All Questions

The phrase "no bounce, no play" comes from a Stephen King novel Dreamcatcher. Questions about the origin and meaning of this phrase have floated around the web on sites such as Reddit and Yahoo ...

My question is about a woman surviving alone in Alaska after her husband was killed and eaten by a bear. The book was published more than ten years ago.

I have a question on Dracula and the Victorian era. I was just wondering to what extent the cultural anxieties of the Victorian age are represented in Dracula?

I apologize in advance if this type of question does not follow the community guidelines, but I'm not sure where else to ask it (even my creative writing professor couldn't help). There was a poem on ...

How did Pale Fire's interpretation and analysis develop through time? Had there been continuous critical attention towards it and what did Nabokov himself say about the work? It is quite a ...

I really like the following poem by E. Bronte: High waving heather 'neath stormy blasts bending, Midnight and moonlight and bright shining stars, Darkness and glory rejoicingly blending, ...

What was Cookie Monsters first appearance in print? I figured that it would have to be at least after Sesame Street was first on the air of course.

A preliminary definition: accismus is a rhetorical device in which the rhetor turns down an offer for something that he/she earnestly desires (usually in order to come off as humble/temperate/etc). ...

When I'm citing books, I need to mention the city in which the publisher's main office is in. Why would it really matter where the publisher's headquarters are? Most of them are in New York anyway...

I am currently reading Berg by Ann Quin, a famous British experimental writer, and having a hard time understanding some of her prose. Although I realise that it is written in a vague, stream-of-...

Earlier this year, someone asked Why did T.S. Eliot make a statement that 'Coriolanus' was Shakespeare's masterpiece and that 'Hamlet' was an artistic failure? If the Wikipedia article about William ...

In the Bartimaeus trilogy, the main character is the eponymous djinni Bartimaeus, a demon/spirit from "the Other Place" who is cheeky, witty, boastful, and at times surprisingly deep. Bartimaeus, ...

Related: Why was Francisco d'Anconia amused by Ellis Wyatt's imminent demise? When describing what a playboy Francisco d'Anconia had supposedly become (including throwing wild and ...

In lecture 3 of his Introduction to the Theory of Literature Yale Open Course, Prof. Paul Fry makes the following claim: ... the notion of hermeneutics arises primarily in religion first, ...

When Hank Reardon was finally ready to join the Strike, he found that Francisco had already been working for him as a furnace superintendent - and, characteristically, as a very good one. Clearly, ...

In "Criminal Ballad", Ted Hughes describes a chain of tragedies happening in parallel with a man's simple moments of life. One of these is the following: "And when he ran and got his toy ...

I’ve already asked about the oldest free public library: now what’s the oldest children’s library in America?

It seems like at the end of Faust II, he has realized what he should do. Shortly before that, he kills humans on his quest to help humanity. So what exactly is his new purpose, except that he has ...

This Q&A mention accusations of plagiarism levelled at T. S. Eliot in the context of his famous poem "The Waste Land". There seems to be a lot of information about this on the internet, for ...

I am not able to comprehend this paragraph? If anybody could help me understand the meaning of this paragraph it would be very helpful. But Mr. Elliot was not done with. Mrs. Smith had been carried ...

Barack Obama's book Dreams of my Father was released in 1995 - many years before he became a senator and then president. Before he became well-known in politics, how successful was the book and him ...

I'd appreciate some help in finding this book I have but vague memories of. Here's everything I remember, some things more vivid than others. The story starts with the protagonist outside of this ...

There's a book I read a while ago, and I forgot what its title was. In the book, there's this really smart science kid who goes on a trip to the Amazon to help in some sort of study tour. I don't ...

I was recently rereading William Makepeace Thackeray's novel, Vanity Fair as it follows the lives of two distinct female characters, Becky Sharp and Emmy Sedley. I also have read that Thackeray ...

Since Stack Overflow thought it would be fun to use a 1990s style featuring a unicorn to celebrate this First of April, let me post a question that fits the theme: What is the oldest mention of a ...

