Culture Clash Ivanhoe is set against the backdrop of the clash between two cultures, the Saxons and the Normans. Saxon is a catch-all term to refer to several Germanic tribes that migrated to the British Isles beginning in about the fifth century; often the term ‘‘Anglo-Saxons’’ is used. At the time of the novel, the…
Tag: Novels
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: Characters
Athelstane Athelstane is a Saxon nobleman and a descendant of the last Saxon king of England. Cedric hopes to marry Rowena to Athelstane as a way of continuing the line of Saxon nobles. While Athelstane, generally a sluggish man more interested in drink and food, wants to marry Rowena, she has no interest in him. …
Ivanhoe by Walter Scott: Summary
Chapters 1–4 The opening chapters of Ivanhoe establish the novel’s historical and social context. King Richard I has been absent fighting in the Crusades, a series of wars fought between Muslims and European Christians over the holy city of Jerusalem. On his way home from the Crusades, Richard has been captured and imprisoned by the…
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….
Dune by Frank Herbert: Setting
General Semantics In the 1930s, the Polish American engineer Alfred Korzybski developed the discipline of general semantics (not to be confused with ordinary semantics, the study of the meaning of words) and founded a school for instruction in his system. General semantics holds that language is a metaphorical abstraction that actually separates the human mind…
Dune by Frank Herbert: Literary Devices
Science Fiction Science fiction and the closely allied genre of fantasy (Dune is often said to have elements of both) is difficult to define. A simple definition based on elements common in the genre, such as space travel, stories set in the future, and so on, or even a more sophisticated attempt at definition such…
Dune by Frank Herbert: Themes
Religion The main theme of Dune is the disastrous effect that messianic religious belief can have on human society. Herbert’s original inspiration was the messianic cult of personality that was attached to Adolf Hitler, who exploited the power it gave him to start World War II and the Holocaust. Herbert treats this through fiction in…
Dune by Frank Herbert: Summary
The text of Dune is divided into three books of unnumbered chapters. Each chapter is headed by an epigraph that is a quotation, not from an existing literary work but from a pseudo-scholarly work attributed to Princess Irulan, whom the reader learns only at the very end of the novel becomes Paul’s wife. The various…
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…
Cold Sassy Tree: Setting
Cold Sassy Tree is one of many works—novels, short stories, and plays—that examine smalltown life in the American South, particularly during the early years of the twentieth century. Chief among American writers who chronicled small-town life was William Faulkner, who created a fictional county in Mississippi that he used in many of his novels and…