America’s first poet laureate, Robert Penn Warren, was best known during his life as a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet. However, his 1946 novel, All the King’s Men, has become his most recognized work since his death in 1987. The novel won… Read More ›
Novel Analysis
Analysis of Milton Murayama’s All I Asking for Is My Body
Almost every scholar of Asian American literature has acknowledged the brilliance of Milton Murayama’s first novel, All I Asking for Is My Body, and its notable contribution to local Hawaiian and Asian American literature. When All I Asking for Is… Read More ›
Analysis of Booth Tarkington’s Alice Adams
Although this book won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, Booth Tarkington’s works remain on very few academic lists today. However, Booth Tarkington, born in Indianapolis in 1869, was quite popular during his lifetime. The Princeton-educated author lived more similarly to… Read More ›
Analysis of Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive
A central but underappreciated figure in the emergence of American national literature, Royall Tyler (1757–1826) is probably best known for his nationalistic play The Contrast (1787), a fairly conventional comedy of manners distinguishing Yankee virtue from English vice. From a… Read More ›
Analysis of Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Tom Sawyer
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) published The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876. The novel was Clemens’s sixth book, but only his second novel: Clemens’s earlier books were two collections of stories and sketches and two travel books, Innocents Abroad… Read More ›
Analysis of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Samuel Langhorne Clemens (Mark Twain) began writing Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1876, immediately after he completed The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. Mightily attracted to the character of Huck, who becomes a more complete and complex character in the final… Read More ›
Analysis of Saul Bellow’s The Adventures of Augie March
Saul Bellow’s third novel and winner of the National Book Award, The Adventures of Augie March, came easily to him. Indeed, says Bellow, he began the novel in Paris, writing in trains and in cafés, then moving to Rome: “The… Read More ›
Analysis of Anne Tyler’s The Accidental Tourist
The Accidental Tourist (1985), Anne Tyler’s 10th novel, won the 1985 National Book Critics Circle Award for the most distinguished work of American fiction and was nominated for the Pulitzer Prize. It was made into a Warner Brothers feature-length film… Read More ›
Analysis of William Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!
Absalom, Absalom! was William Faulkner’s eighth novel and the first to include a map of its setting, the fictional Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi. In many respects, it is Faulkner’s most ambitious work, and it caused him more trouble to write than… Read More ›
Slave Narrative
A slave narrative is an account of the life, or a major portion of the life, of a fugitive or former slave, either written or orally related by the slave personally. Slave narratives comprise one of the most influential traditions… Read More ›
Analysis of Ford Madox Ford’s The Good Soldier
The story of a disillusionment with respect to a misunderstood marriage, this novel of psychological realism is cast in the form of the recollections—with the full force of hindsight—of John Dowell, a wealthy American who has lost his wife, Florence,… Read More ›
Analysis of Molly Keane’s Good Behaviour
Set in the Anglo-Irish world of “great houses” during their days of waning influence in the first half of the 20th century, this satire attacks the emotional frigidity of a society that has allowed propriety and decorum to replace sincerity… Read More ›
Analysis of Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook
An innovative and experimental novel that broke new ground in terms of both form and content, The Golden Notebook was identified as a manifesto of feminism when it was published, but the author’s examination of the protagonist’s life has even… Read More ›
Analysis of Philip Pullman’s The Golden Compass
The first volume of a trilogy collectively entitled His Dark Materials, this fantasy novel introduces Lyra Belacqua, a girl on the threshold of adolescence. Lyra lives in Oxford under the careless supervision of scholars associated with Lord Asriel. Readers familiar… Read More ›
Analysis of Henry James’s The Golden Bowl
One of the greatest of Henry James’s prolific output of novels, The Golden Bowl focuses on the relationship between a widower, Adam Verver, and his daughter, Maggie. The Ververs are wealthy Americans, freed for a life of cultivated leisure by… Read More ›
Analysis of L. P. Hartley’s The Go-Between
In 1953, this novel—Hartley’s seventh—received the Heinemann Foundation Prize; it is widely regarded as Hartley’s best novel. In 1971, director Joseph Losey chose it for a film adaptation with a screenplay by the noted British dramatist Harold Pinter. The film… Read More ›
Analysis of Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means
The third-person narrator of this novel follows the lives of several young women living in the May of Teck Club in London during World War II and of the young men who take an interest in them. The May of… Read More ›
Analysis of Margaret Forster’s Georgy Girl
A story that captures the changing sexual mores of the 1960s, Georgy Girl contrasts the choices two roommates make as birth control expands the range of options women have in their personal lives. Georgina Parkin is the daughter of Ted… Read More ›
Analysis of Ian Fleming From Russia, with Love
The fifth installment in the ongoing saga of adventures featuring the consummate spy James Bond, this novel helped make the series an international phenomenon when, in 1961, President John F. Kennedy named it as one of his favorite books. As… Read More ›
Freudian Criticism
Sigmund Freud’s theories of the personality and the unconscious mind received international attention in his lifetime as psychoanalysis became an accepted method of treating emotional disorders. Freud’s ideas rather quickly became the basis of an approach to literary criticism that… Read More ›
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