Ernest Miller Hemingway was an American novelist, short-story writer, and journalist. His economical and understated style—which he termed the iceberg theory—had a strong influence on 20th-century fiction, while his adventurous lifestyle and public image brought him admiration from later generations. Hemingway produced most of his work between the mid-1920s and the mid-1950s, and he was awarded the 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature. He published seven novels, six short-story collections, and two nonfiction works. Three of his novels, four short-story collections, and three nonfiction works were published posthumously. Many of his works are considered classics of American literature.
Kate Chopin was an American author of short stories and novels based in Louisiana. She is considered by scholars to have been a forerunner of American 20th-century feminist authors of Southern or Catholic background, such as Zelda Fitzgerald, and she is one of the more frequently read and recognized writers of Louisiana Creole heritage. She is best known today for her 1899 novel The Awakening.
The Tragedy of Julius Caesar (First Folio title: The Tragedie of Ivlivs Cæsar) is a history play and tragedy by William Shakespeare first performed in 1599.
Antony and Cleopatra is a tragedy by William Shakespeare. The play was first performed, by the King's Men, at either the Blackfriars Theatre or the Globe Theatre in around 1607; its first appearance in print was in the Folio of 1623.
Samuel Daniel (1562–1619) was an English poet, playwright and historian in the late-Elizabethan and early-Jacobean eras. He was an innovator in a wide range of literary genres. His best-known works are the sonnet cycle Delia, the epic poem The Civil Wars Between the Houses of Lancaster and York, the dialogue in verse Musophilus, and the essay on English poetry A Defense of Rhyme. He was considered one of the preeminent authors of his time and his works had a significant influence on contemporary writers, including William Shakespeare. Daniel's writings continued to influence authors for centuries after his death, especially the Romantic poets Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth. C. S. Lewis called Daniel "the most interesting man of letters" whom the sixteenth century produced in England.
The Awakening is a novel by Kate Chopin, first published in 1899. Set in New Orleans and on the Louisiana Gulf coast at the end of the 19th century, the plot centers on Edna Pontellier and her struggle between her increasingly unorthodox views on femininity and motherhood with the prevailing social attitudes of the turn-of-the-century American South. It is one of the earlier American novels that focuses on women's issues without condescension. It is also widely seen as a landmark work of early feminism, generating a mixed reaction from contemporary readers and critics.
In Shakespeare studies, the problem plays are plays written by William Shakespeare which are characterized by their complex and ambiguous tone, which shifts violently between more straightforward comic material and dark, psychological drama. Shakespeare's problem plays eschew the traditional trappings of both comedy and tragedy, and are sometimes cited as early predecessors to the tragicomedy.
Chekhov's gun is a dramatic principle that states that every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed. Alternatively explained, suppose the writer features a gun in a story – if the writer features it, there must be a reason for it, such as it being used sometime down the line in one way or another: Elements should not appear to make "false promises" by never coming into play.
"Asp" is the modern anglicisation of the word "aspis", which in antiquity referred to any one of several venomous snake species found in the Nile region. The specific epithet, aspis, is a Greek word that means "viper". It is believed that aspis referred to what is now known as the Egyptian cobra.
The Complete Works of William Shakespeare (Abridged) is a play written by Adam Long, Daniel Singer, and Jess Winfield. It parodies the plays of William Shakespeare with all of them being performed in comically shortened or merged form by only three actors. Typically, the actors use their real names and play themselves rather than specific characters. The fourth wall is nonexistent in the performance, with the actors speaking directly to the audience during much of the play, and some scenes involve audience participation. The director and stage crew may also be directly involved in the performance and become characters themselves.
The Mummy, or Ramses the Damned is a 1989 horror novel by American writer Anne Rice. Taking place during the early twentieth century, it follows the collision between a British archeologist's family and a resurrected mummy. The novel ends with the statement, "The Adventures of Ramses the Damned Shall Continue", and twenty-eight years later, Rice fulfilled this promise with Ramses the Damned: The Passion of Cleopatra, written in collaboration with her son, novelist Christopher Rice. A third jointly-authored novel in this series, Ramses the Damned: The Reign of Osiris, was released on February 1, 2022, two months after Anne Rice's death.
A vignette is a French loanword expressing a short and descriptive piece of writing that captures a brief period in time. Vignettes are more focused on vivid imagery and meaning rather than plot. Vignettes can be stand-alone, but they are more commonly part of a larger narrative, such as vignettes found in novels or collections of short stories.
A ghost character, in the bibliographic or scholarly study of texts of dramatic literature, is a term for an inadvertent error committed by the playwright in the act of writing. It is a character who is mentioned as appearing on stage, but who does not do anything, and who seems to have no purpose. As Kristian Smidt put it, they are characters that are "introduced in stage directions or briefly mentioned in dialogue who have no speaking parts and do not otherwise manifest their presence". It is generally interpreted as an author's mistake, indicative of an unresolved revision to the text. If the character was intended to appear and say nothing, it is assumed this would be made clear in the playscript.
The False One is a late Jacobean stage play by John Fletcher and Philip Massinger, though formerly placed in the Beaumont and Fletcher canon. It was first published in the first Beaumont and Fletcher folio of 1647.
Charmion, alternatively Charmian, was a trusted servant and advisor to Cleopatra VII of Egypt. Plutarch, in his Parallel Lives biography of Mark Antony, writes that Charmion managed the principal affairs of Cleopatra's government; therefore, she held an important position in Cleopatra's trusted circle.
Women in Shakespeare is a topic within the especially general discussion of Shakespeare's dramatic and poetic works. Main characters such as Dark Lady of the sonnets have elicited a substantial amount of criticism, which received added impetus during the second-wave feminism of the 1960s. A considerable number of book-length studies and academic articles investigate the topic, and several moons of Uranus are named after women in Shakespeare.
The death of Cleopatra VII, the last ruler of Ptolemaic Egypt, occurred on either 10 or 12 August, 30 BC, in Alexandria, when she was 39 years old. According to popular belief, Cleopatra killed herself by allowing an asp to bite her, but for the Roman-era writers Strabo, Plutarch, and Cassius Dio, Cleopatra poisoned herself using either a toxic ointment or by introducing the poison with a sharp implement such as a hairpin. Modern scholars debate the validity of ancient reports involving snakebites as the cause of death and if she was murdered or not. Some academics hypothesize that her Roman political rival Octavian forced her to kill herself in a manner of her choosing. The location of Cleopatra's tomb is unknown. It was recorded that Octavian allowed for her and her husband, the Roman politician and general Mark Antony, who stabbed himself with a sword, to be buried together properly.
Janet Ann Adelman was a Shakespearean scholar, a literary critic, and professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley.
The long-lost tomb of Antony and Cleopatra, the burial crypt of Mark Antony and Cleopatra VII, from 30 BC, remains undiscovered somewhere near Alexandria, Egypt. According to historians Suetonius and Plutarch, the Roman leader Octavian permitted their burial together after he had defeated them. Their surviving children were taken to Rome, to be raised as Roman citizens.
The 1954 Nobel Prize in Literature was awarded the American author Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961) "for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style."