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Literature Criticism
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Thomas Jefferson is without doubt one of the great writers of the Revolutionary and Early National eras, and among American Presidents who wrote with distinction his only rivals are Abraham Lincoln and Woodrow Wilson....
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From:Reference Guide to English Literature (2nd ed.)Samuel Johnson's most famous poem, The Vanity of Human Wishes, can serve as an ideal example of the aesthetics and values of 18th-century neoclassical poetry. Johnson's poem is a re-creation of Juvenal's tenth satire,...
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From: The Midwest QuarterlyEvelyn Waugh's early novels are often thought to express the view that a traditional, stable, and dignified social order in England is quickly being replaced by a state of near chaos in which dishonesty and ruthless...
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From:Reference Guide to English Literature (2nd ed.)Alfred, Lord Tennyson's life and work almost span the century, and encompass numerous aspects of the Victorian period and its literature. With his sensibility closely responsive to the doubts, needs, enthusiasms, and...
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From:Reference Guide to World Literature (2nd ed.)The Marquis de Sade, like Edgar Allan Poe, is one of those writers whose importance is out of all proportion to the actual literary quality of his compositions. As a novelist Sade is a hopeless amateur: his plots are...
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From:Contemporary Popular WritersThe novels and stories of Bernard Malamud deal with downtrodden losers whose lives consist of facing hardship and humiliation, which they may or may not be able to endure. Many of his characters are Jewish, inhabiting...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)William Inge remains an interesting phenomenon in American drama. His impact upon critic and public alike demands that he be included in any serious consideration of the postwar theatre, but in subject matter and in...
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From: The Kenyon ReviewFables are those narratives which leave the impression that their purpose was anterior, some initial thesis or contention which they are apparently concerned to embody and express in concrete terms. Fables always give...
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From: The American Political Science Review[(essay date 1940) In the following review of Dewey's Freedom and Culture, Merriam concludes that Dewey has a firm grasp on the theories of political science.] [Freedom and Culture] by the Nestor of American...
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From: The Athenaeum[In the following excerpt from a review of Nature and Human Nature, the critic asserts that Haliburton's talent remains strong.] How far either Yankee or Nova-Scotian nature—how far that wider humanity which is the...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)Actor/drag queen Harvey Fierstein began writing plays at age 20 so as to create roles for himself. His first attempt concerned his efforts to clean Harry Koutoukas's apartment, a horrifying task which he undertook so...
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From:Nonfiction Classics for Students: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Nonfiction Works (Vol. 5. )No book becomes a classic unless it has something to say to generations of readers. One of the remarkable things about The Varieties of Religious Experience is how much of it is still timely one hundred years after its...
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From:St. James Guide to Science Fiction Writers (4th ed.)William Golding's novels are unique, fabulistic inversions of traditional perspectives that explore human nature and its veneer of civilization to suggest that man's instinctual past is directly linked to our present....
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From:Reference Guide to English Literature (2nd ed.)By the time it was published in book form H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, the best-known of his ``scientific romances,'' had already been serialized three times in very different, usually incomplete forms: as The Chronic...
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From:Twentieth-Century Young Adult WritersKen Kesey's appeal to young adults resides perhaps as much in the "text" of his personal life as that of his novels. As a precociously brilliant sixties' novelist, Kesey left for us his famous One Flew over the Cuckoo's...
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From:Reference Guide to Short Fiction"Nos" ("The Nose") is the second of Gogol's St. Petersburg stories—the others are "The Nevsky Prospect," "The Portrait," "The Overcoat," "The Carriage," and "Diary of a Madman"—a cycle in which he took as his model the...
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From:Reference Guide to English Literature (2nd ed.)A careful assessment in Dryden's Of Dramatic Poesy (1668) calls Ben Jonson, for the honour of England, ``the most learned and judicious writer which any theatre ever had,'' and finds in Epicoene ``the pattern of a...
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From:Reference Guide to English Literature (2nd ed.)``I may have been meant for the Drama—God knows!—but I certainly wasn't meant for the theatre.'' John Whiting scribbled this remark in his Notebook for 1960. Like Henry James, from whom the remark comes, Whiting saw...
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From:Twentieth-Century Young Adult WritersThe works of Jack London, author of some twenty novels and novellas and over one hundred short stories, are marked by an enormous amount of preparation; he once asserted that he suffered a "lack of origination" and had...
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From:Reference Guide to English Literature (2nd ed.)Labels like ``novelist'' and ``novel'' are at best problematic, and at worst dangerous, when applied to the writers and fictions of the 18th century. Not only did these words have different meanings than they do today,...