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.
Edgar Huntly: or, Memoirs of a Sleepwalker, published in 1799 by Charles Brockden Brown, is one of the earliest work of American fiction, and the first to depict the tense relationship between Americans and Indians on the frontier. Adopting but...
Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil is a critique of sciences, politics, and art of the modern world through a collection of aphorisms and commentary. The author uses epigrams to shine a unique light on truth and nature. His exclusive perspective...
The deeply influential poet who stood at the forefront of examining the constrictions upon gender during the era in which she lived as a vital element of her poetry is perhaps paradoxically known to the world as Anne Sexton. Sexton was the name...
TheSumma Theologica(orig.Summa Theologiae) was written by St. Thomas Aquinas in the 13th century. It is the magnum opus of St. Thomas' body of work and is still regarded as one of the most precise, detailed collections of Christian theology. It's...
Published in 1980, One Child was the first novel by American psychologist and educator Torey Hayden. It is largely an autobiographical work, based on the experiences of the author working with a class of special-needs children and containing...
Hope Leslie, or, Early Times in the Massachusetts is the third novel by Massachusetts author Catharine Maria Sedgwick. The novel was first published in two volumes in 1827 and has been considered a foundational text in the creation of an American...
De Claris Mulieribus, or On Famous Women as translated to English was written by Giovanni Boccaccio and first published in 1374, the year before Boccaccio died in 1375. He was 62 years old, having been born in 1313 in Florence, Italy. Boccaccio...
The Ballad of the Sad Café is considered by many critics to be the most mature and profound work in the canon of Southern Gothic master Carson McCullers. In this novella that shares its title with the collection in which it appears alongside...
Edward Albee wrote The Zoo Story in less than three weeks in 1958, and originally titled it Peter and Jerry. Although Albee is now widely considered to be among America's greatest living playwrights, this was his first foray into drama writing. It...
The Night Hazel Came to Town, by John Ibbitson, was published in 1993. It follows the life of Lee, who becomes the newsboy, and he becomes entangled in the chaos of a world he has never before been exposed to. This story takes place in Toronto,...
D.H. Lawrence began writing his fifth novel, Women in Love, in 1913 but it was not completed until Lawrence was living in Cornwall three years later. It was first published in 1920 after several delays and editorial changes, some of which were due...
The Swamp Dwellers is a play that was written by Wole Soyinka and was published in 1958. Wole Soyinka is a writer from Nigeria, and he was the first African to be honored with a Nobel Prize, winning the 1986 Nobel Prize in Literature. Soyinka was...
Published in 1997, Memoirs of a Geisha became successful into a short period of time and remained on The New York Times best seller list for two years. The book was the result of 6 years of work and it was rewritten 3 times with changers regarding...
Ingmar Bergman’s Scenes from a Marriage seems to defy the laws of the film universe. The story exists as several different entities all at the same time, thus making it a conversation about it between two or more people a potentially tricky...
Federico Fellini began his directing career firmly entrenched within the neorealist school dominated by fellow Italian Robert Rossellini. In fact, Fellini collaborated with the master on his classic in neorealist cinema Open City before creating...
Imagine Cinderella’s story if she’d never made it to the ball. Or Pretty Woman if Richard Gere had hired the girl standing next to Julia Roberts. In a way, one need not imagine these alternative universes since there is always Federico Fellini’s...
Louise Brooks was an American silent-film actress born on November 14, 1906 in Cherryvale, Kansas. She endured a hostile upbringing due to her emotionally-unavailable parents, who failed to provide her with any attention or discipline. In...
A brand new approach to acting started appearing with greater frequency in Hollywood movies and on the Broadway state in the 1940s and 1950s. Personified by such legendary stars as Montgomery Clift, Marlon Brando, James Dean and Shelley Winters....
In 1925, schoolteacher John Scopes was put on trial in the state of Tennessee for teaching evolution in its schools. In the trial that followed in Dayton, Tennessee, the chaotic atmosphere and intense press coverage earned it the label "Monkey...
The Bloody Chamber is a collection of short stories by legendary British writer Angela Carter, whose untimely death in 1992 brought her work extensive critical attention. It was first published in 1979, at which time it won the Cheltenham Festival...
J.M. Synge wrote The Playboy of the Western World in 1907, to be produced at Ireland's Abbey Theatre, which he had helped to form. Though it is today one of the English-language drama's most widely-anthologized works, it was hardly a success at...
Scholars widely acknowledge Christina Rossetti as one of the greatest Victorian poets and the foremost poet of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. She excelled in using words to invoke the particular aesthetic of the movement. She based some of her...
The poetry of Alfred, Lord Tennyson, is among the greatest of English literature. Many of his poems are mainstays of literature courses, and most have attracted copious critical attention. His poems are renowned for, among other things, their bold...
A River Runs Through It is a collection of three short stories written by the American writer Norman Maclean. The stories were published in 1976 by University of Chicago Press. A few years later, in 1989, an illustrated version was published by...