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The Chaste Clarissa by John Cheever Analysis
WHAT HAPPENS IN THE CHASTE CLARISSA A twice-divorced philanderer holidays where he has always holidayed, on Martha’s Vineyard. On the ferry he meets for the first time a beautiful young woman who has recently married into a bird-watching, rock-collecting family of average Joes, but her husband won’t be joining Clarissa on the island, so our viewpoint…
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The Wizard of Oz Novel Study
The Wizard of Oz is in some ways the inverse of Winnie the Pooh. Whereas L. Frank Baum’s Oz series is so highly metaphorical every member of a thinking audience weaves their own symbolism into it, Milne’s Pooh series is so devoid of symbolism that it’s famous among specialists of children’s literature for precisely the…
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Reflection and Delusion In The Cure by John Cheever Analysis
In his story ‘The Cure’, Cheever comes pretty close to writing a supernatural thriller story, with a few typical thriller genre beats. The stars are ordinary heroes, or to use Northrop Frye’s terms, mimetic heroes.
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Utopian Children’s Literature
The word ‘utopia’ means different things to different people and even comes from two different words. In modern English, we colloquially use ‘utopia’ to mean our own version of a perfect society. Philosophers go deeper. For example, Nassim Nicholas Taleb defines a utopia as a society built according to some blueprint of what “makes sense”.…
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Pig The Pug by Aaron Blabey Picture Book Analysis
Pig the Pug and Trevor the sausage dog live together in a flat. Pig is greedy and selfish and refuses to share his toys. Trevor suggests they play together, but Pig refuses. He piles up all his toys and sits on top of them, but the pile collapses. Pig ends up covered in bandages, completely…
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The Burgundy Weekend by Mavis Gallant Analysis
This is a wonderfully frustrating story. The awful character of Gilles will probably remind you of someone you have known at least once in your life. He is a caricature, to be sure, but not so much of one that he isn’t immediately recognisable. You will feel as if you are stuck inside a car…
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Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret by Judy Blume
As an adolescent I was keen to get my hands on the complete works of Judy Blume, but unfortunately only a select few were available to me. I’ve only just read Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret, Margaret Simon, almost twelve, likes long hair, tuna fish, the smell of rain, and things that are…
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Must Characters Change? How Much?
Theorists have been interested for a long while in the question: What makes a story? Aristotle noticed in The Poetics that a plot must allow for a significant change in the fortune of a main character. But you’ve surely read stories in which characters don’t seem to change at all. Perhaps that’s why you’re here,…
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Snow White Fairy Tale History and Storytelling
I’m sure any visitor to this blog has at least one version of Snow White on their childhood bookshelf. Which version did you have? When you think of Snow White, perhaps you think fondly of the Disney film, or perhaps, like me, you grew up with ‘Read It Yourself’ versions, as well as coming across…
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Home Away Home Story Structure
Philip Richard Morris – Home, Sweet Home
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How Many Words Is A Modern Children’s Book?
PICTURE BOOK WORD COUNTS The new digital era may welcome variations in time, but for now the ‘correct’ word count is 400 and the ‘correct’ number of pages is 32. The ‘correct’ target age-range for a picture book is under three, three to six, or six to nine. You can tell a great story with [fewer] than 500…
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Clancy in the Tower of Babel by John Cheever Analysis
In “Clancy in the Tower of Babel” (1953), Cheever dealt with homosexuality overtly for the first time. But his treatment is stereotypical; he portrays his homosexual characters as effeminate, hysterical, and tortured. glbtq It’s difficult to read the stories of John Cheever without taking what you know of the author’s life as a palimpsest for…
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Common Characteristics Of Best-selling Children’s Books
As outlined by Nodelman and Reimer in The Pleasures of Children’s Literature, here are the common-characteristics of best-selling modern children’s books. They are written and sold as part of a series. They have a simple and straightforward writing style. Central characters are enough like their intended audience for readers to relate to and identify with…
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The difference between story and plot
Story is the chronological order readers discover when they ask “what happened next”? Plot is the order readers experience when they pay attention to what happens next as they read. Plotting is what storytellers do when making decisions about how to unravel their story. Storytellers don’t tell the entire story. They pull out the…
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The Pot Of Gold by John Cheever Analysis
John Cheever isn’t exactly well-known for his ability to get inside women’s heads and depict the other half of humanity as fully human. If he wrote a story with a rounded female protagonist, I’m yet to read it. In “The Pot Of Gold”, at least, the main male character has something to learn from his wife. This…