Study Like a Boss
Comedy, Courtly Love, Drama, Fiction, Poetry, Protagonist, Short Story, Tragedy, 1984, A Raisin in The Sun, Animal Farm, Beowulf, Fahrenheit 451, Frankenstein, George Orwell, Hamlet, Into The Wild, Lord of The Flies, Macbeth, Of Mice and Men, A Modest Proposal, All Quiet on The Western Front, Allegory, Antigone, Between The World and Me.
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake is a story that is parallel to Nikolai Gogol’s short story The Overcoat. Gogol’s work is commended and mentioned countless times by Lahiri in her writing. The Overcoat is about a man named Akaky Akakievich, who, at first, is content with his life then begins to question his identity. In an … Read more
As a historical novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet[1] alludes to many occurrences, people, places, government acts, and organizations confirming the novel’s veracity by employing history. The book covers the period 1941-1986, a period of over forty years. During this time, Henry witnesses the tragedy of World War II, the tensions between … Read more
For centuries, countries have fought with one another over power. Whether squabbling over who has control of their nation or who really owns a territory, struggles over domination have been commonplace throughout history, featuring not only countries as a whole, but their individual settlers. Power can be defined as the amount of control one has … Read more
Not Love at First Sight, but Something Even Better In Rainbow Rowell’s Eleanor and Park, these two teens want nothing more than to be together, and they will do anything to do so. Through all loves ups and downs, this couple found a way to keep their relationship going strong, and made every moment count. … Read more
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 Vietnam; Mrs. Baker is teaching Holling whilst Mr. Baker … Read more
“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 55). This scene from E. M. Forster’s Room with a … Read more
“Language is not a neutral instrument.”[1] Literature is never without an ideology, whether intended by the writer, interpreted by the reader, inherent in the language, or implied by the context. Thus, an author or a playwright’s particular manipulation of medium – a particular style – always serves a purpose; the author’s, or the audience’s. The … Read more
Without a doubt, Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses stays true to many common tropes within the Western genre. However; what makes this novel so unique is how McCarthy manipulates some of these important tropes. They are still present throughout the book, in fact, some of them are magnified through each part but as a … Read more
Character List Mick Kelly: A young girl who is always in her own world, constantly thinking about music and wanting to go to a different country. She lives in the same house as Singer, and many other characters. She is tall and thin with blonde hair and blue eyes, and dresses like a tomboy. John … Read more
Love is one of the fundamental principles of humanity. It is what ties humans together as a people, and is vital to society. As such, it has influenced the world in countless ways, just one of which being through literature. Les Miserables tells the tale of Jean Valjean, a convicted criminal who must escape his … Read more
The Marrow of Tradition by Charles Waddell Chesnutt utilizes inequalities tied to the era of the American South where the Wellington Insurrection of 1898 occurred as a result of growing racial tensions coupled with the growing divide of economic opportunity among the people there and the relations between these inequalities and divides to paint a … Read more
The Holocaust was a barbaric event, a genocide which led millions of innocent civilians and soldiers to their deaths. Though many groups were targeted during Hitler’s tyranny, the Jewish often faced the worst torment. Believed to be less than human, those who were Jewish were methodically removed from their homes, subjected to hate crimes, and … Read more
Lonely mansions, ghostly apparitions, and magic are some of the elements that create the atmosphere in Gothic stories. In his novel Wieland, Charles Brockden Brown uses most of these to create an aura of mystery and suspense. Brown once said that the Gothic novel was a literary form that could “engage, and transport, and chain … Read more
Setting is extremely important in Gothic literature: after all, setting really is the foundation of the story and can make or break the atmosphere the author tries to create. The same is true of film, and Psycho’s most used setting is arguably the most Gothic element of the movie. The motel is set back from … Read more
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 Ballard, a man who lost his land and subsequently loses … Read more
Throughout Giovanni’s Room, Baldwin makes a series of references to David’s sense of fabricated manhood or masculinity impressed upon him by his father. In the first chapters, David alludes to the hollow jocularity between father and son. This hyperbolized masculinity from his father leads to the formation of David’s fervid belief in archetypal manhood, inducing … Read more
The novel “Chasing Lincoln’s Killer”, by James Swanson, is about the plotting and killing of President Lincoln; the twelve-day manhunt of John Wilkes Booth. Booth is the murderer of The United States 16th President, Abraham Lincoln. It was just the tail end of The Civil War and Lincoln and the North did not see what … Read more
