Part One Beauty tells the story of a young girl whose given name is Honour, the youngest daughter of a wealthy shipping merchant named Roderick Huston, who lives in a large city by the sea. Her sisters are named Grace and Hope. Honour, upon hearing her father explain the meaning of her name at five…
Tag: Literature
Critical Analysis of The Adventures of Augie March
Why do so many literary critics prize The Adventures of Augie March so highly? It is a novel in which a young man comes of age in Chicago yet cannot settle down to one career or commit to one relationship. It is a novel in which, after several hundred pages, the hero, Augie March, suddenly…
Historical Context of The Adventures of Augie March
The Great Depression Much of the action of the novel takes place during the Great Depression, widely considered the most serious economic downturn in United States history. The Great Depression began in the autumn of 1929, when the largely unregulated stock market plunged and American industry came almost to a standstill. By the early 1930s,…
Literary Style & Symbolism in The Adventures of Augie March
The Coming-of-Age Novel The Coming-of-Age Novel, also known as a Bildungsroman, tells the story of a young person discovering their true self and the nature of the world as they come into adulthood. Other examples include Catcher in the Rye by J. D. Salinger and Great Expectations by Charles Dickens. The Adventures of Augie March…
Themes in The Adventures of Augie March
Self-Realization Perhaps the central theme of The Adventures of Augie March is its protagonist’s lifelong struggle to discover who he truly is and what his place in the world should be. This epic search for a path through life is what launches Augie into his ‘‘various jobs,’’ including smuggler, thief, teacher, and shoe salesman. But…
Literary culture at the time of writing All’s Well That Ends Well
Shakespeare based much of All’s Well That Ends Well on Giovanni Boccaccio’s Decameron, a collection of one hundred novellas wrapped around a frame story. Boccaccio was a Florentine writer of the fourteenth century who wrote in the Italian vernacular, thereby making the Decameron popular among the middle class, as opposed to scholars who shunned anything…
Summary & Themes in The African Child by Camara Laye
The novel was originally written in French and later translated to numerous other languages including English. Mostly autobiographical, the novel paints a colourful picture of life in Africa. There are the typical ingredients of African wildlife, traditional tribal culture, belief in hoodoo or black magic, etc. But each of these facets to the novel presented…