To access the databases:
Louisiana Library Connection Databases: http://lalibcon.state.lib.la.us/
Please select the library which issued your card: "Rapides Parish Library" (scroll down)
Enter your library card number or password here: 23330123456789
Choose: Ebsco, Gale Literature for Students Online, Literary Reference Center, NoveList, Scribner Writers Series, Twayne's Authors Series ... There is a plethora of information here.
Rapides Parish Library: www.rpl.org
General caveats about using the databases:
Databases are not considered websites.
A website needs to end in “.edu.”
For the databases, look for articles classified as “work analysis” or “literary criticism.”
For an Internet source, in the search engine box, type author and/or title of book and words like “literary criticism” or “analysis.”
Ex: “Stephen Crane” + “Literary Criticism” + “The Open Boat”
“Stephen Crane” + Biography
“Stephen Crane” + “Literary Analysis”
“Stephen Crane” + “The Open Boat”
“Stephen Crane” + Analysis
“The Open Boat” + Analysis
Journals normally have volume and issue numbers.
Good Internet Sites:
Books and Authors
http://www.kirjasto.sci.fi/
Click on “Authors’ Calendar” on the left-hand side thumbnails.
http://www.online-literature.com/author_index.php
This is the complete list of authors on this website; it is alphabetized.
Literary History: Indexing the Internet: http://www.literaryhistory.com/
Easybib.com http://www.easybib.com/
English IV Research Paper Possible Texts
NOTE: This list is not exhaustive; many other texts may work. Just ask me about a text if you do not see it listed here.
Short Stories
List One
“Young Goodman Brown” (Hawthorne)
“Bartleby the Scrivner” (Melville)
“The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” (Irving)
“The Cask of Amontillado” (Poe)
“My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (Hawthorne)
“To Build a Fire” (London)
“The Purloined Letter” (Poe)
“The Minister’s Black Veil” (Hawthorne)
“The Lottery” (Jackson)
“Bernice Bobs Her Hair” (Fitzgerald)
“The Tell-Tale Heart” (Poe)
“On the Gulls’ Road” (Cather)
“A Painful Case” (Joyce)
“The Garden Party” (Mansfield)
“Her First Ball” (Mansfield)
“The Blue Hotel” (Crane)
“The Real Thing” (James)
“Shiloh” (Mason)
“The Open Boat” (Crane)
“Why I Live at the P.O.” (Welty)
“The Conversion of the Jews” (Roth)
“The Blood Bay” (Proulx)
“Rip van Winkle” (Irving)
“The Fall of the House of Usher” (Poe)
“The Overcoat” (Gogol)
“The Darling” (Chekov)
“The Dead” (Joyce)
“Everyday Use” (Walker)
“The Bath” (Carver)
“The Story of an Hour” (Chopin)
“The Yellow Wallpaper” (Gilman)
“The Jilting of Granny Weatherall” (Porter)
“Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” (Oates)
“Night Women” (Danticat)
“The Necklace” (Maupassant)
“Paul’s Case” (Cather)
“Spunk” (Hurston)
“The Man Who Was Almost a Man” (Wright)
“Sonny’s Blues” (Baldwin)
“Two Kinds” (Tan)
“Interpreter of Maladies” (Lahiri)
“Civil Peace” (Achebe)
“A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings” (Márquez)
“My First Goose” (Babel)
“A White Heron” (Jewett)
“Babylon Revisited” (Fitzgerald)
“The Guest” (Camus)
“This Way for the Gas Chamber, Ladies and Gentlemen” (Borowski)
“Good Country People” (O’Conner)
“The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas” (Leguin)
“Lost in the Funhouse” (Barth)
“Hills Like White Elephants” (Hemingway)
“A Rose for Emily” (Faulkner)
List Two
Washington Irving: “Rin Van Winkle” or “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow”
Nathaniel Hawthorne: “Rappacini’s Daughter”
Edgar Allan Poe: “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” or “The Purloined Letter”
Herman Melville: “Benito Cereno”
Edward Everett Hale: “The Man Without a Country”
Frank R. Stockton: “The Lady, or the Tiger?”
Mark Twain: “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Calveras County” or “The Man the Corrupted Hadleyburg”
Bret Harte: “The Luck of Roaring Camp” or “The Outcasts of Poker Flat”
Thomas Bailey Aldrich: “Marjorie Dew”
Ambrose Bierce: “The Damned Thing” or “An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge”
Henry James: “The Turn of the Screw”
Joel Chandler Harris: “Brer Rabbit, Brer Fox, and the Tar Baby”
Sarah Orne Jewett: “A White Heron”
Henry Van Dyke: “The Story of the Other Wise Man”
Hamlin Garland: “The Return of the Private”
Edith Wharton: “The Mission of Jane”
O. Henry: “The Gift of the Magi” or “The Furnished Room”
Frank Norris: “A Deal in Wheat”
Stephen Crane: “The Open Boat”
Theodore Dreiser: “The Lost Phœbe”
Willa Cather: “Paul’s Case”
Jack London: “To Build a Fire”
Sherwood Anderson: “I’m a Fool”
Ring Lardner: “The Golden Honeymoon”
Edna Ferber: “The Afternoon of a Faun”
Fannie Hurst: “Humoresque”
Conrad Aiken: “Silent Snow, Secret Snow”
Katherine Anne Porter: “Flowering Judas”
Dorothy Parker: “Big Blonde”
James Thurber: “The Secret Life of Walter Mitty”
F. Scott Fitzgerald: “Babylon Revisited”
William Faulkner: “A Rose for Emily”
Stephen Vincent Benét: “The Devil and Daniel Webster”
Ernest Hemingway: “The Snows of Kilimanjaro”
Thomas Wolfe: “The Lost Boy”
John Steinbeck: “The Red Pony”
Isaac Bashevis Singer: “Gimpel the Fool”
John O’Hara: “Imagine Kissing Pete”
William Saroyan: “The Darling Young Man on the Flying Trapeze”
Eudora Welty: “Death of a Traveling Salesman”
Pietro di Donato: “Christ in Concrete”
John Cheever: “The Country Husband”
Bernard Malamud: “The Magic Barrel”
Saul Bellow: “A Silver Dish”
Shirley Jackson: “The Lottery”
Ray Bradbury: “There Will Come Soft Rains”
Kurt Vonnegut, Jr.: “Welcome to the Monkey House”
Truman Capote: “A Christmas Memory”
James Baldwin: “Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone”
Flannery O’Conner: “A Good Man is Hard to Find”
John Updike: “Pigeon Feathers”
Joyce Carol Oates: “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?”
