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.
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...
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...
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...
"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...
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...
“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...
John Grisham is generally considered to be the gold standard of the legal thriller. The Street Lawyer is his ninth novel, and like his other work was critically well received, and almost guaranteed to be made into a blockbuster film, or at the...
George Chauncey completed his Ph.D. in history at Yale University. He's currently a professor of history at Columbia University, continuing the work of his grad school education after a brief period teaching at Yale. He's particularly interested...
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...
Jorge Luis Borges: Poetry is a collection of the several poems written by Borges. Jorge Francisco Isidoro Luis Borges Acevedo, which is his full given name, was a novelist, writer, poet, translator and text critic that was born in the late 1800’s...
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...
Despite popular belief, Badlands was not actually the first screenplay that Terrence Malick wrote; in fact he had previously worked as a screenwriter on a movie called Money in 1972, and again on his own screenplay Deadhead Miles the same year; in...
Reasons of State is a fictional political novel written by Cuban novelist Alejo Carpentier, and published in 1975. The novel is a very important piece of Latin American literature, as it captures the events of the times, which were mostly of...
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,...
Down to his last few hundred dollars and without a job, Taylor Sheridan went on a mad dash to produce as many quality scripts as he could before his family lost their home and went hungry. Flash forward to 2012, when the script (then titled...
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...
Oliver Parker's 1995 adaptation of one of William Shakespeare's most tragic of tragedies is surprisingly loyal to the Bard's original plot, but leaves out much of the verbiage, replacing it instead with silent scenes that are not featured in the...
Imagine trying to cope with the changes both within yourself and in the world around you as you are turning eight years old; then imagine trying to cope when the older brother you look up to and depend on has an accident that forever changes his...