Newest Literature Essays

Two plays by Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman and The Crucible, both contend that society is the indifferent, sometimes brutal, force that crushes an individual. Although the plays take place in different time periods, they each convey the force...

From the bawdy Mercutio to the gentle Juliet, the characters in Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet are colorful, but purposeful. Even the most obscure characters reflect Shakespeare's calculations in the development of key themes throughout the play....

The post-World War II boom that informs today's world has no place in Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses. The post-war optimism and suburban complacency common to other American works of this period does not figure into McCarthy's novel,...

Enkidu's Deathbed Realization

The heartbreaking scenes in the seventh tablet of The Epic of Gilgamesh describe Enkidu's deathbed realization that his friendship with Gilgamesh was a one-sided affair. In this scene, Enkidu lies dying and feeling...

Poets often revise and re-revise their work, as it can be difficult to fully express the emotions they want to invoke in the reader. Just a change of one word can change the entire meaning of a line, and poetry's usual brevity requires every...

Emma, Jane Austen's most comical and spirited novel, is well received for its lively characters and engaging narrative. In yet another story of society verses sensibility, Austen weaves together a myriad of incidents to illustrate how youthful...

"A Streetcar Named Desire" is a story of damaged people. Blanche DuBois, a repressed and sexually warped Southern belle, seeks either atonement or reassurance; she wants someone to help lift the burden of her guilt for her twisted sexuality....

In many ways, the controversial last chapter of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange undermines the novel's fundamental premise. Alex's unforeseen transformation from a sadistic criminal into a consciously reformed and mature individual is not...

By the end of Hamlet, six people--not including Hamlet himself--are dead. It has been asserted that the sole reason for the bloodshed was Hamlet's inability to take speedy revenge on the king. However, a close examination into the circumstances...

Until the very end of Oedipus the King, Oedipus retains his steadfast belief in the absolute efficacy of reason and logic, basing all decisions and actions solely on these golden principles. However, as the plot runs its course, the reader can...

Bleak House, a novel by the Victorian novelist Charles Dickens, has a number of elements: comedy, tragedy, melodrama, romance, and biting social satire. The work also includes at least ten major characters, and scores of minor ones. The novel's...

Hume argues in his Enquiry that necessity and liberty are compatible, and that the dispute between the two is only due to improper definitions of the terms (Hume 92). The question that he poses in his paper is whether we are responsible for our...

Azar Nafisi was born and raised in Iran, and her credentials as an Iranian woman and scholar are not in question. Her book, Reading Lolita in Tehran, is a memoir of a certain part of her life lived in Iran, but many features of it are shared with...

Ursula K. Le Guin's short story "Sur" lends itself easily to feminist literary criticism. As a fantasy of alternate history about polar exploration, the story tells of nine women arriving at the South Pole over a year before Roald Amundsen's...

"The Miller's Tale", a ribald and bawdy fabliaux about the generation gap, youthful lust, aged foolishness, and the selfishness and cruelty of people towards each other, contains a wealth of color terms which add to and expand the meaning of this...

Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities seems simple in its narrative construction, built on the use of short sections comprised of concise chapters that may better be understood as the tales the explorer Marco Polo tells the emperor Kublai Khan....

When the Europeans arrived in Nigeria to harvest ivory and spread their religious ideals, many Africans were exploited and their cultures were irreversibly changed. Two novels, Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad and Things Fall Apart by Chinua...

The Middle Ages were marked by religious upheaval in Europe. Two new major world religions were coming to power: Islam and Christianity. The rapid success of Christianity led the Roman Catholic Church to become the dominant religious force in...

Elizabethans studied the Bible according to typological doctrine. Typology sought to resolve the problem of broken continuity between Old and New Testaments by positioning the Old Testament (the Old Law) as the foreshadowing of its own fulfillment...

In Octavio Paz's book The Double Flame, he describes three different categories of love that can arise between partners: sexuality, eroticism, and Love. The first category, sexuality, refers to the biological and instinctive urge to reproduce,...

"'Send him,' quoth [Minos], 'to our infernal king, / To doom him as best seems his majesty" (1.1.52-3). Nestled in the lengthy opening monologue by Don Andrea, these lines introduce the overarching question that Thomas Kyd's The Spanish Tragedy...

In "Oedipus Rex," the chorus represents the voice of the average citizens and contributes insight that cannot be communicated by the other characters in the play. The chorus moves along the story by announcing the arrival of characters and...

In the pastoral setting of the Forest of Arden in William Shakespeare's As You Like It, the characters are physically removed from society, and thus from the political, economic, and sexual rules that govern social life. If Arden is a paradise,...

Director Orson Welles, along with Cinematographer Gregg Toland and others, expertly controlled the atmosphere of Citizen Kane through the heavy use of long take and the occasional instance of conventional shot-reverse shot passages. Through...