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Despite his remarkable accuracy as a prophet, it's astonishing just how many people in ancient Greek mythology treat Tiresias and his prophecies with such contempt and disrespect. The most obvious...

The imagery in "London" is largely visual or auditory. This means that it conveys sensory information that one can either imagine seeing or hearing, respectively. In the second stanza, the speaker...

The action of D. H. Lawrence's poem “Bat” takes place against the idyllic setting of Florence at sunset. The speaker is sitting on a terrace in the beautiful old Tuscan city when he sees what he...

Tennyson's long poem "In Memoriam" expresses the grief and remorse the poet felt as he processed the death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam over a seventeen year period. Hallam was only 22 when he...

When Annemarie expresses the thought that pride has become an odd word, she means that it is strange in the context of the times in which they are living. In a world dominated by fear of the Nazis,...

The "marriage hearse" appears in the last line of Blake's poem. The image is deeply ambiguous. First, it conflates two opposites. Marriage is associated with beginnings, procreation, and a kind of...

In The Ministry of Fear, Graham Greene uses a third-person limited narrator. In book 1, chapters 5 and 6, Rowe’s point of view predominates as he becomes increasingly agitated about the suspicions...

In Philip Pullman's The Golden Compass, "daemons" are manifestations of the human soul. They represent the essence of the human being that they are attached to. Their reactions, tendencies, likes,...

Before arriving at the clinic where his niece Connie will participate in her “burn” ceremony, Jack Sperry goes into a store and buys her a pair of skates. Consulting with the sales clerk, he learns...

The poem "anyone lived in a pretty how town" by E. E. Cummings is a complex analysis of life, love, and death in the context of a town that is oppressed by conformity. One of the most important...

In Thomas Hardy's The Woodlanders, Grace Melbury marries the doctor Edgar Fitzpiers after Giles, the man to whom she has been promised, loses his livelihood. Grace is not happy with Edgar, however....

Blake's "London" present a bleak portrait of life in the capital city. The speaker notes marks of "weakness" and unhappiness in "every" face he sees as he walks the city's streets. His London is...

"London," by William Blake is a Romantic poem. This is not to say that it focuses on a loving or "romantic" relationships between people who feel affection or lust for one another, but, rather,...

Jorge Luis Borges's story “The Shape of the Sword” centers around an act of confession, but the person doing the confessing does so in a roundabout way. Borges himself acts as the first-person...

William Blake is playing with words with the term mark. He is using the word both as a verb and as a noun. To mark is to notice, but it can also refer to a physical mark, like a birthmark or the...

In the last section of act III of A Raisin in the Sun, Walter Younger Jr. abruptly reverses course in his dealings with Karl Lindner of the Clybourne Park Improvement Association. Earlier, Lindner...

Mary Antin’s portrait of immigration as an almost completely positive experience contributed to the popularization of the universally attainable American Dream. She not only advocates for the...

Love and loyalty emerge early on in the story as Lyra realizes her "uncle" Asriel, whom she "admires" and fears, is about to be poisoned by the Master, who has slipped a powder into his wine. She...

Aissatou's husband, Mawdo, is of very high social standing. He hails from the Senegalese nobility, which means that he's much higher up the social ladder than his first wife. Even so, Mawdo is...

William Blake props up the state and the church as symbols of power in his poem "London." The poem depicts misery in many forms in the city of London, from orphaned children crying out to...

Elie Wiesel begins Night by presenting the character of Moshe the Beadle as a person who is both very ordinary and has perceptive insights into matters of faith. After emphasizing how much Eliezer...

The reaction between Sulfur dioxide and Oxygen producing Sulphur trioxide is given as: `2SO_2(g) + O_2(g) <=> 2SO_3(g)` This is a reversible reaction which can proceed in both forward and...

Langston Hughes's short story "Berry" is about a hardworking African American man named Milberry Jones, also known as "Berry." He is an undereducated and poor man, but Berry also has a kind soul...

In act 4, scene 1, Hermia, Helena, Demetrius, and Lysander wake up to face Theseus, Hippolyta, and Egeus. They are sleepy and a bit confused about what happened the night before. It all seems like...

