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101 posts
A detailed guide to absurdism in literature — definition, philosophical background, key features, examples, and how meaninglessness, repetition, and revolt shape interpretation.
A detailed guide to the antihero in literature — Raskolnikov, Holden Caulfield, Meursault, Satan, moral ambiguity, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to archetypes in literature — recurring character patterns, mythic structures, examples, and how to analyze archetypes without reducing texts to stereotypes.
A detailed guide to the ballad — oral tradition, folk ballads, literary ballads, Coleridge, Keats, and close reading methods.
A guide to the Beat Generation — rebellion, voice, counterculture, Kerouac, Ginsberg, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the bildungsroman — definition, history, features, examples, and how coming-of-age novels shape identity and society.
A detailed guide to blank verse in literature — definition, history, major examples, and how unrhymed iambic pentameter creates dramatic voice, meditation, and poetic scale.
A detailed guide to the carnivalesque in literature — definition, Bakhtin, social inversion, festive disorder, examples, and analysis methods.
A detailed guide to catharsis in literature — Aristotle, purgation vs. purification, audience response, tragic emotion, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to character arc in literature — dynamic characters, transformation, Elizabeth Bennet, Scrooge, Okonkwo, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the chorus in drama — Greek tragedy, ritual origins, commentary, mediation, modern adaptations, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to comedy in literature — classical comedy, Shakespeare, social norms, laughter, structure, and close reading methods.
A guide to confessional poetry — Plath, Lowell, Sexton, private life, persona, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to deconstruction in literature — definition, Derrida, binary oppositions, différance, aporia, examples, and how to read textual instability carefully.
A detailed guide to defamiliarization in literature — definition, Russian Formalist background, techniques, examples, and methods for close reading.
A guide to detective fiction — clues, knowledge, Poe, Conan Doyle, Christie, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to dialogue in literature — subtext, speech registers, Hemingway, Pinter, Shakespeare, Austen, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to diction in literature — definition, types, examples, and how word choice shapes voice, tone, character, theme, and close reading.
A detailed guide to dramatic monologue in literature — definition, history, key features, examples, and how speakers reveal more than they intend.
A detailed guide to ecocriticism in literature — definition, history, major ideas, examples, and practical methods for analyzing nature, environment, and ecological crisis in texts.
A detailed guide to ekphrasis — writing about visual art, Keats, Auden, Homer, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the elegy — mourning, memory, consolation, Milton, Tennyson, Whitman, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to enjambment and caesura in poetry — definitions, examples, and how line breaks and pauses shape rhythm, meaning, voice, and reader response.
A detailed guide to the epic — oral tradition, in medias res, The Iliad, The Aeneid, Paradise Lost, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the epistolary novel — definition, history, features, examples, and how letters and documents shape fictional truth.
A detailed guide to euphemism in literature — definition, examples, and how softened language reveals taboo, politeness, fear, censorship, and power.
A detailed guide to existentialism in literature — definition, philosophical background, major features, examples, and how freedom, choice, responsibility, and alienation shape interpretation.
A detailed guide to feminist literary criticism — definition, history, key concepts, examples, and how gender, power, voice, and representation shape literary interpretation.
A detailed guide to focalization in narrative — definition, types, examples, and how stories control what readers see, know, and judge.
A detailed guide to foil characters in literature — contrast, Hamlet and Laertes, Macbeth and Banquo, Elizabeth and Charlotte, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to frame narrative in literature — definition, structure, examples, and how stories inside stories shape meaning and interpretation.
A detailed guide to free indirect discourse in literature — definition, examples, and how third-person narration blends with a character's thoughts, language, and bias.
A detailed guide to free verse in poetry — definition, history, examples, and how poets create rhythm, structure, voice, and meaning without fixed meter or rhyme.
A comprehensive guide to genre in literature — definition, major genres, conventions, forms, modes, hybridity, reader expectations, and examples.
