Charles Kenneth Williams was born in Newark, New Jersey. He was educated at Bucknell University and at the University of Pennsylvania, where he took the B.A. in 1959. Since 1972 he has been a contributing editor for American Poetry Review....
Study Pack: 1 Biography, 1 Summary, 30 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
C. P. Snow's place in twentieth-century letters is unusual; no other major writer in any creative literary genre established himself also in science and in the high ranks of governmental and public service. And in an age in which most lead...
Study Pack: 4 Biographies, 1 Summary, 12 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
C. S. Forester is best known for his series of eleven historical novels about the early-nineteenth-century British naval officer Horatio Hornblower. A prolific writer, Forester had produced twenty-four books before he conceived the nautica...
C. S. Lewis has several reputations. He was an important and respected critic and literary scholar, specializing in medieval and Renaissance English literature. To the public he has been well known for fifty years as an expositor and defen...
Study Pack: 8 Biographies, 4 Summaries, 18 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
When something is created it is a given that it will be picked apart, dismantled, will evolve into something even greater. It has become the norm in film-making to play by these rules of deformation. Movie makers have stretched the defini...
SOURCE: "Caligari," in From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film, Princeton University Press, 1947, pp. 61-76. A German philosopher as well as a social and arts critic, Kracauer emigrated to the United States when ...
SOURCE: Goldberg, Leonard S. “‘This Gloom … Which Can Avail Thee Nothing’: Cain and Skepticism.” Criticism 41, no. 2 (winter 1999): 207-32. In the following essay, Goldberg argues that, for Byron, Cain's tragedy “can serve as a ...
SOURCE: “Fiction: In History and Out,” in Hudson Review, Vol. 44, No. 3, Autumn, 1991, pp. 491–93. In the following excerpt, Kearns praises Mahfouz's complex portrayal of a middle-class Muslim family in the 1920s in his “Cairo Trilo...
SOURCE: “Post-Colonial Pox,” in Times Literary Supplement, No. 4870, August 2, 1996, p. 23. In the following review, Baker offers a positive assessment of The Calcutta Chromosome. The existence of “research luck” has been often rema...
Calendars have always been based on the Sun, Earth, and Moon. Ancient people observed that the position of the Sun in the sky changed with the seasons. They also noticed that the stars seemed to change position in the night sky throughout ...
THE GOLD RUSH
The California Gold Rush of 1849 is one of the most interesting events of California's and even the United States. The Gold Rush, in 1848 dynamically changed the small town of San Francisco. James Marshall, a worker on John...
Like gambling itself, the impulses of Altman's characters [in "California Split"] seem a matter of luck or catastrophe, resting on choices ungoverned by rehearsal. The film gives us the sense that it is being improvised. We catch at events ...
"Constant pleasure," said Voltaire, "is no pleasure." The geyser of gag lines in Neil Simon's latest spurt, California Suite, is virtually incessant…. Occasionally I heard a spot of dialogue which struck me as particularly bright but, whe...
Consideration of ["Caligula and Three Other Plays"] by Albert Camus provokes a paradox. They are important without being good. Only one of them, it seems to me, really demands a stage production. This is "Caligula"—a play which marks a da...
Call It Sleep - Henry Roth - 1934 Introduction Henry Roth's 1934 novel Call It Sleep is based loosely on the author's own experiences growing up as a Jewish American in New York City during the early 1900s. In the novel, David...
Study Pack: 1 Study Guide, 1 Biography, 2 Summaries, 18 Criticisms
The Greek poet Callimachus (ca. 305-240 BC) is regarded as the most characteristic representative of Alexandrian poetry. Learning, polish, and contemporaneity characterize his work, which had enormous influence on the Roman elegiac poets. ...
Study Pack: 2 Biographies, 1 Summary, 7 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
SOURCE: Kritzman, Lawrence D. “The Discourse of Desire and the Question of Gender.” In Signs in Culture: Roland Barthes Today, edited by Steven Ungar and Betty McGraw, pp. 99-118. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1989. In the follow...
The Spanish author Camilo José Cela y Trulock (born 1916) was a prose stylist of extraordinary ability. He is generally considered the major Spanish literary figure of the post-Civil War generation. Camilo José Cela was born ...
