Author Archives
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Analysis of Coleridge’s Frost at Midnight
Frost at Midnight is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s most beautiful poems, It belongs to the genre he called “conversation poems” (in the subtitle to “The Nightingale”)—that is, poems in the style of a person talking to a listener, perhaps… Read More ›
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Analysis of John Keats’s The Eve of St. Agnes
This is one of John Keats’s best-loved poems, with a wonderfully happy ending. Keats wrote it in late January 1819 (St. Agnes Day is January 21, and Keats seems to have started composition a few days before that). It is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach
Dover Beach is Matthew Arnold’s most famous poem, as well as one of the standard poems in all Victorian canons. It was written sometime between 1848 and 1851 but not published till 1867, when Arnold had essentially ceased writing poetry…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Lord Byron’s Don Juan
Don Juan is nowadays regarded as Byron’s crowning achievement and his greatest long poem. Unlike the Satanic self-dramatizing that was the source of his fame in the 19th century, in Manfred and Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage especially, Don Juan shows Byron… Read More ›
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Analysis of Coleridge’s Dejection: An Ode
Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1802) Dejection is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s greatest poems, and one of the greatest crisis lyrics of English romanticism. It is in a sense Coleridge’s answer to William Wordsworth’s Intimations Ode, as well as to Wordsworth’s… Read More ›
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Analysis of Thomas Hardy’s The Darkling Thrush
The Darkling Thrush is one of Thomas Hardy’s characteristic poems of bleak despair over the world, natural and emotional. It is the last poem of the 19th century, or at least the last one to be discussed in this book,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Coleridge’s Christabel
According to the preface to Lyrical Ballads (1798) Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth agreed to divide their contributions to the joint volume, with Coleridge writing the “supernatural poems” and Wordsworth the natural ones—the scenes of everyday life. Coleridge’s contributions… Read More ›
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Analysis of William Blake’s The Chimney Sweeper
The two chimney-sweeper poems in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience belong to the explicitly paired poems in the two books. In most of these pairings, the later song mounts a fiercer and more overt critique of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Rossetti’s The Blessed Damozel
The Blessed Damozel is one of Dante Gabriel Rossetti’s earliest poems, as well as one of his greatest and best known. A quarter of a century after writing it at 18, Rossetti depicted its subject in one of his most… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times
Dickens’s 10th novel, serialized weekly in Household Words (April 1–August 12, 1854), unillustrated. Published in one volume by Bradbury & Evans, 1854. This controversial book, the shortest of Dickens’s novels, takes up the issues of industrialism and education and offers… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations
Dickens’s 13th novel, published in 36 weekly parts in All the Year Round (December 1, 1860–August 3, 1861), unillustrated. Published in three volumes by Chapman & Hall, 1861. A Bildungsroman narrated in the first person by its hero, Great Expectations… Read More ›
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Analysis of Charles Dickens’s Bleak House
Dickens’s ninth novel, published in monthly parts in 1852–53, with illustrations by Hablot Knight Browne, issued in one volume in 1853. Often characterized as the first of the late novels, Bleak House describes England as a bleak house, devastated by… Read More ›
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Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Tar Baby
Tar Baby (1981), Morrison’s fourth novel, changes location from the geographical boundaries of the United States to the larger context of the Caribbean and Europe. In part, the novel is the story of two families, the Streets and the Childs,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Sula
Sula (1974) is Toni Morrison’s second published novel. Like The Bluest Eye, the novel is a story of two girls coming of age. As children, the two girls in question, Sula Peace and Nel Wright, function as two halves of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon
Like Morrison’s first two novels, The Bluest Eye and Sula, Song of Solomon (1977) is a coming of age story. Unlike her first two novels, Song of Solomon centrally is the saga of a young man. In fact, Song of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Toni Morrison’s Jazz
Jazz (1992) is the second of a trilogy of Morrison’s novels reflecting on the idea of love and its manifestations. The idea for the novel originated with a James Van Der Zee photograph of a dead teenaged woman who, knowing… Read More ›
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Analysis of Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye
The Bluest Eye (1970) is Toni Morrison’s first published novel. The novel takes place in the 1940s in the industrial northeast of Lorian, Ohio, and tells the story of Pecola Breedlove, a young African-American woman who is marginalized by her… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Joyce’s Stephen Hero
This is the title of the novel begun by Joyce on his 22nd birthday, February 2, 1904, shortly after the editors of Dana had rejected his essay “A Portrait of the Artist” because they deemed its contents unsuitable for their… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Joyce’s Exiles
Exiles is Joyce’s only extant play. It was written in Trieste during 1914 and 1915, and first published by Grant Richards in London and by B. W. Huebsch in New York on May 25, 1918. Joyce purposely waited to publish… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Joyce’s A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
This is the title that Joyce gave to his first published novel, derived, as noted below, from the shorter version given to an earlier prose piece. Joyce composed A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man over the course… Read More ›
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