Newest Literature Essays

T.S. Eliot's poem The Waste Land depicts a modern society engulfed in absolute chaos and plagued by the complications of industrialization. Image clusters from the poem vividly describe littered streets overcrowded with people, while the text...

As the narrator of Charles Brockden Brown's Wieland, Clara is unreliable. The fantastic events she recounts are unbelievable and unexplained, leading readers to question the validity of her tale. For example, she introduces the theory of...

Humanity constantly seeks change to improve itself, be it through economic restructuring, political reforms, or educational agendas. When a collection of these changes towards progress mesh nicely together, while possessing a common, encompassing...

Edward Bellamy, in his novel Looking Backward, delineates a futuristic utopia set in the twentieth century in which humanity lives in a much more collaborative and unified manner. No longer do such concepts as currency or laws exist, while the...

In each of the two short stories, "To Build a Fire," by Jack London, and "A Mystery of Heroism," by Stephen Crane, the author portrays life's realism through the thoughts, actions, and descriptions of a central character. Both characters undergo...

To the same extent that the Ancient Mariner entrances the Wedding-Guest with his 'glittering eye,' Samuel Taylor Coleridge sought to draw his audience in to The Rime of the Ancyent Marinere (1798). The poem, written by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is...

Nathaniel Hawthorne's dramatic novel, The Scarlet Letter, exposes the hypocrisy of a seventeenth-century Puritan society through the lives of two sinners, Reverend Arthur Dimmesdale and Hester Prynne. Both have committed a sin that ultimately...

Daniel Defoe shipwrecks Robinson Crusoe on a deserted island, leaving him stranded for twenty-eight years. Rather than succumb to his primal urges and animal tendencies while alone, Crusoe maintains his humanity by establishing dominance over his...

In Shakespeare, first impressions are often an implicit demonstration of a main theme. In Antony and Cleopatra, the first meeting of Antony and Octavius Caesar is no exception. In this reunion of the triumvirate, the three leaders of Rome,...

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice is a story of courtship and marriage. In Austen's world most matches were made according to circumstance and convenience. So it is with many of her young couples in the novel. The social sense of filial...

If ever Jane Austen set out to depict the moralistic chasm between Regency society and pre-Victorian propriety, she did so with Mansfield Park. To accomplish this, her characters are divided among these diverging ideologies. The majority succumb...

In the thrilling epic Beowulf, the theme of fatalism is very apparent throughout the poem. "Fate will go as it must." (Line 455) The Anglo Saxons believed that people lived life as an everyday struggle against undefeatable odds and that a man's...

There are several parallels between the ideas presented in the Socratic dialogue Meno by Plato and the ideas suggested by Walt Whitman's poetry in the first edition of his work Leaves of Grass. Though the Meno is presented as a work of philosophy,...

During times of war soldiers experience horrific atrocities that are mentally and physically crippling. Most cannot begin to comprehend these sinister and morbid images due to their lack of military experience. In Kurt Vonnegut's...

Understanding the mindset and motivations of Richard Wright while writing Native Son proves to be important in understanding the effect of the novel on society. "Wright... was caught up in a hideous present moment, the Great Depression years and...

Jane Austen's letters to her sister Cassandra, written between 1796-1801, shed much light upon the social events Austen includes in Pride and Prejudice. Frequently, the entire substance of Jane's letter was a description of a ball she had just...

In William Golding's "The Pyramid", the idea of freedom, both lost and gained, is encapsulated in the symbol of Bounce's car. Oliver is part of the events involving the car but is only a spectator, not fully understanding the manipulation that...

It is important to note that a hero is not always someone who is working for the sake of furthering a just cause and that he does not have to be admired by everyone, including the reader. In fact, John Milton presents his audience with a quite...

An air of doom and darkness hangs over the entirety of William Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury. Utilizing the negative aspects of the South that swirled around him, Faulkner skillfully molds a family--the Compsons--out of that life. Not only...

The victimization of Primo Levi must be addressed in two parts: the victimization of his body and the victimization of his humanity. The distinction, as menial as it may appear, is essential in placing blame for the horrors of his experiences in...

The dramatic monologue form used by both Robert Browning and Matthew Arnold in their poems My Last Duchess and The Forsaken Merman, respectively, serves to comment upon the condition of a woman without physically introducing a female into the...

In Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, the narrator, Jack Burden, is a fictionalized version of Warren himself. Jack expresses Warren's views, which are initially nihilistic, cynical, and escapist. He attempts to distance himself from any...

The realistic novel, characterized by its presentation of reality and rational philosophy, was a genre created in response to the romantic, or "gothic," novel and which was characterized by sensationalist escapism. In contrast to romanticism's...

In The Scarlet Letter, author Nathaniel Hawthorne uses Hester Prynne, an unhappily married seamstress, and Arthur Dimmesdale, the local Puritan clergyman, to prove that a community that forcefully suppresses the natural desires of an individual...