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. ... By the age of seven Tyler had already begun writing stories. ... 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 ...

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

In short stories, language is particularly notable because the decision to include each word is likely scrutinized by the author. This is particularly the case in Hemingway's short story because of his creation of the literary style called, "The Iceberg Theory". ... The phrase, "like white elephants" is used in the short story five times. ... The short story introduces the two people as "The American and the girl with him," which leaves a very vague understanding of how they know each other or why they are together (Hemingway 1). ... This theory can be suppor...

• Word Count: 3072
• Approx Pages: 12
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Without it, misrepresentations of the different outlooks and views are easily made in a story and the underlying meaning may not be observed correctly. In the short story "Feeding the Piranha," Pamela Painter carefully weaves the setting into the mood, characterization, and symbolism of the story without detracting from the quality of her writing. ... The mood in "Feeding the Piranha," starts out with little to no presence, but becomes more prominent as the story continues. The different apartment complexes mentioned in the story create the image of the father being someone who constantly move...

• Word Count: 497
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Faulkner's choice to tell the story through the eyes of the townspeople is categorized as limited omniscience. ... The basic meaning of dynamic is in essence the underlying theme of this short story. ... Faulkner purposely chose this point of view to avoid these misinterpretations and to secure his story's relevance and validity. ... Perhaps the very fact that times are changing, therefore new unorthodox ways of writing, causes Faulkner to choose this different for of narrating his short stories. ... The point of view in a story usually can shed light on the theme to a story, an...

• Word Count: 675
• Approx Pages: 3
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In his noted work, Bartleby the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street, Herman Melville portrays the deranged character and namesake of the novel, as a blatant critique of nineteenth century America. ... The story begins with Bartleby seeking employment in the office of a scrivener; a glorified copyist. ... The impact of this environment on Bartleby is nothing short of dehumanizing. ... The narrator concludes the story with the false assumption that Bartleby was the victim of "nature and misfortune," rather than recognizing that he was doomed by the debasing impact of the modern American workplace....

• Word Count: 455
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

While the content and structure vary, the overlying concept of modernism is always present in these writers' stories. ... Therefore, there are circumstances when a writer's personal experience can influence the story told in their novel, with changing the narrative and characters to transform a personal experiences into a realistic fictional story. Stephen Crane is a prime example of this approach in his short story "The Open Boat". This story was inspired from his personal experience of his survival of in a shipwreck tragedy he experienced while he was traveling for w...

• Word Count: 3767
• Approx Pages: 15
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Mistry's short story collection 'Tales from Firozsha Baag' and his two novels, 'Such a Long Journey' and 'A FIne Balance' focus on the Parsi community in India rather than on the immigrant experience. ... Two years later, Penguin Books Canada published a collection of eleven stories titled Tales from Firozsha Baag, which appeared in 1989 in the United States as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag. ... While some readers interpreted the collection's final story, "Swimming Lessons," as a forerunner to future fiction about the immigrant ex...

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

Mistry's short story collection 'Tales from Firozsha Baag' and his two novels, 'Such a Long Journey' and 'A FIne Balance' focus on the Parsi community in India rather than on the immigrant experience. ... Two years later, Penguin Books Canada published a collection of eleven stories titled Tales from Firozsha Baag, which appeared in 1989 in the United States as Swimming Lessons and Other Stories from Firozsha Baag. ... While some readers interpreted the collection's final story, "Swimming Lessons," as a forerunner to future fiction about the immigrant ex...

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

It is the story of two brothers--one of whom served in Vietnam--who must rely on each other to survive a disastrous skiing trip in the wilds of Minnesota. ... These same concerns are evident in his award-winning short-story cycle The Things They Carried (1990), powerful tales so much like memoirs that O'Brien feels compelled to emphasize in a prefatory note that what follows is "a work of fiction." Fiction is a complicated term in O'Brien's world, though; the stories are deemed true sometimes because they happened that way and sometimes because they convey some larger truth ...

• Word Count: 781
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The main character of the novel "A Room with a View " is Lucy Honeychurch, a young English woman who follows the social convensions of the Victorian middle class which she belongs to. She is visiting Florence with her prim and proper cousin Charlotte when she meets George Emerson, a young, a...