Books
List One
Austen, Pride and Prejudice (1813)
Baldwin, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953)
Bellow, Seize the Day (1956)
Bronte, Jane Eyre (1847)
Bronte, Wuthering Heights (1847)
Camus, The Stranger (1942)
Carroll, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (1865)
Cather, My Antonia (1918)
Chopin, The Awakening (1899)
Conrad, Heart of Darkness (1902)
Crane, The Red Badge of Courage (1895)
Defoe, Robinson Crusoe (1719)
Dickens, Great Expectations (1860-61)
Dostoevsky, Crime and Punishment (1866)
Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)
Ellison, Invisible Man (1947)
Faulkner, The Sound and the Fury (1929)
Fielding, Tom Jones (1749)
Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby (1925)
Flaubert, Madame Bovary (1857)
Forster, A Passage to India (1924)
Garcia Marquez, One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967)
Golding, Lord of the Flies (1954)
Hardy, Tess of the D'Urbervilles (1891)
Hawthorne, The Scarlet Letter (1850)
Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms (1929)
Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937)
Huxley, Brave New World (1932)
James, The Turn of the Screw (1898)
Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (1916)
Kafka, The Trial (1925)
Lawrence, Sons and Lovers (1913)
Lewis, Babbitt (1922)
Malamud, The Assistant (1957)
Mann, Death in Venice (1912)
Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Orwell, Animal Farm (1945)
Paton, Cry, the Beloved Country (1948)
Salinger, The Catcher in the Rye (1951)
Scott, Ivanhoe (1820)
Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath (1939)
Swift, Gulliver's Travels (1726)
Thackeray, Vanity Fair (1847-48)
Tolstoy, War and Peace (1865-69)
Turgenev, Fathers and Sons (1862)
Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1886)
Updike, Rabbit, Run (1961)
Voltaire, Candide (1759)
Vonnegut, Slaughterhouse Five (1969)
Walker, The Color Purple (1982)
Wharton, The Age of Innocence (1920)
Woolf, To the Lighthouse (1927)
Wright, Native Son (1940)
List Two
Animal Farm, Orwell
Anthem, Rand
“The Bear,” Faulkner
Benito Cereno, Melville
Billy Budd, Melville
Candide, Voltaire
Catcher in the Rye, Salinger
Daisy Miller, James
The Death of Ivan Ilych, Tolstoy
Demian, Hesse
Ethan Frome, Wharton
Franny and Zooey, Salinger
Heart of Darkness, Conrad
The Loved One, Waugh
Maggie, Girl of the Streets, Crane
Metamorphosis, Kafka
Montana 1948, Foster
Notes from the Underground, Dostoevsky
The Old Man and The Sea, Hemingway
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, Solzhenitsyn
Siddhartha, Hesse
The Stranger, Camus
Summer, Wharton
The Turn of the Screw, James
Washington Square, James
Questions for a Literary Interpretation Paper
1. What is the central theme of the work?
2. How do particular parts of the work relate to the central theme of the work?
3. What do patterns (if they exist in various elements of the work) mean?
4. What meaning does the author create through the major elements?
5. Why does the work begin and end as it does?
Major Elements of Formal Analysis in Literary Works
1. Plot: events and their sequence
2. Theme: central idea or message
3. Structure: organization and relationship of parts to each other and to the whole
4. Characterization: traits, thoughts, and actions of the people in the plot
5. Setting: time and place of the action
6. Point of view: Perspective or position from which the material is presented—by a narrator, a main character, or another person either in the plot or observing the plot
7. Style: words and sentence structures chosen to present the material
8. Imagery: pictures created by the words used to create figures of speech
9. Tone: author’s attitude toward the subject of the work—and sometimes toward the reader—expressed through choice of words, imagery, and point of view
10. Figure of speech: unusual use or combination of words, as in metaphor and simile, for enhanced vividness or effect
11. Symbolism: meaning beneath the surface of the words and images
12. Rhythm: beat, meter
13. Rhyme: repetition of similar sounds for their auditory effect
.
Major Topics for Cultural Analysis
1. Gender: How does a work portray women or men and define or challenge their respective roles in society?
2. Class: How does a work portray relationships among the upper, middle, and lower economic classes? How do characters’ actions or perspectives result from their wealth and power—or the lack thereof?
3. Race and ethnicity: How does a work portray the influences of race and ethnicity on the characters’ actions, status, and values?
4. History: How does a work reflect or challenge past events and values in a society?
5. Autobiography: How might the writer’s experiences have influenced this particular work? Similarly, how might the times in which the writer lives or lived have affected his/her work?
6. Genre: How is the work similar to, or different from, other works of its type, often—but not always—those written at the same general time?
