Newest Literature Essays

In Nathaniel Hawthorne's novel The Scarlet Letter Hester Prynne accepts that she has sinned and realizes that she must pay the price for her crime. In doing so she becomes overwhelmed with courage and conviction and assumes a redemption that is...

C.S. Lewis uses a secondary world, Narnia, to convey complex, thought-provoking messages to readers of The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe. This paper examines the way a selection of Narnia’s key characteristics prompt debates over logic and...

In “Women and Men in Othello: ‘what should such a fool/Do with so good a woman?’,” critic Carol Thomas Neely asserts that nearly all rational thought in Othello comes from women. In Neely’s view, the men of Othello are too consumed by pride,...

"[H]e would sit on his big rocking horse, charging madly into space, with a frenzy that made the little girls peer at him uneasily." This passage, from D.H. Lawrence's "The Rocking-Horse Winner," describes the "mad little journey" of Paul as he...

At first glance, the system of ethics presented by Euripides in his masterpiece Medea seems to parallel the systems found in several other tragedies of ancient Greek theatre. This system of helping friends and harming enemies, which recurs...

The main characters in Shakespeare’s Tragedy of Julius Caesar have distorted self-perception, showing throughout the play that they see themselves as actors in a great historical play rather than actual people (Van Laan 139). Brutus, Antony,...

Pauline Breedlove would be quite a sight. This minor character in Tony Morrison’s novel The Bluest Eye has a missing front tooth and a severe limp that seem to mirror her hollow and warped family life. When looking at the novel from a Freudian...

According to the Marxist theoretician Louis Althusser, society's class structure and gender roles depend primarily not on economics, but on the power of attitudes and ideas. In Edith Wharton's classic work, The House of Mirth, characters show...

Elizabeth Smith

Professor Colin Dickey

Eng 640

22 October, 2006

Surrey's Innovations and Achievements in His Aeneid

Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, is credited as the inventor of English blank verse. In addition to this, he translated books II and IV of...

Great Expectations is a novel which, in its first part, focuses largely on the education and upbringing of a young boy, Pip. Orphaned at a young age, he is raised "by hand" by his older sister and her husband, a blacksmith. Written from the adult...

The images of stones, bones, and tar form a motif in Helena Maria Viramontes's Under the Feet of Jesus. From Alejo's sickness to the encounter with the nurse, these images are continually linked to each other to depict a wide range of the...

Susan Glaspell was only twenty-four-years-old when she covered the Hossack murder in Indianola, Iowa as a journalist. It would be many years before Glaspell would write her breakout play Trifles, a play that bears remarkable similarities to the...

Human nature undeniable has many facets is undeniable. Whether or not some character traits are superior to others, however, is debatable. One such deliberation is whether sense invariably triumphs over sensibility. Through her characters...

In modern literature, suspense and tension are almost essential in producing works that are both successful and interesting to the reader. These two aspects of literature are especially important in Truman Capote's novel, In Cold Blood, which...

Every night as I gazed up at the window I said softly to myself the word,

paralysis. It had always sounded strangely in my ears, like the word gnomon

in the Euclid and the word simony in the Catechism. But now it sounded

to me like the name of some...

American society is rarely content with its present state. Rather, it constantly seeks ways to improve and enhance the current standard of living. Ideally, these changes should be paving the path to a better future, one in which hostility and...

Ernst Lubitsch's sparkling and elegant comedy, Trouble in Paradise, centers around three characters: a male thief, a female thief, and a wealthy widow. The bare bones of the characters suggest predation and immorality, but the storytelling...

The first U.S. Poet Laureate for three consecutive years (from 1997-2000), Pinsky has succeeded in much more than poetry. In 1984, for example, he was the author of an interactive fiction game called Mindwheel; today, he is the poetry editor for...

The vignettes and anecdotes interspersed throughout John Steinbeck's Cannery Row may, at first sight, seem tangential. Yet they are fundamental to the novel, not least because the plot line--throwing a party for Doc--would be insufficient to...

In the German films of the Expressionist Era of 1920-1927, class and wealth distinctions between people were presented visually in a variety of ways. All the films produced in this time period were silent, so distinctions of any kind between human...

A recurring theme that can be found in Thomas Pynchon's novel The Crying of Lot 49 is the conception that chaos has a tremendous effect on society. Pynchon engages in a dualistic method of literary technique to engender the realization of the...

Beowulf is an important text in the history of British literature as it is the first notable work to be written in the English language. Yet, it is significant beyond its chronological status. Containing both Christian and pagan elements, Beowulf...

The novels Things Fall Apart and The Joys of Motherhood both present Nigeria as a competitive, consumption-crazed country. Each novel, therefore, also creates a parallel between Nigeria and capitalist, Western societies--yet each one shows that...

Sylvia Plath composed her most famous - and infamous - poem "Daddy" at a time in her life when she must certainly have been contemplating suicide, or at the very least was in the grip of a devastating depression. At this point Plath, having been...