La Prose du Transsibérien et de la Petite Jehanne de France (The Prose of the Trans-Siberian and the Little Joan of France), published in Paris in September 1913, is in many respects a foundational text for modernism in literature and… Read More ›
character study
Analysis of Thomas Kling’s Manhattan Mouthspace Two
During an unpublished conversation in Cologne, Germany, in 2003, two years before his premature death, Thomas Kling, who had visited New York City briefly a decade before and who planned to visit the United States for a series of poetry… Read More ›
Analysis of Aimé Césaire’s It Is the Courage of Men Which Is Dislocated
In this unrhymed prose poem, Césaire develops the central image of torrential rain and its effects—both destructive and cathartic—on island cultures: “The rain, it’s the testy way here and now to strike out everything that exists, everything / that’s been… Read More ›
Analysis of Yehuda Amichai’s God Has Pity on Kindergarten Children
God Has Pity On Kindergarten Children God has pity on kindergarten children, He pities school children — less. But adults he pities not at all. He abandons them, And sometimes they have to crawl on all fours In the scorching… Read More ›
Analysis of Kamau Brathwaite’s The Arrivants
Kamau Brathwaite’s poetic trilogy, The Arrivants (1988), consists of three previously published long poems: Rights of Passage (1967), Islands (1968), and Masks (1969), each comprised of many constituent parts. Critic Pamela Mordecai labels the trilogy’s structural elements in descending order… Read More ›
Analysis of Rainer Maria Rilke’s Archaic Torso of Apollo
Archaic Torso of Apollo We cannot know his legendary head with eyes like ripening fruit. And yet his torso is still suffused with brilliance from inside, like a lamp, in which his gaze, now turned to low, gleams in all… 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 Doris Lessing’s The Four-Gated City
Volume five in the Children of Violence series, this novel follows Landlocked (1965) and concludes the adventures of Martha Quest in an apocalyptic vision of a future in which human beings overcome the limitations of communication and mutual understanding through… Read More ›
Analysis of Anthony Powell’s Casanova’s Chinese Restaurant
The fifth of twelve 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 experiences the arts scene in London during 1936–37, meeting musicians,… Read More ›
Analysis of Tobias Smollett’s The Expedition of Humphry Clinker
When Tobias Smollett published the last of his novels, The Expedition of Humphry Clinker, he used the familiar epistolary novel form first made famous by Samuel Richardson. Five of his flat, predictable characters wrote letters that differed in their points… Read More ›
Analysis of Anthony Trollope’s The Eustace Diamonds
The third in his sequence of Palliser novels, The Eustace Diamonds represents one of Anthony Trollope’s darkest tales. He departs from his gently ironic presentations of everyday human relationships with their small but important emotional battles. This novel focuses on… Read More ›
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