12th Grade

The Sun Also Rises

In Ernest Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises the protagonist, Jake Barnes, struggles with being impotent in a post World War I society which bases masculinity primarily on a man’s ability to perform in his relationships. The other male...

College

Adam Bede

Adam Bede published in 1859 is George Eliot’s first full-length novel but not her first fiction. At the time of its apparition, she had already published a collection of three novellas and established herself as an editor, reviewer, and essayist....

College

The Water Knife

How far can our ecosystem impact our lives? According to ecocriticism, the environment influences society in almost every way possible. For instance, in Bressler’s Literary Criticism: An Introduction to Theory and Practice, he states that...

College

The Scarlet Letter

The Scarlet Letter and Beloved, despite their vastly different settings, both emphasize the effect of community on an individual. In The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne, set in Boston in 1642, the rigidly Puritan society criminalizes a young...

College

Oliver Twist

A confrontation with death, even if just in thoughts, always generates uneasiness, for death, as described by American existential psychiatrist Irvin D. Yalom, is “a primordial source of anxiety and the primary source of psychopathology”. Most...

College

The Haunted Hotel

Sensation fiction emerged as a large bracket of literary genres that dominated the English market between the 1860s and the 1880s; two decades during which the sensation novel -which dealt with crime, horror, mystery, and forbidden love- came to...