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Literature Criticism
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From:Queen's Quarterly (Vol. 110, Issue 4) Peer-ReviewedThe alphabet offers a bare scheme of order, and so exerts a peculiar fascination when sustained thought is too much to contemplate. It promises sense where there may be mere arrangement--dangerous, but hard to resist....
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From: The Midwest QuarterlyKen Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (1962) portrays sexual mythology as a primary motif in the individual's struggle for consciousness and to become free from institutional oppression in contemporary America. The...
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From: Twentieth Century Literature[(essay date Spring 1986) Dukore is an American educator and critic who has written numerous studies on such twentieth-century dramatists as Bernard Shaw and Alan Ayckbourn: A Casebook (1991). In the following excerpt,...
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From: Modern Drama[(essay date Fall 1996) In the following essay, Hawkins establishes some characteristics of Schizophrenia and applies these to an analysis of the characters and situations in Friel's work.] In Saints, Scholars, and...
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From: Discovering Modern Horror FictionNo one, I think, was better than...[Shirley Jackson] at skewering an emotion, a setting, or a small event on a sharply-honed turn of phrase, then holding it up to the clearest light where it could be seen wriggling,...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)Like Eugene O'Neill—also a New England playwright—Spalding Gray creates histrionic exorcisms of private demons. Such an autobiographical dramatist that he cheerfully admits to narcissism, Gray—again like O'Neill—in his...
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From: The Legacy of David Foster Wallace[(essay date 2012) In the following essay, Cohen considers the role of Wallace’s biography in understanding Infinite Jest, particularly the impact that his struggle with mental illness had on his creative process.]...
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From: The Marble in the Water: Essays on Contemporary Writers of Fiction for Children and Young Adults[(essay date 1980) In the following excerpt, Rees reviews each of Zindel's novels for young adolescents.] There is something peculiarly subversive about Zindel's books that appeals to the adolescent. Adults,...
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From: The Journal of Ethnic StudiesBuried by critics of The Confessions of Nat Turner, William Styron has resurrected his career with the publication of Sophie's Choice. Although the literary quality of Sophie's Choice is debatable, Styron has at least...
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From: The Return of the Vanishing American(essay date 1968) The excerpt below derives from the concluding volume of The Return of the Vanishing American, a three-volume study in “literary anthropology” in which Fiedler attempts “to define the myths which give a...
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From: World Literature TodayThe magic of At the Bottom of the River comes from its language. It is as rhythmic and riddlesome as poetry. Lovely though the words are, they often read like a coded message or a foreign language. Throughout At the...
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From:Contemporary Dramatists (5th ed.)A glance at the titles of David Edgar's many plays of the early 1970s will suggest readily enough to anyone who was aware of the chief social and political issues of the time in Britain (and not only there) the nature of...
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From:Reference Guide to American Literature (3rd ed.)Throughout her work Shirley Jackson focuses on incongruities in an everyday setting, whether for comic or sinister effect. This is as true of her "disrespectful memoir" of her children, Life among the Savages, and its...
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From: Contemporary LiteratureNow that Sylvia Plath has become the darling of those very ladies' magazines that she satirized so mercilessly in The Bell Jar, critics have begun to question her claims to literary eminence. Irving Howe, for example, in...
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From: The Garden and the Map: Schizophrenia in Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture[(essay date 1973) In the following essay, Vernon explores Roethke's affinity for garden imagery and the symbolism of sexual development, personal growth, and self-consciousness.] In Marvell's "The Garden" there is a...
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From:Reference Guide to Short FictionWhen "A Perfect Day for Bananafish" appeared in The New Yorker in 1948, readers were stunned. The American version of French existentialism drew on the tradition of understated narrative and idiomatic language that began...
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From: Twentieth Century LiteratureMrs. Arnold of Shirley Jackson's story “Colloquy” (1944) feels driven to see a psychiatrist because of her confusion and bewilderment over her loss of “'a world where a lot of people lived too and they all lived together...
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From: And Then There Were Nine ... More Women of MysteryShirley Jackson is one of the most haunting, and haunted, figures in American literature. In the spring of 1948, a young housewife was pushing her baby up a hill in a stroller. She conceived the idea for a story, went...
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From: New Perspectives on the Eighteenth Century[(essay date 2006) In the following essay, Alexander avers that Pope constructs Eloisa’s “heightened emotional state through a complex metrical structure that reflects her sensibility,” building on the pathos figures...
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From:Reference Guide to English Literature (2nd ed.)Alfred, Lord Tennyson's Maud: A Monodrama is perhaps best understood in the light of its original title Maud; or, The Madness. The work is an intimate portrayal of the morbid and disturbed state of mind of its narrator....