Recent Posts - page 2
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Analysis of Virginia Woolf’s A Room of One’s Own
In her highly influential critical A Room of Ones Own (1929), Virginial Woolf studied the cultural, economical and educational disabilities within the patriarchal system that prevent women from realising their creative potential. With her imaginary character Judith (Shakespeare’s fictional sister),… Read More ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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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 ›
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Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape
Audiences confront much that is disturbing in Eugene O’Neill’s The Hairy Ape, beginning with the title itself—and as the play moves forward, we are hard-pressed to find any evidence of the “comedy” O’Neill promises in its subtitle. When it was… Read More ›
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Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Desire Under the Elms
Eugene O’Neill’s greatest play up to this point in his career and the finest American tragedy to be written until then, Desire Under the Elms premiered on November 11, 1924, at the Greenwich Village Theatre in New York City. O’Neill… Read More ›
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Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Ah, Wilderness!
On July 1, 1932, Eugene O’Neill visited his boyhood home, Monte Cristo Cottage in New London, Connecticut. It looked smaller than he remembered and poorly maintained. He wished he had never gone. Two months later, however, on the morning of… Read More ›
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Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Mourning Becomes Electra
Eugene O’Neill began writing Mourning Becomes Electra, one of his most revered dramas, in France at Chateau du Plessis near Tours in the Loire Valley. Recovering from the debacle of Dynamo, which O’Neill believed failed critically because he released it… Read More ›
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Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh
Eugene O’Neill’s reputation as the United States’ “master of the misbegotten” culminates in his late masterpiece The Iceman Cometh. The action takes place in a downtown Manhattan saloon and “Raines-Law” hotel called Harry Hope’s and covers two days in the… Read More ›
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Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s Long Day’s Journey into Night
Eugene O’Neill’s full-length masterpiece Long Day’s Journey into Night is widely considered the finest play in American theater history. Perhaps the most startling facet of O’Neill’s greatest achievement is the ghostly presence of its author, a revelation to audience members… Read More ›
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Critical Analysis of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones
The Emperor Jones is the first international triumph of expressionism by an American playwright; with it, Eugene O’Neill single-handedly introduced experimental American theater to Europe and established his reputation as the United States’ pre-eminent playwright. The November 1, 1920, premiere… Read More ›