Steven Ripley, M.F.A.

Truman Capote’s story “A Christmas Memory” is about a seven-year-old and his sixty-something-year-old cousin enjoying the Christmas season together. There are other relatives living in the house...

The three unities form a theory of writing for dramatic tragedies. Aristotle’s name is attached to the unities, but in truth they were invented in 1514 by the Italian and Renaissance poet and...

Francis Bacon was an English writer, philosopher and statesman. He is often referred to as the father of empiricism. Empiricism states that knowledge comes only from sensory experience—therefore,...

"Hyperion" is an epic poem in blank verse, written by the English Romantic poet John Keats. A long piece of the poem exists; however, Keats never finished writing it. The poem is fully classical in...

"The Umbrella" is a short story written by Guy de Maupassant. It is set in Paris in the 1880s, and it is a subtle and observant comic tale about a woman, Mme. Oreille, and the trials and...

Fatalism is the belief that all events are predestined and inevitable. According to fatalism, no matter what we do, the outcome of a situation can never be changed. In his short version of the...

Christopher John Francis Boone, the protagonist of Mark Haddon's book The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, is not always understood by society, and Christopher definitely neither...

“Because My Father Always Said He Was the Only Indian Who Saw Jimi Hendrix Play 'The Star-Spangled Banner' at Woodstock” was first published in Sherman Alexie's 1993 short story collection, The...

At the climax of The Time Machine, the Time Traveler accidentally launches his Time Machine into the extreme distant future of Earth. Before this, he has landed in a distant enough time, when the...

I think characters are sympathetic not because of what they say but because we recognize within them desire. What breaks our heart in drama is when a characters’ desire is clear and specific and...

Simon Stephens, playwright of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, adapted the play from the book of the same name by Mark Haddon. In an interview, Stephens talks about the big...

John Osborne wrote the play Look Back in Anger in 1956. The play is an intensely realistic tale, a "kitchen sink" drama that presents harsh realism as a counter to the escapist plays and musicals...

"I'm a Mad Dog Biting Myself for Sympathy" is a short story by Louise Erdrich. She is the daughter of a Chippewa Indian mother and a German-American father, and she often writes stories that treat...

"By the Waters of Babylon" is a short story written by Stephen Vincent Benét, published in 1937. The story, reminiscent of the post-apocalyptic and speculative fiction of Ursula K. Le Guin, tells...

A blind spot is defined as "an area where a person's view is obstructed." This is the literal definition. In daily life, people often talk about having a figurative "blind spot" for someone; by...

Historification is a term invented and used by playwright Bertolt Brecht in his plays. Brecht's theater was a revolt against the theater of realism. His epic theater, as he called it, told large...

We are at the start of Jane Austen's novel, Emma. Austen is introducing the character of Emma Woodhouse, who is: handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed...

The tradition of dressing up in costumes began—at least as far back in Western history as is recorded—with the Celts. The Celts believed that as one year ended and the next year began, the worlds...

Joe Keller is a factory man who has worked hard all of his life for his family. As All My Sons by Arthur Miller begins, Joe is sixty years old. His son, Chris Keller, is thirty-two and a veteran of...

Lyrical Ballads, with a Few Other Poems was published in 1798. It was written by both William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who were great friends and colleagues. As the poets themselves...

The Ramayana is a massive piece of oral and written literature, an ancient Sanskrit and Hindu epic that is comprised of 24,000 verses in seven cantos. It was composed in the 5th century B.C and...

At the rise of the curtain, the audience is faced with the dark, grim rear wall of the Wingfield tenement. This building, which runs parallel to the footlights, is flanked on both sides by dark,...

In her play A Raisin in the Sun, Lorraine Hansberry uses an interesting mix of the very specific and the very general in her stage directions. At the very start of her play, she states, The...

Journey to the Center of the Earth is an adventure and science-fiction tale written in 1864 by Jules Verne. It tells the tale of three men—Dr. Otto Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel, and their guide...

Candide, or Optimism by Voltaire AllegoryA story that is metaphorical, with a specific hidden meaning, often political, moral, or from the current real world. Voltaire uses a direct allegory—so...

Egeus is a minor but key character in William Shakespeare's A Midsummer's Night Dream. Egeus appears to have one goal and one goal only: to marry his daughter Hermia to the gentleman Demetrius at...

At the beginning of the story "A Scandal in Bohemia" by Arthur Conan Doyle, the story's narrator, Dr. Watson, mentions that he has not seen his friend Sherlock Holmes for a while. As he states, I...

Dictionopolis is the name of the fantastic city visited by our hero Milo in the first several chapters of The Phantom Tollbooth, written by Norton Juster (with awesome illustrations by Jules...

After the fall of the Roman Empire, the territory of Western Europe was gradually divided into several different countries. This did not happen all at once, but gradually and for diverse reasons....

In the first scene of the book, Christopher discovers that their neighbor’s dog, Wellington, has been killed with a large garden fork. Christopher has Asperger Syndrome, a form of autism that is...

William Congreve’s quick-paced The Way of the World is a comic masterpiece, though curiously it was such a failure when first presented in 1700 that Congreve resolved to never write for the stage...

Rudolfo Anaya's Heart of Aztlán (1976) is a chronicle of loss, hardship, and transformation for a family of Mexican Americans who travel from their ancestral farmlands, through an industrial barrio...

Shakespeare makes extensive use of dramatic irony in the play Hamlet, both antipathetic and sympathetic. His title character, Hamlet, often uses verbal and antipathetic irony as a form of...

The South African passbook is the most overt object discussed in the play Sizwe Banzi Is Dead, by Athol Fugard, John Kani, and Winston Ntshona, and its power as a symbol of oppression is central to...

Here are four language devices William Shakespeare uses in Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene 2. I begin with a quote from the scene, followed by the type of language device, its definition, and how...