Newest Literature Essays

The Greek chorus is a group of individuals who form a single entity that expresses the ideas, thoughts, and histories of a larger group. Often, it represents the consensus of the audience or of society as a whole, for example the chorus of...

Virginia Woolf’s critique of 1930s poetry as being too often an exercise in didacticism is perhaps warranted from an overall perspective. The overwhelming import of the fascist threat that rose in Franco’s Spain, however, holds a unique place in...

Anton Chekhov fought with the famed Stanislavsky over staging his play The Cherry Orchard as a tragedy. According to Chekhov, the play about a well-to-do family forced to surrender its home and orchard to a man who began life as a mere serf on...

In "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," Sir Gawain is King Arthur’s nephew and one of Camelot’s most famous knights. However, unlike other characters of medieval literature, Gawain is not ideal and static but human and real. Gawain is the epitome...

The white whale at the center of Herman Melville’s masterpiece Moby-Dick is often considered to be one of the most symbolic characters in American literature. In part, this is because not only can the white whale mean many different things to each...

The dynamic personalities of Euripides’s Bacchae all serve allegorical purposes within the play’s lines: to represent social orders within ancient Greek culture. The interactions between these characters send a clear message to the audience...

F. Scott Fitzgerald explores the decline of the American Dream in one of his most famous novels, The Great Gatsby. Although this book only takes place over a few months, it represents the entire time period of the 1920s, in which society, mainly...

Slavery's roots extend back more than two thousand years. With such a lengthy past, many arguments have arisen regarding the definition of slavery. Frederick Douglass, being a former slave in the American south, offered one definition of the term...

In Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë develops a conflict between Catherine Linton and Hareton Earnshaw and uses the resolution of their conflict to resolve that between Catherine and Heathcliff. Though their social classes and upbringings differ,...

The need to reconsider first impressions runs throughout Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice. Both Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy judge one another harshly based on first impressions, while Elizabeth also forms judgments of Mr. Wickham and Miss...

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...