Renata Kelly, M.A.

The narrator in "The Tell-Tale Heart" begins by announcing that he is not mad and arguing that nobody could possibly claim that he was. He justifies his argument by pointing to the fact that he can...

Robert Frost's poem "Birches" is dense with natural imagery, through which the speaker imagines himself moving in various guises. The supple birch trees are a kind of extended metaphor for life and...

The primary difference between Dee's attitude and her mother and sister's attitudes can be summed up in Mama's simple statement that "Dee wanted nice things." Mama describes Dee as someone with a...

This quotation is taken from act 2, scene 1 of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, one of Shakespeare's less well-known plays. It is spoken by the Second Fisherman to the titular character, Prince Pericles....

Life in the community of Lois Lowry's novel The Giver is highly structured—every individual has a role to play in contributing to the smooth operation of society. A person's role is determined on...

Shakespeare utilizes a number of literary devices in this poem, which is concerned with the inevitable passage of time. He makes particular use of metaphor and personification in order to convey...

An epigram is "a witty, ingenious, and pointed saying that is tersely expressed." The key aspect of an epigram is its "terse expression"—an epigram packs a great deal of meaning into a single...

Doctor Faustus is the story of a man who sells his soul to the Devil to gain supernatural powers. It is based on the Christian theological concepts of the immortality of the soul, the nature of...

Pahom the peasant is the protagonist of Tolstoy's short story "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" He begins the story content with (or perhaps resigned to) his lot in life, farming his small piece of...

Siegfried Sassoon's poem "Does it Matter?" was included in his second volume of anti-war poetry, Counter-Attack. Sassoon was a captain in the British Army during the First World War. His...

Sir J. C. Squire's short poem "The Discovery" describes the moment in 1492 when a Taino Indian sees Christopher Columbus's ships arriving at the island now known as San Salvador. I'll address the...

George and Lydia Hadley, the parents in Ray Bradbury's short story "The Veldt," have abdicated their role as parents to their two children, Peter and Wendy. They are able to do this because their...

James Thurber's short story "The Night the Ghost Got In" recounts how his hearing of ghostly footsteps in the family home one night led to a rapid series of increasingly ridiculous events,...

Nelle Harper Lee was born on April 28th, 1926, in the small town of Monroeville in southern Alabama. According to the 1920 and 1930 census statistics, Monroeville would have had just over 1,000...

The students in "All Summer in a Day" live on a fictional version of the planet Venus. It is perpetually raining on Venus, and the storms cease only briefly once every seven years, when, for a few...

The community in The Giver is highly structured. Each individual citizen has a role to play in keeping the community functioning, with the exception of babies and the elderly. Children must...

This is an interesting question and arguably the central conflict of Marlowe's play: does Faustus believe he can be redeemed? From the very first scene, he appears to have given up on the idea of...

The narrator of "The Tell-Tale Heart" has had a nervous breakdown which has left him slightly deranged. He is hypersensitive to benign aspects of his environment and becomes fixated on the things...

You need to look at the Wife of Bath's prologue for this, rather than the tale itself. She uses scripture overtly to support what she is saying. She refers to the fact that Jesus once criticized...

Odysseus journeys to the underworld to seek advice from the ghost of the prophet Tiresias about how to get back to Ithaca. While he is there, other ghosts flock around him, and he speaks to many of...

The "journey to the underworld" is a theme present in the mythologies of cultures around the world. It typically involves a living hero physically traveling into the realm of the dead in order to...

The question asks about "suspense" in chapter 8 of The Giver, so a useful starting point would be to define what we mean by "suspense". Dictionary.com defines the word as: a state or condition of...

"Caged Bird" uses multiple poetic devices to convey and enhance its meaning. I've only listed three of them here, but a close reading of the poem yields many more, so it would be a good idea to...

Figurative language is the use of words to express something more than a literal meaning. Shirley Jackson uses figurative language at several points in "The Lottery" to enrich the narrative and...

In Book 1 of the Iliad, Agamemnon is forced to return the girl Chryseis to her father, a priest of Apollo, in order to end a mysterious plague that has been afflicting the Greek army. Agamemnon is...

