Newest Study Guides

James Mercer Langston Hughes, was an American poet and social activist, born and raised in Joplin, Mississippi. Langston Hughes was a prominent leader in the Harlem Renaissance, an artistic movement in the 1920s that consisted of new...

Women and Writing is a nonfiction book published in 1979 by the British author Virginia Woolf. While she is most commonly known for her novels and for her works of fiction, Virginia Woolf was also the author of many nonfiction books and...

Wise Children is a novel published in 1991 by the English author Angela Carter. The novel was the author’s last one as she started writing it after she was diagnosed with cancer. Angela Carter died just a year later at the age of 51. Angela Carter...

Tar Baby is a novel written by Toni Morrison and published in 1981. Morrison was a professor at various universities all over the United States, but she moved to NYC to become a part time writer in the mornings before she went to work as an editor...

Theaetetus is one of Plato’s dialogues, written circa 369 BC. It is a dialogue between Socrates and the mathematician Theaetetus, in which they attempt to define “knowledge.” Living between 428/7 to 348/7 BCE, Plato was one of Socrates’ students,...

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...

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town is a collection of sequential short stories that was published first in 1912. They were written by Stephen Leacock, a Canadian political scientist and writer, who was one of the most famous humorists in the world...

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...

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,...

Swann’s Way is the first volume of Marcel Proust’s novel In Search of Lost Time, which has seven volumes within it. The entire work was first published in French between 1913 and 1927; it was translated into English and published between 1922 and...

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 Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui is a play that was published in 1941. It is subtitled “A parable play” and is a satirical allegory of Hitler and the Nazis rise to power before World War Two. This play was written by Bertolt Brecht, a German...

The Return of the Soldier is a novel written by Rebecca West in 1918. The novel revolves around the story of Chris Baldry, an upper class gentleman who has returned from the war to his wife Kitty Baldry. Kitty Baldry is a perfect representation of...

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,...

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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

The only work written by the ancient Roman historian Livy was a multi-volume history of Rome that modern scholars consider to be long as literary value, but rather wanting in historical fact. At one time the full history written by Livy spanned...

Some historians are destined to be read while others are destined to become omnipresent through throughout the literature of others as footnotes and references. Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian War considered the ultimate source for that...

The Selected Tales of Henry James represent a concerted effort to provide a cross section of the wealth of talent that was the short fiction of Henry James. Speaking of size, there is a good reason why the narratives in this collection are termed...

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 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...