Newest Literature Essays

Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s “The Yellow Wallpaper,” and Kate Chopin’s “The Story of an Hour” explore ideas of female identity and selfhood, and more importantly, female liberation. These authors present their female characters as self-assertive in...

In her poem, “Daddy,” Sylvia Plath uses violent, unnerving, and controversial imagery to illustrate her tumultuous relationship with her father both before and after his death in 1940. Her work, and this poem in particular, is often distinguished...

Supernatural elements in any story intrigue, thrill, and capture the attention of readers, adding an extra dimension to the text and performance. Rather than merely to delight his readers, though, Shakespeare incorporates ghosts and apparitions...

A female victim in Gothic literature is typically innocent, unworldly and powerless, a useful stereotype creating tension and drama as well as encapsulating ideals of male desire. Jane Eyre has lived a sheltered life, unexposed to worldly dangers...

“Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me...

There are countless disparities between the society of Gilead and 1980s America. In The Handmaid’s Tale by Margaret Atwood, the citizens of this dystopian totalitarian state have unconventional reactions to life, death, sex, and violence. When we...

Though a majority of the characters in Leo Tolstoy’s momentous novel Anna Karenina are members of the nobility, the reforms Czar Alexander II put in place for the lower classes had profound effects on them. The time of his rule was an era of...

In his work "Essay Concerning Human Understanding," John Locke explains his belief that the human mind is what he called a "tabula rasa," which is Latin for "clean sheet of paper." It assumes that infants know nothing when they are born and human...

What draws masses of fans to midnight premiers of the Batman movies? What factor has made millions of people advent readers of Bruce Wayne, and other figures similar, such as the Punisher? They have no super powers, they must hide their identities...

Throughout human history, people have been infatuated with the role of the “hero”. The concept that someone would be willing to risk life and limb for someone else never ceases to amaze. Just take a trip to Washington, D.C. The monuments and...

Questions like these that baffle the human mind, and have done so for centuries: what happens after we die? Is there truly life after death? Such riddles can never be known to those who have not crossed over “to the other side”, so to speak, and...

A quick read-through of the Old English epic poem Beowulf revealsthat the text centers heavily around male characters and typically masculine themes. The main character, Beowulf, a powerful and renowned hero, sets on an epic journey to save the...

Plato’s “Symposium” is an essential piece of philosophical literature that concerns itself with the genesis, purpose and nature of love, or eros. Love is examined in a sequence of speeches by men attending a symposium, or drinking party. A...

UnderstandingAfrican American sentiments during the Civil Rights Movement is crucialin understanding Ton Morrison's novel,The Bluest Eye. W.E.B. Du Bois thinks that a biography of an African-Americanalways possesses a"double-consciousness of the...

Insanity is defined as doing something over and over again and expecting a different outcome. In Shakespeare'sHamlet, the young and not fully matureHamlet might be thought of asinsane. However, althoughhe says and doesthings that are out of the...

S1151541/B020117

3rd April 2014

Visalini S.

Do not re-print without express permission from the author.

The Fall of Man

York Mystery Cycle (Play 5)

Medieval Theatre Conventions

Language and Staging

The Fall of Man was traditionally performed as...

Shakespeare uses stagecraft in a number of different ways to create dramatic effects in ‘Antony and Cleopatra’. Jacobean stages were very simple, not much more than an empty wooden platform thrust into the middle of spectators with no scenery to...

In the play Fences, by August Wilson, a fence represents protection and incomplete or broken relationships. Through the fence, Wilson is trying to show that even things that were once perfect and have gone awry can still be rebuilt.

One way Wilson...

When a man’s road to happiness is cut off by a wrong turn and a person finds themselves lost in an unknown state, a second chance is a miraculous hand that comes out at the person, opening up another path, even at his lowest of stages, to once...

West African autochthon Phillis Wheatley employs her tactful methods of writing to convey a subtle but powerful message in her poem ”On Being Brought from Africa to America” (1773). At a very young age, about 7 or 8, Phillis was enslaved and...

In Euripides’ Medea, Plutarch’s Sayings of Spartan Women, Lycurgus and Xenophon’s Spartan Society, it is made clear that filicide is a byproduct of the dichotomy of an honor vs. shame society. Medea, the barbarian wife of a man who remarries in...

In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Caesar is a soon-to-be monarch who is murdered by a group called the Conspirators whose justification for their actions may be debated. Throughout the story, Brutus switches sides several times, starting as Caesar's...

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel, The Scarlet Letter employs dramatic clout within the characters with the light and dark contrast. The “blackness” did not allude to race. The dark colors underline sin and their evil, distraught intentions while the...