Newest Study Guides

Michael Warner’s The Trouble with Normal is an influential book-length statement on sexual politics in the United States. Published at the end of the 1990s, it includes discussions of sex scandals like the one that plagued President Bill Clinton,...

Walled States, Waning Sovereignty is an influential book published in 2010 by the American political theorist Wendy Brown. It seeks to explain a contemporary trend of nations building border walls throughout the world. Brown says this is a symptom...

Alfred Hitchcock’s first Hollywood movie was Rebecca, based on the novel by author Daphne DuMaurier. It became the only Hitchcock movie ever to win the Oscar for Best Picture. After what must have seemed an unlikely twenty-year stretch in which he...

“Mapping the Margins” is Kimberlé Crenshaw’s classic article explaining and applying her concept of “intersectionality.” The article was an important articulation of Black feminist thought, showing how antiracist and feminist activism failed women...

The Wretched of the Earth is Frantz Fanon’s seminal 1961 book, originally published in French, about the effects of colonization on the minds of the colonized, and the efforts by the colonized to overthrow the colonizers. It draws from Fanon’s own...

The Sociological Imagination is C. Wright Mills’s 1959 statement about what social science should be and the good it can produce. In this way, it is a polemical book. It has a vision for sociology, and it criticizes those with a different vision....

Black Skin, White Masks is Frantz Fanon’s classic statement on the psychological experience of Black men and women in societies dominated by white people, especially France. It draws from his personal experience as a man born in the Caribbean...

When Alfred Hitchcock released Vertigo in 1958, it was met with ambivalence and near rejection by critics and audiences. Vertigo defied easy categorization and explored themes related to sexual perversity, erotic obsession and a shifting...

Wilkie Collins found the inspiration for The Woman in White from a French book entitled Recueil des causes célèbres. In this book, there is a story of a French widow who is drugged by her brother and then imprisoned in a mental asylum under a...

The Graduate is a 1967 American comedy/drama film directed by Mike Nichols, based on the 1963 novel of the same name by Charles Webb. The story revolves around Benjamin Braddock, played in a star-making turn by a young Dustin Hoffman, who enters...

Audiences had modest expectations for Taxi Driver when it was first released in the winter of 1976. A low-budget film directed by a not-particularly-well-known Martin Scorsese and starring the young Robert De Niro, who had recently won an Oscar...

"The Idea of Order at Key West" is a philosophical poem about the creative powers of the human mind, by American modernist Wallace Stevens. It is the title poem and most famous work from Stevens' second poetry collection, Ideas of Order, published...

"Of Modern Poetry" is a poem by Wallace Stevens published in 1942, in his collection Parts of a World. The poem acts as a highly self-referential manifesto on the purpose of modern poetry, and the role of the poet.

This poem marks a noticeable...

Mac Flecknoe is one of the four major satires of esteemed English poet John Dryden. The poem is personal satire that has for its target Thomas Shadwell, another poet who had offended Dryden with his aesthetic and political leanings. It is also...

The Maltese Falcon is a 1941 film noir based on the novel of the same name by Dashiell Hammett. It was directed by John Huston and was his directorial debut. The film follows the story of a San Francisco private detective named Sam Spade (played...

"Sweat" is a short story by Zora Neale Hurston, published in 1926. Hurston was "a product of the Harlem Renaissance," an African-American political and artistic movement that took place in Harlem, New York in the 1920s, "as well as one of its most...

The Shack is a work of Christian fiction published by William Paul Young in 2007. The novel tells the story of Mack, a man whose daughter has been abducted by a serial killer, meeting God face to face and spending a weekend in a shack in the woods...

Baz Luhrmann's 2013 film The Great Gatsby is based on F. Scott Fitzgerald's 1925 novel of the same name. The novel is a classic, taught almost universally in high school English classes and touted as one of the most important works of American...

A classic of 20th-century literature, The Once and Future King is based loosely on the epic Middle French poem Le Mort d'Arthur, written by Sir Thomas Malory in the 15th century. Malory's text chronicles the early life, career, and death of the...

All Creatures Great and Small is a novel written by James Herriot, the pen name for James Alfred ‘Alf’ Wight. It is the first book in a series, followed by the novels: All Things Bright and Beautiful (1972), All Things Wise and Wonderful (1977), ...

The Iceman Cometh is often deemed Eugene O’Neill’s magnum opus. It is a towering, profound, and lengthy work that manages to conjure up the universal and existential amidst the conversations of bums, derelicts, and dreamers at a rundown bar in...

Alien (1979) is a highly regarded and influential film in the Thriller/Science Fiction/Horror genres. The film was directed by Ridley Scott and written by Dan O'Bannon. Ridley Scott also had been the director of the well-received film The...

The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: The Will to Knowledge is Michel Foucault’s landmark 1978 study, originally published in French, of the historical and political circumstances under which sexuality, as we know it, was formed. The book largely...

The Haunting of Hill House is considered Shirley Jackson’s best work and perhaps the quintessential haunted house novel. A delicate but insidious mediation on the feminine, the supernatural, psychological trauma, and the oppression of family and...