Tender is the Night

The implications of modernist thought in F. Scott Fitzgeralds' Tender Is the Night, become apparent when conceptualizing crime and punishment. Besides the murder of the Negro in the Parisian hotel, the idea of crime is plastic; adultery, deceit,...

Tender Buttons

As with many poems, an initial read-through of Gertrude Stein's Preciosilla may leave many readers bewildered as to what her intent or message may be. From a technical perspective, it is difficult to make sense of the language because the entire...

The Tempest

The epilogue of Shakespeare's The Tempest, while separate from the body of work preceding it due to the nature of an epilogue, it is an integral part of the work. It provides resolution to an otherwise unresolved piece, and the piece actually...

The Tempest

The abandoned damsel, the lonely daughter, the beautiful virgin... In The Tempest, Shakespeare depicts all of these ideal constructions of womanhood in his character Miranda. However, looking closely at the text reveals that Shakespeare had a...

The Tempest

In William Shakespeare's final play, The Tempest, the playwright intertwines love and magic, creating one of play's the major themes. Prospero, the protagonist, uses magic to plan the events of this comedy. The first act of magic is the tempest...

The Tempest

A post-colonial interpretation of The Tempest is an interpretation which has gained popularity in the latter half of the twentieth century. This particular reading of the play implies that Shakespeare was consciously making a point about...

Swann's Way

To read Proust carefully is like looking closely at your own pupil. Curiosity pushes you up to the mirror so close that eventually the tool of perception itself is ineffective. Indeed you can't see what's doing the seeing. Likewise, putting up a...

Swann's Way

The "Combray" section of Marcel Proust's Swann's Way is an extended meditation on an idyllic past. The book begins, though, not with recollections of Combray, but with a description of the narrator's half-asleep state, a state of consciousness...

The Sun Also Rises

In <i>The Sun Also Rises</i>, Earnest Hemingway depicts the independent Lady Brett Ashley, the main female character in the novel, as a selfish, careless, and superficial woman. She was perhaps once a compassionate woman: she was a...

The Sun Also Rises

The destruction of WWI disillusioned an entire generation and accelerated the evolution of modernism --- a culture that was ostensibly enlightened, irredeemable and confused. The emergence of 1920's modernism allowed for a resurgence of feminist...

The Sun Also Rises

I have been one acquainted with the night.

I have walked out in rain -- and back in rain.

I have outwalked the further city light.

I have looked down the saddest city lane.

I have passed by the watchman on his beat.

And dropped my eyes, unwilling to...

Sula

Toni Morrison novels famously give voice to a black political, social, and moral conscience. Her novels deal primarily with the issues and concerns of black heritage and future and all the triumphs and tragedies of power and identity in between....

Sula

This novel is entitled Sula, after the woman who takes the conventions of her small home town and turns them completely upside down, but the story itself would not be complete without her friend and counterpart who embodies these conventions, Nel....

Jane Eyre

Scorching flames, conflagration, burning. The imagery of fire has long been linked to power and passion. Fire can enact complete obliteration, and yet can also forge a new beginning where only scattered ashes of the past remain. The symbolic motif...

A Tale of Two Cities

Geoffrey Chaucer once wrote, "Trouthe is the hyeste thing that a man may kepe" (The Canterbury Tales ëThe Knight's Tale'). Since before the ancient Greeks, mankind has striven to discern and define truth, a noble if somewhat arduous task. Even...

A Tale of Two Cities

Question:

The theme of resurrection ("rebirth," saving or redeeming in one's soul, renewed interest in and zest for life, salvation from death, harm, or "nothingness," etc.) is predominant throughout this novel. Identify two characters whose lives...

The Stranger

"Society is a masked ball, where every one hides his real character, and reveals it in hiding."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

A society constrained to specific social standards reprimands those who do not conform to such principles. In the process, a supreme...