Newest Literature Essays

Much of Virginia Woolf's novel To the Lighthouse takes place within her characters' minds. Although, of course, their thoughts cannot stop external happenings, they can and do stop time in one way: through memory. Thus, throughout the novel, Woolf...

"I shunned the face of man; all sound of joy or complacency was torture to me; solitude was my only consolation- deep, dark, deathlike solitude" (74). Mary Shelly's Frankenstein was written during a period known as the Romantic Era. The recognized...

Adrienne Rich uses free verse to separate herself from the male-dominated literary tradition in her poem "Diving Into the Wreck". Her poem addresses the role of women in past literature while promising hope for the future generations. Rich's...

Shakespeare's Macbeth is a male dominated play. Most of the noticeable characters in Macbeth are male, including Macbeth, Macduff, Banquo, King Duncan, and Malcolm. Despite the lack of female power by numbers, Lady Macbeth proves to be a...

In Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, protagonist Lily Bart is on a quest for happiness. In her case, happiness embodied in the image of marriage to a rich and indulgent husband and, subsequently, the ability to behave as a proper woman of...

Amy Tan’s Joy Luck Club provides a realistic depiction of Chinese mothers and their Chinese-American daughters struggling in relationships strained by tragedy, lack of communication, and unreasonable expectations. Tan criticizes mothers who intend...

In the novel, All Quiet on the Western Front, Erich Maria Remarque demonstrates, through the character of Paul Baumer, how war has obliterated almost an entire generation of men. Because these men no longer retain a place in life and are incapable...

Which man ultimately prospers: the man of integrity, or the hypocritical, unethical man? In The Fountainhead, Ayn Rand questions the relationship between the moral and the practical. Many people in real life - as well as Gail Wynand and Dominique...

World War I had a devastating effect on all of its participants, transforming and disillusioning them permanently. Ernest Hemingway, himself a participant, clearly illustrates this concept in Sun Also Rises through his protagonist Jake Barnes as...

In the poem "The Flea," John Donne uses a metaphysical conceit between a simple flea and the complexities of young romance to develop the narrator's argument for a young woman to forfeit her chastity.

By giving the flea a dual meaning, Donne...

The book and subsequent film Eight Men Out both portray one of the lowest points in professional sports in American history. Popularly known as the Black Sox Scandal, it involved members of the Chicago White Sox baseball team allegedly taking...

When is one morally sanctioned to take another's life? In Fyodor Dostoyevsky's highly acclaimed philosophical detective story, Crime and Punishment, the author casts light on several important existential and metaphysical quandaries that are...

The Victorian era was a period of great social and political upheaval, especially for women. Increasing opposition to the lack of women's political rights in relation to marriage and property laws, such as the fact that any income a woman earned...

Culture, unlike biology, should allow us to seek liberation from cruel and uncomfortable practices. But instead culture wraps us in a suffocating embrace. ... re cultures discrete or bounded? ...Who defines the boundaries of culture or allows for...

In George Orwell's 1984, Winston Smith cannot escape the state's domination. Yet his inability is not only because of government power. Rather, even if he did have an opportunity to leave Oceania, his actions indicate that he would not have the...

Vivisection, an issue explored by many different scholars, including religious, scientific, and literary, has engendered a fierce debate since its inception. Philosophers early as Aristotle and St. Thomas Aquinas began addressing issues concerning...

Arthurian legends served as a means to centralize the Celtic culture and provide the Celtic people with their own myth in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries CE. One such Celtic myth of the late fourteenth century CE is Sir Gawain and the Green...

In Cold Blood, All the President's Men and Midnight in the Garden of Good of Evil all deal with real-life crimes. Each of the authors takes a different approach to point of view, depending upon their unique relationships to the setting in which...

One of the central thematic elements of As I Lay Dying is the distinction between fact and interpretation of fact. Clearly, any objective fact can result in a multitude of subjective interpretations because the characters all have individual...

In James Joyce's short story "Clay," fate forces Maria into a nun-like existence and keeps her from realizing her dream of marriage. She seems content with her position on the exterior, but several clues suggest this is not the case. Joyce makes...

In Voltaire's Candide, the title character voyages from continent to continent in search of love and the meaning of life. On his journeys, his optimism--learned from his ever-present tutor, Pangloss--is slowly whittled away. Candide experiences...

In the political hierarchy depicted by Milton and Virgil, power rightly belongs in the hands of a man, not a woman. During the times when men are the sole leaders of the nation, a woman's possession of power and influence is viewed as unnatural...

The phrase "he was a good king" appears three times in Beowulf. The first iteration (line 11) is a homage to Shield Sheafson. By describing Sheafson in honorific terms, the poet suggests that Sneafson's offspring are also worthy of respect. The...

Jane Austen's insightful and influential novel Persuasion is an emotional tale of human conduct, and, in particular, of the moral implications of direct and indirect persuasion. The impact of the words of Sir Charles Grandison "...there is great...