In John Updike's short story A&P, why does Sammy feel sorry after seeing McMahon is making eyes at the girls, while Sammy himself was enjoying making eyes at them.

Here's what I'm trying to say. I'm creating a children's book for a school project. I've been tasked to identify some literary devices used throughout the book. There is a section of the book which ...

Thomas More uses Greek puns such as Hythloday that means speaker of nonsense, etc. What is he trying to do? What difference would it make for Greek readers and non-Greek readers?

Is there a dominant metaphore or a moral in the book series Inheritance Cycle by Christopher Paolini (mainly, I'm interested in Eragon, as the original story)?

Miep Gies was one of the persons who helped Anne Frank's family and several other people hide in the "secret annex". She also managed to retrieve Anne Frank's diary after the inhabitants of the secret ...

Excerpt from chapter 21 from Jane Austen's Persuasion: She felt a great deal of good-will towards him. In spite of the mischief of his attentions, she owed him gratitude and regard, perhaps ...

This is an essay prompt from my literature class: "The women in Jane Austen's novels are more life-like than men". How far is this comment applicable to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice? What ...

Below is a sentence from Lovecraft's "Polaris": I said to myself, "This is no dream, for by what means can I prove the greater reality of that other life in the house of stone and brick south of ...

Recently, I started reading "A Clockwork Orange" in English. A feature of the book that jumped out at me was that a lot of words used by the main character are adapted from Russian. Since I am a ...

I've had a spanish friend tell me of a poem that is claimed to be by Rudyard Kipling. However i was tipped off to it probably not being a Kipling poem by several facts: one, the english translation ...

I just attended a performance of Macbeth that ended on a much more ambivalent note than Shakespeare's original text. Instead of Malcolm and his posse picking up the shambles and Malcolm motivating his ...

There is a fragment of a short story by Louce Baker. Sladen Morris is the boy next door. The girls all think he’s fascinating and tend to deify him now that he’s touched six feet on the wall ...

A recent answer from verbose mentioned: Postcolonial approaches to The Tempest cast Prospero as colonizer, exercising imperial control over the original inhabitants of the island: Caliban and Ariel....

When the creature is first created we get a strong impression that it is built up from body parts, quoting from chapter 4: I collected bones from charnel-houses and disturbed, with profane fingers, ...

In A Ted Hughes poem called "Criminal Ballad" (of the Crow collection), there's a usage of the word "heave" which I can't figure: "A woman fell between the ship and the jetty At a heave from the ...

In 1886, Mark Twain wrote an essay entitled "The New Dynasty" Its theme, and much of its language, are quite similar to Carl Sandburg's poem "I Am the People, the Mob" of half a century later. It is ...

T. S. Eliot's poem "The Waste Land" is usually printed with the poet's notes. However, these notes were not present in the original edition and were added in a later edition dating from the same year (...

The Jew's dress, which appeared to have suffered considerably from the storm, was a plain russet cloak of many folds, covering a dark purple tunic. He had large boots lined with fur, and a belt around ...

In The Princess Bride by William Goldman, there is an extended section where the author says that he wanted to include a reunion scene when Buttercup first discovers that the "man in black" is in fact ...

In an excellent answer to one of my previous questions, verbose writes: Since The Tempest is the first play printed in the First Folio, it was often assumed to be an early play. Scholars such as ...

All you need to free yourself from slavery is a couple of pints of beer I read Ivanhoe for the first time translated into Spanish, and am having a heck of time finding the material in any English ...

Think sci-fi but only about ~20-30 years out. It takes place in NYC and has a huge emphasis on the media, entertainment, and cultural conflict in America. One of the protagonists hosts a radio show ...

The series I remember is about a young female lead. She is in a world where human trafficking is common. The rich and powerful are able to take another person's attributes through the use of a Blood ...

In John Buchan's famous short novel The Thirty-Nine Steps, much of the plot (ha) revolves around a German plot to assassinate the Greek Premier, which is thwarted by the story's hero. All this happens ...

I've been trying to find this, but can't remember the exact wording and can't find it in the online editions, was it 'pens' or 'writing tools' etc. etc. I think it was when one of the characters (...