Newest Literature Essays

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne creates a division between the truth and a Puritan society tainted by hypocrisy. Such a division existed in Hawthorne’s life as well. Born into a historically Puritan family, Hawthorne developed an...

“There is a way to be good again” (Hosseini 2). Rahim Khan’s first words to Amir in Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner set in motion Amir’s attempt to mend his scarred past. A mentally tormented man until Khan’s call, he has repressed memories from...

In Homer’s Iliad, two conflicting desires motivate Hector. He adheres to the heroic code by fighting for honor and glory, but he does not always actively pursue battle. He has a strong instinct for self survival that urges him to remove himself...

“For who so firm that cannot be seduced?” (1.2.312). Cassius’ muttered soliloquy in William Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Julius Caesar immediately calls attention to his goal of manipulating people. A man well versed in rhetoric, he puts to good...

In the late 19th century, young women began to renounce the rigid gender roles of the Victorian era, dissociating themselves from the inflexible differentiations of domestic and public spheres, and ultimately from notions of maternity. Countless...

Many say that walks bring out emotions that are otherwise unfelt. In Pride and Prejudice, Austen creates walks to portray characters’ emotions and revelations. When looking into Darcy and Elizabeth’s relationship, walks serve as important venues....

“…man cannot endure for long the absence of meaning. And meaning, in it most basic sense, is pattern. If man cannot find pattern in his world, he will try by any means at his disposal to create it, or at least imagine it” (Webb 55). Aristotle...

“The absence of action is intrinsic to Beckett’s vision of despair” Show how inactivity is linked to Beckett’s portrayal of a dystopia.

Hamm’s realisation of the futility of the search for a meaning to life leads him to a state of satisfaction in...

Admirable qualities of men in Virgil’s The Aeneid include bravery, honor, and courage, but a woman’s value is based less on their power, wit and brains and more on their beauty, or lack of beauty. There are many instances within The Aeneid where...

In his essay “The Achievement of Desire,” Richard Rodriguez acts as both a writer and reader in response to a book written by Richard Hoggart entitled The Uses of Literacy. Rodriguez discovers a parallel between his own life and the life of what...

Because of his past, the protagonist in D.H. Lawrence’s novel Sons and Lovers is a perfect example of a character crippled with the incapability to hold fast to a relationship. Paul Morel had three significant relationships in the novel that all...

How can art and warfare be reconciled? It would appear that art would have no place on the battlefield, where men are too concerned with survival and personal glory to indulge in aesthetic appreciation. The combination of art and Aeneas’ shield in...

To understand T.S. Eliot as a writer, one must look at his own view of creative writing and his passion for tradition. Eliot’s idea of tradition can be misinterpreted: “Most often it is perceived as a smug and pompous intransigence to change…...

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice and Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations focus on the themes of money and social class. In both novels, money plays a significant role in shaping and directing human motives and actions. A direct connection can be...

One of the most distinguishing aspects of Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse Five is the structure in which it is written. Throughout the novel, Billy Pilgrim travels uncontrollably to non-sequential moments of his life, or as Vonnegut says, “paying...

It is hard to evaluate and study the mythic character of Robin Hood without considering his significant other, the fair Maid Marian. Though Marian does not appear in the original legend, by the sixteenth century she becomes an essential part of...

In Of Mice and Men by John Steinbeck, the characters’ hands represent all that is wrong with the men and their society. Lennie’s paws, Candy’s missing hand, and Curley’s gloved limb, the characters’ pathology reveals itself in ways that are more...

Mildred Pierce (Michael Curtiz, 1948) is a dynamic film that attempts to reconstruct a post-war economy by teaching lessons about the importance of gender roles and a balanced family to the men and women in the theaters. Mildred Pierce...

“After judgement done, mercy shown and redemption promised, the depiction of the hellish trinity- Satan, Sin and Death- appears grotesque.” Discuss.

In opposition to the Holy Trinity (God the Father, God the Son and God the Holy Ghost), Paradise...

In Martin Scorsese’s 2002 film Gangs of New York, the two main characters—Amsterdam Vallon (played by Leonardo DiCaprio) and Bill “the Butcher” Cutting (played by Daniel Day-Lewis)—attend a ‘Tom’ show (a stage adaptation of Uncle Tom’s Cabin) in...

In a 1929 review of The Threepenny Opera, Felix Salten wrote:

...the young Weill’s music is as characteristic as Brecht’s language, as electrifying in its rhythm as the lines of the poems, as deliberately and triumphantly trivial and full of...

In the introduction for Hamlet in William Shakespeare: A Textual Companion, Gary Taylor writes that “of all the two-text plays, Hamlet comes closest to Lear in the scale and complexity of the textual variation apparently resulting from authorial...

As A.E. Haigh notes, Aristotle treats Aeschylus with complete indifference in the Poetics. Throughout his writings, the standards of dramatic writing are supplied by Sophocles and Euripides. He fully recognizes Aeschylus’ role in the introduction...

When Anton Chekhov began his play The Cherry Orchard in December 1902, he intended it to be a farce in four acts. Having written it during a particularly awful bout with emphysema, it took almost a year for him to send it out to Stanislavski and...