A.A. Milne (1882-1956) worked as an essayist, a playwright, a poet, and an adult novelist, in addition to his important contribution as an author of juvenile books. Although he attempted to excel in all literary genres, he was master of Ch...

[Yehoshua] brings to his plays a knack for structural compactness, for manipulation of character and for creating a sense of an impending turning point. All these dramatic commodities are dynamically galvanized by a dialogue that rapidly al...

The legacy of leading Australian poet A. D. Hope to world literature is unquestionable, comprising eleven books of poetry, seven collections of critical essays, and two plays. His writing, compelling in its originality and passion, and rig...

A. G. Mojtabai opens Mundome with an image of dissolution and decay. The landscape she describes—like those of Pynchon, Barth, and Barthelme—is in the process of breaking down, losing its vitality and wearing away…. Through her initia...

In 1976 at Michigan State University, American and Canadian scholars and poets gathered to honor A. J. M. Smith, seventy-four-year-old doyen of Canadian letters. It is fitting that such a symposium should have been held at an American univ...

A. M. Klein (1909-1972), journalist and lawyer, was widely regarded as one of Canada's leading poets. His novel The Second Scroll has been acclaimed by scholars and critics as a masterpiece. He contributed significantly to the emergence of...

Although thus far she has written only three novels, A. S. Byatt has nonetheless achieved a distinguished place as a person of letters in the last two decades. As novelist, critic, reviewer, editor, and lecturer, Byatt offers in her work a...

SOURCE: Arthur, Paul. “Movie of the Moment: A.I.: Artificial Intelligence.” Film Comment 37, no. 4 (July-August 2001): 22-3. In the following review, Arthur perceives A.I.: Artificial Intelligence to be an unsuccessful amalgamation of S...

(c. 1783–1888), in western Europe and the Americas, the movement chiefly responsible for creating the emotional climate necessary for ending the transatlantic slave trade and chattel slavery. With the decline of Roman slavery in the ...

The Jewish author and journalist Abraham Cahan (1860-1951) was a prominent Socialist leader and union organizer among Jewish immigrants in the United States. Abraham Cahan was born in Podberezhie, near Vilna, Lithuania. His father was a st...

Abraham Polonsky's importance as a screenwriter rests both on his body of work--one of the strongest, continuously radical political statements in commercial American film--and on his role as symbol of the oppressed Hollywood writer, drive...

SOURCE: "Fathers and Sons: The Norative Basis of Dryden's Absalom and Achitophel," in Papers on Language & Literature, Vol. 17, No. 4, Fall 1981, pp. 363-80. In the following excerpt, Donnelly demonstrates that in Absalom and Achitophel, Dr...

SOURCE: A review of Abundance, in Variety, Vol. 335, No. 4, May 10, 1989, p. 120. In the following negative review, the critic asserts that Abundance “is dragged down by its lack of an idea of where it's going or what it intends to accomp...

SOURCE: "Dario Fo, Politics and Satire: An Introduction to Accidental Death of an Anarchist," in Theater, Vol. 10, No. 2, Spring 1979, pp. 7-11. Cowan presents a brief survey of Fo's career and the background of Accidental Death of an Anarc...

SOURCE: A review of The Acid House, in Studies in Short Fiction, Vol. 34, No. 3, Summer, 1997, p. 401. In the following review of The Acid House, Bush examines Welsh's use of dialect and jargon, finding such language rhythmic and poetic. A ...

It is when Steinbeck abandons caution [in The Acts of King Arthur and His Noble Knights] that he contributes most to the Arthurian tradition. In the early sections on Merlin, Balin and Balan, the feud with Morgan le Fay, he is often transla...

Throughout Adam Bede the characters of Dinah Morris and Hetty Sorrell are compared and contrasted, albeit sometimes indirectly, both can, at times, represent the Madonna and the harlot. It is not always clear which woman is the harlot and w...

(born Dec. 24, 1798, Zaosye, near Nowogródek, Belorussia, Russian Empire—died Nov. 25, 1855, Constantinople, Tur.) Polish poet. A lifelong apostle of Polish national freedom and one of Poland's greatest poets, Mickiewicz was d...

Adam Thorpe's first book, Mornings in the Baltic (1988), a poetry collection, was published to critical acclaim and shortlisted for the 1988 Whitbread Award for Poetry. In 1990 Thorpe began writing full-time and since then has produced an ...

Adelbert von Chamisso is known as one of the German Romantics chiefly for his first major work, the novella Peter Schlemihl's wundersame Geschichte (Peter Schlemihl's Marvelous History, 1814; translated as Peter Schlemihl, 1823), which was...

The Argentine Adolfo Bioy Casares, popularly known as an author of "fantastic literature," has inspired generations of Latin-American readers and writers with his elegant humor and prophetic imagination. Bioy (as he is often referred to) b...

Adrienne Rich is one of the foremost poets and feminists of modern times. Her work spans more than forty years of her adult life, beginning in 1951 when she won the Yale Series of Younger Poets prize for A Change of World (1951). Ever sinc...

SOURCE: “The Mad Adventures of Terry Gilliam,” in Sight and Sound, Vol. 57, No. 4, Autumn, 1988, pp. 238–42. In the following interview, which took place on location during the filming of The Adventures of Baron Munchausen, Gilliam di...

SOURCE: "Smollett: The Satirist As a Character Type," in his Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Yale University Press, 1967, pp. 186-208. In the following excerpt, Paulson focuses on Smollett's later novels, arguing that wh...

Aeneas, the hero and the legendary founder of Rome is the offspring of the Trojan mortal Anchises and the Goddess of Beauty and Love, Venus. In the world of literature or more importantly in the Roman world Aeneas is and was regarded as a f...