The Canterbury Tales

Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," a relatively straightforward satirical and anti-capitalist view of the church, contrasts motifs of sin with the salvational properties of religion to draw out the complex self-loathing of the emasculated...

The Canterbury Tales

In the "Franklin's Tale," Geoffrey Chaucer satirically paints a picture of a marriage steeped in the tradition of courtly love. As Dorigen and Arveragus' relationship reveals, a couple's preoccupation with fulfilling the ritualistic practices...

Candide

Although the main characters in Voltaire's Candide supposedly resign themselves to work and cultivation rather than philosophizing in the end, it is necessary for them to survive struggle and turmoil in order to come to this realization. The...

Robert Browning: Poems

In Robert Browning's dramatic monologue, "Porphyria's Lover," the love-stricken frustrations of a nameless speaker end in a passionate, annihilating response to society's scrutiny towards human sensuality. Cleverly juxtaposing Porphyria's innocent...

Keats' Poems and Letters

John Keats' poems "When I Have Fears" and "Bright Star" are remarkably similar, yet drastically different at the same time. The Shakespearean sonnets share rhyme scheme as well as subject matter, yet deal with different facets of the same topic....

Bread Givers

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers is the story of Sara Smolinksy, a young Jewish girl, growing up in New York City in the early twentieth century. Even as a young girl, Sara rejects the Orthodox Jewish teachings of her father, a rabbi. She refuses to...

Brave New World

In the science fiction novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley shows a "revolution of revolutions" resulting from technological advances. He does so by portraying a future BNW society that is supposedly perfect in every way. Everyone is happy....

Brave New World

Brave New World, by acclaimed author Aldous Huxley, is not so much a novel about individuals as it is about a society as a whole. It is a story of a dystopia, of a cold scientific world order and the people who inhabit it. Against this harsh...

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World portrays a world in which pain and suffering have been all but eliminated, where pleasure is perpetual, and where society is immersed in stability. In a world such as this, the novel argues, there is no need for God...

Brave New World

It has been said that Muhammad is the "Seal of the Prophets," meaning that he was the last. However, our world has recently been graced by another prophet in Aldous Huxley. Huxley's prophetic vision is unmistakable in his science-fiction novel,...

Bluest Eye

Among Toni Morrison's works, "images of music pervade her work, but so also does a musical quality of language, a sound and rhythm that permeate and radiate in every novel" (Rigney 8). This rhythmic style of writing is particularly evident in The...

Black Boy

In his autobiographical account, Black Boy, Richard Wright instills in the reader the hunger that he felt for knowledge, as this drive had been suppressed by his environment. Wright's quest for knowledge and literacy parallels that of W. E. B....

Black Boy

Richard Wright's novel Black Boy is not only a story about one man's struggle to find freedom and intellectual happiness, it is a story about his discovery of language's inherent strengths and weaknesses. And the ways in which its power can...

The Odyssey

Generalizations and associations seem to permeate the culture of every human society. If this were not the case, there would be no need for the sociological study of ethnocentricity. The Odyssey of Homer strongly exhibits this quality of judging...