Encyclopedia of Themes in Literature

Homer in The iLiad and The odyssey, Virgil in The aeneid, and the early English poet Caedmon explain how a people came to inhabi ...

The sketchbook oF GeoFFrey crayon, depicted the ever-evolving Dutch settlements of New York. James Fenimore Cooper’s five-volume ...

tain, it seems quite clear that as global warming, overpopulation, and general environmental degrada- tion continue, themes of n ...

Walker’s The coLor purpLe and Zora Neale Hurston’s their eyes were watchinG God, where the oppressed black men further subjugate ...

to postcolonial critics, who examine the works pro- duced in or written about countries that have been subject to European colon ...

bilities and financial and affective obligations such as the education and instruction of one’s children. The notion of “parenth ...

Edgeworth (Parent’s Assistant, 1796, and Practical Education, 1798), and many minor authors of the late 1780s and the 1790s. An ...

In an attempt to expiate the sin of abandonment, the main character becomes mayor. The impulse to compensate for his wrongdoing ...

bounds downward would be to become a beast. In this ethical scheme, pride, understood negatively as an overly high opinion of on ...

tion to ponder as one compares Aeschylus’s Pro- metheus Bound with its later variants, Christopher Marlowe’s doctor Faustus and ...

beth’s path to a deep-rooted happiness rather than the mere fairy-tale assurance of “happily ever after.” See also Browning, Rob ...

and the “civilizing” effect it is purported to have on native peoples. In addition to postcolonial politics, race has been a rec ...

servants, Sam and Willie. Sam and Harold have an equal footing—a long relationship that goes back to Harold’s childhood, in whic ...

cognitive. That is, to feel regret requires that we think about what we have done (or failed to do). Regret, by its very nature, ...

Commission, helped to partially heal the country’s deep wounds and allow citizens to move forward together. In Charles Dickens’s ...

distorting their personalities forever. This theme is powerful because of these far-reaching conse- quences. Rejection is a powe ...

them in some form for life. These children, denied the love of one or both parents, carry “feelings of emptiness where that love ...

Leary, Mark, ed. Interpersonal Rejection. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001. Melancthon, Monica J. Rejected by God: The Hist ...

Europe, it was the monks who preserved some of the most valuable books of ancient Greece and Rome by diligently copying them on ...

book around the world, and he suffered threats to his life. Countries such as Pakistan and India with large Muslim populations b ...