Newest Literature Essays

Vengeance, chaos, uncertain honor and untimely death-whether describing the fall from grace of a noble king, impassioned General, or valiant warrior, each arises in the historically based tragedies of William Shakespeare. Coriolanus,...

Over the course Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie resides in several communities, each of which play an important role in the story, and serve as essential influences on Janie's life. At different stages in her life,...

Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, mainly takes place in an Oregon psychiatric hospital ward controlled by Nurse Ratched according to a precise schedule and strict rules. The narrator, Chief Bromden, describes many patients in this ward,...

In their Lyrical Ballads, Samuel Taylor Coleridge and William Wordsworth experimented with traditional forms by interpreting them in a fresh manner. Although they garnered little attention upon their publication, the Ballads stepped outside of...

Achilleus' defilement of the body of Hektor is a grotesque and elaborate moment in the story of the Iliad, while all of the other bodies killed in the epic are either carried back by their comrades or left to the vultures. His treatment of the...

In literature, an author will often choose to portray a turning point in a novel through a change in setting. This transformation alerts the reader to take notice of not simply the plot development but also many other things about the work. For...

Most of the attention in William Shakespeare's Hamlet is directed toward the play's namesake the Prince of Denmark or at the least King Claudius, the villainous uncle who murdered his brother and seduced his wife. Critics and readers alike...

Mark Twain examines the relationship between moral codes and their effect on society through the characters he develops in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Twain constructs a unique moral code for each individual character based on that...

Harold Bloom asserts that "Our ideas as to what makes the self authentically human owe more to Shakespeare than ought be possible..." (15). If this is true, then the Prince of Denmark himself in Shakespeare's Hamlet is the epitome of humanity in...

Mary Ann Evans, born in Warwickshire, England, wrote the novel The Mill on the Floss during the Victorian era of 1859 under the pseudonym George Eliot. In keeping the Victorian mindset, the novel encompasses many stereotypes of gender roles for...

Jane Austen is one of the most revered female writers in the history of literature. Her accomplishments with her novel Pride and Prejudice are still recognized to this day. This satire has withstood the test of time largely because of the...

The late 1950s and '60s saw a merging of government and corporation. For the most part, this took place during the Eisenhower administration. This new political climate seemed to be too powerful to many in the beatnik generation. One of these is...

In the year 1373 A.D., thirty-year-old Lady Julian lay on her deathbed in Norwich, England, after suffering for weeks from an unknown illness (Julian VII). Around the year 3100 B.C., the war of Mahabharata broke out in India, leaving villages in...

"So that troubled time continued, woe that never stopped..." (Beowulf 38)

In the epic poem Beowulf, the relation of aggression and heroism is complicated and challenging, especially when a contemporary reader is introduced to views expressed from...

In Leviathan from 1651, philosopher Thomas Hobbes reflects on "the time wherein men live without other security than what their own strength and their own invention shall furnish them withal... the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and...

There is no such thing as a perfect family, or a perfect person for that matter, but the Compson family from Toni Morrison's The Sound and the Fury has endless problems. The Compson's situation becomes so tragic that it leads to anger, remorse,...

The most common distinction between a tragedy and a comedy is the arc of plot development. Generally speaking, a comedy moves from a world of disorder into a world in which everything is put back together again. A tragedy, on the other hand,...

World War I was a conflict fueled by territorial desires and nationalism. This very sentiment is captured in Erich Remarque's novel All Quiet on the Western Front. In the novel, the main characters, all young soldiers, come to understand that war...

Voltaire's Candide bears the mark of a piece written during a time of reform. It is heavy with satire, poking fun at whatever issues become tangled in its storyline. The subjects tackled range from the political to the religious, and each receives...

Frederick Douglass's Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave brings to light many of the injustices that African-Americans faced in the 1800s under Southern slavery. The story of Douglass's life is presented in a way that...

Romance and sexuality are not unfamiliar concepts to the typical Victorian sensational novel. Reversing and deconstructing these themes, however, marks a more sophisticated sensation novel and makes for a more enduring literary work. This...

Although his methods have largely been discredited, Sigmund Freud's theories about the unconscious, the subconscious, and repression are extremely useful when applied to literary texts. None of the three novels discussed here - Jane Austen's Emma,...

"We feel safer with a madman who talks than with one who cannot open his mouth," stated the French philosopher E.M. Cioran. Though seemingly counterintuitive, this statement is undoubtedly true, begging us to question what it is about silence that...

Perhaps no medieval work of literature is as rich in the concept of games and play as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. The tales are framed by the very idea of a game, i.e. the game of telling stories while on a pilgrimage. However, the real games in...