Nita Kuykendall

The thematic focus of Robert Bolt's play A Man for All Seasons is the nobility of what may seem to be a very ordinary, mundane virtue: obedience to the law. In A Man for All Seasons, abiding to the...

Essence of winter sleep is on the night, The scent of apples: I am drowsing off. I cannot rub the strangeness from my sight I got from looking through a pane of glass I skimmed this morning from...

In Edith Wharton's novella Ethan Frome, the first suggestion that readers have of Ethan's figurative imprisonment is in the following description of his appearance: it was the careless powerful...

By the end of Nadine Gordimer's short story "The Train from Rhodesia," the husband has learned that his new wife does not trust him and that she expects him to be able to read her mind. Meanwhile,...

Philip Freneau's 1786 poem "The Wild Honey Suckle" is an important predecessor of Romantic poetry and of Romanticism more generally. In the poem, Freneau combines Neoclassical poetic structure and...

When Tom Tulliver returns to boarding school on a cold, wet day in January, he is introduced by the schoolmaster, Mr. Stelling, to a new classmate, Philip Wakem, who, like Tom, is from the town of...

Emerson's treatment of idealism in the essay "Nature" is complex and ambivalent. For an example of this complexity and ambivalence, we need look only to Emerson's understanding of the commonplace...

Many historians concur that writing came into existence in Mesopotamia in the fourth millennium BCE, although isolated texts from Greece, Romania, Egypt, and China from the sixth millennium BCE are...

Voltaire's novel Candide is replete with examples of situational irony (in which expectations conflict with what actually happens) and dramatic irony (in which readers of a given work of literature...

In one sense, door and windows play a highly conventional role as motifs in Franz Kafka's novella, The Metamorphosis, in that they figure as thresholds. They are boundaries between experiential...

Two central themes of V. S. Naipaul's novel A House for Mr. Biswas are the absurdity of human desire and the diminished scope of the modern Western bourgeois experience. It is correct to say, as it...

Chapter 1 of George Eliot's novel Romola is set under the Loggia de’ Cerchi in a venerable Florentine neighborhood. At the chapter's inception, the character of Bratti Ferravecchi, a local...

St. Augustine believes that human beings cannot find inner peace apart from God because of his belief that God created human nature. In his account, human beings were made to seek God and find...

The main themes of Esther Hautzig's novel, The Endless Steppe, are the triumph of the human spirit and the love of beauty in the face of unspeakable oppression. When the novel begins, Esther is...

From the beginning of Jane Eyre's relationship with Helen Burns, Jane is struck by Helen's seeming detachment from her immediate circumstances. This detachment is associated with her particular...

The late sixteenth-century playwrights, dubbed by nineteenth-century writer George Saintsbury as the university wits, included such figures as Marlow, Nashe, Lodge, and Lyly and others who tended...

In order to write a character sketch of Anne Shirley, the protagonist of Lucy Maud Montgomery's novel, Anne of Green Gables, one should go through the book and write down the passages in which Anne...

Jonas, the young protagonist of Lois Lowry's novel, The Giver, has always been told that Ceremonies of Release are happy celebrations. Thus, in Chapter 19, when he actually has an opportunity to...

Adonias is the title of Percy Bysshe Shelley's poem written in honor of the death of his rival, the young poet, John Keats. Within the poem, Adonais is the persona of the late Keats. The name is...

In Charles Dickens's novel Hard Times, Louisa and Tom Gradgrind are sister and brother. The two siblings have very different responses to their difficult upbringing at the hands of Thomas Gradgrind...

In the short story "Good Country People" by Flannery O'Connor, the characters, particularly Joy, are taught the lesson that their pride in their own knowledge has blinded them to the lessons that...

In Delia Owens' novel, Where the Crawdads Sing, the character of Kya chooses to leave school because, in her view, she has a better chance of learning things by watching birds and collecting...

In Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play School for Scandal, female characters both generate false stories and rumors about others and play an active role in circulating those stories. This leads to the...

George Bernard Shaw's play "Pygmalion" focuses on economic, cultural, and linguistic disparities between different social classes. The issue of the gap between rich and poor is very much a global...

The directive to "treat as a friend who treats you as a friend, treat your master as an enemy" is based upon an implicit assumption that someone who treats you as a friend must treat you as an...

To a considerable extent, the protagonist of Ayi Kwei Armah's novel, The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born, is vulnerable to the negative influence of post-colonial African leadership—and yet, at the...

In Delia Owens's novel Where the Crawdads Sing, Ma runs away to New Orleans when she leaves Kya's home. Although her departure occurs at the beginning of the first chapter, we do not learn where Ma...

In her novel Dare, Marily Halvorson confronts the social problems of post-traumatic stress in young people and inadequate social services for foster children. The most pressing social problem is as...

In his novel Midaq Alley, Naguib Mahfouz depicts a world in women are objectified by the male gaze. The beautiful character Hamida is represented as being a magnet for male attention: “Hamida set...

From the first sentence of Mark Twain's short story "The Californian's Tale," the author uses suspense to generate uncertainty, thereby securing the reader's attention and creating a desire for the...

The central idea of Rabindranath Tagore's collection of essays, The Religion of Man, is what he calls "the creative principle of unity." This is an evolutionary principle which governs both the...

Even before the palm wine is served in the ritual depicted in chapter 12 of Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe alerts his readers that the serving of the wine will be a means through which prestige...

John Arden's anti-imperialist, anti-war play, Serjeant Musgrave's Dance, An Un-historical Parable (1959) centers on the lives of a group of deserters led by the eponymous Musgrave featured in the...

Xuanzang, Monkey, Zhu Bajie, and Sha Wujing are changed by their journey as pilgrims to the West in accordance with their varying capacities for illumination. The four pilgrims are designed to...

"The bird is on the wing" is a quotation from the "Rubáiyát of Omar Khayyám," an 1859 poem by Edward FitGerald that is a loose translation of 12th century Persian poet, Omar Khayyám. The bird...

"Magical realism" is not a device that is employed discretely in one part of a novel and not in another. Rather, it is a holistic perspective towards reality that dictates the use of tropes,...

"The Definition of Love" is a seventeenth-century British metaphysical poem by Andrew Marvell. It exemplifies a number of characteristics associated with metaphysical poetry, as it is 1) witty, 2)...

Of Thomas Gray's two Pindaric odes, Samuel Johnson wrote: These odes are marked by glittering accumulations of ungraceful ornaments: they strike, rather than please; the images are magnified by...

The conclusion of Cervantes' Don Quixote, for all of its ostensible solemnity, is as satirical as the rest of the novel. The copious language indicating a return to sanity and the renunciation of...

After Julia gives up the role of Ophelia in Shakespeare's play, Hamlet, Mr. Heminges kindly offers her a job gathering money from members of the audience at the entrances to the theater. Although...

The very first paragraph of Amor Towles's novel, A Gentleman in Moscow, contains a description of St. Basil's Cathedral, which is located in Red Square. The book's main character, Count Alexander...