Category: Essays

My dear nephew, I WISH YOU A MERRY CHRISTMAS! First, I hope you and your little sister Katty are okay and that your life in Ottawa is great. I don’t know if you know this, but your father was born there. I have sent some presents for you and your…

INTRODUCTION The play ‘A Doll’s house’ is a three act play written by Henrik Ibsen. The play is significant for its critical attitude toward 19th century marriage norms. It aroused great controversy at the time, as it concludes with the protagonist, Nora, leaving her husband and children because she wants…

Cyril Connoly once said, ‘While thoughts exist, words are alive and literature becomes an escape, not from, but into living.’ Truly, thoughts are our keys to open the gates of freedom and get away from man’s world of madness and hopelessness. However, if these thoughts are suppressed, then men will…

In her biography, Forster states that on writing the savage Jamaica Inn, du Maurier sets out ‘to demonstrate the unevenness of the relationship between the sexes’ and to scrutinize and discover the roles, produced repeatedly right through the history of the Gothic genre, of ‘the man as brute and the…

‘I am a feminist, and what that means to me is much the same as the meaning of the fact that I am Black: it means that I must undertake to love myself and to respect myself as though my very life depends upon self-love and self-respect.’ ‘ June Jordan…

‘ Introduction ‘Why were some people fated, like Job, to live a never-ending debate between themselves and their sense of what they believed life should be’? (Wright 24). This question posed by protagonist Cross Damon in Richard Wright’s novel The Outsider (1953) illustrates his alienated position from society and his…

“The Lottery”, a short story, by Shirley Jackson is a very suspenseful yet shocking read, which focus on how tragic it can be to blindly follow a tradition. The story is set in a small town, on the summer morning of June 27th. The story begins with the towns people…

One major motif that takes place in the novel, Anansi Boys by Neil Gaiman is ‘Facing one’s Twin or Double.’ It all begins when Charles ‘Fat Charlie’ Nancy visits Florida for his father’s funeral. While there a friend of his father’s, Mrs. Higgler, tells Fat Charlie he has a brother…

Great Expectations is a novel that centres on the life of a young boy, Phillip Pirrip, who lives with his abusive sister and her husband, his kind brother in law and his journey and the trials and tribulations throughout his life. Throughout the novel we meet many characters who have…

Wayne C. Booth was a George M. Pullman Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus in English Language and Literature at the University of Chicago. He was a famous critic of literature and of literary critics. He wrote the influential books, The Rhetoric of Fiction in 1961 and The Company We Keep in…