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John Barth's Once Upon a Time: A Floating Opera is part memoir, part fiction. In it, the protagonist—who, like the author, is a recently-retired author named John Barth—goes sailing with his wife...

In "Ode on a Grecian Urn," Keats spends most of the poem describing what he sees on the Grecian urn in the title. He shows us various scenes that appear on the urn, exploring them from his own...

John Rawls argues that defining justice as fairness is the best way to deal with the concept of justice in a liberal society. Rawls begins by pointing out that, for a government, "legitimacy" is a...

Jean Valjean's parole was, in some ways, as harsh as his prison sentence. As a paroled prisoner, Valjean was required to carry papers that identified him as a parolee and to show them to pretty...

When Fantine finds herself a single mother with a young child and without a means of support in the world, she has to make a hard choice: Either leave her child with other people, so that she can...

In Station Eleven, the outer plot focuses on a post-apocalyptic world some twenty years after a global virus kills nearly everyone. Many of the central characters of this world regularly grapple...

The lynching of Black people in the US has served many purposes over the past few centuries, including to strike fear into Black communities as a means of control. There are perhaps hundreds of...

One benefit of writing a reaction paper is that you can focus on your own thoughts and feelings, without needing to do lots of outside research. One downside, however, is that you may wonder if...

Structuralism got its start in the early twentieth century, particularly in the work of philosophers and critics in France and Russia. By the 1950s, structuralists were at work in a number of...

Formalism, like its name suggests, is concerned with form rather than content. Generally speaking, a formalist—whether in literature, philosophy, sociology, or other fields—argues that there is no...

Tennyson's "The Lotos-Eaters" is a retelling of the episode in the Odyssey in which Odysseus and his crew land on a beautiful island and are greeted by the locals offering them Lotos nectar to...

A. K. Ramanujan begins "Is There an Indian Way of Thinking?" by pointing out that the question in the title can be asked in several different ways. He then spends the first part of the essay trying...

Oludah Equiano's narrative about his experiences as a slave, published in 1789, were released in the middle of the Enlightenment era in England and the United States. Yet, in some ways, the book...

In her narrative, Mary Rowlandson describes in detail the raiding of her home by the Narragansett and how she was taken as a captive. She discusses her travails, which includes starving, freezing,...

The God of Small Things is very much a novel about what it means to be colonized. Specifically, Arundhati Roy looks at how individual Indian characters respond to the fallout of India's having been...

In the opening of Paradise Lost, Milton asks his muse for poetic assistance: That to the highth of this great Argument I may assert Eternal Providence, And justifie the wayes of God to men. Here,...

Postmodernism (sometimes spelled "post-modernism") was a late-twentieth century cultural movement that pushed back against some of the assumptions made by Modernism, which came just before it. In...

These are two fascinating characters to compare because the elements listed—genre, sense of audience, tone, and vocabulary—have such a profound impact on how they portray themselves and how we come...

Isaac Bashevis Singer's "Zlateh the Goat" is full of examples of personification, or points at which Zlateh is assigned human qualities despite being a goat. For example, when Aaron and Zlateh step...

Auden's "Refugee Blues" was published in 1939, just before the outbreak of World War II. It focuses on German Jews' status as refugees—forced to leave Nazi Germany but unable to find any other...

Both the Wife of Bath and Mary Rowlandson give the reader a sense of their respective personalities in the way they tell each of their stories. Both of them do so through the details they choose to...

Augustine's The City of God appears in two parts. Part 1 focuses primarily on arguments about why Rome fell to the Vandals in 410. At the time, Rome was known as the "Eternal City" because the...

Derek Walcott's "The Wind in the Doorway" is one of several of Walcott's poems that begin with frustration, but which manage to find a solution or at least a sense of peace. "The Wind in the...

T.S. Eliot's "The Metaphysical Poets" was first published as a review of J.C. Grierson's Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the 17th Century. T.S. Eliot did far more than just review Grierson's book,...

Emerson's line "beauty is its own excuse for Being" appears in his poem "The Rhodora," where it is addressed to the rhodora itself. Emerson spends the lines leading up to this quote describing his...

Mary Rowlandson presents herself in the narrative as someone who relies heavily on faith to help her through troubling times, and whose kindness prompts her to share that faith with others who need...

Carol Ann Duffy's poem "In Your Mind" explores themes of imagination and memory. It asks where the line lies between what we imagine and what we remember—or even if that line exists at all. Duffy...

Don Quixote begins by introducing the main character, Alonso Quehana, who has read so many books about chivalry that "his brains dried up" and he became convinced he was actually a knight. He takes...

Near the end of Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH, Mrs. Frisby overhears a conversation in the Fitzgibbons' farmhouse. Mr. Fitzgibbons, the farmer, tells his family a story about how a local...

The "conversation poems" are so named because they all represent an attempt by the poet to converse on the poet's examination of nature and the role of poetry, as examined through the lens of a...

In Civil Disobedience, Thoreau argues that the only government humans are obligated to obey is one that behaves in a moral and ethical manner—a government that does what is right, not merely what...

In The Sign of the Beaver, the main character, Matt, is saved from a bee swarm by a Native American man. As repayment, Matt tries to teach the man's grandson, Attean, to understand English. Matt...

In Nature, Ralph Waldo Emerson sought to explain his own philosophical theories about the place of people in the universe. In the Introduction, he explains that he sees "nature" as everything...

Wheatley's choice of heroic couplets in "On Being Brought from Africa to America" helps to underscore the poem's key message—that black people (with Wheatley herself as an example) are not hopeless...

Vikram Seth's "The Crocodile and the Monkey" is a rhyming poem of 178 lines. Often, several lines combine to make a single sentence. Lines 1–16 introduce us to one of the two main characters,...

The possession of Genji's first wife, Aoi no Ue, by spirits (mono no ke) is arguably an example of the uncanny in The Tale of Genji. Freud defines the unheimlich, or "uncanny," as the revelation...

There are several examples of symbolism in Edwidge Danticat's "A Wall of Fire Rising" which work to tie together the story's overall themes of aspiration and desperation. The hot air balloon plays...

T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land develops themes of regeneration and rebirth by intertwining images of death with images of life (or the potential for new life), beginning with the first seven lines:...

The tone of the second paragraph of Civil Disobedience changes slightly throughout the paragraph. The second paragraph begins in the same earnest tone used in the first paragraph, but by the end,...