• Word Count: 379
• Approx Pages: 2
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

" Chaudhry's words can be applied to the theme of isolation in both William Faulkner's short story "A Rose for Emily," and Edwin Arlington Robinson's poem "Richard Cory." In Faulkner's story, Emily is an eccentric recluse pitied by the people of her town and lives her entire life in isolation from the rest of the world. ... The use of this perspective allows the reader to feel as though they are part of the community; this involvement gives the reader a better understanding of the events taking place, and makes the stories seemingly more reliable. T...

• Word Count: 1022
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Every time he feels that he might be exposed or thinks of redemption he tends to get short of breath or nearly stop breathing altogether. ... Raskolnikov's madness not only drives the plot but rather is the plot itself for Dostievsky's Crime and Punishment is not merely a detective novel; on an underlying level it is the story of the suffering of an individual due to the ideas of the day, which represents 1800s Russia with its tyrant, communist leadership and economic despair. ... Through his rationale Raskolnikov's eccentric behavior enhances the story and causes all readers ...

• Word Count: 856
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Every time he feels that he might be exposed or thinks of redemption he tends to get short of breath or nearly stop breathing altogether. ... Raskolnikov's madness not only drives the plot but rather is the plot itself for Dostievsky's Crime and Punishment is not merely a detective novel; on an underlying level it is the story of the suffering of an individual due to the ideas of the day, which represents 1800s Russia with its tyrant, communist leadership and economic despair. ... Through his rationale Raskolnikov's eccentric behavior enhances the story and causes all readers ...

• Word Count: 876
• Approx Pages: 4
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

"What is Literature?" Defining literature is very subjective but can be well defined as a piece of written art that possesses some sort of educational, moral, or personal value when read. Value being the key point from a piece of work which would classify it as being a piece...

• Word Count: 660
• Approx Pages: 3
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

In this novel, the father, who has been already arrested and removed by the U.S. government at the start of the story, shows some relationship with the Emperor by giving the evidence of the connection to the Japan and his final confession after return four years later. ... The whole story ends with an angry plea from the father who actually asks readers to consider what he has done wrongly by distorted confession in short phrases and sentences. ...

• Word Count: 1101
• Approx Pages: 4
• Has Bibliography
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

Shelley's novel was inspired while she was visiting Byron in Switzerland with her husband, Percy, in which they challenged each other to create a horror story. Many people think that this event happened but we cannot be certain, but the account of how Shelly came upon the story adds to the stereotypical image of the genre. ... Frankenstein begins his story in Geneva, at home with his family, during chapter three, his mother dies of scarlet fever after attending to Elizabeth, whom she contracts it from. ... Biblical and spiritual references are used throughout the story to describe various...

• Word Count: 2019
• Approx Pages: 8
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

An eighty-page mixture of short, fragmentary chapters, photographs, and illustrations of medieval architecture and manuscripts, the Postscript is partly a poetics designed to "help us understand how to solve the technical problem which is the production of a work." (Eco, 1984) Eco explains how the historical fiction writer must become immersed in historical evidence: to tell a story, "you must first of all construct a world, furnished as much as possible, down to the slightest detail." ... Discussing the "mannerist," or hierarchical, labyrinth that he constructs in his novel, Eco in his "Pos...

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

Didactic Fiction in Alcott's Little Women And Barrie's Peter Pan On the surface, children's literature appears to be very straightforward and light-hearted, failing to carry within a particular story any deeper inherent meaning "the language is simplistic, there's a limited viewpoint, and characters oftentimes are portrayed as caricatures. ... Nevertheless, Little Women is a story about teaching and educating young women about maturation, and Alcott effectively uses her characters to relay her messages across to her readers. ... In short, both novels, in their re...

• Word Count: 1473
• Approx Pages: 6
• Grade Level: Undergraduate

The new dialogical form of the novel of the XX century assumes belittling of the "all-knowing" epic author up to a role of the story-teller alongside with an eminence of the hero up to a role of the objective author. ... "I do not know, - the story-teller interferes with "objective-epic" narration, destroying illusion of the all-knowing author, - whom she could become in our century, but is sure, that a lot of centuries back she would become a saint or a beloved of an emperor. ... However, the destiny has disposed so, that wandering along the coast of Lime gulf (in a southwest of Engla...

• Word Count: 2592
• Approx Pages: 10
• Grade Level: Undergraduate