Literature

Literature is also a form of time travel that helps put today in context. All those apocalyptic lamentations about how "things used to be so much better" are controverted in literature of the last...

House Taken Over is a short story written by Julio Cortazar. It is set in Buenos Aires and it centers around a brother and his sister. The brother is the narrator and is unnamed, his sister is...

A primary difference between academic and non-academic texts involves audience, which also speaks to purpose. An academic, nonfiction text will be based on research methods that can be replicated....

Literature is one way for us to hear the voices of the past and work with the present. It is a way for the present to connect to the possible future. Story telling is one way for humans to reach...

"Get up and Bar the Door" is an anonymous ballad, written in English with some Scots dialect, that appears to date from the seventeenth century. The poet recounts an argument between husband and...

The basic elements of prose are: character, setting, plot, point of view, and mood. Character refers to: biographical information; personality traits; social roles, and psychological factors such...

A literary convention is: A customary feature of a literary work, such as the use of a chorus in Greek tragedy, the inclusion of an explicit moral in a fable, or the use of a particular rhyme...

The difference between non-academic and academic writing can be important to you when you are doing research for a paper. It also will concern you if you are considering writing as a career. When...

In examining the terms "traditional" and "modern," literary scholars will differ on the defining time periods or characteristics which qualify those classifications. The following are provided as a...

Narrator- The mind from which all aspects of the story are necessarily told Theme- one or more direct or indirect statements about the human condition as evidenced through the work as a whole...

The key theme of this poem by Julio Noboa Polanco is individuality and the freedom that comes with retaining one's own personal identity. Polanco uses an extended metaphor to imagine himself as a...

No literature exists in a vacuum. It is influenced by history, and it is also influenced by the present. If you are reading a piece of literature written in the past, you need to understand the...

Figures of speech enhance the author's creation. This is true of any genre and any form of writing. The effective use of figures of speech brings to life what would have been mere words, phrases...

Santa Rama Rau's short story "By Any Other Name" refutes Juliet's contention that something retains its essence no matter what its name. In this colonial story of English imperialism, the teacher...

Dictionary.com defines myth this way: A traditional or legendary story, usually concerning some being or hero or event, with or without a determinable basis of fact or a natural explanation,...

The best metaphor I have ever heard on why we read literature is that literature acts as a window or mirror (or both.) This is expressed so often in education that I am not even able to tell you...

The main difference between the different forms of literature is the purpose and the way words are arranged. The main difference between prose and poetry is how the words are used. In prose we...

Poetry is a form of writing in verse, which usually has a musical quality obtained through the specific use of literary elements such as meter and rhyme, and literary devices such as alliteration,...

The first characteristic is chivalry. This deals with knights and their code of honor, which included being of service, being honest, and helping those less fortunate. The second characteristic is...

"Olden days" is a fairly relative phrase. Some younger students might consider olden days any time before Instagram existed. They can't fathom a world that existed before cell phones and texting,...

I think the engine here definitely refers to the goldfinch and her family. Before she arrives, the laburnum tree is quiet, "quite still," with nothing to indicate that there is anything alive...

In the poem, the speaker describes a beautiful dream she had, a dream in which truth and love and peace reigned in the world. She says that she bent down low to drink from the stream of peace in...

In addition to the excellent posted comments, literary criticism helps reader develop critical thinking skills. Criticisms take the reader to a higher level of cognitive thought by evaluating what...

It is telling, I think that when Nenita is first introduced, she is described as "the wife." She is not the loving wife, the dutiful wife, the good wife: just the wife. Earlier, she'd taken a nap...

This phrase is contained in a speech found in Act II of The Crucible by Arthur Miller. It is spoken by John Proctor at the height of the witchcraft/accusation frenzy in the courts of Salem. At the...

The primary similarities between a novel and a drama are that they both have plots, complete with rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution; they both have conflicts, characters, and...

Certainly, one theme of the story is that we must be wary of strangers. Little Red Riding Hood meets the wolf in the forest, "but as she did not know what a bad sort of animal she was, she did not...

In the science fiction short story "The Wretched and the Beautiful" by E. Lily Yu, an alien spaceship lands on a popular tourist beach. Inside are strangely shaped alien refugees (the wretched) who...

It sounds like what you may be referring to is, as the other instructor has pointed out, a frame story. Such stories start at the ending and then flash back in time to demonstrate how this pivotal...

Mr. Robert Baldwin is Mr. John Gresham's personal secretary. At the start of the play, Baldwin's wife (Martha), son (John), and daughter (Evie) are tense and worried: John Gresham has just been...

There exists a duality in this sparsely written poem through combining the speaker's frustration and recognition of the humiliation of women with a spirit of resilience and dry optimism. The...

The short story "Night Calls" takes place on a small game preserve in South Africa. A 13-year-old girl named Marlene comes home from her boarding school for the holidays. Five years earlier, her...

Prose refers to written or spoken language that is not in poetic form, whether in rhythm, rhyme, or structure. Drama is a performing art in which actors use dialogue and actions to tell a story or...

Este cuento, "Los Bomberos" de Mario Benedetti, depende mucho de la ironía. El cuento se trata de un hombre llamado Olegario, quien tiene un don de premonición. Olegario ha ganado bastante fama y...

If you consider one of Shakespeare's sonnets and then compare it to a Harry Potter novel, for example, you will notice that the two are very different. In fact, despite both being bodies of text...

As with many fairy tales, there are different versions of the story with very similar plot lines, characters, and settings. In fact, there are versions of Beauty and the Beast that date back to the...

In the short story "The Rain Came" by Grace Ogot, customs and traditional beliefs leave Oganda having to face death for her people to have rain. Oganda is to be sacrificed in order to end the...

This poem turns on its head the idea that a tenth birthday is a joyous occasion. Instead, the young speaker laments the loss he is feeling as he grows older. The poem shows the pain of maturing...

The simplest and most obvious point is that "humble" is an adjective or a verb, whereas "humility" is a noun. More significantly, however, "humble" is often used refer to social status, in phrases...

One the most general level, most literature portrays people engaging in social interactions. Thus literature gives an image of society in words just as your bathroom mirror gives a reflected visual...

This is a good and important question. English literature is important in many different ways. Let me list a few of them. First, English literature tells us about the history of the English...

Here is how you would quote the passage according to Modern Language Association (MLA) style: But we must never speak of the times before the Great Rebirth…. They whisper many strange things, of...

The basic characteristics of African English Literature are: 1) Written in both African and European languages. The predominant African languages used are Amharic, Zulu, Hausa, and Swahili. 2)...

You will recognize a simile (take care spelling simile as there is no extra i) when you see a comparison using the word "like" or a description of something using as....as when those two things...

Why study American literature? The question is not about literature but rather about the American aspect. Studying American literature encompasses understanding society. From this study, society...

#3: Yes! Too many people -- teachers, students, reviewers, writers -- make an arbitrary distinction between what is considered "good" literature and what is considered "bad." Since there is no...

Sometimes I think you can learn more from short stories than novels, simply because the author gets to his/her point much quicker and is more concise with descriptions. Authors don't write just to...

This ancient Navajo proverb has begun to circulate recently as an inspirational quote. It is often used on online memes and printed on tote bags and so on. It can be interpreted in several ways,...

In general, we read stories to learn about life, about the world around us, and about how people in the world react to their circumstances and experiences. Characters in stories help us see how...

Onomatopoeia is a literary device in which a word is formed to imitate a sound. Examples include "ring," "pow," "snap," and "boom." The first example of onomatopoeia in Edgar Allan Poe's short...