Newest Literature Essays

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is during Act IV that the four “lovers” awaken along the boundary of the woods in which they spent the prior evening and attempt to explain and understand the previous night’s happenings. This...

In James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the narrator presents the story of his life as a black man passing as white, and the different stages he progresses through while doing so. In both his life and the lives of many...

Tradition and change are as much at war as the people are in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. The events that define this war are centered on and around the main character, Okonkwo, who finds himself unable to adapt to the changes taking...

The narrator and focal character of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, who has appointed upon himself the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, strikes the reader as one of the most despicable and unorthodox protagonists in classic literature. He embodies numerous...

Homer’s Iliad features many sacred cultural principles present in the ancient Greek culture, but the importance and gravity of fate are communicated at the forefront of the work.

While the exact properties of fate and how it can be changed are a...

Hiketeia is a ritual supplication in which an individual embraces the knees of another in solicitation of a favor or errand. The use of hiketeia in The Iliad establishes a nature of authority in characters of power, including Zeus and Achilles, by...

Language in the “Birthday Party” is seen as a major theme of the play, despite its absurd nature. Through the use of language, Pinter creates silences that are monumental to the meaning and overall understanding of the play. With language, Pinter...

In John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums,” nature represents Elisa Allen’s confinement, the chrysanthemums symbolizes Elisa herself, and the tinker embodies Elisa’s wants. The narrator compares the Salinas Valley to “a closed pot” because “[a] high...

Chaucer, at least on the surface, recreates the commonly perceived stereotype of a vile woman in Alisoun; and as D.W. Robertson in Chaucer’s Exegetes states, “She is but an elaborate iconographic figure designed to show the manifold implications...

Critics and historians are of varied opinions when it comes to the authenticity of Homer’s text. Amidst everything else, it is often disputed whether The Iliad was even written by the man known as Homer, just as Shakespeare’s authorship is...

Being a devout Christian, reasonable freethinker and a popular writer with a political consciousness, John Milton took upon himself the ambitious task of writing a modern Christian epic in English, inspired by the classical pagan tradition of epic...

“Her days are practis’d in such noble virtue,

That, sure her nights, nay more, her very sleeps,

Are more in heaven, than other ladies’ shrifts.

Let all sweet ladies break their flatt’ring glasses,

And dress themselves in her” – (1.2.123-127)

These...

In Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare uses grand evocative imagery for a variety of reasons such as juxtaposing Rome against Egypt, and to add different dimensions to the main characters. Moreover, there are a few overriding themes throughout the...

Critics have noted that unlike his illustrious predecessors who also specialized in Greek tragedy, Euripides bears a far greater sensibility towards the marginalized sections of society such that many of his prominent characters are seen to be...

It is imperative for drama to require much more consideration regarding the intended audience than other literary forms, since in the end, a play is meant to be a performance. In drama and its theatrical depiction, the spectators experience the...

“Wheels that have crossed long, dusty distances with their mineral and vegetable burdens, sacks from the coal bins, barrels, and baskets, handles and hafts for the carpenter’s tool chest. From them flow the contacts of man with the earth, like a...

“I would write a different Sons and Lovers now; my mother was wrong, and I thought she was absolutely right.” (Jeffers 296)

This line betrays D. H. Lawrence’s eventual realization about his maternal fixation. As a corollary, it might be implied...

In James Joyce’s “Araby”, readers are taken on a young boy’s quest of discovery. The beginning of the short story paints a picture of Dublin, a place described as rather dark and lonely. This is a ‘coming of age’ tale, peering into the mind of a...

In the works of Daisy Miller and The Beast in the Jungle, author Henry James provides readers with multiple explanations as to why it is important for one to live a full life. These two novellas share many broad similarities, including central...

In Naguib Mahfouz’s The Thief and the Dogs Albert Camus’ The Stranger, we are exposed to two very different characters, Said Mahran and Meursault. Both these characters are alienated from their societies, and change drastically as a result of this...

Males still make up an uncomfortably large majority of published authors; perhaps this, along with many other factors, contributes to the dearth of strong female characters in literature. But regardless of causation, the truth is still evident:...

Years before Black Swan, writer/director Darren Aronofsky exploded across the film universe with his surprisingly low-budget motion picture, Pi. The film is a violently pensive study of the fine line between madness and genius, as well as a...

After eternally transforming the science fiction scene with his groundbreaking film Alien, Ridley Scott returns to his home turf years later with an implied prequel, Prometheus. Though the potential of the new film sent devoted Alien fans into a...

“I learned to recognize the thorough and primitive duality of man . . . if I could rightly be said to be either, it was only because I was radically both” (41).

So says Henry Jekyll in a heartfelt letter to his best friend, Henry Utterson. His...