Shaw himself wrote that Candida `is a counterpoint to Ibsen's Doll's House, showing that in the real typical doll's house it is the man who is the doll'.Ibsen in A Doll's House(1879)had shown how men treated their wives as inferior creatu...
It is often said that a person's life is shaped when he or she is a child. This is very much so with Candide - Pangloss was his tutor in "metaphysico-theologo-cosmolonigology" (Voltaire 18) since Candide was a child, and instilled into Can...
Study Pack: 2 Study Guides, 1 Biography, 2 Summaries, 21 Essays, 15 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
SOURCE: “Minority Discourse and the Pitfalls of Canon Formation,” in Yale Journal of Criticism, Vol. 1, No. 1, Fall, 1987, pp. 193-201. In the following essay, West discusses some of the factors that have influenced the Afro-American li...
SOURCE: "The Canon of Avicenna," in Avicenna in Renaissance Italy: The Canon and Medical Teaching in Italian Universities after 1500, Princeton University Press, 1987, pp. 19-40. In the following essay, Siraisi outlines the main ideas of Av...
The second of the Canopus in Argos series of novels is finer-grained and stronger than Shikasta [the first]…. [The Marriages Between Zones Three, Four, and Five] may be read for the pure pleasure of reading it, a tale unencumbered by meta...
SOURCE: Conerly, Porter. “Largesse of the Epic Hero as a Thematic Pattern in the Cantar de mio Cid.” Kentucky Romance Quarterly 31, no. 3 (1984): 281-89. In the following essay, Conerly examines the motif of largesse in Cantar de mio Ci...
Study Pack: 1 Study Guide, 1 Summary, 17 Criticisms
Pasolini's The Canterbury Tales is the first film to come my way in which the protagonist is the Fart. And even that has every aural sign of being dubbed in…. Chaucer was not above specific gags about breaking wind, bums, queynts and the ...
In The Canterbury Tales, most of the pilgrims that are in the clergy are symbolic of the clergy of the time, aside from the Parson. As Chaucer was writing The Canterbury Tales, the church and its members are quite corrupt with influences of...
Study Pack: 2 Study Guides, 3 Biographies, 3 Summaries, 33 Essays, 7 Criticisms
[A Canticle for Leibowitz, a] very good, partly humorous historical novel, is about the role of the Church as the preserver of wisdom and spiritual life in dark ages, but its era is in the future rather than the past. (p. 632) The telling o...
Study Pack: 1 Study Guide, 1 Biography, 1 Summary, 13 Criticisms
SOURCE: "Southern Discomfort," in The New Republic, Vol. 205, No. 24, December 9, 1991, pp. 28-9. In the following review of Cape Fear, Kauffmann notes the film's strengths and weaknesses and questions why Scorsese chose to lend his talents...
SOURCE: Chait, Sandra. “Mythology, Magic Realism, and White Writing after Apartheid.” Research in African Literatures 31, no. 2 (summer 2000): 17-28. In the following essay, Chait explores the use of mythology in two novels by white Sou...
["The Captain"] is a master's narrative of an ocean experience. In his newest sea journey, [Jan de Hartog] is in full command of his material and his ship of men…. The author's debt to Conrad and to his "The Secret Sharer" is evident, but...
[Miłosz's] study of the relationship between the creative writer and the oppressive state, The Captive Mind, has become something of a classic and achieved a popularity in the West which his essays and poetry can hardly hope to attain. Yet...
Study Pack: 1 Study Guide, 1 Summary, 5 Criticisms
SOURCE: Pearce, Roy Harvey. “The Significances of the Captivity Narrative.” American Literature 19 (1947-48): 1-20. In the following essay, Pearce examines the evolution of the style and intent of captivity narratives, from religious co...
SOURCE: “Translating Caradoc Evans's Welsh English,” in Style, Vol. 30, No. 3, Fall, 1996, pp. 433–44. In the following essay, Hopkins provides a systematic analysis of Evans's use of language and translation, asserting that it profou...
SOURCE: “A Book of Novels,” in Bookman, Vol. 49, No. 291, December, 1915, p. 97. In the following review of My People, Pugh praises the harsh depictions of the Welsh people, maintaining that “the justification of this book consists in...
