The section of Malcolm X's autobiography entitled “Literacy Behind Bars” (2007) was written in the mid-1960s and deals with the intense process of self-education that X undertook while he was a prison inmate. It details both the methods which he used in order to improve his reading abilities, as well...

The scene in Byron's “Manfred” in which the spirit of Astarte, the protagonist's dead love, rises from the mist is one of the drama's focal points and features classic tropes associated with Romantic literature. The themes present in the scene focus on defiance of authority, the nature of law and...

The Last Flight of Doctor Ain is a short story written by a science fiction master, James Triptree. The author is best known as a master of a short story prose with deep psychological implications and the elements of a classic suspense. The major part of her most recognized works...

Enjambment is a literary technique used by which a line of poetry does not correspond with the clause it contains: a syntactical segment will be visually separated from one line to the next, creating a sense of ambiguity of the poet’s meaning, and sometimes of urgency in the reading of...

While Frederick Douglass’s literacy did not in itself set him free, it informed him he was in bondage and was the catalyst of his identity with freedom. When Frederick Douglass was rented to the amazingly deceptive slave owner Edward Covey, he almost lost his will to live amid the labor...