Cynthia Dawn

In Lois Lowry's The Giver, before a child becomes a seven, the buttons on their jackets are at the back. These children cannot button their jackets themselves. They must depend on parents and peers...

In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Asher is required to play catch in order to improve his hand-eye coordination because it is not up to standard. In this community, equality and conformity are essential...

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, those in power have engineered a society that is community-oriented and impeccably stable. People's identities are assigned to them at birth, and this creates a...

Arthurian romances are quite varied in their presentation of events, but there are several key characters and elements which are found throughout the Arthurian tradition. Thomas Malory's Le Morte...

In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, Bernard and Helmholtz both feel like outsiders in the civilized world. Both of them are Alpha-Plus males who perceive themselves as being different from those...

In Lois Lowry's The Giver, Jonas is presented with a list of responsibilities and duties for his new position as Receiver of Memory. Many of the instructions concern him because they go against the...

George Orwell wrote 1984 in 1948. In order to decide which year to set his novel in, he simply reversed the last two digits of his present year. Worlld War II had just ended. Orwell had seen the...

Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens is a bildungsroman, also known as a coming of age novel. Dickens uses a variety of styles in this book in order to stimulate a variety of emotions and reactions from...

The citizens of Aldous Huxley's Brave New World have been conditioned to only enjoy low, vulgar art which promotes the self-indulging values of this society. Children are given electric...

In chapters 17-20 of Rodman Philbrick's Freak the Mighty, one lie that Max tells his father is that he is satisfied when his father swears on the Bible that he never murdered Max's mother. Max is...

In Mary Shelly's Frankenstein, Robert Walton is an explorer on an expedition in the Arctic. His ship has become trapped in the ice. He sees a man floating on a sheet of ice and brings him...

Both Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and P.D. James's The Children of Men are British dystopian novels, but unlike most dystopias, these books feature populations that are happy and...

Raymond Chandler's The Big Sleep is set during the Great Depression in America when poverty and organized crime were rampant. We see this corruption through the eyes of Philip Marlow, a...

This story comes from the first volume in T. H. White's The Once and Future King, "The Sword in the Stone." This volume tells of the childhood of King Arthur (also known as Wart), growing...

In "A Scandal in Bohemia," the first story in Arthur Conan Doyle's The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, Sherlock shows off his powers of observation by telling Watson that he's gained...

Andy is a strong and stoic character in both the film and novella of Stephen King's Shawshank Redemption. Even after he is sent to prison for the murder of his wife and her lover, Andy continues to...

One of the main ways that the Ingsoc party controls the population of Oceania in George Orwell's 1984 is through hegemony. Hegemony is a form of control where one group holds power over another by...