Autobiographical novel Essays

  • Annie John By Jamaica Kincaid: An Autobiographical Fiction Novel

    895 Words  | 2 Pages

    This Autobiographical Fiction novel is based on the 6-year span of a girl’s life that lives in British Colonized Antigua. The people of Antigua are descendants of African Slaves brought there to work sugar plantations. Annie is almost obsessed with the thought of death because of her religion, but she has been fortunate to not see many. Annie is considered a privileged young girl because her parents are married, and she attends school. Although parent- child relationships are key in this community

  • Esther Greenwood Character Analysis in The Bell Jar

    849 Words  | 2 Pages

    Sylvia Plath’s 1963 novel The Bell Jar remains an autobiographical tale of a teenager who learns that she will never fit in, due to her cynical attitude on life and her slowly fading mental health. Esther Greenwood is introduced as a young woman who appears to be stuck with the wrong type of crowd, as she is an academically sound intellectual. The protagonist appears to be out of place and her life appears to be controlled by outstanding circumstances, “only I wasn’t steering anything, not even myself

  • The Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath

    1366 Words  | 3 Pages

    spring of your life if the spring of a life refers to your first twenty years in your life? The Bell Jar, a semi-autobiographical novel by Silvia Plath, describes Esther Greenwood’s harsh spring of her life. Narrating in the first person, Esther tells her experience of a mental breakdown in a descriptive language, helping the readers visualize what she sees and feel her emotions. The novel takes place in New York City and Boston during the early 1950s when women’s roles were limited to domesticity.

  • Comparing the Treatment of Madness in The Bell Jar and The Yellow Wallpaper

    1038 Words  | 3 Pages

    trigger a decline to pressure from more vast, impersonal sources. Generally speaking, writers have tried to show that most threats to sanity comprise a combination of long-term and short-term factors - the burning of the library in Mervyn Peake's novel 'Titus Groan' precipitated Lord Sepulchrave's descent into madness, but a longer term problem can be discerned in the weight of tradition which caused him to worry 'that with him the line of Groan should perish'. Such interplay between the acute and

  • Exploring Maya Angelou's Autobiographical Fiction

    1375 Words  | 3 Pages

    III.Genre and Form Many of Angelou's writings are autobiographical, her life has not been a great one and she uses this to convey a great story. The word autobiography means self/life/story with the narrative of the events, however Angelou uses devices commonly found in fiction (Lupton 29-30). The type of autobiography that Angelou writes is called serial autobiographies because it is many books about her life( Lupton 32). “Many African American texts were written to create a particular impact,

  • The Bell Jar Feminism

    1207 Words  | 3 Pages

    In Sylvia Plath’s autobiographical novel The Bell Jar, the readers learn of a young womans adventures and everyday life in a male-dominated society. It is not just the character Esther Greenwood that encounters a male-dominated society, Sylvia Plath did herself growing up. Feminism was a big impact on women's life during the nineteen fifties. Feminism is a strong theme in The Bell Jar since Feminism had a huge part in the nineteen fifties, Ted Hughes is a huge feminist in Sylvia Plath's life, Esther

  • The Autobiographical poem “Daddy” by Sylvia Plath

    532 Words  | 2 Pages

    1962, she was left with feelings of grief, guilt, and anger that would haunt her for life and led her to create most of her poetry. She fell into depression until she committed suicide in 1963. “Daddy” is also one of her autobiographical poems. There are numerous autobiographical element in the poem. The poem “Daddy” expresses bitterness, frustration, and blending of nursery-rhyme-like sound and violent imagery. The word “Daddy” is typic...

  • Comparing Dickens's View of Children in David Copperfield and Great Expectations

    1693 Words  | 4 Pages

    Great Expectations Of all Dickens' works, David Copperfield and Great Expectations are considered to be his most autobiographical.  Philip Collins writes, "Great Expectations, indeed, though overtly less autobiographical than David Copperfield, is a more searching and self-critical account of Dickens' own inner impulses" (178).  It is also true that both of these novels have children  as main characters.  Dickens had a real talent for creating child characters in his works.  In some cases

  • Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield

    928 Words  | 2 Pages

    Copperfield was Charles Dickens’s eighth novel, and has been said to be Charles Dickens favorite novel. In the Charles Dickens edition of the novel Dickens states, “It will be easily believed that I am a fond parent to every child of my fancy, and that no one can ever love that family as dearly as I love them. But, like many fond parents, I have in my heart of hearts a favorite child. And his name is David Copperfield”(Valsmis 1). Many of the events of the novel, David Copperfield, have been compared

  • Critiques of Ernest Hemingway's Novel, Death in the Afternoon

    1447 Words  | 3 Pages

    of Ernest Hemingway's Novel, Death in the Afternoon Ernest Hemingway's Death in the Afternoon shows a new side of Hemingway's writing which initially disappointed the critics. Published in 1932, Death in the Afternoon was not the expected fictional novel, but instead was more of a nonfiction description of bullfighting and Spanish culture in the 1920's and 1930's. In Curtis Patterson's words, "It is a tripartite work: bullfighting in Spain, plus semi-autobiographical details of the author

  • The Characters of Women in The Handmaid's Tale and The Bell Jar

    1510 Words  | 4 Pages

    renowned autobiographical legend "The Bell Jar" and Margaret Atwood's fictional masterpiece "The handmaid's tale" are the two emotional feminist stories, which basically involve the women's struggle. Narrated with a touching tone and filled with an intense feminist voice, both novels explore the conflict of their respective protagonists in a male dominated society. In spite of several extraordinary similarities in terms of influential characterization and emotive themes, both novels are diverse

  • Edwidge Danticat's Krik? Krak!

