Writer Essays

Amy Tan and Maya Angelou come from highly different civilizations. and seeking to experience accepted in American Culture. Both writers discuss a feeling of being an castaway and how their cultural differences set them apart. However. Amy Tan efficaciously uses narrative and description to picture her sense of isolation from the dominant American civilization. Angelou’s […]

An author’s cultural background can play a large part in the authors writing. Amy Tan, a Chinese-American woman, uses the cultural values of Chinese women in American culture in her novel, The Joy Luck Club. These cultural values shape the outcome of The Joy Luck Club. The two cultural value systems create conflict between the […]

Amy Tan, Frank O’Connor, and Tom Whitecloud explore similar themes in their stories despite their diverse backgrounds. They all focus on the challenges encountered by children who belong to a different culture than their own families.

In Amy Tan’s novel of conflicting cultures, The Joy Luck Club, the narrators contemplate their inability to relate from one culture to another. The novel is narrated by and follows the connected stories about conflicts between Chinese immigrant mothers and their American-raised daughters. Jing-mei, one of the daughters, has taken her mother’s place in a […]

Rhetorical Analysis of “Mother Tongue” written by Amy Tan “So easy to read”(p. 4). Amy Tan ends her essay, “Mother Tongue” with this short and even grammatically wrong sentence. She tells us this mother’s brief review is a proof of success of her writing. Why does she think that easiness is an essence of her […]

Suyuan and Jing-Mei’s relationship in The Joy Luck Club In The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan, Jing-Mei and her mother have a very rocky relationship. Tan develops a relationship between Suyuan and Jing-Mei that is distant in the beginning due to culture differences and miscommunication, but gradually strengthens with time and understanding. Both of […]

The Duchess and the Jeweler is the story of the world’s greatest jeweler who had promised his mother to become the richest jeweler in the world in his childhood but now that his dream has materialized he does not feel satisfied. So trying to achieve satisfaction, knowingly he buys fake pearls from a Duchess in […]

The play discusses the importance of self-perception through the representation of how self- delusions lead to more destruction and stasis in an individual’s life. George and Martha create an illusory barrier to repress feelings such as self-inadequacy, fear and self- contempt. But this Illusion simply exacerbates their self-loathing. This sense of entrapment that evolves from […]

The Presence of Baby Symbolism in Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? by Edward Albee is packed with babe imagination. Albee seems to add an image of a babe to about every page of the drama. The ground for this type of imagination is to typify babes. which has great importance […]

Review of Virginia Woolf’s shakespeare’s sister By Gabriel Gyamfi University of Cape Coast Department of English INTRODUCTION Virginia Woolf’s ‘Shakespeare’ Sister’ is the third chapter from her literary essay A Room of One’s Own. In this chapter, which is the essay on Shakespeare’s Sister, she considers the question of why no women writers are represented […]

Dillard and Woolf Style and Effect Compare and Contrast Annie Dillard and Virginia Woolf both wrote beautiful essays, entitled “Death of A Moth,” and “Death of the Moth,” respectively. The similarities between the two pieces are seen just in the titles; however, the pieces exhibit several differences. While both Dillard and Woolf wrote extensive and […]

Woolf’s novel, published in 1927, was a groundbreaking work that defied traditional narrative and plot-based storytelling. Instead, it embraced impressionistic and modernist approaches borrowed from the visual arts. In his essay, Jonathan Culler examines five aspects of literature, providing an interesting opportunity to analyze their relevance to Woolf’s novel. This essay contends that Woolf’s novel […]

Virginia Woolf’s essay on Mary Wollstonecraft in the Common Reader is essentially, an active continuation of the experimental method on which Mary Wollstonecraft based her life. “The high-handed and hot-blooded manner in which she cut her way through life” is in essence what Woolf is trying to replicate in this essay, in particular through her […]

In an excerpt from Virginia Woolf’s memoir “Moments of Being”, she constructs a memoir with optimistic diction to convey to humanity that the significant moments from the past are a lesson to be used in the future. In Woolf’s excerpt she reflects upon her childhood memories with her brother Thoby and her father at a […]

Alienation, Isolation, and Loneliness The New Dress Virginia Woolf -Woolf was born into a privileged household on January 25th, 1882. -She began writing when she was young and published her first novel in 1915. -She was known as an advocate for women rights and feminist movements helped influence her writings. -Virginia Woolf was known for […]

The Purgative Tone and Stream-of-consciousness technique Virginia Woolf uses in her short essay, helps her take a deeper look into an insignificant event such as the death of a moth. Her essay narrates a moth’s submission to death through the eyes of a human being. Although the moth is just an insect, Woolf is able […]

D. H. Lawrence’s The Horse Dealer’s Daughter is a haunting tale about the complex, almost mysterious, ways of love and human relationships. Like his fellow modernist writers, viz. James Joyce and Virginia Woolf, Lawrence was also very fond of a symbolic way of expression and his short stories and novels are usually veritable powerhouses of […]

In Virginia Woolf’s short essay “The Death of the Moth”, Woolf uses combat imagery to portray the vulnerability of all creatures on Earth to death, but also to show how some will not give up without a fight. Witnessing the moth’s death, Wolf realizes that it tries to hold onto life before giving up. She […]

Edward Albee first published his famous American play, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, in 1962. The play took to the stage with critical praise and can be described as one of the greatest American plays ever written. Four years later, Director and Producer Mike Nichols adapted the play to the silver screen with one of […]

Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, and Virginia Woolf – names that ring familiar to individuals that are close to literature, but for those that aren’t, the names might not spark a definite image. Perhaps the only thing that might be known is that each of these talented authors committed suicide after battling mental illness. Despite the […]

Virginia Wolf’s anecdote recounts men’s suppression that impeded women’s intellectual progress in the 20th century. She uses metaphors and similes to portray how women yielded to the educational limits set upon them. In her description, Wolf draws on metaphors to express her thought process and how it was influenced by men. She likens her contemplation […]

How does Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway intentionally show Woolf’s lesbian-feminist critique of the institution of marriage and acknowledge the competing discourses of lesbianism and male homosexuality? Eileen Barrett’s “Unmasking Lesbian Passion: The Inverted World of Mrs. Dalloway” answers the question showing that Woolf used her text to inform the reader of her views. The probable […]