American Literature

The comparison I have chosen to make is through the similarity of character interpretation we all face a crossroads. We have the choice to make what we will of our lives. Even when we are persecuted we can still overcome hardship and in the same breath if we choose the wrong road it can lead to sufferance by our own hand. What makes the works of Joyce and Eliot so intriguing is that they are so personalized in their emotive writings and yet almost surreally detached. As though they could talk about...

Bharati Mukherjees Jasmine is a fictional meditation on the experience of recent non-white immigrants to the United States.  Mukherjee does not shrink from depicting the difficult, sometimes nightmarish, reality of many immigrants. She certainly does not shy way from portraying the foibles and perversions of her new home and its people. At the same time, her main character embraces the possibility America offers to liberate herself from the chains of tradition, poverty, and religious fanaticism....

Many of our texts contained a supernatural element ghost stories or tales of horror. What instinctual fears or social preoccupations do these texts reveal about the 19th century Nineteenth century literature is quite popular for having in its body of literature elements of the supernatural. In fact, it is highly characterized with dark gothic, ghost stories and tales of horror.     The era was a period of time when people were under repression. And the people werent too happy about...

Raymond Carver is one of Americas most important writers during the latter part of the twentieth century. A minimalist, he was considered influential in the genres of short story and poetry. This can be attributed to the fact that Carver was mentored by John Gardner when he enrolled in one of the creative-writing courses that the former taught. Gardner instilled him to use fifteen words instead of twenty-five. Later in his writing career, his editor at Esquire Magazine, Gordon Lish, instructed him...

People constantly formulate ideals and create perfect images of things in their minds and most often they get carried away with the imagined scenarios so much so that they fail or refuse to understand that nothing on earth can ever be perfect. They stubbornly cling to the belief that all dreams can come true especially since stories abound in the media about people who lead lives that the average human can only imagine. Sometimes, however, a certain situation or event wakes them up to the realization...

Starting from as early as the beginning of the twentieth century (Rice, 2003 Hein, 2001), the educational functions of museum exhibition were being explored by museum professionals.  By and large, however, discussions centered on searching for innovative methods to arrange and display works in transparent cases, bases, and spaces for children to look at (Moore, 1941 Russel, 1956).  Progressing to the mid-twentieth century, there were more indications in literature on how museum professionals...

In most cultures, women are always regarded as the less-dominant sex, and looked at as individuals, whose only purpose in life is to get married, and perform the role of a docile housewife and a caregiver to the children. Numerous literary works have depicted these attitudes of the society regarding the social roles of the women. Owing to the biased attitude of the society, the various problems of women remain unnoticed, or are interpreted in an erroneous manner. One such short story which focuses...

There are lots of things in common about the two great writers that this essay will attempt to examine. We are referring to the writings of Jonathan Edwards, known to be a pastor, theologian, and an essayist and by Ralph Waldo Emerson who is known for his philosophical thoughts. Their works that we are going to examine are parts of Edwards Freedom of the Will which was published in 1845 and Emersons On Self-Reliance, which was published in 1841.Though they are moving in a different plane and possess...

    Reading the Ode to the West Wind by Percy Bysshe Shelley is a pleasure on different levels because other than in being a multi-layered description of the seasons, it also has numerous imagery that are as well, metaphors for hope.  The longish poem is suffuse with metaphors of this kind, from the first few initial stanzas to the last few stanzas.  While this association may be made with most poems that talks about nature, Shelleys approach is quite unlike the approach...

This paper is based on Arthur Millers Death of the Salesman and will examine whether the play adheres to the edicts of Aristotle on characteristics that define a tragedy. My thesis is that the play does not fully ascribe to the requirements of a tragic play though it borrows some of the qualities of the type. Through this paper, the differences between the play and a classical tragedy will be examined and the effects on the audience will be looked at.            ...