    751 Words  | 2 Pages

    Krik? Krak! Danticat's Krik? Krak!, are a collection of short stories about Haiti and Haitian-Americans before democracy and the horrible conditions that they lived in. Although it is a mistake to call the stories autobiographical, Krik? Krak! embodies some of Danticat's experiences as a child. While the collection of stories draw on the oral tradition in Haitian society, it is also part of the literature of diaspora, the great, involuntary migration of Africans from their homeland to other parts

  • Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House

    2141 Words  | 5 Pages

    Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House Margaret Laurence's A Bird in the House differentiates itself from the four other novels that make up the 'Manawaka series' that has helped establish her as an icon of Canadian literature. It does not present a single story; instead, it is a compilation of eight well-crafted short stories (written between the years 1962 and 1970) that intertwine and combine into a single narrative, working as a whole without losing the essential independence of the parts

  • Assia Djebars Fantasia

    1335 Words  | 3 Pages

    Assia Djebars Fantasia Assia Djebar’s Fantasia, is an autobiographical novel of an Algerian woman’s struggle to find her voice in a society that rewards the voiceless. In an area heavily laden with cultural traditions, she confounded these traditions by embracing the French language. Her struggles and development through the French language were very important themes within the novel. But what was Djebar’s link to the French language? Why did she pursue it in the manner that she did? Djebar’s

  • Susan Cooper

    1304 Words  | 3 Pages

    so-called science fiction novel, Mandrake. And in response to a publishing house competition for a children's adventure story, Over Sea, Under Stone. In 1963 she left England to marry an American, a professor at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and went "rather nervously" to live in the USA. She wrote two more books for adults: a study of America, Behind the Golden Curtain and a biography of J.B. Priestley, Portrait of An Author. A further novel, the autobiographical Dawn of Fear published

  • Nisei Daughter by Monica Sone

    833 Words  | 2 Pages

    hopes for democracy. It was too late, much too late for us to turn back.' (Sone 124). This statement is key to understanding much of the novel, Nisei Daughter, written by Monica Sone. From one perspective, this novel is an autobiographical account of a Japanese American girl and the ways in which she constructed her own self-identity. On the other hand, the novel depicts the distinct differences and tension that formed between the Issei and Nisei generations. Moreover, it can be seen as an attempt

  • Examples Of Charles Dickens' Chthonic Journeys

    651 Words  | 2 Pages

    Question- In Charles Dickens autobiographical memoir Fragments of an Autobiography what are three chthonic journeys that he faces? In Charles Dickens autobiographical memoir Fragments of an Autobiography he has many chthonic journeys that he never fully recovered from. The essay starts off with Charles Dickens having to work at a blacking warehouse with a pay of six pints at the age of ten or twelve, even though he wants to go to school. His father is in jail due to money problems, which leaves

  • Horrors of Ghetto Life Exposed in Whoreson and Dopefiend

    4085 Words  | 9 Pages

    Dopefiend, were actually written during his last prison term. One critic of Goines, his biographer Eddie Stone, says the following about these books: "Whoreson, like most of Donald Goines's books, is autobiographical . . . . Donald wrote Dopefiend from personal experience, and the pages of the novel draw the reader into that world with almost hypnotic rhythm" (145, 151-52). It is because of the fact that Goines was writing from experience that he was able to make reading one of his books such a captivating

  • Personal Perseverance in the Works of Maya Angelou

    1312 Words  | 3 Pages

    light (Ebony 96). This theme is consistently exemplified throughout Angelou's greatly acclaimed autobiographical worksand poems such as I Know Why The Caged Bird Sings, Gather Together in my Name, Still I Rise and Phenomenal Women. All of these books depict the true-life stories of Ms. Maya Angelou's tragedies, and there dreadful conditions she had encountered in her youth. But in all of Angelou's novels and poems, she escapes the night to go into the light, leaving all the hurt and shame to prosper

  • Adaptation of Heart of Darkness to the Movie, Apocalypse Now

    672 Words  | 2 Pages

    finally reached the station where the boat he had a commission for was supposed to be waiting, he found that his job had been given to someone else, so he returned to England. So why did he take what starts out looking like a fictionalized autobiographical account, and then half way through the story start being totally fictional? The important changes made seems to be that he is in charge of the boat, and thus is in control of his own journey to the heart of darkness. The other is the significance