Dubliners

Probably no other twentieth century short story has called forth more attention than Joyce's "Araby." Some universality of experience makes the story interesting to readers of all ages, for they respond instinctively to an experience that could...

Beloved

Much like a ghost, Beloved's Sethe is caught in limbo between her past and future. She constantly struggles between the remembrances triggered by Beloved and the opportunities afforded by Paul D. Having never matured into the present, Sethe finds...

Yonnondio: From the Thirties

In contrast to many other Depression-era novels, in which the teamwork of the common man is seen as society's glue, Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio looks with great admiration at one family's struggle to keep above water. Through the travails of a...

Yonnondio: From the Thirties

The four didactic interludes present in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties are vitally important in relation to the rest of the text. These narrative intrusions, as Constance Coiner prefers to call them, not only change but also deepen...

The Yellow Wallpaper

The Victorian rest cure, a diagnosis set forth to upper class, white, Victorian women who were believed to be suffering from "hysteria", or "trauma related to an unsuccessful role adjustment" sought to instill in them a "childlike submission to...

The Yellow Wallpaper

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the most prominent feminists and social thinkers at the turn of the century. Her best fiction, The Yellow Wallpaper, is also her least typical. It is about a young wife and mother's mental deterioration as...

The Yellow Wallpaper

"Personally, I disagree with their ideas." One of the opening statements of "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this quote sums up the point of the text. Gilman becomes incensed at the way doctors and society view women. This short...

The Yellow Wallpaper

In the well-known work Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman emphasizes her belief that "dependence on men not only doom[s] women to live stifled lives but also retard[s] the development of the human species" (Kirszner 449). Those words...

The Yellow Wallpaper

"The pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you."

As her madness progresses...

Wuthering Heights

Emily Bronte, in her novel Wuthering Heights, characterizes the protagonist Heathcliff as both a recipient and a perpetrator of the continually domineering forces of both love and revenge existing within the novel. Through complex...

Wuthering Heights

In Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights, Catherine redeems her mother's inability to love another tenderly with her love towards Linton. Catherine's lovingness is not one of intense self-consuming passion where the object of love is over-looked and...

Wuthering Heights

Readers of Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights and Maryse Conde's Windward Heights can easily become overwhelmed by the deluge of voices that permeate each of the respective novels. After sorting through the complicated filtering of narratives in...

Wuthering Heights

In Wuthering Heights, Bronte depicts the turbulence of the psyche through her characters. Heathcliff, Edgar and Catherine are portrayed not as three distinct personas, but instead as three parts of a single psyche. Heathcliff, Edgar and Catherine...

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is essentially a romantic novel in which the author, Emily Bronte, brings two groups of people with different backgrounds into contact with each other. Close analysis of the novel reveals a key theme. When the reader examines the...

Wuthering Heights

Wuthering Heights is a timeless classic in which Emily Brontë presents two opposite settings. Wuthering Heights and its occupants are wild, passionate, and strong while Thrushcross Grange and its inhabitants are calm and refined, and these two...

Anne Bradstreet: Poems

Anne Dudley Bradstreet was America's first published poet. Cotton Mather described her as: "a gentlewoman whose extraction and estate were considerable." She was an intelligent, well-educated poet, wife, and mother, who contradicted almost all of...

Wordsworth's Poetical Works

"Resolution and Independence" and "Lines Written Above Tintern Abbey" respectively illustrate the difference between a young and nave poet-wanderer to a traveler who has found wisdom through time and nature. Furthermore, the two poems are also...

Wordsworth's Poetical Works

Although scholars classify both William Wordsworth and William Blake as "romantic poets", their writing styles and individual perspectives differ tremendously. Wordsworth, though he is not so blind as to ignore the strife that is prevalent in...

Coleridge's Poems

After ten weeks of intently studying a wide range of some of literature's greatest authors and their representative works, one is hard pressed to single out only four of these transcendiary pieces from such a distinguished list. However, four of...