Erica Shelley

The poem "Inukshuk" by Daniel David Moses uses the image of an inukshuk to illustrate the spread of colonialism to the far north. Inukshuks were stones piled in the shape of people, traditionally...

In Wide Sargasso Sea by Jean Rhys, Rochester wakes up believing that he has been poisoned by his new young wife, Antoinette. Amelie, earlier introduced as Antoinette’s “half-caste” servant girl,...

Susan Glaspell’s short story “A Jury of Her Peers,” written in 1917, is based on her play Trifles, written in 1916. Both pieces of literature are loosely based on Glaspell’s own experience as a...

In Philip Larkin’s poem “Ambulances,” the ambulance is the vehicle—literally—that intertwines the living and the dead. In the last stanza, Larkin finishes the thought from the previous stanza: “the...

In Into the Wild, journalist Jon Krakauer pieces together the experiences of various people who met Christopher McCandless to paint a fuller picture of his character and his journey to Alaska....

The poem “To Autumn” by John Keats is an ode to the fall season. When discussing the mood of the poem, you could choose to focus on a few different lines. In the first stanza, Keats uses specific...

Edgar Allan Poe’s poem “The Raven” has many allusions to his other poem “Lenore.” Read both texts carefully, and you will notice a few things. In “The Raven,” the narrator is alone in his study,...