Zora Neale Hurston was a folklorist who studied with anthropologist Franz Boas at Barnard College before becoming a novelist.
In Mules and Men (1935) and Tell My Horse (1938), she compiled black traditions of the South and the Caribbean.
Her novels include Their Eyes Were Watching God (1937).
Medea was the Princess of Colchis and the wife of Jason, the King of Iolcus. Her father was King Aeetes of Colchis. Medea, by Euripides, was first performed in 431 B.C.
Ethan Frome and his beloved, Mattie Silver, drive a sled into a tree in a botched suicide attempt in Edith Wharton’s novel, Ethan Frome.
In Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel of the same name, it is the catch that prevents a U.S. Air Force pilot from asking to be grounded on the basis of insanity. A man “would be crazy to fly more missions and sane if he didn’t, but if he was sane, he had to fly them. If…
Science-fiction writer Kilgore Trout is a recurring character in Kurt Vonnegut’s books, including God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater (1965), Slaughterhouse-Five (1969), Breakfast of Champions (1973), and Jailbird (1979).
Robert Burns wrote “O, my luve’s like a red, red rose/That’s newly sprung in June” in “A Red, Red Rose” (1796).
Popularized in the 1960s by Roland Barthes and others, narratology is the study of narrative, linguistic or otherwise: myths, legends, novels, comic strips, stained-glass windows, psychological case studies. It employs methods drawn from structuralism, the study of the relations and functions of the internal elements of cultural phenomena.