American Literature
Essays

Fu, P. "Hong Kong Cinema: Colonizer, Motherland and Self. By Yingchi Chu. [London and New York: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002. xxi+184 pp. £55.00. ISBN 0-7007-1746-3.]. "The

William Shakespeare is one of the most famous playwrights of the English literature and one of the titans of the Renaissance movement. His works gave way to new forms of literary creations, or the perfection of old ones.

Hemingway, Eichmann, Stranger in a Strange Land, Dylan, Berlin, Bay of Pigs Invasion are some words to the song "We didn't Start the Fire" by Billy Joel talking about the 20th Century, particularly the year 1961.

Kate Chopin was master at creating female characters that lived out of their own time. Chopin was not what we may truly call a feminist by modern standards but she did attempt to give the women in her fiction the…

¶ … Strength of Women Depicted in Gaines' Lesson Before Dying

Upton Sinclair's Novel Oil! And Paul Thomas Anderson's Movie There Will be Blood

Abstract Wile Sula is the most moving of Morrison's works for me, I have found myself coming back over and over to Song of Solomon: first, for the fierce wisdom of Pilate, which I wrote on in Listening to Our Bodies; then for the wisdom and clarity and originality of Morrison's analysis of masculine archetypes and how they underlie men's individuation; and finally, for lessons about women's life stages, since the novel gives a cross section of women on the boundary line of passages into various new life stages (Smith, 1995). Like her other novels, Morrison's Song of Solomon crosses several generations; the major action of the novel takes place when all the women have grown middle-aged or old. Although this novel develops in depth Morrison's vision of masculine archetypes, the portraits of the women are as strong and compelling as her more centrally feminine previous novels; as Gloria Snodgrass Malone says, "men [are] more prominent in this novel, but women bear the brunt of suffering." The female figures are for me more memorable than the males. And although the novel's protagonist is male, he is finally redeemed by the strength and spirituality of several women in his family and the witch figure Circe, whom he meets on his journey South. Milkman is thirty-one when this happens (Cowart, 1990). The older women in his family are his mother, Ruth, sixty-two, and his aunt, Pilate, sixty-eight; these women comprise the portraits of women in the last stage of life, well past middle age. His sisters, Corinthians and Lena, are forty-two and forty-three respectively, thus moving into middle-age during the last section of the novel, as does Reba, Pilate's daughter, although her age is never actually given. Hagar, Milkman's cousin and lover, dies at thirty-six, apparently unable and unwilling to move towards middle-age. But before examining the women's life stages in depth, we need to set the stage with Morrison's development of masculine archetypes (Novak).

Both Mark Twain and his character Huck Finn are truly the embodiment of what it is to be American. They represent freedom of speech, liberty, equal opportunity, and an undeniable individualism that has been at the core of American ideology since the very inception of this nation. The devotion to these principles is what makes this work, and its author, so American.

Traditionally, American literature as it is taught in schools, has been comprised of texts composed by white, male, protestant authors who have been accepted into the Western canon.

Scott Fitzgerald's famous novel, the Great Gatsby, has been identified by the critics as a novel which stands at the boundary between nineteen century fiction and the modernism of the Roaring Twenties.