In Reservation Blues, Alexie has scattered magical occurrences throughout his otherwise perfectly realistic fictional world, an approach critics refer to as magic realism. In her essay ‘‘Conjuring the Colonizer: Alternative Readings of Magic Realism in Sherman Alexie’s Reservation Blues,’’ Wendy Belcher discusses how the association of magic with the guitar, a secular Western object, inverts…
Tag: Analysis
The Prince and the Pauper – Analysis – Essay
Twain’s The Prince and the Pauper contains several instances of mistaken identity, the most obvious cases being those of Prince Edward and Tom Canty. Through the experience of mistaken or lost identity, Twain depicts one’s personal identity as something with a dualistic nature. For Twain, as these characters’ experiences demonstrate, identity exists as a composite…
The Princess Bride – Analysis – Essay
In The Princess Bride Goldman managed to produce a fantasy novel that parodies the genre in a consistently amusing manner, yet also reveals an underlying seriousness of purpose. It is a fine balancing act, successfully accomplished, which is why The Princess Bride is usually regarded as Goldman’s best novel. Rob Reiner’s excellent film adaptation of…
The Power and the Glory – Analysis – Essay
Graham Greene has been called a theoretical or automatic writer, in that he uses the objective perspective, with his narrative point of view roaming around from one image to another and one scene to the next without much commentary. In The Power and the Glory, for example, he presents a man on the run from…
The Namesake – Analysis – Essay
Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake opens with a pregnant Ashima attempting to recreate a favorite snack from India. This image, of a woman clearly homesick and disconnected from her roots, sets the tone for Gogol’s birth shortly thereafter. When the infant Gogol is named, a further disconnection is underlined in the form of a lost letter…
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: Analysis
Romanticism was a highly complex literary and artistic movement that began roughly in the mid-eighteenth century and reached its full flowering in the early decades of the nineteenth century. Literary historians usually distinguish between the Romantic movement or Romanticism and a more generic ‘‘romanticism’’ that can be found in later literature, including that written in…
Dune by Frank Herbert: Critical Analysis
Despite its obvious theme of ecology, which has generated much of the book’s popularity and the ornate gothic surface that attracts so many of its readers, the main theme of Dune is religion, and especially the interaction of religion with human culture as a whole. The presentation of religion in the book is quite remarkable….
Cold Sassy Tree – Analysis – Essay
Within the broad category of novels, critics and literary historians identify numerous types, each with its own conventions and each arousing certain expectations in the reader. While readers are usually told that they cannot judge a book by its cover, the fact is that readers begin to make judgments about books on the basis of…
The Bonesetter’s Daughter: Analysis
Two writers fill the pages of Amy Tan’s latest novel, The Bonesetter’s Daughter. The first and most talented is LuLing, an 82-year-old Chinese woman who, in a tragically beautiful narrative, tells the story of her life before she emigrated to the United States following World War Two. At the heart of her story is Precious…
Woman Work by Maya Angelou: Analysis
The definition of protest literature is fluid and varies according to perspective. For example, social critics could insist that protest literature must include a specific political purpose. A feminist critic may look to protest literature to promote (or avoid promoting) a gender bias. The deconstructionist who is concerned only with language and definition and not…