All Questions

Is there a version of Snow White where her name is a longer description? TVTropes says: Snow White. Her real name is "Lips Red as Blood, Hair Black as Ebony, Skin White as Snow" based on ...

The meaning of "obscure" in the title of Thomas Hardy's Jude the Oscure has been discussed previously on this site, but what about the name Jude? Earlier versions of the manuscript had the ...

On searching for the same query on the internet, I found multiple articles that called Comedy, Tragedy, Tragicomedy and Melodrama as the major forms but, there were an equal number of articles that ...

I have a question regarding rhymes in two English poems by William Blake. Here is the first poem, "The Ecchoing Green": The sun does arise, And make happy the skies. The merry bells ring To ...

From The Kite Runner: Hassan milled about the periphery of my life after that. I made sure our paths crossed as little as possible, planned my day that way. Because when he was around, the oxygen ...

What does "the descent of their last end" mean in James Joyce's The Dead? His soul swooned slowly as he heard the snow falling faintly through the universe and faintly falling, like the ...

In The Crucible, during act 4 (Danforth's monologue), he says While I speak God's law, I will not crack its voice with whimpering. When looking at this quote the only technique I can see is ...

Is there not a excerpt from the Bible... Not religious just thought I heard something like this in a preaching, told by my Daddy.

I read an English adult book about around three to four years ago (it seemed quite fresh at the time) which was about a seventeen-year-old boy in the early 20th century, who was shot and became ...

I've been trying to do research to confirm my English teacher's claim that T. S. Eliot plagiarized works by Jules Laforgue, Henri Bergson, and Andrew Marvell in his poem "The Love Song of J. ...

In Zinky Boys (track 7 in the audiobook), a female doctor complained that the girls she stayed with mostly talked about things like rubles, foreign currency vouchers, and how to steal meat and other ...

From the Wikipedia page on C.S. Lewis's Till We Have Faces: C. S. Lewis originally titled his working manuscripts "Bareface". The editor (Gibb) rejected the title "Bareface" on ...

I have just started to read Rumi. I've been trying to make sense of "The New Rule" for a while now but it's too much. What does it mean?

CEO's Wife So Sweet This seems to be an online novel series originally written in Chinese. The language in the translated end product seems stilted and unnatural to say the least. I am wondering about ...

I believe I read this story in my AP Literature textbook, but can't recall the name. It's about a young boy living in South Africa during Apartheid who is ironically killed by the fence surrounding ...

I'm looking for a beauty and the beast type short story where the beast wears a mask and wins the beauty by playing cards with her dad. I remember that the beast cries diamonds or some type of gem and ...

D. J. Enright's poem "The Typewriter Revolution" (1971) is a text in which a typewriter appears to revolt against its owner (?), resulting in the distortion of texts and literary allusions. ...

"The Grand old Duke of York" is a well-known English nursery rhyme concerning the exploits of an not-specifically-identified duke of York. Wikipedia, citing the Opies and other books, gives ...

You Are Old, Father William is a poem by Lewis Carroll that appears in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. It is a parody of Robert Southey's poem, The Old Man's Comforts and How He Gained Them. I ...

In part 1 one of Dante's Inferno, "The Dark Wood", the narrator is introduced to a figure: At sight of him in that friendless waste I cried: "Have pity on me, whatever thing you are, ...

In the sixth stanza of the poem "The Patriot" by Robert Browning, what do the last three lines mean? “Paid by the world, what dost thou owe “Me?”—God might question; now instead, ‘Tis God ...

I'm reading the novel Percy Jackson and the Lightning Thief for my literature class and was trying to use the characterisation framework of PAIRS (Physical appearance, Actions, Inner Thought, ...

In the translation of The Count of Monte Cristo I am reading, I noticed in Chapter 51, in the exchange between Valentine and Maximillian, Valentine makes repeated reference to her father's second wife ...

A book I am looking for is about how one day all poor people stopped working. All shops closed and rich people were left on their own - their cars would break down, no food at home - and all the poor ...

Why does this French Tintin book (Tintin et les Picaros) not have a printing number?

I was sorting through some old books and noticed that both these “My little pony” picture books say first edition on them. If they really were first editions they probably wouldn’t be worth much. But, ...

