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The Oedipus myth goes back as far as Homer and beyond, with sources varying about plot details. The play that Sophocles presents is merely the end of a dramatically long story, and some plot background must be provided to make the story...

Rabbit, Run was, to put it bluntly, the book that made John Updike - a mere twenty-eight years old at the time - a star. When it was published in 1960, Rabbit, Run heralded a distinctly new voice in American literature. The blending of precision...

Grimms Fairy Tales refers to a collection of stories released by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm in the early to mid 1800’s. The first volume of the first edition was released in 1812. It contained 86 stories. An additional volume with 70 more stories...

Eclipse is the third installment of the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book was released originally in hardcover on August 7, 2007 by Little, Brown Publishing Company.

The narrative begins immediately following the events of New...

New Moonis the second installment of the Twilight Saga, written by Stephanie Meyer. The book was released originally in hardcover on September 6th, 2006 by Little, Brown Publishing Company.

New Moonreceived favorable critical reception, quickly...

“A comedy – three f., six m., four acts, rural scenery (a view over a lake); much talk of literature, little action, five bushels of love.”

One month before Chekhov finished writing The Seagull, this is the synopsis he offered to Suvorin, a rich...

In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens is Alice Walker's 1983 collection of 36 essays composed from 1966 and 1982. At the start of the collection, Walker coined the term "womanist", which refers to a black feminist or another feminist of color. The...

No-No Boy is a novel written by Japanese American writer John Okada and was published in 1957. The novel is focused on a Japanese American man, Ichiro Yamada, a prisoner who has recently been released and is trying to find his way in the world...

In 1762, Rousseau published The Social Contract and another major work, Emile, or On Education. Both works criticized religion, and were consequently banned in France and his native Geneva. As a result, Rousseau was forced to flee his homeland and...

Marlowe, while he was still at the University of Cambridge, translated works by the Classical Roman poets Ovid and Lucan. The scholarly reading and translation of ancient Latin (and sometimes Greek) was required of all students in all disciplines...

Dream Psychology (Psychoanalysis for Beginners) is a book written by the famed neuroscientist and psychoanalyst, Sigmund Freud. The book introduced the concept of dream interpretation as the process of understanding one’s unconscious thoughts...

Written in Latin between 1 B.C.E. and 2 C.E., The Art of Love is a three-book didactic elegy on how to seduce and maintain a relationship with a woman or man. The Art of Love contains various allusions to Greek and Roman mythology, especially the...

The second work of one of the most renowned and prominent Canadian writers of the 20th and 21st centuries caused a lot of confusion among literary critics. The main reason of their perplexity was the fact that Alice Munro was a master of the short...

Child of God (1973) depicts the life of a violent young outcast in 1960s Appalachian Tennessee. McCarthy's inspiration for the novel came from history, especially a historical figure whom, in a 1992 interview, he refused to name. Despite its...

When Edith Wharton was a young girl, she was stricken with typhoid and spent time recuperating in Germany. During that period of convalescence, Wharton chanced to read what she later described as a “robber story” that left her in the grips of a...

"Watchmen" is a comic book consisting of the twelve issues published by DC Comics in the period from September 1986 to October 1987, and later reprinted in a graphic novel. The authors of the series - a writer Alan Moore, an artist Dave Gibbons,...

Clock Without Hands was published in 1961. Publication came about only as a result of the commitment by Carson McCullers to get her manuscript completed for submission. That commitment was in the form of typing most of the manuscript with just one...

The Harvest Gypsies is a seven article long discussion written for newspapers by John Steinbeck. The articles are concerned about the lives of migrant workers in California during the 1920's. Steinbeck begins the discussion talking about the...

In 1791 Susanna Rowson published a novel titled Charlotte, A Tale of Truth that would in editions be known simply as Charlotte Temple. Many later editions were printed and most of those copies immediately purchased as Charlotte Temple did...

After Virtue is a philosophical novel written by Alasdair Macintyre and was first published in 1981 by the University of Notre Dame Press. The third edition of the novel was published in 2007 and contains a new prologue.

The novel focuses on the...

Natural Theology or Evidences of the Existence and Attributes of the Deity was published in 1802. The English clergyman William Paley wrote this work about philosophy of religion, which presents his arguments of natural theology that argue for the...

Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is a collaborative effort between writer James Agree and photographer Walker Evans. Ostensibly a documentary-like prose account of a visit to rural Alabama in the summer of 1936 by the writer and photographer, the work...

Robert S. McElvaine (born in 1947) is a professor at Millsaps College in Mississippi. He's enjoyed a wildly successful and lengthy career as a historian, specializing in the Great Depression. In fact he is one of hte world's leading experts upon...

In the late 80's MacKinnon was a celebrated voice in the feminist movement, particularly insightful regarding legal aspects of feminism, such as jurisprudence and ethics regarding mistreatment of women in the workplace. Part of her public...