Newest Literature Essays

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...

In George Eliot's novel Middlemarch, a successful and happy marriage between two characters involves the willingness to work together on their relationship. Each character must present a broad perspective, which includes the ability to know and...

In her book Towards a Recognition of Androgyny, Carolyn Heilbrum defines androgyny as "a condition under which the characteristics of the sexes, and the human impulses expressed by men and women, are not rigidly assigned (Heilbrum 10). In Thomas...

One of the main themes in Shakespeare's King Henry IV, Part 1, is Prince Hal's "act of becoming" as he moves from Falstaff's "sweet wag" (I.ii.23) to King Henry's "fair rescuer" (V.iii.48). The significance of the scenes at Boar's-Head Tavern,...

In the novel Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe uses Okonkwo's story to elaborate a deeper, more comprehensive understanding of the cultural values of African tribes. Achebe wrote Things Fall Apart as a rebuttal to Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness....

When Christopher Morley explains in Where the Blue Begins that "All cities are mad: but the madness is gallant. All cities are beautiful: but the beauty is grim," he may not realize how closely he is describing the city illustrated in Jazz, a...

In Henrik Ibsen's acclaimed play Hedda Gabler, the main female character, Hedda Gabler, is a modern woman striving to attain her desires through manipulation. She persistently endeavors to create a world that matches her masculine character by...

Hamlet and Macbeth are two of William Shakespeare's most famous plays. Each share not only fame, however, but format: Both feature main characters with tragic flaws that become their demise. In the cases of Hamlet and Macbeth, this flaw is...

William Golding's The Lord of the Flies is not simply a book about outward conflict between individuals. It is, rather, a novel about one's inner being. When the formerly-civilized British boys of Golding's novel are stranded on a desert island...

In order to fully understand the meaning of a text, different approaches are used in analyzing or interpreting literature. When dealing with Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice, one approach that is particularly appropriate is the...

Many consider Franz Kafka one of the most prominent and influential writers of the twentieth century (Votteler 204). Many of his works, mostly short stories, met with critical acclaim only after his death in 1924. His stories usually present, "a...

Why does Hawthorne give Hester Prynne the name Hester? Hawthorne himself, as is well known, changed his family name from Hathorne, to distance himself from those Puritan ancestors whose achievements and excesses haunted his fiction. The Scarlet...

Adolescence is a confusing and vulnerable time in any young woman's life. Unfortunately, the sexual decisions one makes as an immature youth can set a dreary path for a woman's future. Unhealthy sexual lives such as these are displayed in Toni...

The examination of philosophy requires an in-depth look at two aspects of the philosopher. First one must examine their writings to grasp their points and perspectives, and then one must be able to examine the philosophers' personal lives to see...

The Brothers Karamazov, by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, exaggerates the extremes of Russia, saying that "[Russians] need continually...two extremes at the same moment, or they are miserable and dissatisfied and their existence is incomplete. They are wide,...