Newest Literature Essays

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neal Hurston uses language as a tool to show the progression of the story. Throughout the novel, Hurston uses a narrative style that is split between poetic literary prose and the vernacular of Southern...

The novel The Sorrows of Young Werther engages with a complex discourse of communication. It deals with a society highly lacking in personal communication, yet desperately in need of it. Although Werther longs for intimate face to face...

Bop jazz divorced itself from its mainstream predecessor when musicians like Charlie Parker, Dizzy Gillespie, and Thelonious Monk began to emphasize fast tempo and improvisation over the predictable music of the swing era. These renegade musicians...

Chapter 33 of Herman Melville’s novel Moby Dick, titled “The Specksynder,” is another of those non-narrative interstitial chapters that serves to give fits to many first-time readers, but that, like the others, contains within it a symbolic and...

When T. S. Eliot wrote The Waste Land in 1922 he was a self-proclaimed atheist. Some six years later, he described himself as an adherent to anglo-catholic Christianity and thus wrote the Four Quartets. As is possible to postulate, some scholars...

There is no doubt that immoral people can spring from all walks of life, Tall, short, rich, poor and everything in between – any of these can fall victim to the vices of the human spirit. When sex and money mix, a potentially dangerous (but...

In “Desert Places,” Robert Frost describes the snowfall upon a field as darkness falls in passing. By first impression, it seems to be a simplistic idealist image of nature. However, beneath the surface of the snow, Frost breathes darker...

J.D. Salinger’s novel The Catcher in the Rye and Joseph Heller’s novel Catch-22 reveal a concern for innocence within each protagonist. Salinger and Heller center their novels on questions relating to innocence: Holden Caulfield’s “where did the...

Sherman Alexie composed “The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven” as a series of digressions that shed light on the inner demons of the narrator. The story clearly demonstrates elements of Native American folklore, which are appropriate for...

“Out of the ground the Lord God made to grow every tree that is pleasant to the sight and good for food, the tree of life also in the midst of the garden, and the tree of knowledge of good and evil,” Genesis reads (Gen 2.9). In the Genesis story...

Toni Cade Bambara’s “The Lesson” and Alice Walker’s “Everyday Use” explore the Black Empowerment Movement of the 1970’s. Although slavery had been outlawed for over a hundred years, lack of education and economy proved to be the modern day...

Antony and Cleopatra’s love for one another is the prominent theme throughout the play, and although both characters profess to an incomparable “peerless” love, they encourage doubt in the audience by acting in a manner that appears to contradict...

The community featured in Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice has entrenched societal systems known as “propriety”. This “propriety” is a cultural code of conduct that dictates the lifestyles of the cultural citizens and defines success for the...

In My Antonia, the prairie, with its dogtowns, creeks, and grassy cliffs, is as prominent a force as Jim Burden or Antonia Shimerda, in that it becomes their home and playground in childhood and shapes their consciousness in adulthood. The...

It has been said that the true power of beauty is felt most deeply by those who have caught but a glimpse of its potential; those able to see its ethereal quality without demanding more. Perhaps, some have said, the fragility of aesthetic beauty...

Often, authors develop a central idea in a novel by presenting it repeatedly in differing forms throughout the work. Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov is a perfect example of this technique. Specifically, over the course of the...

In order to highlight the underestimated value of women in Victorian society, Elizabeth Gaskell develops the character of Margaret: a powerful and independent woman who does not allow herself to adhere to patriarchal Victorian conventions. Through...

Virginia Woolf’s answer to Mr. Ramsay’s philosophical pursuits in To the Lighthouse is a reconciliation of both worlds – subjective perception and interpretation, and external objectivity. The first chapter of the novel is entitled “The Window,”...

According to Soren Kierkegaard, there are three categorizations of people based on their motive and actions: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the religious. In The Seducer’s Diary, Kierkegaard presents the character of Johannes as a typical...

MARK but this flea, and mark in this,

How little that which thou deniest me is;

It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee,

And in this flea our two bloods mingled be.

Thou know'st that this cannot be said

A sin, nor shame, nor loss of maidenhead;

Yet...

A statistician would balk at the idea of analyzing women in Hamlet: as there are only two members of the fairer sex in the entire cast, surely any observations drawn are unreliable. However, when approaching Hamlet, it is best to remember that...

Though in the beginning of Kenneth Branagh’s screen adaptation of Henry V Derek Jacobi implores that we try to “think” when the players speak of Agincourt that we “see” the commotion (Prologue. 27), we soon realize that pretending is not...

Like a sculpture etched in bas-relief, the intrigue of The Tempest is depicted on raised stone, but the story’s substance depends entirely on a realm of negative space. To grasp the gender discourse present in Shakespeare’s drama, one must...

Frankenstein’s Creature is, to be sure, an essential actor in the unraveling of Shelley’s narrative. For this reason, it is logical and arguably necessary to question his unnamed status throughout the novel. He is described as many things: a “...