Newest Literature Essays

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...

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...