Newest Literature Essays

It is tempting to approach a novel with a predetermined perspective or goal, to which all passages and plot events can be forced to comply. With this approach, the story theoretically makes more sense; the messages to walk away with are neatly...

In F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, as Jay Gatsby delves into his pursuit of wealth and need for materialism, his hopes and aspirations become shattered in a world of unobtainable and unreachable possibilities. While Jay Gatsby confidently...

This Great Stage of Fools: The Journey of Delusion and Deceit in

Spenser's The Faerie Queene and Shakespeare's King Lear

Perhaps more than any other period in British history, the English Renaissance embodied the themes of deception and...

Armed with a view that strongly opposes the ideas presented by rational egoism, Fyodor Dostoevsky conducts an all-out assault against the theory in his 1864 novella, Notes from Underground. The narrator is a sick, pessimistic man who remains...

Virginia Woolf's creation of the main character in the novel Orlando relies upon a certain amount of "wordplay" in order to maintain her androgynous nature. But what is androgyny according to Woolf; to what degree does this gender mixing occur?...

'Oh! I feel an emotion even when I am relating this; methinks I see Pamela at this instant, with all the pride of ornament cast off.'

(Tickletext in Shamela - Henry Fielding)

Richardson's notion that to relate an emotion in ink just as it in the...

Early on in Marlow's journey to the heart of the Congo, he encounters the chief accountant for the Company; later, he and his crew find an abandoned hut, formerly occupied by a "white man." In these two scenes, Conrad puts forth a series of...

In S/Z, Roland Barthes so thoroughly maps out his narrative theory that he leaves little room for problematic tales such as Turn of the Screw. While Barthes' example text Sarrasine revolves around a central unknown - the identity of the strange...

Having subdivided the text into three distinct parts, namely, the State, the Church and the Commons, Gower's Prologue addresses all three estates from its stylistic "medial" point. Although initially dedicated to the king, this poem addresses all...

Donne is sick and his poetry is sick.

- Stanley Fish

Fish's comment, though extreme in its reductive appraisal, is nevertheless understandable. He may find Donne's poetry objectionable on three accounts: style, explicitness, and morbidity. With...

Many poets draw on the theme of nature to symbolize the message they are trying to convey. In many cases, nature is juxtaposed with artistic design to emphasize the conflict or the relationship between the natural and the human worlds. Millar...

Compared to the poetry prior to the 20th century, the poetry of T.S. Eliot rings vibrant, unconventional and inventive. Eliot's poem "Journey of the Magi" is typical of his style and illustrates how Eliot's poetry changed the genre forever. In its...

Sexuality has always been a powerful tool for writers: it can make heroes or break them, forge relationships or destroy them, suggest utter misery or heavenly bliss. Ken Kesey's One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest offers a unique take on this theme:...

As one of the most significant moments in Shakespeare's King Lear, the scene described in Act 4, Scene 6, lines 131-146 provides insight into the parallels within the play and offers a definition of true meaning through irony. King Lear is the...

In his early poem "The Rhodora," Ralph Waldo Emerson says, "If eyes were meant for seeing, than beauty is its own excuse for being." If one were to ask the speaker in Robert Frost's "The Most of It" how he feels about Emerson's quote, there would...

Alone in his childhood home, his father buried and his mother married to another man, Hamlet laments, "O that this too too sullied flesh would melt, thaw and resolve itself into dew" (1.2.129-30). Hamlet brings up suicide early in Act I and...

Families in Ulysses and One Hundred Years of Solitude are often breeding grounds for distortion and curses, not of the stability and progress expected of most kin relations. Genealogies are either perverted or unsuccessful: The BuendÃa line, with...

...'twas amazing to imagine where it was he learned so much humanity; or, to give his accomplishments a juster name, where 'twas he got that real greatness of soul, those refined notions of true honour, that absolute generosity, and that softness...

W. E. B. Du Bois, in The Souls of Black Folk, seems to be speaking for a raceless society where the quality of one's character was the sole basis for being judged. Yet this is not what Du Bois saw in his day and it is not what we see today. The...

The introductory paragraph of "Fall of the House of Usher" (90-91) is a sharp plunge into the deep, haunting tone of this story. The language of the narrative immediately brings the reader into the surreal and horrific world of the Ushers as the...

Edna Pontellier's domestic situation is nothing out of the ordinary for a wealthy New Orleans family. Her roles as a housewife and a mother exemplify society's expectations of upper-class women during the Victorian era. Edna's burning desire to...

"The dream-vision appears personal and private." Discuss

Despite their frequent internal contradictions and their transitive, pseudo-empirical character, dreams can make inexplicably authoritative claims to factuality. Accordingly, the dream-vision...

Near the conclusion of The Late Mattia Pascal, after Mattia has returned from his two-year absence and reclaimed his name, he wonders what the point of his extraordinary life was. Mattia's fellow librarian, Don Eligo, contends, "it proves that...

When The Crucible opened on January 22, 1953, audiences greeted it with lukewarm applause. Critics did what they do best by berating the new play. What is now arguably the most influential allegorical play on the subject of Communism written...