F. R. Leavis is widely considered the most important literary critic of the twentieth century. He is identified with the consolidation of English as a university subject and with the production of an influential map of the English literary...

F. Scott Fitzgerald was a writer very much of his own time. As Malcolm Cowley once put it, he lived in a room full of clocks and calendars. The years ticked away while he noted the songs, the shows, the books, the quarterbacks. His own car...

The scholarship already accumulated on the subject of F. O. Matthiessen may be larger than that on any other American scholar born in the twentieth century. As the collective reminiscences published in the Monthly Review shortly after his ...

SOURCE: Goldsmith, M. M. “Mandeville's Pernicious System.” In Mandeville and Augustan Ideas: New Essays, edited by Charles W. A. Prior, pp. 71-84. Victoria, Canada: English Literary Studies, University of Victoria, 2000. In the followin...

["The Face of Another"] is an intricately contrived fantasy, somewhat wanting in dramatic confrontation of characters, but replete with symbolic devices having to do with the fate of modern man. The story, told in a series of letters and jo...

Ingmar Bergman's most personal work and one of his most profound and provocative efforts, Face to Face is probably also the Swedish artist's greatest film. A striking synthesis of his previous work and rich in images and themes, the movie w...

[Faces] is, I think, a great and courageous film in which Cassavetes has dared more than any American director in recent memory, and it is important to understand the nature of what he has done. (p. 217) [Several] qualities have led to a fe...

Facundo by Domingo F. Sarmiento Domingo Faustino Sarmiento was a man of extremes. During his lifetime, he would be both an exile from his own country (in the 1840s, when he wrote Facundo) and president of the Argentine Republic (from 1868 t...

In the book Fahrenheit 451, written by Ray Bradbury, the author has added the effect of parallelism of today's society and his fictional society in which Guy Montag, the main character, lives. There are both similarities and differences to ...

The publication of Falconer, with its shockingly new milieu and its unusually violent language, is only the most dramatic proof that Cheever is not afraid to push off from past accomplishments and to work with previously untried materials. ...

SOURCE: Stevens, Penny. Review of The Fallen Man, by Tony Hillerman. School Library Journal 43, no. 4 (April 1997): 166. In the following review, Stevens argues that The Fallen Man includes vivid descriptions of Native American mythology an...

Harry Berger, Jr., University of California, Santa Cruz Throughout the two Henry IV plays, from his first appearance in the second scene of Part 1, Falstaff knowingly collaborates with Harry on the scenario entitled "The Rejection of Falsta...

SOURCE: Langley, Lee. “Grim Home Thoughts from Abroad.” Spectator 288, no. 9060 (30 March 2002): 41. In the following review of Family Matters, Langley praises Mistry as a writer who effectively weaves tragedy and vivid descriptions of ...

The Famished Road by Ben Okri Ben Okri is a Nigerian-born author known for juxtaposing incisive social critique and African mythological tradition. His Booker Prize-winning third novel, The Famished Road, exemplifies this duality through it...

One of America's first woman newspaper columnists. Sara Payson Willis, using the name Fanny Fern, wrote weekly from 1851 to 1872, primarily for the New York Ledger. Her columns were widely reprinted, and several of her ten books of essays ...

[A Fan's Notes is] a work of depth and seriousness—a moving, richly humorous record of humiliation and perseverance. Perhaps only in tightrope America, where to trip once is to die more than a little, can one immediately recognise lonelin...

The fantasy genre consists of many interesting features that allow the reader to float into an imaginary world were you can have an unthinkable adventure through walls and misty mountains or across a new un explored world that is protected ...

SOURCE: Shore, Robert. “Prophecy off the Back of the Lorry.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5099 (22 December 2000): 18. In the following review, Shore expresses his disappointment with Churchill's Far Away, describing the play as incoh...

The Far Pavilions follows M. M. Kaye's two highly successful historical novels Shadows of the Moon and Trade Wind; all three set in the second half of the nineteenth century in lands bordering the Indian Ocean, and all three evidence of the...

In order to gain a piece of his father-in-law's fortune, a financially desperate husband (William H. Macy) hires two hitmen (Steve Buscemi and Peter Stormare) to fake a kidnapping of his wife in Joel and Ethan Coen's 1996 noi...

SOURCE: A review of The Farming of Bones, in Publishers Weekly, Vol. 245, No. 23, June 8, 1998. The following review offers a positive assessment of The Farming of Bones. The almost dreamlike pace of Danticat's second novel (Breath, Eyes, M...

SOURCE: Perrot, Phillipe. “The Imperatives of Propriety.” In Fashioning the Bourgeoisie: A History of Clothing in the Nineteenth Century, translated by Richard Bienvenu, pp. 87-123. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1994. In...

Fat City is a work of art. This is the movie John Huston had under his skin for years to justify all the premature applause…. Allowing for the dreary level of consciousness conveyed by characters who live in the basement of themselves, th...

One trouble with Joe McGinniss's true-crime anatomy, Fatal Vision …, is that it's 663 pages long. If the prose is a little wooden and the insights less than electric, that's like forever. This isn't the Rosenberg case. The book's great le...

SOURCE: “Impasse in the Middle East,” in The Progressive, Vol. 48, No. 6, June, 1984, pp. 40-1. In the following review, Steif offers positive evaluation of The Fateful Triangle, which he praises as “a powerful and thoroughly document...