Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
During the occupation of Japan by U.S forces following its surrender at the end of World War II, samurai films fell out of favor. The controlling U.S. political machine looked unkindly on the samurai code of Bushido, which required allegiance to...
Chungking Express was Wong Kar-Wai’s third film to be released and his international breakout feature. Neither of those facts should have been the case.
Wong Kar-wai decided to follow up his second film Days of Being Wild—-a critical sensation but...
Adapted from the novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby is a 1974 film directed by Jack Clayton, starring Robert Redford as the eponymous Jay Gatsby. The film also features Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, Sam Waterston as...
The Journal of John Woolman is one of the most successful and widely read; in fact, since it's first printing in 1774, it has never been out of print. So, who exactly was John Woolman?
Born in 1720, Woolman was an American merchant, journalist and...
About a Mountain is an essay-like book-length narrative published in 2010 by American author-essayist John D’Agata. At 240 pages long, D’Agata tells the story of himself in Las Vegas, following a case of a nuclear-waste storage plan by the...
Christina Rossetti was a 19th century English poet. She grew up in a family of writers, all three of her siblings also becoming accomplished poets or authors over her lifespan. From a young age, she wrote poetry, fascinated with wordcraft. She...
Possession was published in 1990; it is Byatt's fifth novel, and widely considered to be her most successful. The novel is inspired by Byatt's interest in Victorian literature, and her own work as an academic researcher and lecturer. It also...
"The Wild Swans at Coole" was written in 1916 when Yeats fifty-one. He was staying with his friend and patron Lady Gregory at her home near Coole Park, located in Galway, Ireland, a county located on Ireland's Atlantic coast. It was published in ...
It is not entirely clear on which day Aphra Behn was born, but we know that she was baptized on December 14th, 1640, in the little church that sat quietly in the shade of Canterbury Cathedral in the south of England where she was born. One of the...
It would be easy to credit Walt Disney with making Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea an adventurous cultural phenomenon, but in fact, credit should actually go to French author Jules Verne, whose penned this futuristic novel in 1870, almost...
To this day, scholars are unsure why Kant wrote this text, and bicker constantly about Kant's intentions when he wrote it, and his inspiration for doing so. What they can agree on, however, is that it was the most influential writings on the...
Hegel believed that history follows the dictates of reason - in other words, history is fluid, interpretive, and written retrospectively according to how we understand the facts as we see them. Hegel makes history into more of a science than an...
"It is not love which you poor fools do deem" is a sonnet that appears in Lady Mary Wroth's 1621 sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. In it, the speaker (Pamphilia) challenges an unknown group of antagonists by asserting that her...
"Big Poppy," featured in Ted Hughes' Flowers and Insects: Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders (1986), is a poem about sex and death. A first-person speaker dramatically narrates the path of a bumble bee as it guzzles nectar from a poppy flower. He...
"In Memory of Radio" was published as a part of Baraka's first poetry anthology, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961) under the name LeRoi Jones. This was published before Baraka became a radical black nationalist and changed his name....
To read the beginning of the Feminist Manifesto, one could close one's eyes and believe oneself to be in the middle of the Women's March, or at the very least, burning bra after bra as the sexual revolution inspired women everywhere to demand...
If Cher's nineteen seventies hit "Half Breed" were a novel, this would be it; like the song, it tells the story of a protagonist on the cusp of adulthood, struggling with never quite fitting in with either their Native American or their white...
'The Secret Lion' is a well-known published text written by American author Alberto Alvaro Rios. It is narrated from the position of a mnemonic adult but with a child's eye and voice, which gives the story a good deal of humor and wit. Through...
2011 McArthur Fellow Alicia Elizabeth Stallings is an American poet, and also a renowned translator of the poems of others. From an early age, Stallings was captivated by classical civilizations and studied Classics at the University of Georgia...
Most poets credit philosophies, natural beauty, and all things esoteric as their inspiration, but Vijay Seshadri credits his influences as American poetry heavyweights Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. Seshadri is an American poet and essayist of...
Born in 1905, Sartre was an intellectual and writer whose political beliefs and worldview were greatly altered by the German occupation of France during World War Two. The invasion in 1940 was followed by the collaboration of the Vichy government,...
Stranger than Fiction is a film released in 2006, directed by Marc Forster. A fantasy and comedy film, it stars Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, and Emma Thompson. Will Ferrell plays the main character, Harold Crick....
The novel Breath, Eyes, Memory was published in 1994 by the Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat. Her first novel, it became a bestseller almost immediately and won numerous awards. Critics almost unanimously praised Breath, Eyes, Memory. The...
In 1969, Kenneth Clark debuted a BBC miniseries narrating the history of Western art. Entitled Civilization, the series sketched out a concise, simple approach to art history, positing that every work of art can be understood by an adequate...
