Newest Study Guides

“The Yellowhammer’s Nest” is one of the best-known poems by the English Romantic poet John Clare. It was written in the mid-1820s and published in Clare’s final collection, The Rural Muse (1835), as part of a series of poems about bird’s nests....

Daniel Woodrell's Winter’s Bone is a 2006 mystery-crime novel about Ree Dolly, a sixteen-year-old girl whose family home will be seized unless she can find her missing father and make him appear in court. Determined to secure a place to live for...

Malgudi Days is a short-story collection by Indian writer R. K. Narayan. The book was initially published in 1943 in India by Indian Thought Publications. It was republished internationally by Penguin Classics in 1982.

The book follows the lives...

In “Autumn,” the English Romantic poet John Clare describes how the land changes as summer gives way to fall. The poem employs a string of similes to compare the autumnal landscape to the things of domestic country life. However, at the end of the...

The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid was published in 2017. It is Jenkins Reid's 5th novel, but her first work of historical fiction; her first 4 novels are generally considered to be part of the romance novel genre. The Seven...

Legend says that Macbeth was written in 1605 or 1606 and performed at Hampton Court in 1606 for King James I and his brother-in-law, King Christian of Denmark. Whether it was first performed at the royal court or was premiered at the Globe...

Released in 2001, O is a film directed by Tim Blake Nelson. Starring Mekhi Phifer, Josh Hartnett, Julia Stiles, and Elden Henson, the play had a budget of $5 million and raked in nearly $20 million at the box office. The rights to the film were...

The plot of Shakespeare's Othello is largely taken from Giraldi Cinthio's Gli Hecatommithi, a tale of love, jealousy, and betrayal; however, the characters, themes, and attitudes of the two works are vastly different, with Shakespeare's play being...

After establishing herself as one of the leading 20th-century poets in Canada, the publication of Surfacing in 1972 instantly confirmed Margaret Atwood’s status as one the country’s most important novelists. Atwood’s unnamed heroine goes into the...

The Candy House is a speculative fiction novel by Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jennifer Egan, first published in 2022. The novel follows the intersecting lives of various characters in a series of stylistically diverse short stories as they...

“The Badger” is a poem by the English Romantic poet John Clare. It describes the traditional sport of “badger baiting,” in which a badger is captured and made to fight with dogs until it dies. The poem was published in 1820, as part of Clare’s...

“First Love” is a love poem by the English Romantic poet John Clare. Clare was born in 1793 in the small village of Helpstone. Before leaving school at the age of 12, he developed a love of poetry. His first book, Poems Descriptive of Rural Life...

Published in 1988, The Shadow Lines is a novel by award-winning Indian writer Amitav Ghosh. It recounts the story of the narrator's coming of age in Calcutta and the sweeping impact of political violence on his life.

The novel is told from a...

A Midsummer Night's Dream is first mentioned by Francis Meres in 1598, leading many scholars to date the play between 1594 and 1596. It is likely to have been written around the same period Romeo and Juliet was created. Indeed, many similarities...

"I Am!" laments the difficulty of asserting an individual identity in a hostile world. First published in 1848, it is one of the most famous poems by the nineteenth-century English poet John Clare. Clare was born in 1793 in a small village to...

The Aspern Papers is a novella by Henry James, first published serially in 1888 in The Atlantic Monthly. It was later released as a book in the same year. The novella explores an unnamed literary biographer's quest to obtain letters written...

Graves wrote the novel “I, Claudius” in 1934. The book is presented as a secret autobiography of Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus (or Claudius) who was the Emperor of the Roman Empire from 44 to 51 AD. In order the maintain this concept,...

The Legend of Good Women is a long poem about women who were faithful in love. It comprises a prologue and nine short stories, the last of which is unfinished. The prologue is the best-known portion of the poem, and apparently also Chaucer’s...

John Milton was born on December 9, 1608. Milton's father was a scrivener and, perhaps more importantly, a devout Puritan, who had been disinherited by his Roman Catholic family when he turned Protestant. In April 1625, just after the accession of...

Jon Krakauer's nonfiction book Under the Banner of Heaven: A Story of Violent Faith was first published in July 2003. The text follows two parallel storylines: the founding and development of the early Mormon church in the nineteenth century, and...

"Tableau" is a poem by American writer Countee Cullen describing an interracial romance between two men. Originally published in 1925, the poem appeared in Cullen's first poetry collection, Color. Cullen was born in 1903, supposedly in Louisville,...

"From the Dark Tower" is a poem by American author Countee Cullen detailing the struggle of Black individuals to receive recognition for their work. Originally published in 1927, the poem appeared in Cullen's second collection, Copper Sun. Cullen...

Countee Cullen (1903 – 1946) was an American poet, primarily known as one of the most celebrated figures of the Harlem Renaissance. His work is recognized for its formal versatility as well as its thoughtful examination of race in America. Cullen...

“Yet Do I Marvel” was published in Countee Cullen’s first and most famous poetry collection, Color (1925). At the time, he was just twenty-two years old. Alongside “Heritage” and “Incident,” this poem is one of Cullen's best-known. As a perfectly...