A detailed guide to Gothic literature — definition, history, key features, examples, and how terror, secrets, architecture, and the uncanny shape meaning.
A detailed guide to haiku — Bashō, image, season, kireji, compression, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to hamartia in tragedy — Aristotle, the 'tragic flaw' myth, error vs. moral failing, examples, and close reading methods.
A guide to the Harlem Renaissance — Black modernism, art, identity, Hughes, Hurston, Toomer, and close reading methods.
A guide to historical fiction — the past, narrative imagination, Tolstoy, Hilary Mantel, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to hubris in literature — Greek pride, transgression, divine order, Macbeth, Frankenstein, Paradise Lost, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to hybridity in postcolonial literature — Homi Bhabha, third space, mimicry, language mixing, identity, and analysis methods.
A guide to Indian English literature — language, nation, identity, Rushdie, Roy, Tagore, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to intertextuality in literature — definition, theory, examples, types, and practical methods for analyzing how texts echo, revise, quote, and transform other texts.
A detailed guide to liminality in literature — thresholds, rites of passage, border spaces, exile, identity, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to lyric poetry — the lyric 'I', Romantic inwardness, Sappho, Shakespeare, Dickinson, Yeats, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to magical realism in literature — definition, history, key features, major examples, and how ordinary impossibilities shape meaning.
A detailed guide to Marxist literary criticism — definition, history, key concepts, examples, and how class, labor, ideology, and material conditions shape literary form and meaning.
A detailed guide to metafiction in literature — definition, history, techniques, examples, and practical methods for analyzing self-conscious storytelling.
A guide to metaphysical poetry — Donne, Herbert, conceits, wit, spiritual argument, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to meter and scansion in poetry — definitions, poetic feet, examples, and how measured rhythm shapes emphasis, voice, form, and meaning.
A detailed guide to metonymy and synecdoche in literature — definitions, differences, examples, and how association and part-whole language create meaning.
A guide to Middle English literature — Chaucer, romance, vernacular, The Canterbury Tales, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to mimesis in literature — definition, Plato and Aristotle, representation, examples, and practical methods for literary analysis.
A detailed guide to modernism in literature — definition, historical context, key features, examples, and how fragmentation and experiment shape meaning.
A guide to modernist poetry — difficulty, fragmentation, new forms, Eliot, Pound, H.D., and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to motif in literature — definition, examples, types, and how recurring images, phrases, objects, and actions build theme.
A comprehensive guide to narrators in literature — definition, narrator vs author, reliable and unreliable narrators, intrusive narration, focalization, voice, and examples.
A detailed guide to neoclassicism in literature — definition, historical context, key features, examples, and how order, wit, decorum, and classical imitation shape meaning.
A detailed guide to New Criticism and close reading — definition, history, key ideas, examples, common mistakes, and practical methods for analyzing literary form.
A detailed guide to New Historicism and cultural materialism — definitions, history, major ideas, examples, and methods for reading literature with power, culture, and historical context.
A detailed guide to the novel as a literary form — rise of the novel, realism, interiority, social world, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the novella — compression, psychological intensity, The Metamorphosis, Heart of Darkness, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the ode — Pindaric, Horatian, irregular odes, Keats, Wordsworth, Shelley, and close reading methods.
A guide to Old English literature — heroic poetry, faith, oral tradition, Beowulf, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to orientalism in literature — Edward Said, empire, exoticism, othering, colonial fiction, and practical analysis methods.
A detailed guide to oxymoron in literature — definition, examples, and how compressed contradiction creates tone, conflict, wit, and emotional depth.
A detailed guide to paradox in literature — definition, examples, and how apparent contradictions create deeper meaning in poetry, drama, fiction, and criticism.
A detailed guide to pastoral literature — idylls, Arcadia, social critique, Theocritus, Virgil, Shakespeare, and close reading methods.
