Newest Literature Essays

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...

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,...