Newest Study Guides
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
Each study guide includes essays, an in-depth chapter-by-chapter summary and analysis, character list, theme list, historical context, author biography and quiz. Study guides are available in PDF format.
Emily Jane Brontë (1818-1848) is widely recognized as one of the greatest writers of the Victorian era. Her novel, Wuthering Heights, is considered an essential part of Gothic literature. At the same time, Brontë was also a very prolific poet...
Louis Sachar's Fuzzy Mud is a 2015 novel about a fifth-grade girl who discovers a mysterious rash-causing substance in the forest and unwittingly saves the world from a pandemic.
On a Tuesday in November, protagonist Tamaya Dhilwaddi is ready to...
"A Daydream" is a poem by British author Emily Brontë about the transition of the seasons. Published in 1846, the poem appeared as part of a collection that Brontë released with her sisters Anne and Charlotte, titled Poems by Currer, Ellis, and...
"Long Neglect Has Worn Away" is a poem by British author Emily Brontë that deals with decay and the passage of time. Originally written in 1837, the poem was published posthumously in 1902.
Brontë was born in the small village of Thornton, outside...
Margaret Ogola’s The River and the Source is a novel about four generations of Kenyan women. Through their lives, Ogola traces the history of a rapidly changing country and society. The novel was published in 1994, receiving the 1995 Commonwealth...
"Hope" is a poem by British writer Emily Brontë about perseverance and adversity. Originally published in 1846, the poem personifies hope as the speaker describes its effect on her.
Brontë was born in the small village of Thornton, just outside of...
The author John Knowles, like his narrator Gene, was from the south (West Virginia, to be exact), and sent off to an uppercrust boarding school in New England for polish before university. However, unlike Gene, Knowles was no academic whiz at...
"On the Pulse of Morning" is a poem written and performed by Maya Angelou as part of the presidential inauguration of Bill Clinton in 1993. The poem is a call to recognize America’s history of slavery and racism, as well as the catastrophic...
"No Coward Soul Is Mine" is a poem written by author Emily Brontë about faith and bravery. Published in 1846, the poem appeared as part of a collection that Brontë put together with her sisters, Charlotte and Anne, called Poems of Currer, Ellis,...
"Remembrance" is a poem written by British author Emily Brontë that deals with memory and grief. It was published in 1846. Brontë is best known for her work as a fiction writer, particularly for her seminal novel, Wuthering Heights, which is...
Family (家 Jia) is the first installment of the Turbulent Stream trilogy (激流三部曲 Jili Sanbuqu), by Ba Jin. Before being published as a novel in 1933, Family was serialized in 1931-1932. It was Ba Jin's first novel-length work. The second and third...
Julian Barnes's The Sense of An Ending is a novel about a middle-aged man coming to terms with how a cruel letter he wrote as a young man precipitated the suicide of a close friend. The book won the 2011 Man Booker Prize.
Retired arts...
“Love Armed” is not an independent, standalone poem, but actually a poetic song that Aphra Behn freqeuently inserted into another type of writing at which she excelled: stage drama. “Love Armed” is a song that was originally conceived for the only...
Epicœne, or The Silent Woman, commonly referred to now simply as Epicene, is a comedy by early modern English playwright Ben Jonson. It was originally performed in 1609 by The Blackfriars Children but did not become popular until many years later,...
"Felix Randal" is a poem written by British poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1880, first published posthumously in 1918. Partly inspired by Hopkin’s own experience as a Jesuit priest, the poem shows a priest (thought to be Hopkins himself)...
Half of a Yellow Sun (2006) is one of the seminal works of literature written by Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (born in 1977). It chronicles the Nigerian Civil War of the late 1960s, depicting a politically charged climate. In...
Robert Creeley (1926 - 2005) was an American writer commonly associated with the group known as the Black Mountain Poets. He is now widely recognized as one of the most influential poets of the last half-century. He was known for his compressed...
William Carlos Williams (1883-1963) was a Puerto Rican-American poet whose work was central to the Imagism and Modernism movements. He operated in a variety of registers, from plainspoken to lyrical to darkly sardonic, but was always concerned...
"To the Memory of Mr. Oldham" is a 1684 poem by the English satirist John Dryden, elegizing the fellow poet John Oldham, who died in 1683. Dryden and Oldham were socially acquainted, making the poem both a tribute to Dryden's departed friend and a...
“I Know a Man” is a poem by American author Robert Creeley that deals with the problem of finding meaning in contemporary life. First published in 1955, it later appeared as part of his 1991 collection, Selected Poems of Robert Creeley. Creeley...
“Heroes” is a poem by American author Robert Creeley about the afterlife of myths and legends. The poem first appeared in his 1960 collection For Love: Poems, 1950–1960, and was republished in The Collected Poems of Robert Creeley 1945-1975....
"The World" is a poem by American writer Robert Creeley. First published in 1962, the poem describes a man struggling to provide comfort to his wife in the middle of the night. Creeley was a prominent member of the Black Mountain Poets, a group of...
Published in 1995, The Jade Peony is author Wayson Choy’s first novel. The settings and themes reflect Choy's own experiences growing up in Vancouver's Chinatown neighborhood. The book was a significant critical success, and has been subsequently...
The early nineteenth century was not a good time to be a female writer -- particularly if one was audacious enough to be a female novelist. Contemporary beliefs held that no one would be willing to read the work of a woman; the fantastic success...