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.
Minority Report is a science fiction film directed by Steven Spielberg and based on a short story by Philip K. Dick called "The Minority Report." The screenplay was written by Scott Frank and Jon Cohen and the score was composed by frequent...
After the critical and commercial success of Reservoir Dogs, and garnering considerable studio interest in scripts like Natural Born Killers and True Romance, Quentin Tarantino was one of the most sought-after directors in early-to-mid 1990s...
Coleridge composed "Metrical Feet" sometime between December 1806 and March 1807, enclosing it in a letter to his son, Derwent. Originally, the poem was composed in some form in December 1806 to assist Coleridge's eldest son, Hartley, with whom he...
The River Between is the first novel written and the second novel published by Ngugi wa Thiong'o. He wrote the book in 1965 while a student of English at Makerere University, an affiliate of the University of London in Kampala, Uganda. It was...
Sometimes, writing feels easy: you sit at your desk, uncap your pen, and a poem pours out of you. But other times you struggle to figure out the first line, and you find yourself waiting for the words to form, for inspiration to strike. This is...
Stanley Kubrick released Full Metal Jacket in 1987, a full seven years after his previous project, the psychological horror film The Shining. Kubrick was contemplating making a war film as early as 1980, when he initiated contact with writer and...
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the first and bestselling book by science journalist Rebecca Skloot. Blending the line between nonfiction and narrative, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks is the story of Henrietta Lacks, her family, and...
All the President's Men is a 1976 American political thriller film that follows Washington Post reporters Carl Bernstein and Bob Woodward as they uncover the crimes committed by the Nixon Administration, in what would come to be known as the...
Published in 1894, Rudyard Kipling’s The Jungle Book is a collection of short stories and poems. It is one of the best-known and beloved works of children’s literature; however, Kipling’s complex views on colonialism and race justifiably factor...
The Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able To Present Itself as a Science was written by Immanuel Kant in 1783. Kant was one of the greatest philosophers of the German Enlightenment. He worked to synthesize the two main...
During the occupation of Japan by U.S forces following its surrender at the end of World War II, samurai films fell out of favor. The controlling U.S. political machine looked unkindly on the samurai code of Bushido, which required allegiance to...
Chungking Express was Wong Kar-Wai’s third film to be released and his international breakout feature. Neither of those facts should have been the case.
Wong Kar-wai decided to follow up his second film Days of Being Wild—-a critical sensation but...
Adapted from the novel of the same name by F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby is a 1974 film directed by Jack Clayton, starring Robert Redford as the eponymous Jay Gatsby. The film also features Mia Farrow as Daisy Buchanan, Sam Waterston as...
Christina Rossetti was a 19th century English poet. She grew up in a family of writers, all three of her siblings also becoming accomplished poets or authors over her lifespan. From a young age, she wrote poetry, fascinated with wordcraft. She...
Possession was published in 1990; it is Byatt's fifth novel, and widely considered to be her most successful. The novel is inspired by Byatt's interest in Victorian literature, and her own work as an academic researcher and lecturer. It also...
"The Wild Swans at Coole" was written in 1916 when Yeats fifty-one. He was staying with his friend and patron Lady Gregory at her home near Coole Park, located in Galway, Ireland, a county located on Ireland's Atlantic coast. It was published in ...
"It is not love which you poor fools do deem" is a sonnet that appears in Lady Mary Wroth's 1621 sonnet sequence Pamphilia to Amphilanthus. In it, the speaker (Pamphilia) challenges an unknown group of antagonists by asserting that her...
"Big Poppy," featured in Ted Hughes' Flowers and Insects: Some Birds and a Pair of Spiders (1986), is a poem about sex and death. A first-person speaker dramatically narrates the path of a bumble bee as it guzzles nectar from a poppy flower. He...
"In Memory of Radio" was published as a part of Baraka's first poetry anthology, Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note (1961) under the name LeRoi Jones. This was published before Baraka became a radical black nationalist and changed his name....
Born in 1905, Sartre was an intellectual and writer whose political beliefs and worldview were greatly altered by the German occupation of France during World War Two. The invasion in 1940 was followed by the collaboration of the Vichy government,...
Stranger than Fiction is a film released in 2006, directed by Marc Forster. A fantasy and comedy film, it stars Will Ferrell, Maggie Gyllenhaal, Dustin Hoffman, Queen Latifah, and Emma Thompson. Will Ferrell plays the main character, Harold Crick....
The novel Breath, Eyes, Memory was published in 1994 by the Haitian-American author Edwidge Danticat. Her first novel, it became a bestseller almost immediately and won numerous awards. Critics almost unanimously praised Breath, Eyes, Memory. The...
In 1969, Kenneth Clark debuted a BBC miniseries narrating the history of Western art. Entitled Civilization, the series sketched out a concise, simple approach to art history, positing that every work of art can be understood by an adequate...
Gorgias is one of the earliest of Plato’s dialogues, dating back to a period in the 4th century B.C.E. when the Sophists' rhetoric reached a fever pitch of popularity in Athens. Sophistry was viewed by Plato as the epitome of false rhetoric...