveal where the author's true sympathies lie. Because most of...
“A profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture” To what extent do you agree with this assessment of the novel? Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it Each essay is customized to cater to your unique preferences + experts online Get my...
Stevens believes that to be a great butler, one must maintain their professional facade at all times in order to remain dignified (or at least, the ability to maintain a professional facade regardless of one’s circumstances is Stevens’ definition of dignity). This results in him...
In John Vanbrugh’s The Relapse; or Virtue in Danger, Act I, scene i. plays a crucial role in establishing the theme of appearance versus reality. Because this play is a continuation of Colley Cibber’s Love’s Last Shift, it is imperative that the first scene of...
In The Remains of the Day, Kazuo Ishiguro exemplifies English identity from the perspective of the butler of a prominent estate, Mr. Stevens of Darlington Hall. Ishiguro uses Mr. Stevens’s account to establish English identity, allowing Mr. Stevens’s conservative perspective to be a commentary on...
In her essay, “Origins of the Novel”, Marthe Robert characterises the novel as knowing “neither rule nor restraint. Open to every possibility, its boundaries fluctuate in all directions”. Indeed, both Madame de Lafayette’s The Princess de Cleves and Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko are often claimed to...
Set during the throws of the Cold War offensive and the threat of the domino theory in Asia, Graham Greene’s fiction annexes his experiences as a war correspondent in Indochina during the years 1951 – 1954 into his works, impart reasoning and voice into a...
The long, antepenultimate paragraph of “The Portrait of Mr. W.H.” neatly interrupts the dialogue that has just revealed the true nature of the death of Erskine, a friend of the narrator. The narrator is taking in the shocking news that Erskine had died naturally of...
Writing on nineteenth-century London poetry, William Sharpe comments that ‘Regardless of shared reference to sublimity, fog, of Babylonian blindness, each poet’s London is different. Each time we read ‘London’ we have to begin again.’ For poets in the late eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries, London...
In psychology, one of the most frequently debated topics deals with the issue of environmental and societal impact on one’s upbringing. It is commonly believed that society plays a tremendous role in how one behaves and how one readily conforms to the environment he is...
“On her long journey from Rome her mind had been given up to vagueness; she was unable to question the future. She performed this journey with sightless eyes and took little pleasure in the countries she traversed, decked out though they were in the richest...
In Graham Greene’s dynamic novel The Power and the Glory, we follow the Whiskey Priest throughout his harrowing journey as he runs for his life, avoiding capture and death at the hands of the Lieutenant. This novel shows the development of the priest as he...
In The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, Hoppie Groenewald is a train guard, conductor and star welter-weight boxer. While reading the book, the reader will notice Hoppie does not have as extensive of a role as some other characters but is undoubtably the strongest...
Throughout the poem “Wind”, by Ted Hughes, there are two significant symbols. In the poem, the house (and its surroundings) is one of the main subjects and symbolizes a relationship between the writer and another person. The second symbol in the poem is the “menacing...
The message of “Leda and the Swan” is often interpreted in drastically different ways due to the ambiguity of the text. Much of this ambiguity can be attributed to intentional contradiction by the author, William Butler Yeats. This contradiction emphasizes the nature of sexism, for...
Sonnets are traditionally fourteen line poems written in iambic pentameter. They often adhere to either a Shakespearean, Petrarchan, or Spenserian rhyme scheme, or they can contain a mixture known as a diaspora rhyme scheme. Many times, sonnets are about topics such as mortality, love, time,...
One of the most potent works by the writer D.H Lawrence is The Piano, a poem that explores the role of memory in life. A similar idea is explored in The Gift by Li Young Lee. These two poems show that memory plays a complex...
Both the speakers in “The Gift” by Li-Young Lee and “My Papa’s Waltz” by Theodore Roethke look up to their fathers with wide-eyed admiration. Comparing these two poems, we can say that what stands out the most is the similar theme – each boy has...
Famous Romantic era poet Percy Shelley once noted that “a poet is a nightingale, who sits in darkness and sings to cheer its own solitude with sweet sounds”. In his 2008 poetry anthology Behind My Eyes, IndoChinese-American author Li Young Lee sings thirty nine different...