Journey’s End’ by R.C, Sherriff was written in the late 1920s when attitudes towards the First World War began to change and people began to realise the horrors of the war and face them. This play offers different view than most about the commanding officers...
Jonathan Swift played the misanthrope; that is, such was his thorough enjoyment in moralising those practices he perceived to be symptomatic of the rancid condition of human nature, that this vehemence became as much a part of his poetry as the derision itself. In many...
The gender dynamic constructed in the Restoration and early eighteenth century British literature manifested itself around the conceptual binary of man and woman. The debate that appears in literature of this time roots itself in societal expectations for the performance of gender: when these expectations...
Of the many themes in Joseph Andrews, one of the most complicated issues is the value of a formal education. Throughout the novel, Parson Adams is depicted as a man who has been educated in the classics, and a formal education is important to him....
In his novel Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding uses irony to express satire and offer social commentary. Irony “results when there is a disjunction between what an audience would expect and what really happens.” The dominant form of irony in Joseph Andrews is dramatic irony: Fielding...
Modernism as a literary genre began sometime before the First World War. It was, however, in the fires of this great conflict that the genre was forged and adopted its characteristics of disorientation and disconnection. The development of modernism can be traced in the poetry...
Jesus’ Son by Denis Johnson and Identity and Intercultural Communication by Judith Martin and Thomas Nakayama are both concerned with identity and the effect it can have on the way someone’s life turns out. While Jesus’ Son is a book of short stories about a...
Considering its initial publication in 1892, during the era of the Civil War and Reconstruction, Frances E. W. Harper employs the meaning of racial uplift through passing. During the era of slavery, the phenomenon of racially passing was a common practice in that it gave...
In Daniel Quinn’s Ishmael, Mother Culture is the embodiment of unquestioned influences man is accustomed to living by. Her story tells the Takers that they were intended to lead the world into paradise; however, quite the opposite happened. Because of Mother Culture’s bias towards the...
Immigrants almost inevitably face immense challenges pursuing the American Dream–socially, economically, perhaps even internally. Such struggles are evident in the novel “Jasmine,” Bharati Mukherjee’s richly descriptive and emotionally powerful novel about a young immigrant woman. Mukherjee vividly brings to life the theme of rebirth in...
When placed in an environment of high stimulation, populace, and activity, one may begin to feel the desire to escape or detach from civilization. Such environments, most notably urban cities, often consist of a variety of tall buildings, which contain numerous tiny living spaces. Such...
In “Model Minority” by Jason Koo and “Clashing in Coney Island” by Sheila Maldonado, both authors portray a sense of cultural identity within their writing to capture the complexity of being a minority in America. Koo and Maldonado are Brooklyn poets who write about their...
All people go through change over the course of their lives, some fast, some slow, for better or for worse. Often events in one’s youth can be traced to be the origin of such change in direction. In many cases teenage years are the catalyst...
Inheriting the vices of both the black and white race, traditionally tragic mulatto characters have been comfortably depicted in much of abolitionist literature as intricately, and inextricably, conflicted individuals; miserable and without race “worshipping the whites and despised by them… despising and despised by Negroes.”...
Elizabeth Bishop ends her famous poem “One Art” with the lines, “It’s evident the art of losing’s not too hard to master / though it may look like… disaster.” Although “One Art” lists many literal and symbolic forms of loss, the one that becomes the...
Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities seems simple in its narrative construction, built on the use of short sections comprised of concise chapters that may better be understood as the tales the explorer Marco Polo tells the emperor Kublai Khan. However, an incisive textual analysis confronts the...
Suleiman’s innocence is shown to be the cause of his simplistic view of a hero and why he is unable to recognize instances of heroism displayed not only by those around him but also by himself. Hisham Matar’s novel In the Country of Men explores...
Ha Jin’s In the Pond is a tactful yet an oscillation between subtle and violent upheaval delineation of the decadent post Mao-China in a pro communist setting repleted with shades of corruption. Jin meticulously captures the panoramic view of the unscrupulous China which witnesses the...
Setting is an important part of Michael Ondaatje’s novel In the Skin of a Lion, symbolically underpinning the novel’s conceptual concerns. This narrative can be understood as a sweeping contemporary myth in which the setting works ironically and movingly, humorously and poignantly, to mirror and...