Nihilism plays a dominant role in both Lermontov’s A Hero of Our Time and Mishima’s The Sailor Who Fell From Grace With The Sea. Both novels target a particular character to be made an example, but the circumstances of this undertaking are notably different. In A Hero of Our Time, Pechorin “[experiences] all that life … Read more
A symbol in the story is like a souvenir from a travel destination. It holds meaning beyond what is actually being seen. Every author has their own deft way to instill thematic meaning into a seemingly inanimate object, which then grows to become a powerful symbol. In horrific stories about reality such as The Lottery, … Read more
“The Beautiful Ambiguity of Blankets: Comics Representation and Religious Art”, written by the University of Florida’s Benjamin Stevens, provides a great deal of insight into Craig Thompson’s 2003 autobiographical graphic novel Blankets. Stevens’ analysis focuses on characteristics of the novel such as style, the search for identity, the impact of Christianity, and the details within … Read more
The ‘Crime and Punishment’ is a novel written in the mid-1860s by a well known author named Fyodor Dostoevskys in Siberia. This novel has six parts with an epilogue, it has a serious, dramatic tone and Dostoevskys made use of a dual character-personality. This book presents a student with the shallow-type of beliefs on philosophy … Read more
Passage: “Meanwhile my soccer team practiced mostly as usual, and my mother’s drama students continued to rehearse their production of Macbeth. All across the country, events like these were held as planned. Shows had to go on. We clung to anything previously scheduled. To cancel seemed immoral, or it might mean we’d given up or … Read more
In The Power of One by Bryce Courtenay, Hoppie Groenewald is a train guard, conductor and star welter-weight boxer. While reading the book, the reader will notice Hoppie does not have as extensive of a role as some other characters but is undoubtably the strongest male presence in Peekay’s life. So far, a male figure … Read more
The journey from childhood to maturity is guided primarily by the search for meaning. In All the Pretty Horses, protagonist John Grady Cole leaves home to find the place where he belongs in the world. Throughout the novel, John Grady chased the ideal vision of the ranch lifestyle instilled in him by his late grandfather, … Read more
The novel Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Houng is a work that represents postwar Vietnam quite well, with the author holding nothing back in terms of her home nations virtues and ailments. So much is her unbridled frankness that the work has long since been banned in its country of origin, yet this … Read more
Bees making a commotion in somebody’s brain, a bright red hat, and a water pump in New York City. There seems to be no connection between those objects, but they all in fact have something in common; they are all symbols in the book Chains, by Laurie Halse Anderson. In that novel, Isabel and Curzon, … Read more
In Ann Petry’s novel The Street, even the most simple, everyday objects take on fiendish personalities and shifting, threatening aspects. From the cruel wind in the story’s opening chapter to the hard, bitter street itself, glaring situational cruelty and injustice brings vivid color to the narrative. Even the walls, as Petry describes, “were reaching out … Read more
Commonly referenced in Western Europe and around the world, the story of the Faustian bargain—in which a remarkable individual trades soul and salvation for vast power—has appeared throughout history in poems, plays, newspapers, and novels describing characters’ dilemmas. In The Invention of Morel by Adolfo Bioy Casares, the narrator falls in love with a machine-generated … Read more
One of the most striking elements of Paradise of the Blind is its constant discussion of food. Through imagery and description of traditional foodstuffs, the novel emphasizes the Vietnamese’s deep cultural connections to and love of food. These descriptions serve to describe family and cultural dynamics of Hang’s childhood as well as highlight the differences … Read more
In Graham Greene’s novel, The Quiet American, Greene portrays American character and foreign policy during the 1950’s. He does so by maintaining three important themes; the insufficiency of theoretical thinking, the fear of innocence, and the difficulty of remaining neutral. Throughout the novel, Greene emphasizes “that innocence and idealism can claim as many lives as … Read more
The River Between The novel by Ngugi Wa Thiong’o, The River Between, tells the story of two tribes that hold very different beliefs central to themselves. However, though they agree on very little, there are still people that believe in peace and unity. The clash between the two villages is over the traditional Gikuyu belief … Read more
Edith Wharton’s novel The Age of Innocence lends itself as a work of social criticism against the tyrannous ideals of Old New York society through the experiences of Newland Archer and his torn love between two women. Wharton’s plot, set in the late nineteenth century, depicts the story of a young handsome attorney named Newland … Read more
Symbolism is a very important aspect of any story. Symbols can build on the theme of a book like a theme about good and evil. It can also be the symbolism of a character or an animal like a Mockingbird. In the novel, “To Kill a Mockingbird” by Harper Lee, the symbolism of the Mockingbird … Read more
