It would be difficult to try and clarify the meaning of this book - the author's meaning - but the superficial nature of its story certainly puts it in a category of post-modernist writing. ... The gray area then becomes how to differentiate classical writing that contains elements of self-reflexivity from post-modernist contemporary writing which aims to respond to social agenda. ... The color, the pattern, and the soul of his piece comes from "a self-reflexivity prompted by the author's awareness of the theory underlying the construction of fictional works" (Waugh 2). ... The ch...

• Word Count: 1165
• Approx Pages: 5
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Anne Tyler Well-known contemporary novelist and short story writer, Anne Tyler, was born in Minneapolis, Minnesota in 1941 to Lloyd, an industrial chemist, and Phyllis Tyler, a social worker. ... In 1965, the couples first daughter, Tezh, was born, followed by Mitra in 1967, prompting the family to move to Baltimore, the place in which Tyler still resides, although now widowed, and where many of her novels and short stories are set, especially Baltimore's Roland Park-the "epitome of upper-middle class waspdom in all its glory" (DISCovering Authors). ... Perhaps one of Tyler's gre...

• Word Count: 834
• Approx Pages: 3
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Chapter 15 of Voltaire's 'Candide' can be taken as a perfect example of the author's skill as an 18th Century Enlightenment writer. ... Voltaire is an author who handles character dialogue expertly. ... From the examples in this essay, it can be seen how Voltaire, utilizes methods from centuries before him to effectively communicate his point to his contemporary readers and does so in a way that is amusing and captivating....

• Word Count: 1041
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Ellen Hopkins is a contemporary novelist who has found a way to intrigue the minds of young adults using poetry in her numerous verse novels. ... With subjects that hit so hard for some, the author must be careful to not become too confident in their ability to express the emotions felt by the victim. ...

• Word Count: 875
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Umberto Eco's best-selling novel--The Name of the Rose challenges its readers to map their landscapes cognitively and illustrate the emergence of the late-twentieth-century novel of complexity, that is, the novel of emergence, itself an apparently self-organizing emergent phenomenon among several writers in contemporary culture. ... Its author, the elderly monk Adso, divides his text into seven parts, spanning seven days; each part or day is further ordered into "periods corresponding to the liturgical hours" of the monastic day (7). ... The Name of the Rose is an early fourteenth-century...

• Word Count: 4697
• Approx Pages: 19
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Although coinciding with contemporary modernist writing, Woolf's Orlando has been described as almost specifically written as a screenplay. ... In her paper, Sharon Oudit further embellishes on the idea that Woolf's novel is in fact riddled with cinematic allusion thereby implicating that the author intended the novel for filmic adaptation and mocked her readers. ...

• Word Count: 1793
• Approx Pages: 7
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

For a debut novel, it brought the author rare attention, first as a winner of the Governor-General's Award of Canada and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, then as an entry on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. ... As far as Parsi life goes, though, Mistry has some competition, because the Pakistani writer Bapsi Sidhwa, now a United States citizen, has written a robust novel that portrays this community during the colonial period, The Crow Eaters (1980), another that depicts a Parsi family in Lahore during the time of Partition in 1947, Cracking India (1991), and a third set in the postcolo...

• Word Count: 4675
• Approx Pages: 19
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

For a debut novel, it brought the author rare attention, first as a winner of the Governor-General's Award of Canada and the Commonwealth Writers Prize, then as an entry on the shortlist for the Booker Prize. ... As far as Parsi life goes, though, Mistry has some competition, because the Pakistani writer Bapsi Sidhwa, now a United States citizen, has written a robust novel that portrays this community during the colonial period, The Crow Eaters (1980), another that depicts a Parsi family in Lahore during the time of Partition in 1947, Cracking India (1991), and a third set in the postcolo...

• Word Count: 4673
• Approx Pages: 19
• Grade Level: Undergraduate