Recent Posts - page 22
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Analysis of Patrick McCabe’s The Butcher Boy
Based on the author’s recollection of a radio play he heard as a child, this dark novel was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1992 and became the basis of a film adaptation by Neil Jordan in 1998. The first-person… Read More ›
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Analysis of Hanif Kureishi’s The Buddha of Suburbia
A celebration of London’s new multiethnic youth culture, this comic novel relates the adventures of the first-person narrator, Karim Amir, the 17-year-old son of a Muslim Indian businessman, Haroon, and an Englishwoman, Margaret. The family resides in the middle-class suburbs… Read More ›
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Analysis of Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited
A bestseller that securely established its author’s commercial reputation, Brideshead Revisited evokes mixed responses from critics, some of whom see it as a flawed novel. Its name became associated with the generation of writers who were children during World War… Read More ›
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Analysis of Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World.
This example of a dystopian novel opens in a pleasure-dominated but totalitarian future world by touring London’s main Hatchery. This expository device allows the author to introduce unexpected features of his imagined future, where human reproduction has been removed from… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anthony Powell’s Books Do Furnish a Room
The 10th of 12 volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel continues the story of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he returns to a peace-time life at the end of World War II…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Keri Hulme’s The Bone People
Winner of the Booker Prize in 1985, and of the Mobil Pegasus Prize and the New Zealand Book Award in 1984, this novel is the first work by a part-Māori New Zealand author to receive international attention and awards. It… Read More ›
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Analysis of Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin
Awarded the Booker Prize for 2000, this novel is an example of both postmodernism and feminism and includes elements of science fiction in a complex, multilayered plot rooted in the traditions of realism. The first-person narrator, Iris Chase Griffen, writes… Read More ›
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Analysis of Iris Murdoch’s The Black Prince
One of the most complexly philosophical of the many novels by this author, The Black Prince is narrated in the first person by Bradley Pearson, a writer who produces a manuscript entitled The Black Prince: A Celebration of Love before… Read More ›
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Bildungsroman
This German word has been adopted in English literary criticism to refer to a novel of transition, the plot of which follows a protagonist from childhood or adolescence to adulthood. Novels of this sort frequently follow the outline of the… Read More ›
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Patrick O’Brian’s Aubrey–Maturin Novels
At the time of the author’s death in 2000, the adventures of Captain Jack Aubrey of the Royal Navy and his friend and chief of surgery, Dr. Stephen Maturin, stretched through 20 volumes (O’Brian left a three-chapter manuscript of a… Read More ›
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Analysis of Flann O’Brien’s At Swim-Two-Birds
Written as the first-person narration of a Dublin student who relishes multiple approaches to the representation of reality, this antirealistic novel presents a narrator living with an insufferably conventional uncle. The young man has reason to resent his uncle’s inquisitiveness:… Read More ›
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Anthony Powell’s At Lady Molly’s
The fourth of 12 volumes in Powell’s roman-fleuve entitled A Dance to the Music of Time, this novel continues the first-person point of view narration of Nicholas Jenkins, a writer, as he begins his adult life in London. In the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Kazuo Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World
Winner of the Whitbread Award in 1986, Kazuo Ishiguro’s debut novel follows the first-person narrative of Masuji Ono, a Tokyo painter, after World War II. Masuji has retired and spends his time in meditative seclusion, in contrast to the prominence… Read More ›
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Archetype
Borrowed from the ideas of Carl Jung and developed by Joseph Campbell and Northrup Frye, an archetype is a pattern of characteristics that can be deployed in many different ways without losing its coherence. Both character and plot can draw… Read More ›
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Analysis of George Orwell’s Animal Farm
Cast in the form of an allegory, this beast fable is a harsh satire that condemns totalitarianism. In particular, Orwell targets the Soviet Union’s brand of communism as nothing more than the ideology of a police state. The setting of… Read More ›
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Analysis of Ian McEwan’s Amsterdam
Winner of the Booker Prize in 1998, Amsterdam is the story of four men who have loved Molly Lane, a vivacious woman who has died too soon. The story, related by a third-person omniscient narrator, opens at Molly’s memorial service…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Philip Pullman’s The Amber Spyglass
This final volume of the trilogy entitled His Dark Materials concludes the series that began with The Golden Compass and continued in The Subtle Knife. It is the first example of children’s literature to win the Whitbread Book of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Henry James’s The Ambassadors
The protagonist of the novel that Henry James himself considered to be his best is Mr. Lewis Lambert Strether, an American editor and a widower with close ties to the wealthy and sternly Protestant Mrs. Newsome. This lady’s grown son,… Read More ›
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Analysis of Lawrence Durrell’s The Alexandria Quartet
The story is set in the Egyptian city of Alexandria just before World War II, a crossroads of the ancient and the new, simultaneously primitive and cosmopolitan. The main characters include the Irish teacher and writer Darley, who narrates the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Anthony Powell’s Afternoon Men
This satire of modern life was the first novel published in the long and distinguished career of Anthony Powell. The targets of Powell’s satire are artists, intellectuals, and aristocratic poseurs; his own extensive knowledge of the arts underpins the fully… Read More ›
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