Newest Literature Essays

Irresolution of Paradox in Donne’s “Batter My Heart”

John Donne’s “Holy Sonnet XIV” is filled with Biblical imagery and language suggestive of Psalmic platitude.

Batter my heart, three person’d God; for, you

As yet but knocke, breathe, shine, and...

In Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, Eddie’s death is made all the more tragic because it stems from his inability to understand – let alone articulate – his feelings. The play depicts the downfall and death of a decent man due to a fatal...

“Hell hath no fury like a woman scorned.” This popular saying, paraphrased from William Congreve's The Mourning Bride, was written nearly 1600 years after Vergil's Aeneid. Even so, the quote speaks to the Aeneid's exploration of the relationship...

Peter Quint and Miss Jessel symbolize the indistinguishable nature of both the governess and Miles’s sexuality in Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw. Whether or not these ghosts actually exist in the literal sense, Quint’s presence evokes what...

Isobel’s wildly vivid imagination serves as a powerful survival tool throughout a traumatic childhood and subsequent tumultuous transition into adulthood, providing escapism from an agonizing and often humiliating reality, and comfort that she...

The heart of conflict in Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge is the struggle to reconcile the array of conflicting social, moral and legal laws to which an individual is bound and to determine which of those deserves one’s primary allegiance....

Alfieri’s commentary on the action of the play is integral to Arthur Miller’s A View From the Bridge, communicating directly to the audience and presenting the events from a more impartial and credible perspective, forcing the viewer to consider...

Any true representation of horror, the sickening realization of the hideous or unbelievably ghastly, seems something of an impossibility. How can one speak the unspeakable? How can unimaginable terror and revulsion ever be recreated? Yet writers...

Aesthetically merging erudition and emotion through a cacophony of diverse and often dissonant voices, The Waste Land serves as a microcosm of the modern state of mind and the state of the world itself. The personality and experiences of...

Much of Dubliners revolves around the weary contemplation of mortality, the apex of which appears in the novel’s endpiece, “The Dead,” which serves as the perfect counterpart to “The Sisters,” bookending the collection of stories with a cyclic...

Imagination is the individual’s ability to create mental images through his perception of reality. It is an indispensable artistic tool that allows humans to express themselves creatively; it separates us from other living creatures. In A Portrait...

As far as last words of tragic heroes go, Shakespeare’s Othello’s are distinctly honorable. He says to Lodovico, nobleman who is returning to Venice:

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am. Nothing extenuate,

Nor set down...

What motivates Puck in A Midsummer Night’s Dream? Also known as Robin Goodfellow, the spirit Puck is based on legend contemporary to Shakespeare (OED). His origins are as curious as his character: the Oxford English Dictionary traces the origin of...

Like character actors or members of an ensemble drama, women are omnipresent in Joyce’s literary corpus. In Dubliners, for example, women are painted and developed within a variety of character framings. The reader is exposed to woman as sister...

Tolstoy uses The Death of Ivan Ilyich to show his readers the negative consequences of living as Ilyich did. Ivan Ilyich made decisions based on what others thought and what would benefit him monetarily. As death approaches, Ilyich realizes that...

In Cloud Nine, playwright Caryl Churchill examines questions of gender identity, sexuality and individual freedom as they exist within two traditional, oppressive ideological paradigms: colonial imperialism and masculine hegemony. By juxtaposing...

Many of David Hume’s writings and ideas, such as the famous “Hume’s Fork,” are common currency today. While his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding was not well-received when it was first published, it later became known as one of his major...

Remarque’s account of the horrors of the Western Front in World War I, from the common German soldier’s perspective, is a poignant reminder of the horrors of war. Dehumanisation, death and destruction are the key themes are relayed through the...

Oftentimes, modern adaptation of a classic work loses many elements of the original. This is not the case with Jane Austen’s Emma and Amy Heckerling’s film adaptation, Clueless. The adaptation closely parallels the original text, from themes to...

Thomas Hardy’s Tess of the d’Urbervilles provides social commentary on many issues prevalent in Victorian society. In particular, Hardy uses Tess’ submission to her parents, Alec d’Urberville, Angel Clare, and society as a whole to examine the...

Justice and its relationship with prejudice is the central theme of the timeless 1960 novel, Harper Lee's To Kill a Mockingbird. Its focal point is the trial of Tom Robinson, an African-American erroneously charged with the rape of a white girl,...

The central idea of Michael Ondaatje’s In the Skin of a Lion is the presentation of the marginalised voice, which is in keeping with his motivation to craft texts of post-colonial fiction. He offers an alternative version of events to reveal the...

The lash which drives [the modern slave—the slave of the factory, the sweat shop] cannot be either be seen or heard . . . This slave is never hunted by bloodhounds; he is not beaten to pieces by picturesque villains, nor does he die in ecstasies...

Beyond the brutalities that all slaves endured, females suffered the additional anguish of sexual exploitation and the deprivation of motherhood. In “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Harriet Jacobs focuses on racial subjugation but also...