Societal and Cultural Expectations for Young Adults 

A young teenage girl goes through a rough Christmas Eve dinner with her Chinese family and an American family as their guests in “Fish Cheeks” by Amy Tan. The main character, Amy, has fallen in love with the son in the American family. The point of view and the imagery in the short story work [...]

In the autobiographical narrative "Fish Cheeks," Amy Tan contrasts her perspective at a Christmas dinner with the other individuals at the same Christmas dinner to highlight her cultural shame. The embarrassment Tan feels of her culture is a main perspective depicted throughout this narrative. [...]

Much of Charles Dickens' representation of morality in his most famous of Christmas stories, A Christmas Carol, is derived from "the wisdom of our ancestors." (1) From the beginning of his narrative Dickens explains his usage of the phrase "dead as a doornail," in relation to Marley, as trusting [...]

Dickens’s “A Christmas Carol” is set in Victorian London and tells the story of the transformation of a wicked, miserly Scrooge into a benevolent humanitarian via supernatural intervention. The invited reading persuades readers to accept that despite the gap between rich and poor, inspired [...]

"When Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1515, he started a literary genre with lasting appeal for writers who wanted not only to satirize existing evils but to postulate the state, a kind of Golden Age in the face of reality" (Hewitt 127). Unlike a Utopian novel in which the writer intends to portray [...]

“Nobody is a villain in their own story. We're all the heroes of our own stories.” According to George R.R. Martin, an estimable American novelist, an individual's perspective ultimately decides whether he views himself as a protagonist and deems his doings morally correct. These seem to be the [...]

Like Christmas morning itself - when each present represents a discrete mystery, separate from the last - the Christmas Carol is divided into a set of episodes. The book's chapters are episodic, with the duration of each spirit a single episode. Within each chapter, there a number of discrete [...]

“O, brave new world!” John joyfully proclaims after being told he will have the chance to live in the World State with Bernard and Lenina (Huxley 93). Upon first reading dystopian literature, one might feel much like John, assuming a more progressive society full of equality and promoted [...]

Both texts highlight and effectually foreground, the need for humanity to learn from its mistakes for its ultimate survival. The social, cultural and historical milieu of a composer’s era, significantly molds construction of their text and the ideals, values and attitudes that they choose to [...]