H. G. Wells's earlier works of science fiction have retained their popularity for nearly a century. In recent years they have also won academic regard for integrating the fantastic with the realistic to produce challenging alien perspectiv...

H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937) is widely considered the most important literary supernaturalist of the twentieth century. He is one of the greatest in a line of authors that originated with the Gothic novelists of the eighteenth century and w...

SOURCE: Mussari, Mark. “H. C. Branner and the Colors of Consciousness.” Scandinavian Studies 71, no. 1 (spring 1999): 41-66. In the following essay, Mussari studies H. C. Branner's use of pictorial language in his writings as a means to...

Few writers have appeared on the American literary scene to such sudden acclaim as the Chinese émigré Ha Jin. His first short-story collection about life in the Chinese People's Liberation Army, Ocean of Words (1996), won the...

SOURCE: Axters, Stephanus. “Before Ruysbroeck.” In The Spirituality of the Old Low Countries, translated by Donald Attwater, pp. 9-28. London: Blackfriars Publications, 1954. In the following excerpt, Axters sums up Hadewijch's mystical...

Shams al-Din Hafiz (ca. 1320-1390) was a great Persian mystical poet who, as a professor of Koranic exegesis, composed some of the most sensitive and lyrical poetry ever produced in the Middle East. Hafiz was born in Shiraz, the capital of...

Hair, a "tribal-rock musical" (Barnes), captures the attitudes and idealisms of the Hippie movement of the 1960's. Written by James Rado and Gerome Ragni, with music and lyrics by Galt McDermot, Hair illustrates Hippies' repudiation of conv...

SOURCE: Wood, James. “Saving Vidia.” New Statesman (1 October 2001): 79-80. In the following review, Wood applauds Half a Life,finding it intelligent and complex. It is a delight, after the spilt “fury” of Salman Rushdie's latest as...

[In Salka Valka] Halldor Laxness has portrayed a world without hope, without gentleness, without even the concept of progress…. In [a] fishing village on the coast of Iceland, the common people live in such misery that the birth of a chil...

A critical assessment of two appropriations/adaptions of Hamlet. Many of Shakespeare's works have been transposed from stage to screen, none so more than Hamlet. Two of the most unique film appropriations of the play are to be found in Ro...

SOURCE: Monroe, Barbara. “Reading Faulknerian Comedy: Humor and Honor in The Hamlet.” Southern Quarterly 26, no. 4 (summer 1988): 33-56. In the following essay, Monroe contends that the characters in The Hamlet employ humor as a way to ...

Whatever one's view of [J.R.R. Tolkien's] The Lord of the Rings there can be no doubt that it has done dreadful things to the young imagination. There are simply too many long, level-paced pseudo-epics, three-part sometimes, about these day...

An oppressive world, a world without freedom, without choice and without opinion. In the totalitarian regime that governs the society of Gilead, women are not worthy of anything - they don't even have an identity. Both the women and the me...

A Jewish refugee from Germany, Hannah Arendt (1906-1975) analyzed major issues of the 20th century and produced a brilliant and original political philosophy. Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Hanover, Germany, the only child of middle-cla...

Hannah Webster Foster's The Coquette is probably the finest of the sentimental novels of the early national period. Psychologically astute, wellplotted, and carefully written, the novel portrays sensitively the life and death of Elizabeth ...

[Kenttäläinen käy Talossa ("Kenttäläinen Visits a Farm") and Minä, Olli ja Orvokki ("I, Olli and Orvokki")] are well-written, personal works. Kenttäläinen käy talossa contains several studies of lonely or misunderstood persons…. ...

Hans Küng (born 1928), a Swiss Roman Catholic theologian, questioned church dogma, emphasized the need for reform within the church, and sought reunion with other Christian groups. His liberal views led to his censorship by the Vatica...

. Although chiefly remembered today as the genial shoemaker-poet and leader of Nuremberg's Meistersinger Guild in Richard Wagner's opera Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg (1862; translated as The Master-Singers of Nuremberg, 1892), Hans Sachs ...

["Happy Birthday, Wanda June"] is an attempt at a satire on the return of Odysseus. Mr. Vonnegut's Odysseus is a paunchy, bearded fellow named Ryan who has been missing for eight years, held captive by Indians in South America. He is a bull...

SOURCE: Thomas, Jacqueline. “Happy Days: Beckett's Rescript of Lady Chatterley's Lover.” Modern Drama 41, no. 4 (winter 1998): 623-34. In the following essay, Thomas studies Happy Days for evidence of a subtext influenced by D. H. Lawre...

[The] three motifs introduced during the early moments of [A Hard Day's Night]—running (flight), antagonism towards the establishment (order), and subsequent mayhem (misrule)—are extended by variation throughout the remainder of the act...

Solutions to Singularity and Industrialization In an attempt to propel the quality and way of life forward by means of efficiency and advancement of technology, industrialization destroys many intrinsic characteristics of society and indiv...

Hardcore must be the most perversely priggish movie in the history of the American cinema. It's impossible to think of another film that approaches its bizarrely knotted interweaving of prurience and dismay, lurid excitement and icy disgust...

Described by fellow author J. G. Ballard as "an aggressive and restless extrovert who conducts his life at a shout and his fiction at a scream," Harlan Ellison is a writer who actively resists being labeled. Though he has written or edited...

SOURCE: "Mailer's Main Event," in The Hudson Review, Vol. 45, No. 1, Spring, 1992, pp. 149-57. In the following review, Pritchard offers favorable assessment of Harlot's Ghost, praising the admirable ambition of the work despite Mailer's ch...