As the title states: if you have a guide book to reading an author or a specific work, should you read it before, after, or alongside the work itself? I've wondered this for a while in a general sense ...

In Tudor/Stuart literature and drama there are a lot of female characters dressing as men. And, of course, the male actors dress as female characters. But are there any plays or novels from the era ...

A discussion of murder mysteries on Twitter included this claim: Agatha Christie is on record as saying that she didn’t decide who the murderer was until she was ready to write the last chapter—then ...

I think it's about some college girl and she’s involved in some activities in school and gets absolute power. The cover is mostly red. On the book it says “Absolute power corrupts” I remember at the ...

I've been reading Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad, which is rife with what I would call non-standard narrative structures. There are obvious narrative peculiarities in the book that have been discussed at ...

One of the major supporting characters in Code Name Verity is Paul, leader of the Damask resistance circuit. A superb organizer, he takes pride in how he'd never lost anyone in his circuit (before ...

In Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Aurora's cousin Romney Leigh complains about the character of the times: We’re too materialistic,—eating clay, (Like men of the west) instead of ...

In the opening chapter of Naked Lunch by William S. Burroughs, the first-person narrator is telling a story to an "advertising exec type fruit" on the New York subway, and in the middle of ...

Macbeth wrote a letter to Lady Macbeth. Duncan suddenly wants to have a feast or celebration at Macbeth's castle, without prior notice as Lady Macbeth said. From this, we know that it's all within a ...

In Aurora Leigh (1856) by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the character Romney Leigh has a “pattern on his nail”: To think,—I have a pattern on my nail, And I will carve the world new after it, And solve ...

H. L. Mencken quoted "One horse-laugh is worth ten thousand syllogisms." The other half of it is It is not only more effective; it is also vastly more intelligent." Is that an idiom?...

In several poems in Like Water, like Fire, Belarus is spelled "Byelorussia", and in some it's spelled "Biełaruś". Why is that?

I saw The Play That Goes Wrong when it came through my town, having greatly enjoyed the excerpt I'd found online of the show. It's now available to be licensed for professional, community, and school ...

Nickolas Butler and Barbara Ehrenreich have written (completely different) books entitled "The Hearts of Men". The phrase also appears in the fourth verse of the Battle Hymn of the Republic. ...

Read this when I was in primary school in Sydney, Australia, early 2010s. It was probably a small chapterbook with some pictures. I'm pretty sure the author is Australian but I'm not sure if it was in ...

While looking for novels by Jorge Amado in the online catalogue of a bookseller, I stumbled upon the recently published novella Anna Seghers im Garten von Jorge Amado ("Anna Seghers in Jorge ...

Empire of the Ants is a translation of the first in a trilogy of books "Les Fourmis" by Bernard Werber. Quoting the Wikipedia article: Les Fourmis (English: The Ants) is a 1991 science ...

I am looking for a French comic that was published at least 30 years ago. The story took place in the Wild West, during the American Indian Wars. There were three main characters: a young man with a ...

In the poem Belarusian I by Valzyhna Mort, extracted from her book Factory of Tears, the poet appears to be bemoaning the lack of freedom in her country. Some parts are clear enough, even if ...

To Our Native Land by Janka Lučyna starts as follows: Thou art spread widely with forests and marshes, With sand-dune expanses that grant but poor living It then goes on to talk about how bad the ...

In the Harry Potter books, you can only see a threstral if you've seen someone die, right? In the beginning of the fourth book (The Goblet of Fire), Harry sees "horseless carriages", but ...

I have not fully read Homer's The Iliad and The Odyssey and I'm only in the Book 3 of The Aeneid. All I know is that in the Iliad, there is the fighting of the Trojan War. In the Odyssey, there is a ...

I finished Elif Shafak's The Forty Rules of Love recently, and I just can't stop thinking about Kimya's ending. Shams just rejects her and she dies?? Why doesn't he at least comfort her or explain why ...

Is Neal Stephenson's novel Anathem a version of Plato's Republic? Those who have read the novel and have a little Plato will understand why I ask. We often point to Swift as the originator of modern ...