Sophia Angelis

The relationship between Clarissa Dalloway and Peter Walsh is one of the most important components of Mrs. Dalloway.  Peter and Clarissa had once been good friends. They were very...

Over the course of the play, Juror #8 emerges as the leader of the group. Juror #8 is the first person (and initially the only person) to express doubt that the boy accused of murdering his father...

Sea of Poppies is the first novel in the Ibis trilogy, created by author and historian Amitav Ghosh. The book takes place in India at the beginning of the opium trade. In proceeding years, the...

The plot of Vanity Fair primarily follows the lives of two women: Becky Sharp, a girl who is born poor and strives to gain money through cunning and social standing through marriage; and...

Bill Oliver is one of Biff Loman's former employers. He is introduced to the plot when Biff and his brother, Happy, tell their father that they're considering going into the sporting goods...

Lane is Algernon's butler. His primary role in The Importance of Being Earnest is to protect and support Algernon, who undertakes comic escapades that entail a great deal of risk. His role is...

Blanche and Stella are sisters, but their personalities are very different. Blanche is a romantic, and speaks in lyrical language that often uses figurative language or references poets or writers....

Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Annabel Lee" tells the story of two young lovers who lived together in a "kingdom by the sea." Their love was "a love that was more than love." For that reason (in the...

The passage your question refers to is below:  "Kino moved cautiously so that the water would not be obscured with mud or sand. He hooked his foot in the loop on his rock and his hands worked...

To the Lighthouse, which Virginia Woolf published in 1927, is a three-part novel. In the first section, the Ramsay family spends the summer at their house at the Isle of Skye. The son, James, wants...

To the Lighthouse, which Virginia Woolf published in 1927, takes place on the Isle of Skye, the northernmost island in the Inner Hebrides in Scotland. The setting is, however, generally considered...

In The Pearl, the protagonist, Kino, and his wife, Juana, find a huge pearl that they believe could make their family rich. The pearl potentially offers their family many things that Juana...

The background to Stella and Stanley's marriage is not explained directly in the play, but Stella's reasons for marrying Stanley are implied. It is implied in the play that Stella met Stanley in...

Elizabeth Proctor is the wife of John Proctor, and both are members of the Massachusetts Bay Colony.  Elizabeth Proctor becomes implicated in the conflict of the play by way of Abigail...

Adjectives are words that modify (describe) nouns. This means that adjectives are extremely common in most kinds of writing, including poetry. "I Stood Tip-Toe Upon a Little Hill" is full of...

Virginia Woolf belongs to a historical group of writers called "modernists" who wrote in a style called "modernism." Literary modernism emerged at the beginning of the twentieth century, and also...

The poet John Keats is known for many of his "odes," which are types of poems that celebrate or pay homage to their subjects. (For instance, Keats wrote an ode to autumn, an ode to a nightingale,...

A Streetcar Named Desire is one of the most important plays in American history. Today, the play has significance in many ways.  The first of these is that it defined an important genre in...

Scholars have often considered Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire to be a historical play about the transition of the American South into the modern era.  In this reading,...

Blanche is one of two main characters in Tennessee Williams' play A Streetcar Named Desire, which debuted in 1949. In the play, Blanche is an English teacher, though she leaves her position...