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.
Woody Allen's cinematic journey took a significant turn with the release of "Annie Hall" in 1977, marking a departure from his earlier slapstick, sketch-based comedies. Before delving into the profound impact of this film, it is crucial to...
The highly dubious “auteur theory” that distinguishes the director as the “author” of a film in the same way that a writer is the author of a novel simply does not hold when applied to Network. The film that reveals a shocking ability to produce...
The Caliph's House: A Year in Casablanca is a Moroccan folklore written by Tahir Shah and was released on October 26 2006 by Bantam Dell publishers.
The story follows the life of Tahir Shah, an Anglo-Afhan immigrant, who travels with his family to...
The Upanishads (also commonly known as the Vedanta) are a collection of ancient Sanskrit texts of religious and philosophical subjects. There are many concepts that are central to Hinduism and related to Buddhism, Sikhism, and Jainism. They are...
Having finished “The Legend of Saint Julien," Flaubert, as he said, was too excited to take on much work. In March 1876, he began his second novel “A Simple Heart”, completed in September of the same year.
He had already somewhat developed the...
Lucky Jim is a novel written by Kingsley Amins in 1954. The novel mainly revolves around the story of Jim Dixon, who is a history lecturer at a university in England. He is a middle-class man who is grammar school-educated who has just started out...
When talking about A Man for All Seasons,one has to consider two aspects: the period in which the play was written and the historical backround on which it is based.
Robert Bolt was a playwright born in Lancashire on the 15th of August 1924. He...
During the first two years of her new marriage, Carson McCullers worked on a manuscript titled The Mute which she then showed to her writing teacher, Sylvia Bates. Bates was impressed enough to strongly urge McCullers to apply for a Houghton...
Written in 1893, The Odd Women explores the role of British women in the latter half of the nineteenth-century, especially that of the redundant woman. What do women do when marraige isn't an option? What is natural for women? If woman's practical...
Hunger is a novel written by Knut Hamsun in 1890. The book mainly revolves around an unnamed vagrant who is very intellectual leanings and wanders around the streets of Norway's capital, Oslo, in pursuit of nourishment. The unnamed character also...
The novel The Natural was published in 1952 by the American writer Bernard Malamud; it marks the writer’s debut in the literary field and the start of his literary career. While Bernard Malamud published short stories before the novel, The Natural...
In the late 1870's, Friedrich Nietzsche was planning the publishing of his latest philosophical works, a three-part book called Human, All Too Human. The books would be published in three parts, and then in a two-volume release several years...
On December 17, 1996, rebels stormed the Japanese embassy in Peru, taking hundreds hostage in an act of protest against the policies of Peruvian leader Alberto Fujimori. Within days all but 72 of the hostages had been released. Of these 72 people,...
ZZ Packer is an American short fiction writer. She is of African ethnic origin and her most known collection of stories Drinking Coffee Elsewhere (2003) is closely connected with the issue of race affiliation. Still it is not the central issue of...
A Thousand Acres is a novel that was published in 1991 that was written by Jane Smiley. The novel is highly acclaimed, having won the 1992 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction as well as the 1991 National Book Critics Circle Award for fiction. In addition,...
The context within which Raymond Chandler unleashed The Big Sleep upon an unsuspecting world of murder mystery devotees may be surprising to some. Although Chandler had established his hard-boiled variety of murder mystery within the world of...
The Dew Breaker is a 2004 novel by Edwidge Danticat which is structured in the form of nine connected stories. Each story is set either in Haiti at the height of the dictatorship of François Duvalier, known as Papa Doc, and his son, Jean-Claude...
Gottfried Leibniz should make the short list for any discussion of true genius. His insights into mathematics helped shape our understanding of Calculus and Physics, and he also wrote extensively about probability, biology, medicine, psychology,...
Artificial Paradises (original French title Les Paradis artificiels) is a non-fiction text published by an author far more famous for his reputation as one of the greatest poets that France ever produced. Charles Baudelaire's 1860 volume, which...
When you set your novel in a California town called Ithaca and you give your characters names like Homer and Ulysses, you had better be making some sort of effort to tie your story in with the ancient myths of yore. Lots of writers have attempted...
Delmore Schwartz first wrote the short story "In Dreams Begin Responsibilities" in July 1935, when he was twenty-one years old. The story was first published in the Partisan Review in 1937, in the first issue following the publication's...
Published in 1894, George Moore’s groundbreaking experiment in pushing the boundaries of Naturalism in English-language fiction presents a stark portrait of both how much things have changed in the past century or so and how little things have...
Dry Lips Oughta Move to Kapuskasing is a play by Tomson Highway. It was nominated for a Governor General's Award along with nomination for Dora Mavor Moore Awards (presented by the Toronto Alliance for the Performing Arts) including Best New Play...
John Dewey originally published The Public and Its Problems in 1927. The release of a new edition in 1946 added a subtitle—An Essay in Political Enquiry—as well as the addition of an introduction to the original’s short preface. That preface...
