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William Wordsworth’s “Lucy Poems” consist of five verses composed between 1798 and 1801. They include “Strange fits of passion have I known,” “She dwelt among the untrodden ways,” “I travelled among unknown men,” “Three years she grew in sun and...

"Miss Cynthie" is a short story originally published in Story Magazine in 1933. It's publication was controversial to some, because it was written by an African American author, Rudolph Fisher. At this time, it was often seen as unacceptable for...

"John Archer's Nose" is a short story by the African American author Rudolph Fisher. The story was originally published in 1935 in the Metropolitan Magazine. The story is the sole companion work of his most famous novel, The Conjure-Man Dies. In...

Rudolph Fisher only wrote his short story City of Refuge because he wanted to read something that was an accurate representation of day-to-day life in Harlem during the Harlem Renaissance. :The story first appeared in The Atlantic Monthly in...

The Walls of Jericho is the debut novel of author and physician Rudolph Fisher. The book, originally published in 1928, inspired Langston Hughes to title Fisher one of the wittiest authors of the Harlem Renaissance. Fisher is well known for his...

The Conjure Man Dies is a novel written in 1932 by African American author Rudolph Fisher. It tells the curious story of a mystic who is murdered, only to apparently come back to life. 'N. Frimbo is discovered dead at his conjure table and his...

John Milton’s “On The Morning of Christ's Nativity,” also known as the "Nativity Ode," is a poem about the birth of Christ, and also a poem about the birth of a poet. When Milton wrote the poem in 1629, he was 21 and had not yet published a...

Of Jonson's works, the satires are some of his most well-known. Every Man in His Humour was written in 1598 and was the first of his many "humour plays." Following Every Man in His Humour was a sequel, Every Man Out of His Humour. Though the first...

Debbie: An Epic is a book of poetry written by poet Lisa Robertson. This book was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Poetry in 1998. In writing this text, Robertson was influenced by other epic texts, such as Virgil's Aeneid.

Praised...

Thomas Cromwell was an English lawyer who was Henry VIII's chief minister for eight years, orchestrating such things as the annulment of Henry's marriage to Catherine of Aragon and the creation of the Church of England which was founded almost...

The Glass Hotel is the fifth novel penned by Canadian author Emily St. John Mandel. One literary critic described the work as "a jigsaw puzzle that was missing its box"; the novel tells the story of two siblings whose lives are a mixture of...

William Wordsworth, along with Robert Southey and Samuel Coleridge, is one of the "Lakeland Poets," a group that is widely credited with beginning the English Romantic Movement. The movement was characterized by a rejection of the Enlightenment,...

Shelley’s poetry covers a variety of themes, but a reader of his poetry will almost always perceive some hint of radicalism, a challenge to one institutional tyranny or another: monarchy, government, church, or court. Thus, when analyzing Shelley’...

"The Nose" is a satirical, absurdist short story written by Nikolai Gogol between 1832 and 1833.

In "The Nose," Gogol seeks to show the image of an empty and bombastic man, Kovalev, who loves appearances, high social status, and favor from his...

One of Us is Lying is a fictional mystery book published in 2017. The book follows four narrators—Bronwyn Rojas, Nate Macauley, Addy Prentiss, and Cooper Clay—in the two months after their classmates Simon Kelleher’s death by peanut allergy.

After...

This eye-opening book offers an analysis of the cross and the lynching tree as religious and cultural symbols in American history. These symbols are paralleled, connected and contrasted in the text, and are ultimately shown to reveal the dark side...

Based on the Chinese legend of Hua Mulan, Disney's 1998 animated film Mulan takes place during the Chinese Han dynasty and follows the titular Fa Mulan as she impersonates a man in order to take the place of her ailing father and fight against the...

Katherine Applegate's The One and Only Ivan is a 2012 children's novel written in the voice of Ivan, an artistic gorilla who lives in a mall as a customer attraction. After Stella the elephant dies from neglect, Ivan comes to terms with his...

Salt to the Sea is a young-adult historical fiction novel published on February 2, 2016. It is Ruta Sepetys’s third novel. Like Sepetys’s other three novels, Salt to the Sea explores the lost and forgotten stories of history. In particular, it...

Originally published in French in 1947, The Ethics of Ambiguity is the second non-fiction publication by Simone de Beauvoir. In her book, she claims that humans are naturally born "free" because of their since of self-awareness, among other...

In his 1884 satirical novella, Flatland, English school teacher Edwin Abbott contends that Victorian society is divided into distinct classes and that the main goal of everyone is to climb the social ladder as quickly as possible. However,...

Originally published in 2015, Fish in a Tree is a New York Times bestselling novel by Lynda Mullaly Hunt. The novel follows the inspiring story of Ally, a troublemaking middle-schooler who has dyslexia. Because of this, she is unable to read, and...

British author Doris Lessing wrote the short novel The Fifth Child in 1998. It tells the story of a happily married couple, Harriet and David, who already have four children, but whose lives become fractured and difficult after the birth of Ben,...