The following sections of this BookRags Literature Study Guide is offprint from Gale's For Students Series: Presenting Analysis, Context, and Criticism on Commonly Studied Works: Introduction, Author Biography, Plot Summary, Characters, Themes, Style, Historical Context, Critical Overview, Criticism and Critical Essays, Media Adaptations, Topics for Further Study, Compare & Contrast, What Do I Read Next?, For Further Study, and Sources.
(c)1998-2002; (c)2002 by Gale. Gale is an imprint of The Gale Group, Inc., a division of Thomson Learning, Inc. Gale and Design and Thomson Learning are trademarks used herein under license.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Encyclopedia of Popular Fiction: "Social Concerns", "Thematic Overview", "Techniques", "Literary Precedents", "Key Questions", "Related Titles", "Adaptations", "Related Web Sites". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
The following sections, if they exist, are offprint from Beacham's Guide to Literature for Young Adults: "About the Author", "Overview", "Setting", "Literary Qualities", "Social Sensitivity", "Topics for Discussion", "Ideas for Reports and Papers". (c)1994-2005, by Walton Beacham.
All other sections in this Literature Study Guide are owned and copyrighted by BookRags, Inc.
The parent, or mother or predecessor as it is often called, is a term that refers to the more general element in a relationship that is formulated in a generalization-type architecture or hierarchical structure. In this type of architecture things associated with child, a more specialized element, are substitutable for a parent of that child. Often times it is common to say "the child is a kind of the parent." The parent is the object or element that is immediately above another object in a hierarchical structure. It can also be an object or element that contains other objects or elements.
This kind of generalization architecture is often found in organizational trees of classes of elements, databases, and directory file structure in some computer languages. In Unix files are organized into directories that contain files and other directories. This type of file structure looks similar to a tree with its different branches. It is a directed acyclic graph, that is a graph that has only a single route between any pair of nodes. The top of a tree file structure is called the root node. Each entry on a different branch is a node and considered a child node, or daughter node, of the parent branch. Each parent branch is, in turn, considered a child node of the next higher parent branch closer to the root node to which it falls under. No node can have more than one parent. If a node has no parents but does have child nodes then it is called a root node. A superclass is a parent of another class within that generalization, and a supertype is a patent of another class within a generalization.