Newest Study Guides

Director Ernst Lubitsch regularly referred to this 1932 pre-Code sex comedy Trouble in Paradise as his favorite of all the movies he directed. Lubitsch is regarded as one of the masters of light comedy, especially romantic comedies to the point...

The Short Tales of Joseph Conrad is a collection of eight examples of shorter fiction by the esteemed writer of Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness. Conrad was born in Poland and moved to England, where he became a naturalized citizen. Much of his life...

The Shadow Line was one of the last pieces of long prose that Joseph Conrad ever produced. At 30,000 words, it is a long piece, but as to whether it is actually a long short story or a short novel is up for debate. The general consensus is that,...

Mark Twain asserted that his literary hybrid Roughing It was nothing more than a simple personal narrative, absent any intent to present that account as history or philosophy. Well, Mark Twain said a lot of things, some of them not to be trusted....

The short story “Sunstroke” has been written by Bunin in 1927, and due to the category and stylistic features is adjacent to the collection of narratives “Dark Alleys” created during the Second World War, when Bunin’s family was in extreme...

Though Hardy is known more for his novels and poetry, the short fiction canon of Thomas Hardy nearly reaches the half-century mark. The overwhelming bulk are those available in just four collections published between 1888 and 1913: Wessex Tales, A...

Selections from the Essays of Montaigne is a collection of essays written by Michel de Montaigne. Montaigne was a French writer, philosopher, and statesman in the 1500s. Since he lived at the end of the century, he lived and wrote in the...

Having played the part of the Shakespeare's caring magician or cruel tyrant, depending on how you view Prospero, in four stage productions in his career, John Gielgud's self-professed life ambition was to create a film adaptation of what we...

S/Z was published in 1970 and written by Roland Barthes, a French philosopher and writer. Barthes dabbled in quite a few schools of theory, and made significant contributions to quite a few, including semiotics, social theory, anthropology, and,...

It was while visiting Europe in in 1874 that Henry James begin writing Roderick Hudson. Even before the manuscript was completed, the Atlantic Monthly began serializing chapters upon the author’s return to American in 1875. With the highly popular...

The Pioneers was published in 1823 and holds a significant place in American letters: it is the novel that launched the famous Leatherstocking Tales of James Fenimore Cooper. This is the book that introduced the world to Natty Bumppo, one of the...

Revelations of Divine Love belongs to the same genre of texts based entirely upon mysterious visions imparted through what is believed to be a divine goodness. In this case, the year was 1373 and a woman who has become known as Julian of Norwich...

Horatio Alger was an American writer and an author of more than one hundred books, most of which were written for young readers. His best known work is called Ragged Dick and was published in 1867. The plot of this book follows a formula made so...

First published in 1757, Edmund Burke’s A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful was a treatise on aesthetics that had a tangible impact on the Romantic and Gothic movements. Burke, through this work, was...

The Subterraneans was published in 1958. It was written by the famous Beat Generation author Jack Kerouac. The Beat Generation is a group of writers who started publishing their works and gaining popularity after World War II, around the 1950s....

The Street was written by Ann Petry, an African American author. The novel was published in 1946 and is set during World War II in New York City, specifically Harlem. The protagonist is named Lutie Johnson, who is the single African American...

Play with Repeats is the seventh play written by British playwright Martin Crimp. It was first staged in 1989 at the Orange Tree Theatre in London, where Crimp had debuted all his previous work.

Crimp was born to a working-class family in eastern...

In 1917 Edith Wharton moved out of her fictional comfort zone of life among the New York City elite and took her profound imagination to New England in the novel Summer. Over the course of four months in North Dormer, Massachusetts, a teenage girl...

The Romance of the Rose is an allegorical romance composed in two parts by two different writers over the course of half a century (more or less) during the 13th century. Gillaume de Lorris contributed the opening 4,000 lines (more or less) around...

The Skull Beneath The Skin is a 1982 detective novel by British crime writer P.D. James and featuring her renowned female private detective Cordelia Gray. The novel is set on fictional Courcy Island on the Dorset Coast, in a Victorian castle that...

George Lippard wrote The Quaker City with the express purpose of creating a controversial and infamous exposé of criminal underworld of Philadelphia that would be embraced by a scandalized public and perhaps lead to wholesale reform. At least,...

Gustave Flaubert (1821-1880) was born to a doctor and his wife in the northern French town of Rouen. Like Frederic in his 1869 novel Sentimental Education, Flaubert studied law in Paris as a young man. Like Freredic, he also never practiced law....

The Political Writings of John Locke is a collection of a few of Locke’s most important works that was edited by David Wootton, a professor of history and expert on English speaking countries, and others, such as France and Italy. The Political...

GE Moore is an English philosopher born on November 4, 1873 in Upper Norwood, London. Moore grew up in a family of academics - some were poets, other were professors, and all were dedicated to the arts and humanities. He received his primary...