Author Archives
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Analysis of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People
Winner of the Booker Prize in 1985, and of the Mobil Pegasus Prize and the New Zealand Book Award in 1984, this novel is the first work by a part-Māori New Zealand author to receive international attention and awards. It… Read More ›
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Analysis of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
Awarded the Booker Prize for 2000, this novel is an example of both postmodernism and feminism and includes elements of science fiction in a complex, multilayered plot rooted in the traditions of realism. The first-person narrator, Iris Chase Griffen, writes… Read More ›
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Analysis of Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince
One of the most complexly philosophical of the many novels by this author, The Black Prince is narrated in the first person by Bradley Pearson, a writer who produces a manuscript entitled The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love before… Read More ›
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Bildungsroman
This German word has been adopted in English literary criticism to refer to a novel of transition, the plot of which follows a protagonist from childhood or adolescence to adulthood. Novels of this sort frequently follow the outline of the… Read More ›
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Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin Novels
At the time of the author’s death in 2000, the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend and chief of surgery, Dr. Stephen Maturin, stretched through 20 volumes (O’Brian left a three-chapter manuscript of a… Read More ›
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Analysis of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
Written as the first-person narration of a Dublin student who relishes multiple approaches to the representation of reality, this antirealistic novel presents a narrator living with an insufferably conventional uncle. The young man has reason to resent his uncle’s inquisitiveness:… Read More ›
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Anthony Powell’s At Lady Molly’s
The fourth of 12 volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel continues the first-person point of view narration of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he begins his adult life in London. In the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World
Winner of the Whitbread Award in 1986, Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel follows the first-person narrative of Masuji Ono, a Tokyo painter, after World War II. Masuji has retired and spends his time in meditative seclusion, in contrast to the prominence… Read More ›
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Archetype
Borrowed from the ideas of Carl Jung and developed by Joseph Campbell and Northrup Frye, an archetype is a pattern of characteristics that can be deployed in many different ways without losing its coherence. Both character and plot can draw… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Orwell’s Animal Farm
Cast in the form of an allegory, this beast fable is a harsh satire that condemns totalitarianism. In particular, Orwell targets the Soviet Union’s brand of communism as nothing more than the ideology of a police state. The setting of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam
Winner of the Booker Prize in 1998, Amsterdam is the story of four men who have loved Molly Lane, a vivacious woman who has died too soon. The story, related by a third-person omniscient narrator, opens at Molly’s memorial service…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass
This final volume of the trilogy entitled His Dark Materials concludes the series that began with The Golden Compass and continued in The Subtle Knife. It is the first example of children’s literature to win the Whitbread Book of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henry James’s The Ambassadors
The protagonist of the novel that Henry James himself considered to be his best is Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether, an American editor and a widower with close ties to the wealthy and sternly Protestant Mrs. Newsome. This lady’s grown son,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet
The story is set in the Egyptian city of Alexandria just before World War II, a crossroads of the ancient and the new, simultaneously primitive and cosmopolitan. The main characters include the Irish teacher and writer Darley, who narrates the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men
This satire of modern life was the first novel published in the long and distinguished career of Anthony Powell. The targets of Powell’s satire are artists, intellectuals, and aristocratic poseurs; his own extensive knowledge of the arts underpins the fully… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rex Warner’s The Aerodrome
This political allegory predates George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four by seven years, but shares with it a critical view of totalitarian efficiency. The Aerodrome features two contrasting settings, highlighting the crucial differences and quintessential weaknesses of both: the unnamed village represents… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time
The third of 12 volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel uses a first-person point of view to continue the narrative of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he completes his transition to adulthood… Read More ›
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Analysis of Agatha Christie’s The A. B. C. Murders
One of Christie’s most admired mysteries and a fine example of mystery and detective fiction, The A. B. C. Murders pits Hercule Poirot against someone who kills by the alphabet and who also sends Poirot an ominous letter before each… Read More ›
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Analysis of Geraldine Jewsbury’s Zoe
Geraldine Jewsbury’s first novel, Zoe: The History of Two Lives, was one of the first Victorian novels to interrogate religious skepticism. Jewsbury could not rush through such an important topic, as she explained to her lifelong friend and correspondent Jane… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni
Edward Bulwer-Lytton wrote a fantasy/science fiction piece in his novel Zanoni. The novel’s protagonist, labeled by those familiar with him in Italy “the rich Zanoni . . . his wealth is incalculable!,” possesses special powers of the occult that give… Read More ›
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