Blog Posts - American Literature

This must be the way most of us maneuver through the world, half knowing, half not, visited by memories that can’t possibly be true. But when I see others walking with confidence down the sidewalk, as though they are free completely from terror...

Each word I put on paper I imagine may be the last I write in freedom. I came across this quote a mere 22 pages into I Am No One, and immediately found myself identifiying with Jeremy O’Keefe, the History professor who said it. How often I have...

For a Science Fiction book written 66 years ago, Fahrenheit 451 has an astonishing amount of relevance for today. The people do not have living rooms, they have TV parlors, where they are inundated with sound to such an extent that they cannot conver...

I have been reading Cooper's The Spy, enjoying it, and wondering why. Cooper is certainly vulnerable to criticism yet even D. H. Lawrence whose scorn could be withering devoted two chapters to him (as he did to Hawthorne and Melville) and declared h...

Since at least 2011, I have, along with a former co-worker, kept a list of books completed each year, along with dates, the number of pages per book and the number of pages per year. My cohort...

Another book from Harper Lee? Is it the biggest literary coup the world has ever witnessed? No one can tell for sure. No one is certain what it means. What, however, is undeniable is the fact that fifty-five years ago in 1960 Harper Lee became a worl...

  Virtual Book Tour Dates: 12/8/14 – 1/5/15 Genres: Horror, Historical, African-American Lit Release Date: 11/15/14 Available Free With Kindle Unlimited!   Blurb: It’s a snapshot from the darkest chapter in human history. A cripple...

  Virtual Book Tour Dates: 12/8/14 – 1/5/15 Genres: Horror, Historical, African-American Lit Release Date: 11/15/14 Available Free With Kindle Unlimited!   Blurb: It’s a snapshot from the darkest chapter in human history. A cripple...

The necessity of evil from Frank Herbert’s Dune saga - A Renaissance-inspired analysis Introduction Christianity, from late antiquity to Renaissance and even further, told us that: ‘Man is the centre and the purpose of the entire creation’, but...

by Bogdan Christian Blascioc If Christianity, from late antiquity to Renaissance and even further, told us that: ‘Man is the centre and the purpose of the entire creation’, the conceptions were changed with the passing of time and after the scien...

Note: This review contains some spoilers. I initially rated this book three stars, but after giving it some thought and when comparing it to literary classics — the standard by which I judge all novels — I downgraded it to two stars. This highly...

1. The Idea of the RomanceAfter the sixteenth century, entries in the OED define romance as a story very remote from ordinary life, “an extravagant fiction.” Though the very title of Hawthorne’s Blithedale Romance implies a fanciful unrealis...

Page references are to the 1965 paperback Harper Perennial edition. Uncle Tom’s Children is a remarkable first book, all the more for the fact that these insightful and artful stories were the work of an author who, due to American racism, had...

Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (New Americanists)Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (New Americanists)Raising the Dead: Readings of Death and (Black) Subjectivity (New Americanists)Raising the D...

The reader of Huckleberry Finn who thinks that the author has perhaps exaggerated the violent, semi-lawless towns with their drunks, duels, feuds, and frauds, all enacted against the violent background of chattel slavery, finds in William Otter’s a...

Preamble Nobel Laureate Eugene O’Neill’s plays are influenced by psychoanalytical theories of the 19th century and they boldly disrobe people’s civilized appearance and probe their inner psyches. His well-admired play Desire Under the Elms (192...

Introduction Emily Dickinson has been the centre of curiosity for a number of researchers due to her insuppressible obsession with death. Even though death has been the subject of scrutiny for numerous literary artists and philosophers for centuries,...

“Travel is fatal to prejudice, bigotry, and narrowmindedness, and many of our people need it sorely on these accounts. Broad, wholesome, charitable views of men and things cannot be acquired by vegetating in one little corner of the earth all one...

Since my middle school years, I have considered Ezra Pound the greatest poet of the first half of the twentieth century. (Who might be the best of the second half I cannot say, though I could name some good ones.) Whether I like it or not, this cho...

Perhaps the single individual who inquired is the only one curious about my background. Having been brought up in a strongly anti-academic counter-cultural tradition yet loving the close reading of poetry and every language in which it has been writ...

Trending Topics