Newest Literature Essays

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...

Practice What You Preach, Pardoner

"The Pardoner's Tale," written by Geoffrey Chaucer, exhibits several qualities of life, as we know it today. In this story, Chaucer writes about a man who preaches to his audience for money. This man begins...

Voltaire, as an eighteenth century French philosopher and writer, lived in a far different society than the average American college student is accustomed to today. Though Voltaire was a champion of civil liberties, he spent most of his life in a...

In The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison questions the origin and validity of truths imposed by white standards of beauty. The white standard of beauty is defined in terms of not being black, so in turn, blacks equate beauty with being white. Morrison...

In Franz Kafka's classic, The Metamorphosis, family members of Gregor Samsa, the main character who is a giant insect, ignore Gregor for a majority of the plot. Disregard for Gregor eventually obliterates him. In Oedipus the King by Sophocles,...

In Robert Frost's poem, "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening," from his book entitled New Hampshire, the poet descriptively evokes a bucolic New England winter ambience (which Frost knew quite intimately) and utilizes a simple narrative soliloquy...

A shrew, a scold, was in fundamental nature any woman that verbally defied authority in public and obstinately challenged the "axiom" of male rule. The late sixteenth century was harsh to deviants of social role and standing, and the penalty of...

Bertolt Brecht (1898-1956) lived in a period when Europe went through the most massive economic, political, and social changes. He witnessed the two World Wars, the revolutions in Austria, Germany, Hungary in 1917-1918, the uprising of Communism...

Act 2 scene 1 of Julius Caesar, from lines 1-69, is terribly important as it marks a turning point in the play. The two characters appearing are Brutus and his servant, Lucius. Brutus, having had the notion of murdering Caesar planted in his mind...

One of the significant conflicts within Renaissance culture was how to rationalize the many instances of violence which took place in a society with such strong Christian values. While some preached from the New Testament of the importance of love...

On the surface, "The Rape of the Lock", by Alexander Pope, appears to be a mild satire on the recent rise in materialism and the specifically female habit of excessive consumption. Originally published in 1712, the poem was situated among numerous...

Puritans are often mischaracterized as overly strict and moral persons whose lives revolve around killjoy attitudes and laws against all innocent social pleasures. Qualities of sympathy, charity, and compassion are rarely tied to Puritanism or...

The voice of his generation, Ernest Hemingway, captured the many complex emotions of Americans during the World War I era and provided clarity to his peers through his famous collection In Our Time. Through the stories and vignettes, Hemingway...

Aragorn Louis most probably perfectly captured the relationship between McMurphy and Ratched in saying, "Light is meaningful only in relation to darkness, and truth presupposes error. It is these mingled opposites which people our life, which make...

In his essay, A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift uses the literary devices of organization, point of view, diction and imagery to maneuver the reader into identifying the need for humans to let both logic and emotion govern decisions.

Jonathan...