Comfort Woman

Comfort Woman, written by Nora Ojka Keller, tells the fictional story of two women, a mother and a daughter, bound by their genetics and torn apart by their varying cultures and experiences. Keller explores not only the past experiences of Akiko...

Winter in the Blood

For the narrator of Winter in the Blood, by James Welch, motivation is at the root of all of his problems, from his need to leave his mother and the comfort of home, to his problems in dealing with the past, and finally to his wanting to start a...

From Russia With Love

The failed British invasion of Suez in 1957 has come to represent the end of Britain's reign of military, commercial and imperial dominance in the world. British Prime Minister Sir Anthony Eden resigned in the wake of this humiliating defeat;...

Our Town

In the forward to Our Town, Donald Margulies argues that Thornton Wilder’s play is still representative of the “microcosm of the human family, genus American” (Marguiles xvii). Margulies statement about the plausible modern application of Our Town...

The Old Man and the Sea

The Old Man and the Sea is a novella that “should be read easily and simply and seem short,” Hemingway writes in a letter to his friend Charles Scribner, “yet have all the dimensions of the visible world and the world of a man’s spirit” (738).

Out...

On Revolution

Lenin and Weber hold different views on the state, and explore the pitfalls and praises of democracy through their respective paradigms. In Weber’s Politics as a Vocation he takes a militant view of the state, claiming that if the notion of...

House on Mango Street

“One day I will say goodbye to Mango. I am too strong for her to keep me here forever. One day I will go away . . . They will not know I have gone away to come back. For the ones I left behind. For the ones who cannot out” (Cisneros 110). The...

Jasmine

Immigrants almost inevitably face immense challenges pursuing the American Dream--socially, economically, perhaps even internally. Such struggles are evident in the novel "Jasmine," Bharati Mukherjee's richly descriptive and emotionally powerful...

Little Dorrit

This essay will focus on the collapse of William Dorrit (Bk 2, ch 19) and examine William’s imprisonment to self-deception in this passage as a consequence of his moral debts to society and Amy, what effects this has on his character in the novel...

The Homecoming

In The Homecoming, Harold Pinter suggests that there are two types of women: whores or mothers. The whore, he believes, can have little success in family life; the mother, on the other hand, can create a successful family. Pinter’s statement is...

The Canterbury Tales

The Canterbury Tales presents the Wife of Bath as an honest woman in conflict with her society. “Honest” here takes on two meanings. It either implies that the Wife of Bath is a moral and Christian member of society or, more literally, that she in...

Communist Manifesto

Classical liberalism, as expressed by Locke, contains the notions of both intellectual or physical liberty (i.e., the natural rights and freedoms of man with respect to society) and economic liberty (i.e., the right to own and transmit property)....

The Good Woman of Setzuan

Lennox (1978) argues that Brecht was “unable to see real women in their full dimensions” perhaps due to “a terror of women like that possessed by many men”. Accepting this, Brecht’s portrayal of women is in terms of stereotypes only slightly...

Twelfth Night

Salinger (1974) calls Twelfth Night a “comedy about comedy” in which Shakespeare demonstrates his “fundamental debt to the earlier Renaissance tradition of comic playwriting and his abiding sense of detachment from it” (pg 242), and it is from...