Newest Literature Essays

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...

When the film “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” debuted, critics were almost entirely unanimous in their reverence for the film. But although many pundits agreed on the overall quality of the film, they tended to disagree on the film’s most...

“The Flying Dutchman” is a nautical myth about a ghost ship fated to traverse the ocean waves for all eternity. The story is rooted in the legend of Hendrik van der Decken, a 17th-century Dutch Captain who dared to sail beyond the Cape of Good...

In his comedies, Shakespeare critically examines the nature of female and male friendships as they relate to sexual desire. Specifically, Shakespeare contrasts the strong, faithful bonds of female sisterhood with the chaotic, contentious...

In Maxine Hong Kingston’s semi-autobiographical memoir Woman Warrior and Alice Walker’s short essay “In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens,” the mother figure, the “Woman Warrior” in each tale, plays an important role in shaping the author’s...

In the novel The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald and the play Death of a Salesman by Arthur Miller, both authors use their characters’ living space, the house, as a metaphor for the attainability of the American Dream of security, wealth, and...

Frank Chin’s gripping afterword to the novel No-No Boy emphasizes the crucial influence of John Okada’s literary pursuits in his own life as an Asian-American writer. In a world where words had formerly danced across the pages of books to the sole...

“The white man is very clever…He has put a knife on the things that held us together and we have fallen apart.”

Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart is a prime example of African literature that demonstrates the clash between cultures and...

Mary Rowlandson’s The Sovereignty and Goodness of God recounts her experience of being captured by a group of Native Americans. Rowlandson’s description of this trek is highly subjective and reflects her personal beliefs as well as the values of...

In the Victorian era, appropriate etiquette and manners were predetermined for both men and women. The society in which they lived maintained stereotypical gender roles more rigidly defined than at the present. The coming of age was difficult for...

Repetition in the Aeneid

Ancient Rome was highly dependent on repetition; a repetition of Greek Architecture, repetition of the Olympian Gods, and even a repetition of Greek Literature. This is not to say that Roman culture was a cheap knock-off of...

The Prejudice of Perspective

For many years, film makers have strived to capture the essence of Jane Austen in their films. While not all have been able to accomplish this task, all have been successful in positing unique readings of the novel....

Emily Dickinson’s poem “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant” speaks of the universal idea of truth and the notion that truth should be revealed gradually. The language is vague, however, and deconstructs itself in many ways. Lack of punctuation,...