Newest Literature Essays

In Moll Flanders, Daniel Defoe constructs an image of a woman who is resourceful, self-sufficient, shrewd and independent. His Moll came from nothing, born to a mother imprisoned in Newgate, born to this underworld of contained vice and...

The Victorian concept of masculinity is one caught up a series of interrelated metaphors relating to the empire and national identity. Throughout the Victorian corpus there are a number of texts that create a metaphorical relationship between...

In ‘The Motives of Eloquence’, Lantham describes Shakespearean drama as the art of “superposition”. One arc of action is performed over others so that “[d]ramatic motive is stronger than ‘real’, serious motive”. The justification of a characters...

Alfonso Cuarón’s 2006 film ‘Children of Men’ is a text that explores the interplay of past, present and future on both personal and societal levels. Many characters in the film are obsessed with reiterating the past in an endless cycle of...

In the work of the Romantic poets, there is a clear disparity in the representation of male and female homoerotics. While male homosexual poetry is generally characterised by a careful synthesis of personal feeling and an imagined homosocial...

In Maus, Art Spiegelman produces what can be seen as a reaction to the Holocaust and its complicated aftermath. It is a graphic representation of the various horrors of the Holocaust and he chooses to make his characters anthropomorphic. One may...

In his analysis of Taxi Driver as a revisionist western, Robert Ray places Taxi Driver's protagonist Travis Bickle squarely in the mould of the solitary heroes of the western genre. He notes the unspecified origins of Travis as well as the...

"In a mad world, only the mad are sane."

Akira Kurosawa

"What this picture is about -- and it keeps getting more clear to me all the time -- is the insanity."

Robert Altman

MASH was not Richard Nixon's favorite war film of 1970. Of the four highest...

In her 1987 staging of "Othello" at the Market Theatre in South Africa, Janet Suzman aimed to make a pertinent artistic and cultural statement about both the political system of Apartheid and its deep racial underpinnings. Recorded on video for...

In the realm of assassination drama, The Parallax View is in some ways an inversion of the similarly speculative plot of The Manchurian Candidate. In the latter film, Korean War soldiers are brainwashed by an external force (Communists) into...

In Akira Kurosawa's transformation of King Lear into Ran, the flat character of the Lear's Fool has evolved into Hidetora's Kyoami, a character who exhibits a number of personal complexities absent from Shakespeare's Fool. Both characters have a...

Through intense visuality and the complex connections among various characters, Woody Allen in Annie Hall suggests an inextricable connection between geographical location and identity in terms of class, religion, politics, and interpersonal...

"You're television incarnate, Diana: indifferent to suffering; insensitive to joy. All of life is reduced to the common rubble of banality. War, murder, death are all the same to you as bottles of beer. And the daily business of life is a corrupt...

In a Shakespearean comic setting where chaos, asininity, and insolence reign, the very qualities of comic irreverence become virtues. A comic hero or side character who relentlessly pranks stooges and straight men for the audience's enjoyment is...

The Christian kings of England could suppose a "divine right" imposed by "natural order" in order to legitimize their place in the feudal hierarchy, a view bolstered by Christ's admonishment to "Render unto Caesar the things which are Caesar's"...

Berthold Brecht’s explicit intention to impose an emotional distance between dramatic actors and the viewing audience stands in opposition to the use of propagandistic techniques intended to heighten sympathy and runs contrary to notions of...

The strong current of anti-ritualism as expressed in the Mundaka Upanisad has reverberated throughout Hinduism, penetrating the thoughts and attitudes of the later Sant poets regarding the nature of bhakti, proper devotion. While the Mundaka and...

In his article On Reading Romantic Poetry, L. J. Swingle identifies the Romantic poet’s tendency to “think into the human heart” by using rustic description to explore “the naked dignity of man”. This analysis certainly holds true for William...

In his study Shakespeare: Time and Conscience, Grigori Kozintsev expresses how the plot of King Lear sets in motion “an unstoppable avalanche of the fragments of structures, attitudes, ties, all intermingled in frenzied movement”. Indeed,...

Writing in 1818, Samuel Taylor Coleridge characterises romantic landscape poetry as “the mediatress between, and reconciler of nature and man”. This description holds true for William Wordsworth’s Tintern Abbey, an eighteenth century prospect poem...

One of the main themes that is recurrent throughout Edith Wharton’s work The Age of Innocence is the ongoing struggle between the individual and society. This is an issue that Wharton was quite concerned with in the novel, and it is reflected in...

Charles Dickens’ essay The Noble Savage and and H. Rider Haggard’s King Solomon’s Mines both communicate an agenda set forth by the author. In his essay, Dickens conveys his distaste for the sympathy he sees bestowed upon the native people of...

The Odd Women, by George Gissing, is a story that centers upon the decisions that people make in life and the outside factors that influence these decisions. Gissing looks at the situations of five different women and utilizes their lives to make...

The critical debates swirling around Henry James’ The Turn Of The Screw are a product of the intentional ambiguities written into the text. The psychological thriller centers around a Governess who, upon entering into a position for a man with...