There are few more telling works of literature that speak to the challenges, passions and social order of the medieval period. Throughout the host of stories that comprises Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the concept of love in the Canterbury Tales emerges →
There are several stories in The Canterbury Tales by Geoffrey Chaucer that seek to explore the issue of medieval love and marriage, in both its idealized form and the opposite of the blissful ideal that is seen in The Franklin’s →
One of the most striking aspects of One Hundred Years of Solitude is how it manipulates expectations of genre. History, memory, reality and the supernatural are all intertwined and all given an equal amount of credence, although at different points. →
The “Thing” the narrator refers to in Marie Cardinal’s The Words to say it is not an actual physical presence or the blood itself, rather it is the manifestation of halted urges. The “Thing” is the narrator’s constant desire to →
In Tolstoy’s classic novel, War and Peace, the setting and tone the reader encounter at the opening of the book suggest that war and peace will be presented as opposing constructs, with the former being portrayed as a social vice to →
Although Frederick Douglass’s life narrative and Mark Twain’s “Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” are works that represent two distinct literary genres—the first, an autobiographical text and the second a popular novel, the thematic preoccupation of each text is essentially the same. →
Hemingway is as an author who presents readers with an “iceberg” scenario in which most of the substance lies far beneath the surface and cannot be seen or known. As a result, one is constantly forced to play detective and →
In a certain sense, Henry James’s “Daisy Miller” seems to reflect a time that has passed, a time in which the notion of literal physical and geographical mobility was just beginning to facilitate one’s social mobility. In “Daisy Miller,” the →
“[W]e want suicides to be homicides,” thinks the narrator, Detective Mike, as she is processing her boss’s reaction to learning about the news of his daughter’s death, allegedly committed by the daughter’s own hand (Amis 9). Detective Mike goes on →
The memoir by Evelio Grillo, Black Cuban, Black American does not immediately present readers with the racial issues that the title suggests are coming, but instead offers a distinct picture of a small child as he goes from Tampa (Ybor City) to →