A guide to the picaresque novel — rogues, episodes, social satire, Don Quixote, Huckleberry Finn, and close reading methods.
A comprehensive guide to plot in literature — definition, plot vs story, major plot structures, Freytag's pyramid, conflict, character, theme, and detailed examples.
A detailed guide to postcolonial literary criticism — definition, history, key thinkers, examples, and how empire, language, identity, and resistance shape literary meaning.
A detailed guide to postmodernism in literature — definition, context, key features, examples, and how play, parody, and unstable reality shape meaning.
A detailed guide to protagonist and antagonist in literature — desire, opposition, force of nature, society, self, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to psychoanalytic literary criticism — definition, history, key concepts, examples, and how desire, repression, dreams, trauma, and the unconscious shape literary meaning.
A detailed guide to pun and wordplay in literature — definitions, types, examples, and how double meanings create wit, irony, character, and interpretation.
A detailed guide to reader-response criticism — definition, key thinkers, implied readers, interpretive communities, examples, and how readers participate in literary meaning.
A detailed guide to realism and naturalism in literature — definitions, history, key features, examples, and how ordinary life becomes literary meaning.
A guide to the English Renaissance — humanism, drama, Shakespeare, Marlowe, Spenser, and close reading methods.
A guide to Restoration literature — wit, theatre, political return, Dryden, Congreve, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to rhyme scheme in poetry — definition, notation, major patterns, examples, and how rhyme creates structure, expectation, emphasis, and meaning.
A detailed guide to Romanticism in literature — definition, history, key features, major writers, examples, and how imagination and nature shape meaning.
A comprehensive guide to satire in literature — definition, types, techniques, targets, tone, examples, and how satire uses humor and irony to criticize society.
A guide to science fiction — speculation, technology, society, Asimov, Le Guin, Dick, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the short story — Poe's single effect, Chekhovian openness, epiphany, compression, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to soliloquy in drama — Shakespeare, interiority, audience complicity, Hamlet, Macbeth, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the sonnet — Petrarchan, Shakespearean, Spenserian, form, volta, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the stanza in poetry — definition, types, examples, and how stanza form shapes rhythm, structure, argument, emotion, and meaning.
A detailed guide to stock characters and stereotypes in literature — commedia dell'arte, archetype vs. stereotype, convention, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to stream of consciousness in literature — definition, history, major examples, and how writers represent the movement of inner thought.
A detailed guide to structuralism and semiotics in literature — definition, key thinkers, signs, codes, examples, and how meaning works through systems and difference.
A detailed guide to the subaltern in literature — Spivak, Gramsci, representation, silence, mediation, and close reading methods for postcolonial texts.
A detailed guide to syntax in literature — how sentence structure, rhythm, order, and punctuation shape style, thought, voice, and meaning.
A detailed guide to the grotesque in literature — definition, Bakhtin, Gothic distortion, examples, and practical methods for analysis.
A detailed guide to the sublime in literature — definition, aesthetic background, Romantic and Gothic examples, and practical methods for analysis.
A comprehensive guide to theme in literature — what themes are, how to identify them, the difference between theme and plot, and how authors develop themes through characters, symbols, and structure.
A comprehensive guide to tone and mood — the difference between them, how authors create them through diction, imagery, and syntax, and how they shape the reader's emotional experience.
A detailed guide to tragedy in literature — Aristotle, Shakespeare, modern tragedy, suffering, catharsis, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the tragic hero in literature — Aristotle, hamartia, peripeteia, Shakespeare, modern tragedy, and close reading methods.
A guide to utopian and dystopian literature — imagined societies, political warning, More, Orwell, Huxley, Atwood, and close reading methods.
A guide to Victorian literature — industry, morality, social change, Dickens, Eliot, Tennyson, and close reading methods.
A detailed guide to the villanelle — repetition, obsession, Do not go gentle, Dylan Thomas, Elizabeth Bishop, and close reading methods.