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 Mezzanine is a 1988 novel by American novelist Nicholson Baker, an author who specializes in "stream of consciousness" style writing, as clearly demonstrated in this story.
The Mezzanine can be most basically summarized as what goes through an...
Luigi Pirandello is far better known as a dramatist with a fondness for exploring themes related to masks, disguises and the various personae that people choose to wear or have forced upon them. In fact, the very first major literary work in which...
Old Times is categorized as one of the Harold Pinter’ “memory plays” that characterized his evolution and development in the 1970’s through a series of productions that took a step back from the more cerebral experimentation of the playwright’s...
The Koran (Qur'an) is the holy scripture of the religion Islam, written by the prophet Muhammad, probably during the sixth or seventh century AD, and likely written over the course of 20-something years, as it was received through the prophecy of...
Moonlight is a one-act play by Harold Pinter which was first produced in September 1993 at the Almeida Theater in London. The play is divided into seventeen different sections which take place in three “playing areas” of the set: the...
The Known World earned Edward P. Jones a Pulitzer Prize in 2003 for shedding light on one of the darkest corners of American history: black slave-owners. The novel is set in Virginia before the Civil War and spans several decades in the life Henry...
The Satires are a compilation of the Roman author Juvenal’s satirical poems. Juvenal is known to have five books of sixteen total poems, all of which are considered satirical in the Roman genres, discussing society and morals in dactylic...
The Name of the Rose is the first novel of Italian writer, professor of semiotics at the University of Bologna Umberto Eco. It was first published in Italian in 1980.
The novel is presented as an embodiment of the theoretical ideas of Umberto Eco’...
Author Brian Moore was born Belfast, had immigrated first to Canada and then the United States, and published several potboiler pulp fiction novels under a pen name before finally staking the claim to serious novelist using his own name for which...
History of Rome, or Roman History, is a series of 80 books which chronicles the history of Rome from the arrival of Aeneas in Italy until the year 229 C.E., six years before the author’s death. The books were written over the course of 22 years...
The Enigma of Arrival is a 1987 semi-autobiographical novel by V. S. Naipaul. The story tells of a young man from Trinidad who makes his way to England, and the novel thus encompasses themes related to the post-colonialism and imperialistic impact...
Demons is the sixth novel written by Fyodor Dostoevsky and published in 1871-1872. It’s one of the most politicized novels, which Dostoevsky wrote under the impression from the occurrence of shoots of the terrorist and radical movements among the...
Deliverance is a 1972 dramatic thriller movie produced and directed by John Boorman. It stars are Jon Voight and Burt Reynolds. The movie is based on the book of the same name by James Dickey and the author had a small role in the film as the...
The History of Rome (also known as the Compendium of Roman History) was written by Velleius Paterculus, a soldier and historian. It was published during 1924 by Harvard University Press. This written work is a summary of Rome's history between the...
Fall on Your Knees is a novel written by Ann-Marie MacDonald and was first published in 1996 in Canada but then republished on October 2002 by Pocket books.
The novel follows the life of the Piper Family throughout the 19th and 20th century. The...
The writings of Friedrich Nietzsche diverge significantly from the collected works of most other philosophers. Although certain concepts and theories recur with frequently and ideas are repeated often enough to become motifs, Nietzsche’s writings...
Marcel Proust’s life-consuming literary epic is not just merely one novel, but a series of books. Throughout the 20th century, this collection of volumes was more often than not referred to by the collective title of Remembrance of Things Past....
Meena Alexander's Fault Lines was first published in 1993 and expanded in 2003. It is a memoir that, like many of Alexander's other works, focuses primarily on "trauma, migration, and memory," as well as trauma's "impact on subjectivity, and the...
Despair is Vladimir Nabokov's novel in Russian, first published in the Paris émigré journal "Contemporary notes" in 1934. In 1936, it was published as a book in the publishing house "Petropolis" in Berlin.
Despair is the sixth Russian novel...
In The End of Utopia, Russell Jacoby arguably argues that the idea of politics itself is coming to an end altogether. In a political contest, he states, people compete in viewpoints for the best wave of the future. However, everyone has already...
The title characters the film Eight Men Out are those eight ballplayers for the 1919 Chicago White Sox who were banned from baseball for allegedly throwing the World Series. When you hear the story of the team that came to be referred to as the...
In between the more famous Tortilla Flat and Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck published what may be viewed as a trial run for his famous novel, The Grapes of Wrath. In Dubious Battle is also set in California and is also concerned with migrant...
Many critics argue that Kenneth Branagh’s 1989 film adaption of William Shakespeare’s “Henry V” is one of the greatest cinematic recreations of Shakespearean literature ever. The film, which was shot primarily on intricate theatrical sets with a...
The short story that many students and reader confront under the title “The Grand Inquisitor” was, is and likely always will be a fully integrated yet curiously independent standalone chapter in The Brothers Karamazov. In any other definitive...