“It is a truth universally acknowledged that a single man in possession of a good fortune must be in want of a wife” [3]. So begins Jane Austen’s arguably most enduringly successful novel—one that has been translated into at least… Read More ›
Literature
FIELD POETICS
Field poetics may be defined by a systematic integrity that overrides individual authorial intention. The system in play is usually a form of language, purely acoustic, or purely visual, often scored speech or another verbal matrix. Among the most uncompromising… Read More ›
Analysis of Tolkien’s The Hobbit
The origin of The Hobbit (1937) is well known. One day in the late 1920s, Tolkien was grading essays when he came across a blank page and absently wrote the sentence “In a hole in the ground there lived a… Read More ›
The Lord of the Rings Character Analysis
Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King Aragorn (Strider, Elessar) Aragorn is the… Read More ›
Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King
Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers Synopsis for The Return of the King Book 5: The War of the Ring Chapters 1–3: The Brink… Read More ›
Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Two Towers
Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring Synopsis The Two Towers Book 3: The Treason of Isengard Chapters 1–2: Pursuit to Rohan In a chapter entitled “The Departure of Boromir,” book 3 begins where book… Read More ›
Analysis of The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring
The Lord of the Rings is the crowning achievement of Tolkien’s literary career, and the one narrative by which he is chiefly remembered and admired. In the more than 50 years since the trilogy’s initial publication, it has been republished… Read More ›
Analysis of Tracy Letts’s August: Osage County
Originally produced by Chicago’s Steppenwolf Theatre Company in June 2007, August: Osage County opened on Broadway in December 2007 and won the Pulitzer Prize, the Tony Award, and the New York Drama Critics’ Circle Award. The play takes place in… Read More ›
Asian-American Drama
The acknowledged origins of Asian-American drama date to the 1890s and the controversial symbolist plays of Sadakichi Hartmann, including Christ: A Dramatic Poem in Three Acts (privately printed, 1893), Buddha: A Drama in Twelve Scenes (written, 1891–95; privately printed, 1897),… Read More ›
Analysis of Shelley’s Mont Blanc
On July 21, 1816, Percy Bysshe Shelley, his companion Mary Godwin (who would subsequently marry him), and her half sister Claire Claremont, first saw Mont Blanc, the tallest mountain in Europe. The sight impressed them mightily, so much so that… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s The Lotos-Eaters
The Lotos-Eaters represents one of Alfred Lord Tennyson’s most extended experiments in, and demonstrations of, the sensual nature of poetry. Tennyson—heavily influenced by John Keats—was interested in testing the limits of poetic expression, and thus, more than most poets, he… Read More ›
Analysis of William Blake’s London
London is one of the grimmest of William Blake’s songs of experience (see Songs of Innocence and of Experience. Like “The Tyger” and the “experienced” version of “Holy Thursday,” this is one of the comparatively few songs that seem to be… Read More ›
Analysis of Shelley’s The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty
The Hymn to Intellectual Beauty is often read in conjunction with “Mont Blanc,” written at about the same time in summer 1816, when Percy Shelley was in Switzerland. The two poems have many things in common, but “The Hymn to… Read More ›
Analysis of Byron’s Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage
The crucial fact about Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage is that it is a poem. In many ways it is the archetypal first approximation of a romantic poem, both for Lord Byron’s contemporaries and disciples and for an understanding of English romanticism’s… Read More ›
Analysis of Tennyson’s Ulysses
Ulysses, a perennial favorite and one of Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s greatest poems, appeared in the 1842 volume of Poems that made Tennyson’s name. However, it was written at age 24, nine years earlier, after the death in 1833 of Arthur… Read More ›
Analysis of William Blake’s The Tyger
The Tyger is the terrifying pendant to The Lamb in William Blake’s Songs of Innocence and of Experience as its climactic rhetorical question makes clear: “Did he who made the lamb make thee?” Like “The Lamb,” it takes the form of… Read More ›
Analysis of Keats’s To Autumn
The last of the great series of odes that John Keats wrote in 1819, this one was composed on September 19 and therefore on the cusp of autumn rather than early summer, like the others. Although it is like the… Read More ›
Analysis of Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey
More properly called Lines: Composed a Few Miles Above Tintern Abbey On Revisiting the Banks of the Wye During a Tour, 13 July 1798, this is one of William Wordsworth’s greatest poems, second perhaps only to the Intimations Ode in its… Read More ›
Analysis of Coleridge’s Kubla Khan
Along with The Rime of the Ancient Mariner Kubla Khan is one of Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s two most famous and most-quoted-from poems. Originally written in either 1797 or 1798, it was not published until 1816 (along with Christabel). The long… Read More ›
Analysis of Wordsworth’s I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud
I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud is one of William Wordsworth’s most famous poems. Like many of Wordsworth’s shorter poems, it is far more complex than it seems at first. Wordsworth was particularly good at interweaving several different temporal perspectives… Read More ›
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