Tom Wolfe’s first novel, The Bonfire of the Vanities, was published in 1987 to widespread critical and popular acclaim. Only days after its release, the dizzying pace and boundless decadence of 1980s Wall Street so enjoyed by the novel’s protagonist,… Read More ›
Call for PapersLiterariness Journal LiterarinessJournal.org A Peer-Reviewed Quarterly Journal of Literature and Cultural Studies P-ISSN: 3108-1614, E-ISSN: 3108-172XVol. 1, Issue 2 (March 2026) We invite original research papers for the second issue of Literariness Journal. The theme list includes a… Read More ›
The poetry of the sixteenth century defies facile generalizations. Although the same can obviously be said for the poetry of other periods as well, this elusiveness of categorization is particularly characteristic of the sixteenth century. It is difficult to pinpoint… Read More ›
Paradise Lost is a poetic rewriting of the book of Genesis. It tells the story of the fall of Satan and his compatriots, the creation of man, and, most significantly, of man’s act of disobedience and its consequences: paradise was… Read More ›
Nothing could have prepared either the literary world in general or the curious reader who had been following Eliot’s career to date for the publication, in late 1922, of The Waste Land. Published in October of that year in Eliot’s… Read More ›
America became a subject for literature after the Revolutionary War, when writers began the exploration of themes and motifs distinctly American. Continuing the Puritan belief in America as the New Eden, writers stressed the millennial nature of settlement and progress…. Read More ›
CHAPTER 1 OLD ENGLISH LITERATURE The Old English language or Anglo-Saxon is the earliest form of English. The period is a long one and it is generally considered that Old English was spoken from about A.D. 600 to about 1100…. Read More ›
Fae Myenne Ng’s Bone revolves around the tragic suicide of a daughter of a San Francisco Chinatown family and the personal, cultural, and social questions this event forces the characters to negotiate. Leila Leong, Mah’s daughter from her first marriage,… Read More ›
Upon its publication, Blu’s Hanging met with immediate critical acclaim. Critics considered the book “powerful,” “brilliant,” and “mesmerizing.” But when Blu’s Hanging was chosen as the Best Book of Asian American fiction of the year by a panel of judges… Read More ›
Blood Meridian is nightmarish, yet so hypnotically written, displaying such a wild and profound command of the language that the critic Harold Bloom, among others, has declared it one of the greatest novels of the 20th century, and perhaps the… Read More ›
Call for PapersLiterariness JournalVol. 1, Issue 3 (June 2026) We invite original research papers for the second issue of Literariness Journal. The theme list includes a broad range of contemporary topics in literature and cultural studies. Themes * Monster theory,… Read More ›
The Blithedale Romance (1852) was the third of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s four major American romances, after The Scarlet Letter (1850) and The House of the Seven Gables (1851). Unique among Hawthorne’s novels, it is the only one to feature a first-person… Read More ›
Second recipient of the Quinto Sol Prize in 1971, this novel opened a new era for Chicano letters. Quinto Sol Publications established an annual prize for Chicano writers to promote their works in mainstream literature and, a year after Tomás… Read More ›
Black Oxen (1923) simultaneously earned critical acclaim and prompted scorn and shock. Called drama, romance, and science fiction in its 1924 film release from Frank Lloyd Productions, the book went into 14 printings in a single year. The film’s popular… Read More ›
Black Boy, the first book-length installment of Richard Wright’s novelistic autobiography, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, the second of Wright’s works to be so recognized, the other being his enormously popular and important first novel Native Son (1940). In Black… Read More ›
The Bird Artist, Howard Norman’s second novel, is the story of a man struggling to come to terms with his own identity. The novel’s narrator, Fabian Vas, strives to integrate two very disparate parts of his sense of self; he… Read More ›
Herman Melville began writing the manuscript that became Billy Budd, Sailor in 1886 near the end of his life. Although distinct parallels exist between the story and the historic Somers mutiny of 1842, in which Melville’s cousin was involved as… Read More ›
Many readers wrongly consider Raymond Chandler’s novels to be mere detective stories. The subtle nuances that mimic harsh reality in the plotlines and characterizations, however, help elevate Chandler’s work beyond the genre. This gritty realism could, in part, be a… Read More ›
The last of H. D.’s many autobiographical novels, Bid Me to Live (A Madrigal) portrays the struggles of a female writer to realize her personal and artistic identity. The entire novel is mediated through the mind of Julia Ashton (H…. Read More ›
The grim novella Benito Cereno, written in 1855 during a transitional period in Melville’s career, represents a remarkable fusion of the themes and techniques that characterize his art. F. O. Mathiesson calls it “one of the most sensitively poised pieces… Read More ›
The Bell Jar, like so much of Plath’s writing, is loosely based on her own experiences; the novel was, in fact, originally published under the pseudonym Victoria Lucas because Plath feared it might anger or hurt the people in her… Read More ›
Neither of Kosinski’s first two novels prepared his readers for his third, Being There. The Painted Bird (1965) is a fairly lengthy, nightmarish picaresque of a dark-complexioned young boy’s survival in the eastern European countryside during World War II. Stylistically,… Read More ›
“There is a thread beginning with my grandmother Adelaide and traveling through my father and arriving at me. That thread is flight” (335). It is telling that the identity of the Beet Queen is not revealed until the final section… Read More ›
With her debut novel about one girl’s experience as a spelling bee champion, Myla Goldberg explores the unraveling of a family. Bee Season is the story of the Naumanns, a deeply fractured and emotionally stunted family in which no one… Read More ›
In many ways, Barbara Kingsolver’s first novel, The Bean Trees, might be considered a conventional coming-of-age story, wherein a young woman follows the lead of her literary forebear Huckleberry Finn and journeys east to west on the road to independence…. Read More ›
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