SOURCE: "Making the World Safe for Conventional War," in New York Times Book Review. July 31, 1988, p. 6. In the following review, Lekachman offers praise for The Cardinal of the Kremlin, which he considers "by far the best of the Jack Ryan...
Study Pack: 1 Study Guide, 3 Biographies, 1 Summary, 1 Criticism
Marie Cardinal's writings since 1962 articulate the major intellectual concerns of contemporary France: psychoanalysis and language; the politics of decolonization; questions of female creativity and the sociocultural construction of gende...
SOURCE: Morley, Sheridan. “Pinter Surprise.” Spectator 285, no. 8990 (25 November 2000): 69-70. In the following review, Morley applauds a production of Pinter's The Caretaker that emphasizes the comic elements of the play. Now here's a...
Study Pack: 2 Study Guides, 3 Biographies, 1 Summary, 5 Criticisms
SOURCE: Pizarro, Ana. “Reflections on the Historiography of Caribbean Literature,” translated by J. Ann Zammit. Callaloo 11, no. 1 (winter 1988): 173-85. In the following essay, Pizarro surveys the historical, political, and cultural ba...
American historian Carl Lotus Becker (1873-1945) was a proponent of the doctrine of historical relativism. He is best known for his book "The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth Century Philosophers." Carl Becker was born on a farm near Waterl...
Study Pack: 2 Biographies, 1 Summary, 11 Criticisms
Carl Ransom Rogers (1902-1987) was an American psychotherapist who originated person-centered, non-directive counseling. Carl Rogers was born on January 8, 1902, in Oak Park, Illinois, the fourth of six children to Walter and Julia (Cushin...
Study Pack: 1 Biography, 2 Summaries, 7 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
The American astronomer and popularizer of science Carl E. Sagan (1934-1996) studied the surfaces and atmospheres of the major planets, conducted experiments on the origins of life on earth, made important contributions to the debate over ...
Study Pack: 5 Biographies, 5 Summaries, 7 Criticisms, 1 Quotes
American poet and biographer Carl Sandburg sketched a revealing portrait of himself in the preface to his Complete Poems (1950): "there was a puzzlement," he said, "as to whether I was a poet, a biographer, a wandering troubadour with a gu...
Although the output of Danish film director Carl Dreyer (1889-1968) was slim by Hollywood standards, he was nonetheless a master of early cinema. His insistence on artistic independence and the personal, idiosyncratic style of his films ha...
Until 1966, when his autobiography Als wär's ein Stück von mir: Horen der Freundschaft (translated as A Part of Myself, 1970) appeared, Carl Zuckmayer was known mainly as the author of highly successful plays. He had been one of ...
Study Pack: 2 Biographies, 1 Summary, 4 Criticisms
SOURCE: "Puppet's Progress," in The Atlantic Monthly, Vol. 225, No. 4, April, 1970, pp. 88-91. In the following essay, Bacon discusses the cultural and literary impact of Pinocchio. What manner of man—or woman—sits down and deliberately...
Carlo Emilio Gadda is generally considered one of Italy's most important authors of this century. Gadda does not share the transparency of style one finds in Italo Svevo or Italo Calvino. His prose is characterized instead by a linguistic ...
The Italian writer and painter Carlo Levi (1902-1975), noted as an anti-Fascist leader during Mussolini's dictatorship, scored a sensational international success with his book "Christ Stopped at Eboli" in 1945. Carlo Levi was born on Nov....
In the course of a long career Carlos Baker produced a considerable body of scholarship on the Romantic poets and on a variety of American authors, and wrote novels and poetry: but he is most widely remembered as the official biographer of...
Little consensus has been reached about Carlos Castaneda, whose books detailing his apprenticeship to the Yaqui Indian shaman Don Juan Matus have sold over eight million copies in 17 languages and contributed to defining the psychedelic ...
Much of the poetry of Carlos Drummond de Andrade moves upon the drama of obsessing ideas, for he is obsessed with several convictions of the perfectionist: That he is impossible. That language is absolutely insufficient for the needs of com...