The gradual and horrifically strange mutation of the titular canine of Mikhail Bulgakov’s novel Heart of a Dog into a ‘New Soviet Man’ provides an ideological counterpoint to the instantaneous and handsomely familiar appearance of that same model citizen in the pre-war USSR’s visual propaganda. Through the lens of social science fiction, Bulgakov could be … Read more
Across a Hundred Mountains is a novel written by Reyna Grande. It is based on Grande’s childhood and abandonment fears when her parents left her and her siblings under grandmother in search for work on “the other side”. Although the narration is a partial cover of her life, it brings how the challenges that children … Read more
In William Golding’s Lord Of The Flies, the characters display various flaws in humanity throughout their stay on the island. They Showcase that humans carry non-evident defectual traits that are concealed/secluded until unleashed when put under certain circumstances that those traits naturally come to effect. Human nature and society both are overloaded with iniquity, brutality, … Read more
In her novel, Push, Sapphire challenges the conventions of patriarchal literature through use of language, characterization and archetype, as well as deviations in the traditional, patriarchal novel structure. One of the major elements in Sapphire’s revision of the paradigm of the conventional novel is the placement of the female figures in the forefront as opposed … Read more
Bram Stoker’s novel Dracula, written in 1897 during the Victorian era depicts and delves through the historical context of what society was like in the past. His extraordinary piece places a strong emphasis on sexuality by contrasting it with the conventional and stereotypical views towards sexuality that was once embellished during his life time. By … Read more
“Who is to say who is the villain and who is the hero? Probably the dictionary.” – Joss Whedon Although the line between what makes a hero can become blurred, the basic traits of a hero remain the same for the most part, as proposed by Joseph Campbell’s monomyth. This theory has proven to be … Read more
Romance and sexuality are not unfamiliar concepts to the typical Victorian sensational novel. Reversing and deconstructing these themes, however, marks a more sophisticated sensation novel and makes for a more enduring literary work. This technique is intriguing to a postmodern audience, but to a Victorian audience such an idea may have been seen as threatening … Read more
If one were under a small tree and were hit by an apple that dropped off a branch, the main conclusion one would reach might be that the event was slightly annoying and random. One would then stop thinking about it and go back to doing whatever one had been doing. However, for Isaac Newton, … Read more
The idea of rebirth and newness are a critically important theme of the novel ‘Room’ and a principal factor of the story itself. The novel is all about newness, since for Jack, having lived his whole five years of life inside Room, the act of escaping into The World is in a sense a rebirth, … Read more
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 thus reaches another way of representing identity by a more … Read more
The Land of Green Plums, by Herta Muller, is a novel arguably as defined by its language as its content. There are many interpretations of Muller’s literary style, and one of the most cogent is that it serves to show the reader how indirect, and isolating, life under a totalitarian regime has to be; feelings … Read more
The relationship between the ideal and the reality is many times pictured in black and white. The ideal can be defined as a conception of something in its perfection, whereas reality is defined as something that exists independently of ideas concerning it. In The House of Mirth, Edith Wharton blurs the relationship between ideals and … Read more
Throughout the novel, The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, written by Junot Diaz, sex and masculinity is the vital element in being a Dominican male. Dominican males according to Yunior, the narrator of the novel, is someone who has power and pizzazz, dominates women, controls female sexuality through physical violence and verbal aggression and … Read more
Notions of sins and their corresponding atonement have permeated throughout Khaled Hosseini’s incisive fiction The Kite runner as a major theme, where in the novel, the protagonist Amir’s sin towards his father Baba and his best friend Hassan, as well as Baba’s sin towards his best friend Ali are respectively disclosed, and their attempts for … Read more
This story is about kino finding a pearl and the effects of this. Kino and juana are the main characters of the story and want to change their poor life circumstances to a wealthier lifestyle when they found the pearl. They encounter many conflicts throughout the story. In the end of all this they lost … Read more
In the novel Salvage The Bones, the author, Jesmyn Ward is trying to convey that a strong family stays together through challenging moments and will always support each other. In chapter 7 of the novel, Manny and Esch were together in the bathroom of the gym where Randall was playing his basketball game. Manny was … Read more
In the novel The Wave by Morton Rhue (the pen name for Todd Strasser), a history teacher conducts an experiment to understand Nazi Germany’s influence on its people. However, students turn against each other and terrorize those who are not part of The Wave. Robert Billings is a vital character who develops significantly throughout the … Read more
