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.
Y Tu Mamá También is a 2001 Mexican drama directed by Academy Award–winning director Alfonso Cuaron. The film received critical acclaim and was nominated for an Academy Award (Best Original Screenplay) at the time of its release. Written by...
William Butler Yeats published "The Circus Animals' Desertion" in a collection called Last Poems, which was published in 1939—the year of his death at age 70. Yeats was a legendary Irish poet who wrote profoundly about the Irish fight for...
Monkey Beach is Canadian author Eden Robinson's debut novel. It was published in 2000 by Vintage Canada and tells the story of a girl named Lisamarie Hall who possesses supernatural abilities.
The plot of Monkey Beach unfolds through the eyes of...
Sigmund Freud, an Austrian neurologist and one of the most influential thinkers of the 1900s, spent much of his life devoting himself to psychoanalysis, a technique used to treat psychopathology through dialogue. He devoted himself to studying the...
Frank Darabont's 1994 film The Shawshank Redemption is an adaptation of Stephen King's 1982 novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption, starring Tim Robbins and Morgan Freeman. It follows the story of Andy Dufresne, a man who is serving two...
First published in 1966, A Man of the People offers a critical perspective on the nature of politics, power, and greed. In his novel, author Chinua Achebe assumes an "outside" perspective in order to illustrate the profound effects of governmental...
As Francis Ford Coppola recounted in an interview with Playboy, he used to joke that he would only make a sequel to The Godfather if it were going to be Abbot and Costello Meet the Godfather. For a long time, he found the idea of creating a sequel...
Billy Elliot is a 2000 film directed by Stephen Daldry, written by Lee Hall. It was produced by BBC Films and distributed by Universal Pictures. The film grossed $109,80,263 worldwide and was nominated for three Academy Awards for Best Original...
War Horse is a children's novel set in Wartime Europe; the narrative concerns events from before the declaration of World War I to shortly after the Germans surrendered to the Allies. The narrator of the novel is a horse called Joey, a cavalry...
"Lethe" can be found in H.D.'s 1924 collection Heliodora, which contains many other poems that allude to Greek mythology. Lethe is a fixture in Greek mythology—a river in Hades that causes those who drink the water to forget their past. Lethe was...
"Oread," one of H.D.'s earlier poems, was first published in the magazine BLAST in 1914 and has become one of her most anthologized works. Scholar Gary Burnett points out that the publishing history of the poem is notable. While "Oread" is one of...
“Fern Hill” was written in 1944 and published in 1946 in Thomas’s book Deaths and Entrances. It was written during what critics consider the last period of Thomas’s career, in which he concentrated on longer narrative poems with vivid imagery. It...
Hilda Doolittle is known widely by her initials, H.D. “Evening" is one of the poems belonging to Sea Garden (1916), a book of poems in which H.D. examines the themes of gender, sexuality, feminism, and the human condition through the metaphor and...
“The Force That Through the Green Fuse Drives the Flower” was published as part of Dylan Thomas' first collection of poetry, 18 Poems, which was published to great acclaim in 1934, when Thomas was only 19 years old. The book helped Thomas earn a...
Dylan Thomas, who lived from 1914 to 1953 and was born in Swansea, Wales, is Wales’s most famous poet, a modernist poet whose writing also exhibited romanticist tendencies. “Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night,” written in 1947, is Thomas’s most...
At the time of its release, James Cameron's Titanic was the most expensive film production ever mounted, and widely expected to be a critical and commercial failure. Negative rumors about the film began to swirl after the film's production, which...
Le Père Goriot, translated literally in English as “The Father Goriot,” is a novel by Honoré de Balzac. As a Realist writer, Balzac strove to present people and events exactly as they were, without idealizing or romanticizing people. His work,...
Hannah Arendt, a German-born American political theorist who escaped from Germany in her youth, was uniquely qualified to comment on the trials of the notorious Eichmann. Eichmann In Jerusalem—A Report on the Banality of Evil is the result of a...
Slumdog Millionaire is a British film from 2008, which premiered at the Telluride Film Festival and was one of the biggest hits of 2008. It won eight Academy Awards in total, including Best Picture and Best Director. Its Oscar-winning screenplay...
First published in 1928 in the pulp magazine Weird Tales, "The Call of Cthulhu" is a short story by American author H.P. Lovecraft, an early twentieth-century short-story writer famous for his works of horror and science fiction. Farnsworth...
Good Night, Mr. Tom is a children's book published in 1981, written by English actress, dancer, and writer Michelle Magorian. Magorian had a strong passion for the history of children's literature which inspired her to try her hand at writing....
German film director Fritz Lang was sailing into New York City for the first time in 1924 when he was struck with his initial inspiration for Metropolis. He described his first glimpse of the skyline thus: "I looked into the streets—the glaring...
Little Dorrit is a novel written by Charles Dickens published between 1855 and 1857. The book was published in serial form and was divided into nineteen parts, each sold separately. Each installment was illustrated by Hablot Knight Browne and had...
Considered one of the defining works of contemporary gay literature, Call Me By Your Name is a coming-of-age-story and romantic novel that meditates on time, desire, and the intensity of the experiences that punctuate our lives and leave a...