[w]hile the vast assembly, as if with one impulse, shrank from the centres of the rooms to the walls, he made his way uninterruptedly, but with the same solemn and measured step which had distinguished him from the first, through the blue chamber to the purple—through the purple to the green—through the green to the orange—through this again to the white—and even thence to the violet, ere a decided movement had been made to arrest him. what is the effect of parallelism in this excerpt? a. it emphasizes the frantic spiral toward confrontation. b. it emphasizes prospero’s steady, confident approach. c. it emphasizes the excessive opulence of the decor. d. it emphasizes the rapid progression of time.

The correct answer is option letter C: It emphasizes the excessive opulence of the decor. Taken from the short story “The Masque of the Red Death” by the American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1842), the purpose of using parallelism in this excerpt is to emphasize the opulent, colourful décor of the rooms. Parallelism is a method of writing in which similarly constructed clauses or sentences are arranged in a pairing sequence suggesting some correspondence between them. In this case, the repeated pairing sequence mentioning the colours is “through the … to the …” (through the blue chamber to the purple—through the purple to the green—through the green to the orange—through this again to the white). Moreover, parallelism helps emphasize the importance of the colours, since they also portray the progression of life and its different stages in a symbolic way (blue: birth/ purple: youth/ green: adolescence/ orange: adulthood/ white: old age/ violet: imminent death).

the thousand and one nights – or, as i prefer to call them in the following for purely practical reasons: the arabian nights – as we perceive them three hundred years after antoine galland’s epochal french adaptation bear a distinct arabic imprint. meanwhile, the commonly accepted model for their textual history acknowledges various stages in the conceptualization and effective formation of both the collection’s characteristic frame story and the embedded repertoire. the vast majority of tales in the preserved manuscripts of the nights has been integrated into the collection during two periods of arabic influence, the so-called baghdad and cairo periods (gerhardt 1963: 115–374). these “arabic” stages are preceded by an iranian version, probably dating to pre-islamic times, which in its turn profits from both structural devices and narrative contents originating from indian tradition. considering the eminent position that iran and iranian culture hold in the early stages of the textual history of the arabian nights, surprisingly few details are known concerning the collection’s relation to and its actual position within the iranian cultural context. in the following, i will discuss links between the arabian nights and iranian culture on several levels. in surveying these links, i will treat five major areas: (1) the iranian prototype of the nights; (2) tales of alleged persian origin; (3) persian characters within the tales; (4)persian translations of the arabian nights; and (5) the position of the arabian nights in modern iran

poe’s time at the academy was financed by his foster father, john, meaning that poe needed his foster father’s permission in order to drop out if he wanted to. unfortunately, poe’s relationship with his foster father was soon on the rocks again after john married his second wife, louisa patterson.

i was just learning about this in language arts a week ago. edgar poe makes lots of wonderful books, too.