In both Porphyria’s Lover and Andrea del Sarto, Robert Browning explores the notions of love and its capacity to corrupt an individual’s character and potential through his signature diegetic form; the dramatic monologue. While the form of these two poems is based around an implied...
Though they come from the shores of different eras and the minds of different authors, the protagonists of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” Browning’s “Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came,” and T.S. Eliot’s “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” are all knights in their...
Of the consequences of maintaining an obsessive nature, its ability to cloud rational judgements and encourage humanity to surrender to his darkest, innermost impulses serves as one of its most tragic aspects. Robert Browning explores this concept through his poems “Porphyria’s Lover” and “My Last...
Women and Roses by Robert Browning explores the idea of dreams concerning love, in particular sexual love. The speaker imagines the three women of time as roses: the past, present, and future. Though this poem appeared within the repressive Victorian era, through the allusions and...
W. B. Yeats, whose advice J. M. Synge has followed in exploring the Aran Islands in the remote northwestern corner of Ireland in 1898, mentions that in Riders to the Sea one finds “first to last the presence of the sea”. The impression of the...
In Right You Are (If You Think So), Luigi Pirandello questions absolute truth by presenting various and contrasting perspectives of the same objects. The practice of highlighting multiple perspectives by showing several angles of the same object at once is one of the key elements...
It is a common notion for people to believe other people tend to have better lives than their own. Regardless of the situation, people will compare the worst part of their own life to the best parts of other peoples’ lives, creating a wider disparity...
Many of the popular texts found in 19th century American literature represent emotion, the effects of which can be perceived as both beneficial and dangerous to individuals and communities. In Lippard’s The Quaker City, the characters’ intense emotion help position the story as a cautionary...
Parents are innately protective of their children. They know that their children will meet struggles in their lives, but at one point the parent must let their child be and simply wish him or “her a lucky passage.” In “The Writer” by Richard Wilbur, the...
When colonial settlers arrived in North America on the Mayflower in 1620, the primary concern of the newly established society was to ensure survival; however, nowadays, Western consumer society has placed a significant emphasis on shallow ideals, particularly the worth of outward appearance. Over the...
Richard Wilbur’s poem “Boy at the Window” describes a young boy looking at the snowman he has built outside his window at twilight. Noting the cold outdoor environment in which his snowman must spend the night, the boy weeps; however, the poem reveals that the...
Richard Yates’s Revolutionary Road unveils the emptiness of suburban life by incorporating a play into the opening paragraphs and then continuing a metaphor of theater throughout the rest of the novel. The novel opens with theatrical failure that foreshadows the evident downfall of Frank and...
The first chapter of Remembering Babylon contains the introduction young boy, Gemmy, and his first encounter with the white settlers of Australia. The exposition foreshadows characters’ actions and potential conflicts, establishing later events in the novel and Gemmy’s eventual rejection from society. As Gemmy finds,...
Through war torn villages and billowing sorghum fields, author Mo Yan depicts the subtle joys and harsh realities of the life of a Chinese family during the Second Sino-Japanese War in his novel, Red Sorghum. The intensity of the challenges and hardships that face this...
In the novel Reef, there are a series of events that mark Triton’s (the protagonist’s) coming of age. To understand Gunesekera’s novel, a reader should heed these events and consider how these occurrences have shaped and affected the protagonist’s life. In the novel Triton holds...
Post-colonialism is concerned with the effects of colonization on the colonized. In fact, Richard Schur argues “that there can be no simple escape from the effects race, racism, gender, and sexism without some sort of decolonization” (277). One affect involves how language is used to...
Societally, most individuals enjoy believing that they are without bias. Whether it be gender, race, disability, or religion, everyone has preconceived notions about select people groups. While this can be difficult to admit, Toni Morrison constructs her short story, Recitatif, in a manner which forces...
In Redeployment, Phil Klay reveals the vulgar, brutal aspects of warfare behind the victories and heroism that are often shown in media. Through several short stories, Klay shares the difficult course that soldiers undergo with reconciling with their war experiences when they return home. Soldiers...
Both Tess of the d’Urbervilles and Rebecca are texts in which social class proves to be a factor in the relationships between lovers. Tess is born into a low class poor family, which significantly alters the outcome of events in her life. Contrastingly in Rebecca,...