Newest Literature Essays

T. S. Eliot’s The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock demonstrates several Modernist ideas. In particular, by frequently employing imagery, repetition, alliteration, assonance, rhetorical questions and references, creatively shaping lines and...

In Gloria Naylor’s Linden Hills, the vignette of Ruth and Norman’s lives on Wayne Avenue serves as a stark contrast to the tales of the inhabitants dwelling in the adjacent, more affluent neighborhood of Linden Hills. Naylor uses this couple to...

In the novel The Sun Also Rises, Ernest Hemingway utilizes cyclical themes to communicate an underlying message about the negative effects of war. By integrating cyclicality into the novel’s main characters, Hemingway portrays how World War I...

The idea of desire is represented in several different forms in the poetry of Robert Browning. Certain poems communicate a selfless brand of desire expressed by the speaker, particularly directed towards a lover. Other poems, often directed toward...

In Dickens’s Great Expectations, the alienation of the amiable Joe Gargery speaks volumes about the values of high society at that time. Joe represents the epitome of friendship and love, but he is constantly out of his element when around...

Class Distinctions in A Journal of the Plague Year

Defoe repeatedly returns to how different classes experienced the plague of 1660’s in his pseudo-journalistic account, A Journal of the Plague Year. Defoe contrasts the experience of the poor and...

Though the authors and genres of the works Jane Eyre and Aurora Leigh are distinctive, the messages and methods of communication within both are quite comparable. Both authors aim to, among other things, expose the plight of their female...

William Blake’s Abolitionism

“I know my Execution is not like Any Body Else I do not intend it should be so.”

William Blake is arguably one of the most eccentric and enigmatic artists of the Romantic era. His ideas about religion, art and society...

Divisions within Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven

Anna Barbauld’s Eighteen Hundred and Eleven demonstrates Romantic-era Cosmopolitanism’s promotion of a global consciousness and transnational empathy. Cosmopolitan theory emerged as a result...

Voltaire wrote Candide in 1759 during an “era… in which the conventions and inequities of European society were being questioned and attacked on all sides” (v). It is apparent from the text that his ultimate goal in writing the novel was to point...

In The Crying of Lot 49, Thomas Pynchon expresses a very interesting view of entropy through the actions of Oedipa Maas. In communication theory, entropy is a measure of the efficiency of a system, as a code or language, in transmitting...

The Appalachian mining camps of the early twentieth century are a source of many difficult memories for the people affected by them. If mining is dangerous today, it was even more so then, when there were no unions and company owners had complete...

Luminosity and spiritual longing for something that had vanished a long ago are probably the two main characteristics of the last two paragraphs in Chapter 1 of “The Great Gatsby”. The scene takes place shortly after Nick's return from dinner at...

Laced with haunting similarities between the creator and the created, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein implements the Doppelganger effect to further develop the story of one man’s quest for knowledge and the journey that ensues. From the beginning of...

In William Shakespeare’s final play, “The Tempest,” the playwright spins a magical web of a story that, although being comedic and light-hearted, subtly addresses the issues of absolutism, power and the monarchy. The main character in “The Tempest...

Shakespeare is a subtle author when it comes to religion, and throughout Othello Iago never directly addresses his religious beliefs. Yet one passage in particular, that of Iago’s attempt to persuade Roderigo to control his passions, makes the...

Characters in Shakespeare’s Othello and The Tempest use stories to explain personal history or change the course of events. These are no simple tales; rather, they are complex and thought-provoking means of enriching each play and carrying action...

In Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller uses common objects as symbols of the evolving relationship between the main characters in his play. Women’s stockings and their holes symbolize the failing relationship between Willy Loman and his wife,...

Eveline as Ireland: a realistic and symbolic approach

James Joyce has always been widely regarded as a major exponent of ‘the children of a fragmented, pluralistic, sick, weird period’ as Nietzsche called the artists of the time (Bradbury, p. 7)....

It is commonly believed that one can perceive the soul through a person’s eyes. However, Shakespeare allows the audience and readers to perceive the inner spirit of a character through his words, thereby giving words magnificent power. Throughout...

The success of a story is contingent on its ability to survive. Many stories are preserved as texts, a large contributor to the survival. Stories that are non-textual must be preserved by word of mouth. In Corregidora, by Gayl Jones, the...

A major theme in the play Romeo and Juliet is the contrast between the two worlds: real and unreal. In order for true love between the star-crossed lovers to survive, it must exist in both. Romeo lives in the unreal world for the majority of the...

Ralph Waldo Emerson's optimistic ideal of the “self-reliant man” in nature resonated in the literature of many of his contemporaries. Although many agreed with Emerson's principles, however, two major writers, Herman Melville and John Keats, chose...

In Act IV, Scene II of William Shakespeare’s King Richard II, King Richard II states, “my grief lies all within; / And these external manners of laments / Are merely shadows to the unseen grief / That swells with silence in the tortured soul; /...