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 ›
Novel Analysis
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
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 ›
Analysis of James Joyce’s Dubliners
This is the title that Joyce gave to his collection of 15 short stories written over a three-year period (1904–07). Though he finished the final story, “The Dead,” in spring of 1907, difficulties in finding a publisher and Joyce’s initial… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Gloria Naylor’s Bailey’s Cafe
Sketching the lives of a host of bizarre characters, Bailey’s Cafe (1992) focuses on issues of marginality. Each of the characters, while visiting the title setting, is in transition, having barely escaped lives of not-so-quiet desperation in hopes of regaining… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Gloria Naylor’s Mama Day
With Mama Day (1988) Naylor charts a different literary terrain. While her first two novels were grounded in known reality, this third novel allows Naylor to explore, and to question, the concept of reality. Set on a mystical island off… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills
While The Women of Brewster Place (1982) addressed, for the most part, the plight of black women in a poverty-stricken, and seemingly hopeless, community, Linden Hills critiques the burdens and misguided notions of a well-established, upwardly mobile black community. And… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Gloria Naylor’s The Women of Brewster Place
Described on the cover as “a novel in seven stories,” The Women of Brewster Place chronicles the lives of seven black women as they struggle to survive in a rapidly deteriorating neighborhood. Most of the women have arrived at the… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s A Lesson Before Dying
The year 1993 was an exceptionally good one for Ernest Gaines. Turning sixty, he married for the first time, won the MacArthur award, and published A Lesson Before Dying. Gaines had invested seven years in the writing of this novel,… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s A Gathering of Old Men
If The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman ends by signaling the beginning of a social revolution, A Gathering of Old Men brings this conflict to a logical conclusion. Set in 1979 on the Marshall Plantation, Gaines’s fifth novel focuses on… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman
Inspired by the strong, determined character of his Aunt Augustine Jefferson, to whom the novel is dedicated, The Autobiography of Miss Jane Pittman draws on the tradition of the slave narrative and its creative branch, the fictional autobiography. Slave narratives… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s Of Love and Dust
Of Love and Dust (1967) continues Gaines’s favorite themes, including the unequal distribution of wealth, race and caste, and the conflict between the past and change. Marcus Payne, awaiting trial for killing a man in a knife fight, is ‘‘bonded… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Ernest J. Gaines’s Catherine Carmier
Like many novels, Catherine Carmier is about change and its effects. It is a young man’s novel asking questions of place and purpose that young people in particular wrestle with: Why aren’t things the way they were? What am I… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Amy Tan’s The Hundred Secret Senses
Having explored the dynamics of the mother-daughter relationship in her first two novels, Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) turns to the sisterly bond in her third, The Hundred Secret Senses, published in 1995. Reviews for the new novel were… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Amy Tan’s The Kitchen God’s Wife
In 1991, two years after her tremendous success with The Joy Luck Club, Amy Tan published The Kitchen God’s Wife. Like many writers whose first books have received spectacular and widespread attention, Tan admits that she was more than a… Read More ›
Critical Analysis of Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club
With the publication of her first novel, The Joy Luck Club, in 1988, Amy Tan (born February 19, 1952) became a household name. The book was a tremendous critical and commercial success from the beginning. Before the end of its… Read More ›
Analysis of Márquez’s No One Writes to the Colonel
No One Writes to the Colonel may seem unassuming, for the story line is simple and non-experimental in technique. However, its narrative exposes a corrupt town and its institutions. No One Writes to the Colonel, to date, continues to be… Read More ›
Analysis of Gabriel García Márquez’s Leaf Storm
Garcıa Márquez’s (1927-2014) first novella, Leaf Storm, was translated into English in 1972, eighteen years after it was published in Spanish and two years after the English-speaking public first read his acclaimed masterpiece One Hundred Years of Solitude. As might… Read More ›
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