Elton Bartholomew

This famous scene from Mark Twain's The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn can be read on different levels. The first is the way a young reader might see it, simply as a humorous prank that Tom Sawyer...

Donne uses forceful and startling comparisons in his Holy Sonnet 14 to show the strength of his conviction in his quest to know God intimately. The initial four lines beg God not to hold back in...

Southern Gothic writing is noted for its depiction of the bizarre or grotesque. Flannery O'Connor's work often has significantly strange characters. A more current proponent of Southern Gothic...

The honor of being called founding fathers of modern poetry might be best shared between Walt Whitman and T. S. Eliot. Baudelaire, however, with the publication of Flowers of Evil in 1857, proved...

The beast in Lord of the Flies was, to the boys, a horrible monster. Simon discovers this to be false, a feverish delusion that kept the boys in fear and stuck in their savage state. The actual...

It is perhaps dangerous to view any single Poe story strictly in relation to his personal life. Poe deliberately wrote stories in the Gothic vein, since it was a popular style at the time. He was...

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in The Social Contract, published in 1762, sets out his beliefs concerning where authority should rest in an ideal society. His primary belief is that sovereignty should...

Feed by M.T. Anderson, is a dystopian novel. Dystopia is a genre of fiction in which future society is depicted as being in disarray or decline. Dystopian novels are extrapolations based on the...

Ralph Waldo Emerson was born a New Englander and later became a transcendentalist, and these two formative aspects of his life contributed to his sturdy belief in self-reliance. His essay entitled...

Emerson gave this address to the Phi Beta Kappa Society at Harvard in 1837, to the top twenty-five students from each graduating class. In it he presents, to the best and brightest young scholars...