One of the most important Native American writers of the post-1968 generation, James Welch, to a large degree, established a genre. What he gave us was Native American Literature: literature unmistakably about Indian subjects, written by an Indian writer. His characters were never drawn from sensa

Clean, Clever, Deconstructive, Epic, Expansive, Figurative, Illusive, Lyrical, Mythic, Native american fiction, Native american poetry, Pioneering, Post-colonialism, Sincere, Spiritual, Sublime, Tragic, Tribal

Sor Juana Ines de la Cruz was an exceptional seventeenth-century nun who set precedents for feminism long before the term or concept existed. Her "Respuesta" is a maverick work outlining the logical sense of women's education more than 200 years before Woolf's "A Room of One's Own." Her poetry, meanw

17th century literature, Feminist, Pioneering, Religious, Sublime

When Abraham raised his sword to slice off the head of his son Isaac, he did so with absolute faith in God. Dante Alighieri, on the other hand, was not so convinced. Dante was a devout Christian who believed that divine love required a journey towards, not a blind acceptance of, religion. Unlike Abra

Dramatic, Epic, Medieval fiction, Medieval poetry, Mythic, Pathos, Religious, Sublime

Poe once wrote that all worldly things contain "the germ of their inevitable annihilation." Pretty cheerful stuff -- clearly this was a man obsessed with ruin and with death. His characters typically suffer from various forms of mental and physical deterioration; their minds seem to have a predilecti

Anxiety, Dark, Death, Gothic fiction, Grotesque, Intense, Lyrical, Sublime, Symbolist poetry, Violent