Newest Literature Essays

The core battle in the modern Feminist movement has been the battle against set gender roles. Women no longer feel that it is mandatory for them to be a mother and a housewife simply because they were born female, or that it is a man's role to be...

Truth Dawning:

The Sun as a Symbol for Meursault's Awareness in Albert Camus' The Stranger

In his novel "The Stranger," Albert Camus uses the relentless Algerian sun as a metaphor for the awareness of reality that pursues his main character,...

In many of the metaphysical poems in John Donne's literary canon, the poet assumes a voice that, as John Carey describes "...communicates itself through the dictatorial attitudes [he] adopts, through the unrelenting argumentativeness of his...

In the epic novel "One Hundred Years of Solitude," Gabriel Garcia Marquez writes about the Buendia family of mythical Macondo. Throughout the generations, the Buendias are plagued with incestuous relationships; by the end, they only succeed in...

The characters in Shakespeare's play King Lear endure immense physical, psychological, and emotional torment before meeting their demises. Shakespeare's exploration of their pain underlines two existential quandaries. First, the play's violence...

The late eighteenth century was a busy time for writers and thinkers. Affected by the French Revolution, such people routinely published their opinions for public review and comment. The entire literary community was abuzz, issuing papers and...

While in Christianity Christmas maintains certain religious icons that help school boys and girls remember the story of the birth of Christ, had Tiny Tim attempted to recite the Christian myth he likely would have earned a swift stroke of the...

Jamaica Kincaid's novel, Lucy, revolves, in large part, around the immigration and acclimation experiences of the title character, who has left her small Caribbean island to forge a new life in New York City. Yet there is another female in this...

First rule of Fight Club: "You do not talk about Fight Club. Second rule of Fight Club: You do not talk about Fight Club" (Fight Club, 1999). David Fincher has directed many brilliant movies in his career, including Seven, Fight Club, and most...

Murder, sex, scandal, and drug abuse-all of these sins of the main character thread together to shape Oscar Wilde's The Picture of Dorian Gray, a dark tale of a young man who sells his soul for eternal youth while his portrait bears the scars of...

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...