Newest Literature Essays

The late 19th and early 20th centuries marked a time of empire-building for much of Europe. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad deals with one specific problem of European hegemony-the treatment of natives. Critics accuse Conrad of holding...

Book Six of John Milton's Paradise Lost is a continuation of the angel Raphael's discourse to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He is recounting the fall of Satan, and focuses on the battles that take place between the angels and rebel angels....

In Emily Dickinson's 419th untitled poem, more commonly known by its first line, "We grow accustomed to the Dark-", the speaker describes two distinct situations in which people must gradually adjust to "darkness". The first portion is fairly...

An event marked by sex and celebration, the wake in Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is inescapably bizarre. Though one might expect an air of sobriety, importance, or - at the very least - reflection to characterize a discussion of...

Throughout To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf details the many struggles of the Ramsay family and their houseguests to secure happiness and order within their lives. There are many obstructions to this basic human pursuit, but loss is one of the...

The motifs of greed and possession run throughout Frank Norris's 1899 novel, Mcteague. At the beginning of the novel, we see greed in its most undiluted and disgusting form in the Polish Jew, Zerkow, and again in a more unstable, neurotic form in...

Memories, the good and the bad, shape the character of the people that we become, as Mark Jarman demonstrates in his 1997 poem, "Ground Swell." The author effectively recreates his chilly summer mornings of surfing for the reader, through use of...

The poem "The Four Quartets" by T. S. Eliot illustrates an intricate link between the various problems and limitations of language and those of religious thought. This direct relationship is expressed through the poem's first two quartets, "Burnt...

To say that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a typical romantic ode to the wonders of love, as the title may suggest, is quite far from the truth. To the contrary, this poem enters the straggling mind of J. Alfred Prufrock, a man plagued...

The characteristics of Homeric epic are many and varied, but the key elements of the Odyssey and the Iliad can be narrowed down to two main things: a focus on one hero (Achilles and Odysseus, respectively) and the need for that hero to attain...

Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor...

Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1965, and immediately caught the attention of critics. Its publication helped to save Jean Rhys from the obscurity into which she had fallen after her previous novels, published between the First and Second World...

"[A] persuadable temper might sometimes be as much in favour of happiness as a very resolute character." (Persuasion, Ch. 12)

Persuasion seems to draw on the deep divide in the two then contemporary forms of the novel - one based on Augustan...

Edgar Allen Poe created an interesting paradigm surrounding his theory on cosmic principle. He sees the universe as God's artistic creation dispersed among humankind. Artists, namely poets, bring together the universe by breaking free of their...

Moby Dick is widely considered one of the greatest literary creations in history. The denseness of meaning, infinite possibility of interpretation, and ambiguity of implications give the text many layers. Therefore, knowing that the...

In Sophocles' play Antigone, the two sisters, Antigone and Ismene, have opposing opinions concerning which to value more - the dead or the living. Antigone places greater emphasis on her duty to honor her dead brother, Polynices, while Ismene...

The Modern Prometheus: Reworked Myth in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein

As the subtitle of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein implies, the tragic tale of Victor Frankenstein and his creation takes elements of classical myth and reinterprets them through the...

In the first fifteen chapters of A Passage to India, E.M. Forster prepares for the tragedy of the Marabar visit rather successfully. The tragedy is perceived as the failure of the Marabar expedition and its aftermath: Adela Quested's accusation of...

Military prowess is a quality attributed to many of Shakespeare's male characters. Great military men such as Hotspur, Lear, Hal and Julius Caesar share a proclivity for the military arts with Othello and Marc Antony. As a superior dramatist,...

Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried is a highly unique work, a compilation of many stories carried home by veterans of the Vietnam War. The length of the stories in the 22 chapters varies dramatically, a technique that "demonstrates well the...

Bram Stoker's use of setting to establish some of the key gothic elements to the novel Dracula proves to be crucial in developing both suspense and intrigue. This can be studied particularly closely with reference to Jonathan Harker's narrative of...

Character Juxtaposition: The Twoness of Macbeth

Shakespeare's Macbeth relays the tale of a Scottish general, at first presenting a seemingly brave and noble warrior. Macbeth is eventually prompted by ambition to seek the throne upon hearing a...

Act IV, Scene IV, of William Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale marks a shift away from the Sicilian, courtly world that dominates the previous three acts and much of Act IV. The chaos and disorder resulting from court happenings, Hermione's apparent...

John Boorman's epic movie Deliverance has long been portrayed as the ultimate 'macho' movie; a rite of passage that separates the 'men from the boys', glorifying strength and physical prowess over ethics and decency. However uncompromising this...