Newest Literature Essays

"I have the honour to attend Court regularly. With my documents. I expect a judgment. Shortly. On the Day of Judgment." Bleak House.

In a novel so acutely dedicated to exposing the real and actual misery of its characters, very little of it arises...

Today, most Americans can only imagine what the horrors of the Holocaust must have been like - and, to be frank, they are probably very glad that they have no personal experiences to draw on. However, the Holocaust, and other catastrophic events...

Albert Camus's novel The Stranger is an extremely explicit work describing violent acts witnessed by a narrator who seems to be wholly unaffected by their brutality. The novel begins with death - "Mamman died today" (3) - and ends with the...

In "The Knight's Tale", Chaucer clearly draws on themes used by other writers, and is particularly influenced by the work of Giovanni Boccaccio. In Boccaccio's Teseida dell Nozze d'Emilia, he creates the character of Emilia, with whom the Theban...

Toni Morrison's Bluest Eye is a tragic narrative of how one black community loathes itself simply for not being white. Yet, even more tragic is the fact that an innocent little girl, Pecola, also comes to hate herself for not being white. She...

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn correlates extremely well with novels like The Catcher in the Rye in that it illustrates the profound, omnipresent difficulties, with which characters like Huck and Holden must struggle as they are growing up....

Edgar Allan Poe is known for his thrilling tales of madmen, cunning murderers, and intense, claustrophobic situations. "The Cask of Amontillado" is one such tale. From the very beginning of the story, the narrator's unreliable nature shines...

"Blessed are those in whom grace shines so copiously that love of food does not arouse excessive appetite, but lets them hunger after righteousness" (2.23.150-154). On the sixth terrace of Purgatory, a tree speaks these words, communicating a...

Franz Kafka's novella The Metamorphosis is as a disturbing look at the absurdity of life-and is literature at its most unsettling and most introspective. Throughout much of his life, Kafka suffered from insecurity and internal torment. An...

THE ODYSSEY BOOK III: THE LORD OF THE WESTERN APPROACHES

Book Three illustrates a number of important ongoing themes of The Odyssey. Books One through Four are called "The Telemacheia." They relay the tale of Odysseus' son, Telemachus, and his...

Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms features the numbing experiences of Lieutenant Federico Henry while serving in Italy during World War I. Despite serving as such a dismally despondent milieu, the war actually acts as a powerful catalyst in...

Antigone travels to WWII France

No doubt, the most famous theatrical version of Antigone is the Greek original. Sophocles dramatized Antigone's choice and fate first, but he certainly was not the only playwright to see that Antigone's story is...

"Sex is one of the constants in human experience; sexuality, one of the variables."

Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England.

Sexuality in Renaissance England was ambiguous. The current common idea or definition of "homosexual" did...

The word apocalypse derives from the Greek word meaning "revelation", lending its name to the last book of the New Testament, The Book of Revelations. It refers to a prophetic vision which, through elaborate and often violent symbolism, signals an...

"And that was the October Week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young anymore..."

So begins Ray Bradbury's dark carnival fantasy, Something Wicked This Way Comes. Age and the loss of innocence are strong themes in this story: the boys...

Through experience and suffering, one tightens one's grasp on reality. In William Shakespeare's King Lear, the characters' impressions of their society change as their status changes. Lear's and Gloucester's views of their once perfect society is...

In his impassioned paean "Ode to the West Wind", Percy Bysshe Shelley focuses on nature's power and cyclical processes and, through the conceit of the wind and the social and political revolution prompted by the Peterloo massacre of August 1819,...

We meet the character of Mark Antony three times before Julius Caesar's death, though he speaks little and we do not get much of an indication of his character. Antony fully enters the play exactly halfway through, when he makes a gripping speech,...

Although Adam Smith is considered a great defender of commercial society and Jean-Jacques Rousseau one of its prominent critics, both thinkers share certain criticisms of the division of labor. The two acknowledge that splitting tasks among people...

Although Simone de Beauvoir is widely considered a primary influence on contemporary feminism, she notably criticizes women in her most famous book, The Second Sex. In illustrating the history of female oppression, Beauvoir emphasizes all the...

The Alfarabi and Averroes texts take unique approaches to topics discussed by Aristotle in Politics and by Plato in his Republic. It is important to understand these approaches in relation to each other because it is the similarities and...

Nathaniel Hawthorne's popular short story "Young Goodman Brown" incites mystery and intrigue in its readers for several reasons. "Young Goodman Brown" produces a multitude of questions and interpretations as to the precise events of the...

In "Two Lectures," Michel Foucault criticizes historical materialism for inadequately explaining social phenomena. He derides academics that use bourgeois domination to explain a diverse range of social trends, including the exclusion of madness...

The entertainment of a Harlem cabaret hypnotizes Helga Crane, the protagonist of Nella Larsen's Quicksand. She loses herself in the "sudden streaming rhythm" and delights in the sexually suggestive moves of the dancers. Helga is "blown out, ripped...