Recent Posts - page 60
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Analysis of Mark Twain’s The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calaveras County
A tall tale laced with typical Twainian humor and irony and ultimately meant not to be believed but enjoyed, Mark Twain’s (Samuel Langhorne Clemens’s) “The Notorious [Celebrated] Jumping Frog of Calaveras County” first appeared in an 1865 issue of the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Katherine Anne Porter’s Noon Wine
Katherine Anne Porter’s story is subtitled “1896–1905,” but she wrote it in 1936, and the story has the unmistakable atmosphere of the Great Depression. Characters of ordinary background seem helplessly entangled in a web of Determinism in “Noon Wine”: the… Read More ›
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Analysis of Theodore Dreiser’s Nigger Jeff
“Nigger Jeff” is an early story in Theodore Dreiser’s career, but as his mature fiction does, it offers stark, detailed descriptions of powerful emotions that drive men and women into tragic situations. The story is a compelling and disturbing one… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edith Wharton’s New Year’s Day
One of Edith Wharton’s many stories of New York, it was published with the subtitle The ’Seventies in 1924 as the last of four volumes in a set entitled Old New York. This novella depicts with subtle realism the reactions… Read More ›
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Analysis of Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman’s A New England Nun
Originally published in Harper’s Bazaar in 1887 and in 1891 as the title story in A New England Nun and Other Stories, the story opens onto a scene of pastoral rural New England calm. In complete harmony with this scene… Read More ›
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New Criticism
New Criticism is a movement in 20th-century literary criticism that arose in reaction to those traditional “extrinsic” approaches that saw a text as making a moral or philosophical statement or as an outcome of social, economic, political, historical, or biographical… Read More ›
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Analysis of Willa Cather’s Neighbour Rosicky
First published in Woman’s Home Companion (April/May 1930) and included as one of three stories in Obscure Destinies (1932), “Neighbour Rosicky” dramatizes an old Bohemian farmer’s final days. The story is a character study of Anton Rosicky but also a… Read More ›
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Native American Short Stories
Storytelling is as essential to human survival as food and water. Without stories we cannot remember the past, understand the present, or look forward to a future. Without stories we cannot share our experiences with others or describe our sometimes… Read More ›
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Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Murders in the Rue Morgue
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is an extension of his gothic tales as well as the first detective fiction, although the word detective had not been coined yet. This story, along with “The Mystery of Marie… Read More ›
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Analysis of Helena Maria Viramontes’s The Moths
First published as the opening story in “The Moths” and Other Stories, “The Moths” tells the story of three generations of women, divided by their aims in life and their perspectives about the future. The protagonist, a girl of 14… Read More ›
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Analysis of Richard Connell’s The Most Dangerous Game
Richard Connell’s “The Most Dangerous Game” is widely anthologized in both high school literature and college introductory fiction courses largely because it offers a fine illustration of many of the potential conflicts that an author can incorporate into an compelling… Read More ›
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Modernism
The modernism movement has many credos: Ezra Pound’s exhortation to “make it new” and Virginia Woolf’s assertion that sometime around December 1910 “human character changed” are but two of the most famous. It is important to remember that modernism is… Read More ›
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Analysis of Constance Fenimore Woolson’s Miss Grief
Constance Fenimore Woolson’s “Miss Grief” can be read as a comment on the literary position of American women writers near the end of the 19th century. The story contrasts the literary abilities, reputations, and social and economic circumstances of two… Read More ›
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Analysis of Gertrude Stein’s Miss Furr and Miss Skeen
Originally published in the collection Geography and Plays (1922), “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” has received critical attention for two reasons. First, much has been made of Gertrude Stein’s experimentations with language and their consequent challenges to and elaborations on… Read More ›
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Analysis of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable
Few of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s short stories have garnered as much commentary as “The Minister’s Black Veil: A Parable” since its original publication in the Token in 1836 and its subsequent appearance in the collection entitled Twice-told Tales in 1837. The… Read More ›
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Analysis of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s May Day
May Day is one of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s three long stories sometimes called novellas or novelettes. The title has three connotations: the maritime distress call mayday, a spring rite, and the socialist labor holiday. As the mixed connotations suggest, Fitzgerald purposefully… Read More ›
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Analysis of Richard Wright’s The Man Who Was Almost a Man
Adapted by an editor from the last two chapters of Richard Wright’s novel Tarbaby’s Dawn, this story appeared under the title “Almos’ a Man” in Harper’s Bazaar in 1939, and then in the O. Henry Award Prize Stories of 1940…. Read More ›
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Analysis of Mark Twain’s The Man That Corrupted Hadleyburg
Most scholars believe that near the end of his life, Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) became a brooding, bitter, disillusioned, and cynical man who doubted humans’ ability to right themselves and whose humor became increasingly dark and hopeless. His “The… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bharati Mukherjee’s The Management of Grief
The Management of Grief is collected in The Middleman and Other Stories (1988), winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. The idea of “middlemen” is central to these stories of immigrant experience; Bharati Mukherjee presents characters in fl ux as… Read More ›
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Analysis of Bernard Malamud’s The Magic Barrel
Bernard Malamud has been reckoned a magician himself in that, as one of the most significant Jewish American writers of the 20th century, he helped acquaint readers with Jewish culture as he simultaneously placed Jewish fiction in the mainstream of… Read More ›
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