Newest Study Guides

Jason Reynolds's Ghost (2016) is a young-adult novel about Castle "Ghost" Cranshaw, a middle-schooler who joins a track team as a sprinter and develops greater behavioral discipline as he trains.

At twelve, Castle lives in an impoverished...

"Mean Time" is a poem originally published in Carol Ann Duffy's 1993 collection Mean Time. It describes the experiences of a speaker suffering in the aftermath of a breakup. As the speaker wanders the streets on a winter evening, she muses about...

The Roaring Girl is a fictional dramatization of the real life of Mary Frith, a seventeenth-century virago (or masculine woman) with a reputation for crime, cross-dressing, and general societal insubordination. By the time Frith – later known as...

Jennie Livingston's idea for Paris Is Burning began a number of years before the film's 1990 release. As a photography and painting student from Yale, Livingston became involved in news media after college. It was through this role that she...

Shakespeare lived in a time of great transformation for Western Europe. New advances in science were overturning ancient ideas about astronomy and physics. The discovery of the Americas had transformed the European conception of the world....

Henry IV, Part One first appeared in print in 1598, when two separate quartos were made. The second quarto serves as the standard text for most modern editions, and was followed closely by five more quartos in 1599, 1604, 1608, 1613, and 1622. The...

With Songs of Innocence, published in 1789, Blake introduced a new method of printing his own books. Blake would print his poems by hand onto copper plates, illustrate each poem with drawings, and then color the prints by hand. Blake claimed to...

Esperanza Rising was published in 2000. It is the fictional story of Esperanza Ortega, a privileged girl growing up in Mexico on her family's farm. However, her life is shattered when her father is murdered. Esperanza must leave behind her family’...

Throughout the twentieth century, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has become famous not only as one of Twain's greatest achievements, but also as a highly controversial piece of literature. In certain Southern states, the novel was banned due...

The Giver combines themes of young adult fiction, such as that of the protagonist Jonas's coming of age, with themes taken from dystopian novels such as George Orwell's 1984 or in particular Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, which deals with a...

John Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, published in 1937, is one of the author's most widely read novels, largely due to its ubiquitous presence in the high school curriculum. As a result, this mythic story of two opposites - the clever, wiry George...

“Shooting an Elephant” is a narrative essay by George Orwell about a conflicted period of Orwell’s life while he works as a police officer for the British Empire in colonial Burma. He despises the British Empire, and its presence in Burma, as do...

Kafka wrote The Metamorphosis in 1912, the year he felt his creativity finally taking a definite form. It was one of fairly few works Kafka was to publish in his lifetime. In 1913 he turned down an offer to publish the story, possibly because he...

"An Irish Airman Foresees His Death" is a poem by W.B. Yeats, written in 1918 and published the following year. The sixteen-line, iambic tetrameter elegy is written from the perspective of a fighter pilot in World War I. This speaker is Irish, and...

Carlo Collodi's The Adventures of Pinocchio is an 1883 Italian children's novel about an enchanted wooden puppet whose mischievous and lazy nature lands him in many punishing situations. Throughout the novel, the narrator and characters repeat...

According to scholar Robert Elsie, a common feature across Kadaré's work is the depiction of "a remote and haunted Albania as seen through the eyes of the innocent or incomprehending foreigner" (585). Broken April, Kadaré's twelfth novel, is no...

Gwen Harwood's poem “Suburban Sonnet” was first published in 1961 in The Bulletin, a prominent Australian literary magazine. It appeared alongside two related poems, “Suburban Sonnet: Boxing Day” and “In the Park,” all three of which expose the...

Miss Julie (Fröken Julie) is a play written by the Swedish playwright August Strindberg. He composed the play in a two-week period in late July and early August of 1888. Strindberg deemed it a “modern psychological drama” and a “tragedy,” and when...

"Elvis's Twin Sister" first appeared in Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 poetry collection The World's Wife. The collection explores themes of gender, femininity, and sexism through poems written from the perspective of real and imagined women with...

A Christmas Story (1983) is a bonafide American classic and a Christmas-time staple. Bob Clark's film tells the story of Ralphie, a young kid who tries to convince everyone possible – parents, teacher, and Santa – that the Red Ryder BB gun is the...

"Pilate's Wife" was originally published in Carol Ann Duffy's 1999 collection The World's Wife. This book consists of poems written from the perspective of various overlooked women in history and myth. In the case of this poem, Duffy adopts the...

Inception is a 2010 action-thriller film directed by Christopher Nolan and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. Nolan developed the film over a 10-year period, initially pitching the script to Warner Bros. in 2001 as a horror vehicle. The studio passed and...

David Chariandy's Brother is a 2017 coming-of-age novel about Michael, a child of Trinidadian immigrants who struggles to come to terms with the police killing of his older brother.

Set in the Park, a low-income multicultural neighborhood in...

William Butler Yeats's "Byzantium" originally appeared in his 1932 collection Words for Music Perhaps, and Other Poems. In this enigmatic work, an unidentified speaker enters a transcendent, fantastical space—the city of Byzantium. Here he...