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.
Fires in the Mirror is a one-person play composed of monologues excerpted from interviews conducted by the author, Anne Deavere Smith. The play is part of Smith's project On the Road: A Search for the American Character, which shares a name with...
Written in 1999 by Edmund Morris, Dutch is a biography of the fortieth President of the United States, Ronald Reagan. Though Morris wrote the book alongside Reagan, readers often note how it does not necessarily relate much to the actual term of...
C.P. Cavafy is a unique poet with a distinctive writing style. His poems are simple, straight forward and direct as Cavafy does not use tools like metaphors and other poetic devices. Because of his unique way of writing he has been categorized as...
Written by the Australian playwright Louis Nowra, Cosi is a play first performed in 1992. The play is set in a 1971 mental hospital, and is the sequel to Summer of the Aliens. The play contains some non-fictional elements, but for the most part is...
Love is a strong feeling of intense affection whose cause of sensation remains a mystery to humans. However, in The Four Loves, C.S. Lewis explores four types of love, namely, Storge-affection love, Phileo-friendship love, Eros-romantic love, and...
Richard Ford, born in 1944, is an American writer and editor. Before settling on a literary career, Ford worked a variety of jobs, briefly studied law and enlisted in the United States Marine Corps. The publication of his novel The Sportswriter in...
The Hope Chest is a novel by Rukhsana Ahmad, published in November, 1996. At 307 pages, it tells the story of three women: Ruth, Rani, and Reshma, whose lives intertwine in different ways, connecting their separate journeys together.
Ahmad talks...
Beauty and Sadness is one of the first novels written about gay romance originally in Japan and was written by the known Japanese author and poet Yasunari Kawabata. It was published in 1965 by the Central Public Opinion Company (Japanese: 中央公論新社)...
Imagine, if you will, the scenario of a President of the United States of America committing an indescribable sexual indiscretion in the Oval Office of the White House, only to find that the whole of America knows about it....
The movie was never...
Paradox and Dream and Other Essays is a collection of essays published by American author and essayist John Steinbeck. The main essay focused upon is Paradox and Dream, in which Steinbeck basically describes how he looks down on the American...
D.W. Griffith's Birth of a Nation is no doubt a long film, but it's also very important in film history. It covers two story lines: 1) the United States Civil War and 2) Reconstruction. Both follow the Stoneman family in one way or another.
...
Hiroshima mon amour is a story of two past-time lovers told through a long (36 hours) conversation. It is a French drama movie written by Marguerite Duras and directed by Alain Resnais. It was published in 1959, originally in French which runs for...
La Jetée is a science fiction story performed in a series of mostly still photos explained through a narrator. The featurette was made by Chris Marker and was first released in 1962, distributed by Argos Films. Even though the story only lasts for...
First acted out in 1960, Happy Days is a classic play by Samuel Beckett. The play follows the stories of Winnie and Willie, two people that live simple (yet confusing), happy lives. This play is seen by viewers and critics alike as being very...
U.A. Fanthorpe was an English poet who graduated from St. Anne's College, Oxford. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and winner of the Queen's Gold Medal for poetry, Fanthorpe was highly praised for her work. Her most famous publications...
Bread and Wine is an anti-fascist novel, meaning that it looks down upon the system of totalitarianism, where one person is in complete control of the government and its functions. Originally published in 1936 in Switzerland, though in the German...
Much like its predecessor, Evil Dead 2 was critically and financially successful. On Rotten Tomatoes, critics approved of the film 98% of the time and audiences approved of the film 89% of the time. After giving the film 3 out of 4 stars,...
The History of the Franks is a comprehensive guide to the spread of Frankish culture throughout and up to the sixth century C.E. A large topic of the history is the Christianization of Western Europe, which was perhaps the largest event taking...
The play Bran Nue Dae was written by the Australian Jimmy Chi and was published in the year 1990. The play is meant to be performed as a musical and so it contains many musical pieces. Many attribute this characteristic to the fact that the author...
June, 1981. A director responsible for two of the biggest box office hits of the 1970’s has teamed up with the producer of a film series that changed all the rules of Hollywood filmmaking. Together, these two titans of Hollywood—the wunderkinds...
Ferris Bueller's Day Off was released in 1986 by Paramount Pictures. The film was written and directed by John Hughes and stars Matthew Broderick with Alan Ruck, Mia Sara, Jeffrey Jones and Jennifer Gray. It was produced by Hughes and Tom Jacobson...
"Would I have become friends with my father if I went to school with him?"
That question was the germ (courtesy of producer/co-writer Bob Gale) for a film that eventually became the science fiction classic Back to the Future (1985). Gale and...
If the general public was asked to list their five favorite romantic comedies, Rob Reiner's When Harry Met Sally (1989) would likely be on many of the lists. The Hollywood Reporter wonderfully sums up the feelings of those who love the film. In...
Before the release of 1999's The Matrix, directors Laurence and Andrew Wachowski (now Lana and Lilly Wachowski, respectively) were virtually unknown commodities. Their previous -- and first -- film, 1996's Bound, was well-received but made very...