Rabindranath Tagore's novel 1916 novel The Home and the World consists of chapters told from the point of view of varying characters. One of these is Sandip, who is a militant nationalist and an active participant in the Swadeshi movement. In the third chapter, which is narrated from Sandip's poi...

A recent question from Tsundoku about the Bhagavad Geeta led me to think about how we tag works whose component parts themselves can be regarded as independent works. The Bhagavad Geeta is a small part of a much longer work, the Mahabharata. It is easily the best known part of that epic, as in pr...

I'm looking for an example from epic literature (but willing to accept answers from outside that genre) about the following personality type. In particular, I'm looking for an example of a warrior who doesn't rejoice over his defeated foe nor drag him around the city walls. But instead says somet...

In the following sentence, I understand everything but the "as of" part: It was the awareness that some speeding messenger from spaces far, far beyond the world would presently stand close and touch me, would gaze into my little human eyes, would leave its message as of life or death, and then d...

I am looking for an explanation as to what the phrase "oxygen seeped out of the room" means, in The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini. For example, I can write that it means, "Amir was uncomfortable" but what i need is a slightly more elaborate explanation.

In "In the Midst of Alarms" (1894) by Robert Barr, the author is describing a man who was trying to make a friendly conversation with a rural young woman: “Yes,” Yates laughed uneasily. He had manifestly missed fire. “I notice by your tone that you evidently think my equipment meager. You should...