What is true grit? The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines grit as “perseverance and passion for long term goals.” While the Merriam-Webster dictionary does provide an appreciable explanation of grit, no such definition exists for "true grit." True grit is far more challenging to place words upon;...
Jackie Kay has created a topic of controversy regarding gender identity in the novel Trumpet. Through the difference in perspectives on the gender of Joss Moody and Millie Moody, the novel contests the absoluteness of one’s identity by proving language’s inability to express it. Kay...
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Both Caldwell’s Tobacco Road and McCarthy’s Child of God concern themselves with quintessential poor white people. Tobacco Road follows the Lester family, a poor family on the outskirts of town, struggling for food and money during the Great Depression, whereas Child of God follows Lester...
The family has long been the most basic unit of human society. In a traditional sense, it typically functions as a support system, often both financially and emotionally, with each spouse supporting the other and together the parents supporting their children during their ascent into...
Introduction Published in The School of Eloquence in 1978, Tony Harrison’s “National Trust” is the embodiment of his frustrations at the British social-class system. Through this poem, he divulges how, after receiving a post-War opportunity for education, he was dislocated from his family. “National Trust”...
“V” is a poem in which Tony Harrison illustrates the working class hostility towards the political establishment and Margret Thatcher’s government during the 1984 miner’s strike. However, it also focuses on the unity between himself and his “woman” and well as his parents. It is...
Tadeusz Borowski is an inherently tragic author. His life as a guard in a German concentration camp is something to be pitied at best. While Borowski writes about his horrible experiences as a guard in his collection of short stories This Way for the Gas,...
As Gertrude Stein asserts in her lecture entitled “Composition as Explanation,” “Beauty is beauty even when it is irritating and stimulating not only when it is accepted and classic.” This quotation, especially the portion referring to the element of irritation present in much of Stein’s...
The Romantics sought to distinguish their work from the Enlightenment Era’s prioritisation of logic and reason by rejecting and, in effect, redefining literary convention. Coleridge’s conversation poems are considered hallmarks of Romanticism for their revolutionary treatment of form and confrontation of core 19th century values....
The narrator of Thomas Campion’s “There Is a Garden in Her Face” warns fellow admirers of a young girl’s beauty against taking advantage of her virginity. As indicated in the title, Campion uses words associated with gardens to describe the girl’s beauty; upon closer examination,...
In Theodore Roethke’s poem, “In a Dark Time,” the speaker crosses over into the undiscovered world of insanity and communicates perceptions that others have disproved. Likely representative of Roethke’s own personal struggles with schizophrenia, “In a Dark Time” displays the thought process of a disturbed...
In the book the Wednesday Wars, Holling Hoodhood is a seventh grader at Camillo Junior High in suburban Long Island in the 1967-1968 school year, with the entire book set in the backdrop of the Vietnam War. Holling’s teacher is Mrs. Baker, whose husband is...
In his novel The White Boy Shuffle, Paul Beatty conveys what it is like for a young African American male to grow up in Santa Monica, a coastal town heavily populated by chauvinistic Caucasians with social dominance – at least in the eyes of protagonist...
The works of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf represent the eve of first-wave feminism, where traditional Victorian principles have been challenged by controversy in the Royal Family, the more assertive role that women played in the First World War and receiving the vote for women...
In The Cider House Rules, Homer, the protagonist, after stifling all of the uncomfortable situations in his life would “lay awake [at night] because the phantoms of those days were not gone” (312). While Homer liked to think that he was in control of his...
Introduction In The Vicar of Wakefield, although Charles Primrose portrays almost flawless virtue, he retains two major flaws, pride and obstinacy, which lead to many complications in his family’s life. The Primrose family suffers from the retribution of these flaws until they are finally purged...
With the close of the 19th century and the dawn of the 20th, much of the world was changing. In particular, world literature was shifting from the ideals of Romanticism to the stark realism of novels written after the Great War. At the beginning of...
The Martians in the book and the movie The War of the Worlds are a metaphor for the evils of cultural imperialism because their arrival severs the most important means of communication and transportation technology, challenges religion, and leaves identity unclear. The Martians in The...
The Unbearable Lightness of Being is as much of a philosophical work as it is a fictional story, not following a typical plotline. The novel includes multiple interwoven plotlines surrounding different characters with the same events being narrated many times from different characters’ points of...