Newest Literature Essays

Religious Duties of Proverbs 3:1-12

According to some, King Solomon was inspired by the Holy Ghost to write the poetic Book of Proverbs. All of Solomon’s writings have literary significance, and the third chapter of Proverbs is outstanding not only...

The Spiritual Doldrums of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary

The narrative of Flaubert’s Madame Bovary cannot be completely separated from the commentary on religion and spiritual deficiency in the novel. Segments of Flaubert’s masterpiece are clearly...

1. Introduction

Fog appears in many of Eugene O’Neill’s works. In Long Day’s Journey into Night, O’Neill uses not only fog but the foghorn as symbol. This paper will analyze the function of the fog and the foghorn in the play, with particular...

“King Henry’s Competence as a Ruler in Henry V”

Often remembered for his wild and boyish characteristics, King Henry assures his fellow English and those who oppose him that he has evolved from Prince Hal into a competent king. Although some of...

In “A Supermarket in California,” Allen Ginsberg uses the American supermarket as an extended metaphor for a poet’s mind and experiences. In this supermarket of the mind, the poet can select images and inspirations much as one would search for...

On November 22, 1963, President John F. Kennedy was assassinated while touring downtown Dallas. The death of the president and the subsequent arrest of Lee Harvey Oswald marked the beginning of a national frenzy for information. The public wanted...

Dickinson’s poem “Publication –is the Auction” deals with the speaker’s disdain toward the publication of an author’s works. The speaker seems to regard the act of publishing work as an act of selling oneself short, compromising one’s purity and...

Space is an important element in drama and is embodied by the stage itself as a representation of a space where action is presented. Plays differ significantly with regard to how they present space and how much information about space they offer...

Love as Comedic Energy: Viola and Orsino, Twelfth Night II.iv

Chosen extract: Act 2, Scene iv

In Twelfth Night, it is love’s revolutionary potential to inspire awareness, question authority, and disrupt the anti-comic balance that makes love so...

The play A Doll’s House, by Henrik Ibsen, offers a critique of the superficial marriage between Nora and Torvald Helmer. Written in 1879, the play describes the problems which ensue after Nora secretly and illegally takes out a loan from a local...

In his play Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare puts his minor characters to good use. Romeo’s friend Mercutio and Juliet’s nurse are both characters that are not considered the main focus of the play, but nevertheless play a crucial role in the lives...

The frame narratives in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town provide a profound sense of meaning to the short story cycle. Leacock’s preface presents the reader with a simplified version of the story of his life, in which we can see many parallels...

Bestselling American author Orson Scott Card once said, “Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space.” The Canterbury Tales were written over 600 years before Card made that profound statement, but clearly Chaucer would agree...

In “Sonnet X” and "The Fall of the House of Usher”, Frederick Goddard Tuckerman and Edgar Allan Poe, the respective authors, both argue that to be successful a person must have, as Richard Wilbur describes, rational and non-rational capabilities....

In his survey of American society in the early 1800's, Alexis de Tocqueville spares a few chapters to describe the American woman as he sees her. Obviously, from our more modern view, Tocqueville's claim that women and men in America enjoy a...

Though brief and comedic, Jean-Paul Sartre’s play “No Exit” offers great insight into the basic ideas of his existentialist philosophy. The commonplace setting of the work and the diversity of the basic character types allude to the applicability...

A recurring plot point in Edgar Allan Poe’s short horror stories, doppelgängers allow Poe to delve deep into characters’ consciences, enabling the reader to grasp the contrasting duality of human nature. This theme appears in Poe’s “William Wilson...

Marivaux’s play "The Game of Love and Chance" is a short work composed in the Italian style of commedia dell’arte, using stock characters and humor to explore conventional themes. Specifically, "The Game of Love and Chance" is tailored to address...

“The Human Abstract” offers an alternative analysis of the virtues of Mercy, Pity, Peace, and Love that constituted God and Man in “The Divine Image”, and can be thus considered a companion poem. The speaker argues that Pity could not exist...

John Keats’ “Ode on Melancholy” is a complex poetic investigation into the equally complex emotions of pain and sadness. Melancholy is defined as a gloomy state of mind, a dejection, depression, or despondency. Keats urges the reader to view...

At the crux of Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a love story. The story itself is quite simple but in reality is dominated by the elusiveness of love and filled with cultural customs, clashes, illusions, and ambivalence. The conception of love in...

This paper postulates a subversive reading of Henry James's The Turn of the Screw. The novella ostensibly relates the tale of a governess who struggles to shield her charges from supernatural malevolence. Yet I suggest that it is actually the...

Mikhail Bakhtin, in his essay "Forms of Time and Chronotope in the Novel," argues that the "chronotope" of a literary work – the configuration of time and space in the fictional world that the text projects – is inextricably connected with its...

Matthew Lewis' The Monk makes extensive use of the institution of family in order to underscore the implied author's ambivalent position towards the French Revolution and its aftermath. The novel recounts the tale of two families: Antonia's...