Essays on Literary Genres

3307

Yiyun Li’s Use of Repetition to Define What Love is

3 pages / 1144 words

Many authors use different types of form in order to inform content, enhance their stories, and stress the messages that they are trying to get across. Yiyun Li effectively uses this technique in her short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, by using...

Short Story

3308

Feelings in Laurence Sterne’s a Sentimental Journey Through France and Italy

2 pages / 779 words

Travel literature became, after the novel, the most famous literary genre in the eighteenth century. Thanks to the geographical discoveries made by important navigators of that time, enlightened people finally could explore with their imagination a ‘new World’. Inevitably, the growing interest in knowing the...

Book Review Feeling Novel

3309

Controlling Exchange: Money in a Sentimental Journey

4 pages / 1891 words

In A Sentimental Journey, Laurence Sterne places a peculiar emphasis on the exchange of money. An intentional stress on this topic is clear in the monetary terms found throughout the text, especially as metaphors in unexpected places. The process of buying and selling provides opportunities...

Money Novel

3310

Latino Identities and Sexuality in "The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao"

4 pages / 1598 words

In his novel The Brief and Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz examines Latino identities and sexuality, and the ways in which both are affected and informed by violence. This violence is enacted through institutions like the state, through representation and misrepresentation, and by...

Novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

3311

An Analysis of Motifs in a Room with a View

2 pages / 1130 words

“For a moment [George] contemplated her, as one who had fallen out of heaven. He saw radiant joy in her face, he saw the flowers beat against her dress in blue waves. The bushes above them closed. He stepped quickly forward and kissed her” (Forster...

Novel

3312

Analysis of The Last Three Paragraphs of Chapter 1 of "A Room with a View"

4 pages / 1607 words

The last three paragraphs of Chapter 1 of “A Room with a View” describe the actions of the two female protagonists, Lucy Honeychurch and Miss Bartlett, when they find themselves alone in their own rooms. This short scene is a brief yet extremely accurate representation...

Novel

3313

A Lack of Communication Between Cecil and Lucy in a Room with a View

3 pages / 1166 words

Every year, incredible amounts of time and money are spent on court cases for sexual harassment and divorce. Perhaps a male supervisor made an unwanted advance on a female employee because he thought that her body language or clothing invited a sexual encounter. Or maybe...

Novel

3314

The Sense of Freedom in a Room with a View

3 pages / 1422 words

E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View contains two curiously named chapters: “Fourth Chapter” and “Twelfth Chapter.” Every other chapter in this early 20th century novel has a descriptive, often humorous title. For example, the chapter that follows “Twelfth Chapter” is entitled “How Miss...

Novel

3315

Longfellow’s Psalm of Life: Action, not Existence, Precedes Essence

2 pages / 1062 words

Longfellow first published his poem “A Psalm of Life” in 1836 in the literary magazine The Knickerbocker. As one might intuit from the name of the publication, that magazine was New York-based and Yankee-centric. A much wider readership was reached two years later when the...

Poetry

3316

Sex, Disjunction and The Narrative Voice in Forster's Writings

3 pages / 1414 words

“Only connect,” E.M. Forster’s inscription to Howard’s End, is more problematic than it ought to be. It is a typically Forsterian injunction: idealistic, sweetly humanist and absolute, but vague and stated to be challenged. First, to what does the statement apply? It is there beneath...

Howards End Novel

3317

Conflicting Impulses: Desire and Convention in E. M. Forster’s a Room with a View and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of The Day.

3 pages / 1501 words

The conflict between a conventional lifestyle and the desire to follow individual passion is a struggle that pervades both E. M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day. Despite differing in subject matter and style, both novels depict...

Novel

3318

Edmund Burke’s Reflections on The Sublime

6 pages / 2859 words

In his aesthetic treatise A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origins of Our Ideas of the Sublime and the Beautiful (1757), Edmund Burke (1729-1797) proposes his concept of the sublime. Although several eighteenth-century commentators had attempted the same thing, Burke’s Enquiry far exceeds the others in...

Science Fiction

3319

The Role of Clothing and Ornaments in "A Sentimental Education"

4 pages / 1869 words

Nineteenth century novelists used physical descriptions in their narratives to impose a thematic integrity onto their characters. Flaubert, it could be argued, likewise followed the traditions of realism and moderated Frédéric’s inclinations towards romanticism with an ironic and oftentimes pessimistic tone. Many characters in A...

Character Novel

3320

Stigma of Dependence: Character Analysis in Three Recent Novels

6 pages / 2566 words

In recent years, the age of maturity in Western cultures has been pushed higher and higher as more education becomes necessary to pursue job opportunities. Crashing economies increasingly force children to rely on their parents after graduation. Despite the practical necessity of taking a few...

Character Literature Review Novel

3321

A Lost Ideal: Perspective in Willa Cather’s a Lost Lady

4 pages / 1900 words

Willa Cather has artistically crafted the ending of A Lost Lady so that Marian Forrester comes out a survivor rather than a lost lady as the title suggests. This use of irony is very important because it opens up questions about the nature of the...

Novel

3322

The Theme of The "Outsider" in a Month in The Country

2 pages / 896 words

Written by J.L Carr, A Month in the Country focuses on the story of Tom Birkin; a veteran of World War I who, after his wife leaves him, takes a job to restore a medieval painting in the church of a small village in Yorkshire...

Fiction

3323

"A Man Called Horse" as Transgression of The Western Genre

3 pages / 1418 words

Dorothy M. Johnson’s short story “A Man Called Horse” transgresses some of the conventions of the classical Western genre. In this sense, Johnson’s text can be read as a “revisionist Western”, in so far as Johnson does not merely adhere to the dominant norms and...

Short Story The West

3324

Loss of Innocence in "Lost Lady" by Willa Carther

3 pages / 1453 words

The preciousness of life is something that can often be forgotten. Things come and go, seasons change, and in a modernistic culture the day can shift beneath our feet in a moment’s notice. In this modernizing world, the real question that comes about is what...

Novel

3325

Plot Structure Comparison: a Pale View of Hills and Waiting for The Barbarians

3 pages / 1340 words

Plot structure in any novel is an important literary technique that can differ greatly from one novel to another. While the actual story tells the reader the events that happen to the characters, the plot is the technique used to form a time line for...

Novel Waiting For The Barbarians