Recent Posts - page 2
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Analysis of John Updike’s Separating
First published in the New Yorker in 1975 and included in Prize Stories 1976: The O. Henry Awards, “Separating” was incorporated with other stories featuring Joan and Richard Maple in Too Far to Go (1979), a short story cycle chronicling… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Thurber’s The Secret Life of Walter Mitty
As a 20th-century comic writer, James Thurber had few peers. Not only is “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty” considered his best story, but the term Walter Mitty also has entered the language as a metaphor for an ordinary man… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Saunders’s Sea Oak
The ghost story “Sea Oak” presents George Saunders at his most biting and also most tender. The story takes place in a housing development, Sea Oak, and centers around the unnamed narrator, his sister and cousin (Min and Jade, respectively),… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Hurst’s The Scarlet Ibis
The only work of James Hurst’s to gain widespread recognition, The Scarlet Ibis was originally published in the Atlantic Monthly in July 1960 and won the Atlantic First award that year. Rising quickly to the status of a classic, this story… Read More ›
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Analysis of Grace Paley’s Samuel
In Grace Paley’s “Samuel,” which appears in the author’s second story collection, Enormous Changes at the Last Minute (1974), issues of racism and motherhood emerge as prominent themes. This story, which mostly takes place on a subway in Paley’s favored… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alice Munro’s Royal Beatings
Alice Munro’s short story “Royal Beatings” explores the world of a depression era family weighted down by poverty and longing in rural Ontario. This coming-of-age story focuses on the central character, Rose; her father; her stepmother, Flo; and her half… Read More ›
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Analysis of Alice Walker’s Roselily
From Alice Walker’s collection In Love and Trouble: Stories of Black Women, “Roselily” depicts a young black woman unsure whether she is in love and worried that she might be inviting trouble. Her thoughts occur during her marriage to an… Read More ›
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Analysis of William Faulkner’s A Rose for Emily
Initially published in Forum on April 30, 1930, and collected in These Thirteen in 1931, “A Rose for Emily” remains one of William Faulkner’s most read, most anthologized, and most significant stories. From every imaginable perspective, critics have scrutinized the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s Roman Fever
Since its publication in her collection of short stories The World Over (1936), Edith Wharton’s “Roman Fever” has been frequently anthologized. Masterfully constructed with multiple narrative voices and in a satirical tone, “Roman Fever” is the culmination of a lifetime… Read More ›
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Analysis of James Baldwin’s The Rockpile
The themes and elements of “The Rockpile” all share similarities with James Baldwin’s own experiences as a young man in Harlem. Baldwin followed in the footsteps of his stepfather, a storefront preacher, and preached from age 14 to age 17;… Read More ›
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Analysis of Flannery O’Connor’s The River
Conversion experiences are quite common in the fiction of Flannery O’Connor. Many of her characters realize personal emptiness and seek fulfillment in Christian rituals, hoping to discover a loving God who is more accepting and caring than the people who… Read More ›
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Analysis of Washington Irving’s Rip Van Winkle
Appearing in Washington Irving’s The Sketch Book of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent, “Rip Van Winkle” was an immediate popular success. In retrospect, it helped refute the infamous question posed by the British critic Sydney Smith: “Who, in the four corners of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ellen Gilchrist’s The Rhoda Manning Stories
The four Rhoda Manning stories in Ellen Gilchrist’s first collection, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams (1981), provide a perfect example of Ellen Gilchrist’s art: her laconic and pellucid prose, her indelible and oftentimes heavily ironized characters, her mastery of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Stephen Crane’s The Red Badge of Courage
The Red Badge of Courage, the Novella long considered Stephen Crane’s Civil War masterpiece, is subtitled An Episode of the American Civil War. Although celebrated both for the realism of its style and for the authenticity of its battle scenes,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henry James’s The Real Thing
One of Henry James’s most anthologized stories, The Real Thing was first published on April 16, 1892, in Black and White and later reprinted in the New York edition of James’s works (1909), a comprehensive, multivolume collection of James’s works…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Rappaccini’s Daughter
In a thought-provoking allegory written nearly two years after “The Birth-Mark,” Nathaniel Hawthorne uses a first-person narrator to introduce “Rappaccini’s Daughter.” This nameless narrator tells the reader that he translated the story, originally entitled “Beatrice: ou la Belle Empoisonneuse” (Beatrice:… Read More ›
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Analysis of Margaret Laurence’s The Rain Child
Margaret Laurence’s “The Rain Child,” set in Ghana during the approach of independence in 1957, exposes a host of issues of identity complicated by historical, national, racial, psychological, and linguistic issues. A story from The Tomorrow-Tamer and Other Stories (1963),… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s The Quicksand
“The Quicksand,” published in The Descent of Man (1904), portrays the self-examination of the wealthy Mrs. Quentin as she reaches out to help her son and his girlfriend. The instability of the ground upon which she has constructed her life… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Purloined Letter
One of Edgar Allan Poe’s famous “tales of ratiocination” whose emphasis on deductive reasoning became the basis for the modern detective story, The Purloined Letter features Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin, the archetype of the modern fictional detective who always outwits… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ursula K. Le Guin The Professor’s Houses
Generally known for her fantasy, science fiction, and young-adult fiction, Ursula K. Le Guin insists that her writing is not bound by genre definitions. The Professor’s Houses was first published in the New Yorker (1982), included in The Best American… Read More ›
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