Newest Literature Essays

Shakespeare’s history plays tend to focus on the drama of the rise and fall of kings, as we see in both Richard II and Henry IV Part 1. While the outcome of these stories was known to the theatergoers of his time, Shakespeare retold these stories...

How and why does Shakespeare create two distinct worlds of Rome and Egypt in the first two acts of the play?

Antony and Cleopatra is set predominantly in Egypt and Rome and Shakespeare organises the plot around the conflict between East and West....

“A profound and heart-rending study of personality, class and culture” To what extent do you agree with this assessment of the novel?

Throughout “The Remains of the Day”, Mr Stevens, the protagonist, not only explores the world outside of his...

Evelyn Waugh’s “A Handful of Dust” and Ernest Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises” both feature memorable female characters. Lady Brett Ashley, of “The Sun Also Rises” is a strong and independent woman who refuses to commit to any one man. Brenda...

F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby has been hailed as one of the greatest literary works of Modernism. The Great Gatsby set the tone for the movement that defined American literature in the early decades well into the present day. The...

Sir Thomas Malory’s masterpiece version of the Arthurian tales captures the spirit of the classic tales and brings something new to the heart of the stories. An important element in the traditional Arthurian legends is the presence of magic and...

Oliver Twist is a criticism of the society in which Charles Dickens lived. The book directly criticized the Poor Laws and attempted to inspire readers of the middle and upper classes to improve the intolerable conditions in which Dickens himself...

Petruchio’s multifaceted role in The Taming of the Shrew illustrates various themes of the play, such as the concept of domestication, the economy of marriage, gender roles, and the nature of language. Through his experiences at Padua,...

Considered the precursor of Western dramatic criticism, Aristotle’s notes on The Poetics arms modern readers with the language by which tragedy is evaluated and judged. In this essay I will examine how Aristotle’s classical vision of tragedy...

America has undeniably come a long way from its dark adolescence prior to Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in becoming a global icon of ethnic diversity. No longer are African Americans relegated to indentured servitude or the “black” water...

Prior to the 1920s and the Harlem Renaissance, the voice of the African American narrative was relegated to stories derived from folk traditions. Tall tales, fables, trickster stories and preacher tales dominated the body of African American...

In Marquez’s Love in the Time of the Cholera, the relationships of the three main characters are predicated upon the different fundamental emotional needs they have. For example, Florentino needs love from Fermina, while Fermina needs not love but...

Thomas Hobbes lays his political foundation on the explicit assumption that men are equal in strength and prudence. Strength refers to bodily strength, and it is equal among men because each individual theoretically has the capability of killing...

In some sense, the stage for the debate over how best to address racial inequality was set by Booker T. Washington and W.E.B. Dubois. In the aftermath of the civil war, these two leading Black figures put forth their contrasting ideas. Towards the...

One can see easily that Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South is a novel that presents us with many dualities, sets of matching or opposing pairs. Not only does the title suggest this, but a quick glance through the chapter headings will say the...

“How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?” O’Brien asks. Winston’s answer: “By making him suffer” (214). These two characters inhabit George Orwell’s vision of a future totalitarian government that has evolved to its most...

Within George Orwell’s simple allegory Animal Farm lie lessons about the complex bonds between leadership, fraternity, and self-agency. The animals are at first subjugated by humans in a communal voiceless suffering, but Old Major inspires them...

The philosophy of Milton’s time focuses primarily on the idea of hierarchy. Hierarchy is necessary in thought because all the categories of being indicate how things are ordered and demonstrate degrees in all the dimensions (Kuntz 8). The ideas of...

Polybius concludes that “all existing things are subject to decay is a proposition which scarcely requires proof, since the inexorable course of nature is sufficient to impose it on us” (The Rise of the Roman Empire, VI. 57). He believes that a...

Sir Francis Bacon is often cited as the progenitor of the phrase “knowledge is power”. This sentiment, if true, would render helpless Catherine Morland of Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey. When the reader first encounters Catherine, she is an...

Although set in Messina, Italy, the conventions in Much Ado About Nothing are those of Elizabethan England, where marriage was seen as a business transaction and family stability was vital. This idea is explored through the fate of Hero, who has...

A stark parallel can be drawn between the two central female characters of Voltaire’s satirical philosophic thrust, Candide. It is through the tragic strife and oppression of first the Old Woman and then Cunegonde that we see two sagas woven of...

In her affectionate verse “The Shampoo”, Elizabeth Bishop addresses her lesbian partner Lota, whose great black tresses have begun to bear the signs of grey aging. Her tone is tender and her language contemplative—she marvels at the marks of age...

Rarely does a story portray self-discovery and personal enlightenment as honestly and tenaciously as Raymond Carver’s “Cathedral.” This story depicts the encounter between an initially close-minded narrator and a free-thinking blind man. As the...