Today's Date:
January 11, 2025
- Authors (9)
- Poetry (62)
- Fiction (162)
- Non-Fiction (42)
Analysis and Review of One Hundred Years of Solitude
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. →
Analysis and Review of The Words by Marie Cardina
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 →
Russian History
Somewhere between the hard lines of West and East lies Russia, a country that has long struggled to find its place in a maelstrom of conflicting cultures. Due to its proximity to Western Europe and the many wars and political →
The “Black for Life” Theory and Writers of the Harlem Renaissance
In his historical consideration of the literary movement known as the Harlem Renaissance, essayist Thadious M. Davis does the reader a profound service by situating the phenomenon and its writers within a situational and socio-historical framework. Davis examines the lives →
Three Views of the Model Citizen: Socrates, Antigone, and Oedipus
One of the subjects that will always preoccupy the literary imagination is what it means to be a good, productive, and moral member assisting in the construction of a meaningful society. This theme can be traced across the entire span →
The Blues as Poetry : Ellison, “Crazy Blues” and “Down-Hearted Blues”
Perhaps there is no better definition of the blues than the one that has been offered by the writer Ralph Ellison, who said, “The blues is an impulse to keep the painful details… of a brutal experience alive in one’s →
Literary Analysis of “The Bluest Eye” by Toni Morrison : History and Slavery
Unlike so many works in the American literature that deal directly with the legacy of slavery and the years of deeply-imbedded racism that followed, the general storyline of Toni Morrison’s novel, The Bluest Eye does not engage directly with such events but →
Violence, Coping and Contemporary Poetry
In his poem “Try to Praise the Mutilated World,” Adam Zagajewski juxtaposes intense images of violence, such as “the executioners sing[ing] joyfully” (l. 11), with simple but equally powerful images of beautiful objects and moments of positive connection between people. →
The Purpose of a Poetry Anthology, An Analysis by Example
So many excellent anthologies of poetry were published in the second half of the 20th century, and continue to be published into this century. Anthologies, collections of poems by numerous authors pulled together under a single cover, are attractive to readers →
The Foil Character in Shakespeare : Laertes, Claudius and Fortinbras
In William Shakespeare’s works, there are often many instances of the protagonist’s key traits being highlighted in the behavior of another character. However, there is no play where these foils are more obvious than in the famed Hamlet. While nearly every →
