Beneath the familiarity of middle-class life, in the opening and closing scenes, and the culture of children's play evident in the adventures in Never Land is the anxiety aroused by the shifts in masculine identity in relation to modern life, including the new technologies of the workplace and the demise of Empire. ... In contrast, as Ed Cohen notes in Talk on the Wilde Side, "agricultural labourers and the industrial working classes [ ] were largely determined by the material constraints circumscribing their lives- (19), which is to say that the work in which they engaged was mainly phys...

• Word Count: 7291
• Approx Pages: 29
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The land of the free (except for slaves) and the home of the brave (and extremely violent and repressive) inculcated racial myths within Clemens during his antebellum childhood on the Mississippi that were slowly fractured, but never completely expunged, as he matured intellectually. ... In the public discourse this meant "coon- songs and shows that took the humiliation of the black race to a new level of cruelty, and the passage of laws (i.e. ... Roxy, ironically playing God as her master did, commits an act of pride that brings tragedy and death (Judge Driscoll by Roxy's son) into t...

• Word Count: 3141
• Approx Pages: 13
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Introduction Derek Walcott's "A Far Cry from Africa," published in 1962, is a painful and jarring depiction of ethnic conflict and divided loyalties. The opening images of the poem are drawn from accounts of the Mau Mau Uprising, an extended and bloody battle during the 1950s between European settlers and the native Kikuyu tribe in what is now the republic of Kenya. In the early twentieth century, the first white settlers arrived in the region, forcing the Kikuyu people off of their tribal lands. Europeans took control of farmland and the government, relegating the Kikuyu to a ...

• Word Count: 4862
• Approx Pages: 19
• Grade Level: Undergraduate