In Plowing the Dark by Richard Powers, artist Adie Klarpol is hired by by Stevie Spiegel to create virtual reality "rooms" to project into the blank "Cavern" for an intense, immersive...

In the Catholic Church, the Sacrament of Holy Orders is the religious ritual in which a man becomes ordained as a leader in the church. The Sacrament of Holy Orders is different than the other...

In this horribly tragic scene, related in chapter 7 of Night, Elie and the other prisoners are traveling packed in a train car. They are starving, and many are dying along the way. When some German...

In this tragic scene from Night, Elie focuses on describing what happens between a father, son, and other people around him. This is because he stayed still during the fighting and watched all of...

The exposition of a story is the part at the beginning where the reader learns important background information. In Sinclair Ross’s short story “The Painted Door,” the exposition includes the first...

To identify some of the standard conventions of the immigrant autobiography, review the section that also serves as the title of Maria Lauret’s scholarly article, “When is an Immigrant’s...

As the name suggests, Horace's Ars Poetica—the art of poetry—is concerned with elaborating the principles of what constitutes poetry. Unlike Aristotle's Poetics, Ars Poetica approaches poetry—which...

In ancient epic, it was a standard convention for a poet to ask for help or inspiration from a muse, a goddess of literature. Homer invokes a muse at the beginning of The Odyssey, as does Virgil at...

Let's begin by defining some of these terms. Overfishing happens when people catch so many fish that the population of fish actually drops below the number of fish people want to catch. This is...

The Inca civilization in Peru is the one most associated with the cultivation and consumption of potatoes. Because the Inca empire covered a variety of climate zones, potatoes and sweet potatoes...

Personal accounts, including memoir and autobiography, have many advantages. One of the most important is the sense of immediacy that an individual’s personal experience can convey. The reader is...

In An Indigenous Peoples’ History of the United States, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz documents how Indigenous activists have channeled their collective power to achieve concrete reforms that benefit a...

Despite falling over a thousand feet down the side of a mountain, Nuñez the mountaineer has managed to survive. In the morning after his fall, the search party sent to find him can see that he...

Postmodern poets employ (and experiment with) some especially noticeable and characteristic techniques that make their poetic efforts both interesting and unique. Let's look at some of these....

In The Things They Carried by Tim O'Brien, the narrator (a fictionalized version of the author) kills a young Viet Cong soldier in Vietnam. In the story “The Man I Killed,” he imagines what this...

To identify the differences between the two historians, Howard Zinn and Larry Schweikart, consider the differences between A People’s History of the United States, written by Zinn, and A Patriot’s...

To tackle this question, let's start with Virginia. Its climate provided both problems and opportunities. In colonial Virginia, it was warm year round, and that was well suited for crops and for...

Gary Soto's Living Up the Street is a memoir of the author's childhood written as a collection of short stories. There is not, therefore, a single human antagonist to counter Soto's protagonist...

In colonial days, the primary religious denomination in the South was that of the Anglican Church, or the Church of England. With the coming of the American Revolution, however, Anglicanism fell...

The effect that subsidies have on consumers will depend on the industry that’s being subsidized. In the United States, an industry that’s heavily subsidized is the oil industry. Federal and state...

Brent begins the book as the new kid; he always is the new kid, as his family frequently moves states. Brent tries to assimilate to each new community. After Brent kills Lea Zamora, he falls into a...

If there could ever be such a thing as a snobbish horse, then Black Beauty's mother would be it. She's obsessed with good breeding and wants her son to know that he comes from the very finest...

In Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour," Richards is a friend of Mrs. Mallard's, and so he rushes to bring her the news of her husband's death. He knows Mrs. Mallard suffers from a heart condition,...

Adonais is Percy Bysshe Shelley’s elegy for his fellow poet and friend, John Keats, who died at age 26. Shelley assigns him the name Adonais. An elegy is a poem of commemoration and praise...

Miss Emily responds to the city authorities who come to collect her taxes by insisting she has none to pay. She doesn't invite them to sit down and, after a short time, has a servant show them...

There are several texts by contemporary Albanian writers that would be interesting to consider in an essay about gender identity and sexuality. For instance, the book Sworn Virgin by Albanian...