Industrialization Nineteenth century England had flourishing cities and emerging industries. Machines made it possible for those with money to invest to earn great profits, especially with an abundance of poor people who were willing to work long hours at hard or repetitive jobs for little pay. By contrast, the rural system included landlords, farmers, and…
Category: Literature
Great Expectations: Bildungsroman & other Literary Devices
Point of View The first-person narrator of Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations is an adult Pip who tells the story in his own voice and from his own memory. What is distinctive about that voice is that it can so intimately recall the many small details of a little boy’s fear and misery, as well as…
Great Expectations: Themes
Alienation and Loneliness Beneath Charles Dickens’ major theme of a great respect for wealth is an analysis of the fate of the outsider. At least four known orphans-Mrs. Joe, Magwitch, Estella, and Pip himself-have suffered loneliness, but each character reacts differently. Pip begins his story as a child standing in a gloomy cemetery at the…
Great Expectations: Summary
The First Stage of Pip’s Expectations Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations opens as seven-year-old Philip Pirrip, known as “Pip,” visits the graves of his parents down in the marshes near his home on Christmas Eve. Here he encounters a threatening escaped convict, who frightens Pip and makes him promise to steal food and a file for…
Go Tell It on the Mountain – Analysis
In his first novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain, James Baldwin divides his narrative into three distinct parts. The first section, “The Seventh Day,” sets the novel’s central action, what Shirley S. Allen, in “Religious Symbolism and Psychic Reality in Baldwin’s ‘Go Tell It on the Mountain,”’ calls John’s “initiation into manhood.” John completes…
Go Tell It on the Mountain – Literary Devices
Setting The setting of James Baldwin’s novel – the impoverished part of New York known as Harlem, and more specifically the storefront church within the Harlem community – was undoubtedly a key reason for the book’s popularity upon its first publication, giving intellectuals an inside look at a world not many of them had known….
Go Tell It on the Mountain – Themes
Identity (Search For Self) Go Tell It on the Mountain is primarily about John Grimes’ quest to find out who he really is, to distinguish the values of those around him from the ones that he holds. It is no coincidence that the novel takes place on his birthday, which is the day representing a…
Go Tell It on the Mountain – Characters
Elisha Seventeen years old and recently arrived in Harlem from Georgia, Elisha is the nephew of the pastor of the Temple of the Fire of the Baptized. He has been publicly chastised in front of the congregation for “walking disorderly” with Ella Mae Washington, meaning that they had been walking without supervision and might have…
Go Tell It on the Mountain – Summary
Part I James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain chronicles the experiences of its young narrator, John Grimes, in Harlem in 1935. The novel opens on the morning of John’s fourteenth birthday and centers on the events that lead up 10 his spiritual conversion later that evening. The narrative also provides a history of…
The Chosen by Chaim Potok – Analysis
Chaim Potok’s The Chosen focuses on the contrasts between extreme ends of Orthodox Judaism. Despite criticisms that Potok is overly optimisticReuven regains his sight, Danny renounces the tzaddikate without being ostracized by his father, Danny and Reuven resolve many of the conflicts they feel between the secular world and Orthodox Judaism-Potok’s novel provides us with…