A figure of speech is any kind of rhetorical device which seeks to achieve a particular effect or evoke a particular emotion through the way in which words are used. In this line of this poem, the...

On the face of it, the main conflict of Amadeus is between the musical abilities of the composers Salieri and Mozart. Salieri has devoted his life to music and risen to the rank of court composer....

At the beginning of Homer's The Odyssey, the poet invokes the muse, asking her to tell him of the "ingenious hero" about whom Homer intends to write. This invocation of the muse is a convention of...

Marlow’s feelings about Kurtz begin with mild interest about the missing Company agent, supposedly the best agent in the Company’s entire territory. He gleans from other people’s opinions of Kurtz...

The off-stage action in Oedipus Rex serves to propel the story forwards. The play is centered largely on Oedipus sitting and waiting for information to be brought to him about things that have...

The point of view of the story is that of the townspeople of Jefferson, and consequently, Miss Emily can only be apprehended via the very limited understanding the townspeople have of this...

The quote you have shared is from the politician Edmund Burke's pamphlet Reflections on the Revolution in France, which was published in November 1790. The French Revolution had begun in 1789 with...

The Achaean army is on the beaches near the city of Troy. They are currently suffering an epidemic of a mysterious deadly disease. They assume they must have somehow angered Apollo, the god of...

Miss Brill is a lonely spinster who goes to the park every Sunday to listen to the band playing and to watch the people in the area. Her own life is quiet and rather empty, so she derives a great...

"The Lottery" is an annual human sacrifice conducted by the residents of a small New England town each summer to ensure a good harvest. It involves each household drawing a "ticket" from a black...

Technically, Aeneas himself is responsible for Dido's suicide, as his abrupt departure from Carthage in Book IV drives the queen to despair. However, as the previous educator has noted, the true...

In his poem of the same name, Rudyard Kipling asserts that "the White Man's burden" is to civilize non-white populations. Kipling was both a product and a champion of British imperialism, and spent...

Sophocles's tragedy Oedipus Rex is a lesson about the inevitability of one's fate in which several otherwise-innocent people are drawn together to unwittingly create and perpetuate an appalling...

Kate Chopin's "The Story of an Hour" concerns the thoughts and emotions of Mrs. Louise Mallard in the hour after hearing of her husband Brently's sudden death. All the action of the plot takes...

In Homer's epic poem The Odyssey, Odysseus spends ten long years attempting to get back to his home and family after the end of the Trojan War. Odysseus's journey is difficult and dangerous,...

Tobias Wolffe's "Hunters in the Snow" is written entirely from the third-person objective point of view, with no insight into the thoughts or feelings of its three main characters. Everything...

Leo Tolstoy's short story "How Much Land Does a Man Need?" is a fable about the perils of greed. Pahom is a peasant farmer who tills common land owned collectively by his village. He has never...

Joseph Conrad's "The Lagoon" is the confession of one man to another about the crimes he has committed in the name of love. Arsat, a native Malayan, once served with his brother in the army of the...

There are only three characters in Sarah Orne Jowett's short story "Miss Tempy's Watchers," and they are Temperance Dent (Miss Tempy) and her two longtime friends, Mrs. Crowe and Sarah Ann Binson....

In Joseph Conrad's "Heart of Darkness," the narrator Marlow is making his way up the river Congo into the depths of the Company's territory to retrieve its star agent, Mr. Kurtz, who has fallen...

Tom Godwin's story "The Cold Equations" has very few characters—just Barton the pilot, Marilyn Cross the stowaway, Gerry her brother, Commander Delhart, and an unnamed records officer. These...

The structure and themes of Homer's epic poem the Iliad have become the exemplar for many of the subsequent epic poems in the Western literary canon. For your assignment, consider the following...

"The Snows of Kilimanjaro" is a frustrating story about a frustrated man, who has misspent his life and wasted his talents, and now finds himself dying of slow blood-poisoning on a safari far away...

Achilles' stallions were named Balios and Xanthos, born of a union between the harpy Podarge and Zephyros (the West Wind). The horses, who were immortal, were given by Poseidon as a gift to...

John McCrae's poem "In Flanders Fields" is one of the most famous poems of the First World War, and its predominant theme is the nobility of sacrifice. Written after the Second Battle of Ypres in...