Newest Literature Essays

In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare illustrates love in various forms and suggests that, like beauty, the true meaning of love exists in the eye of the beholder. Love is seen as bordering on insanity, a frivolous game of ever-changing affections, and...

Although it was written in 1776, Hume did not actually publish Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion in his lifetime; it was published three years after his death in 1779. It has been suggested that Hume, a well-known atheist, suspected that the...

Spenser's The Faerie Queene was written mainly to fulfil an allegorical purpose and to "fashion a gentleman or noble person in virtuous and gentle discipline." However, the moralistic tone is softened by the fact that the whole complex allegory is...

The Old Testament of Hebrew Bible centers on the Israelites' claim and journey to their promised land, a struggle characterized by many wars against the civilizations that inhabit their God-given territory. The Iliad by Homer depicts fourteen days...

In "Soldier's Home," Ernest Hemingway makes use of a small-town setting to provide his readers with insight into the troubled, young mind of Harold Krebs. Harold Krebs struggles to adjust to life in Hemingway's lifeless Oklahoma town shortly after...

Three codes of conduct suffuse "Sir Gawain and the Green Knight": chivalry, honor, and Christian faith. As his mystical pentangle attests, Gawain begins his quest under the auspicious perfection of all three; however, after endeavoring through...

"The function of wisdom is to discriminate between good and evil"

-Cicero-

There are villainous characters throughout the history of literature that capture our utmost fears of hatred, vengeance, and psychotic behavior. The complexity of the...

In Greek myth, Sisyphus repeatedly rolls a giant boulder up a mountain only to have it roll back down the peak every time. He serves a sentence of eternal suffering for trying to escape from Death and Hades. Like Sisyphus, the warriors of Homer's...

An exemplary knight of King Arthur's renowned court, Sir Gawain is guided by a complex set of ethos, a collection of principles symbolized by the mystical pentangle. A five-pointed star consisting of five interlocking lines, the figure represents...

In Jane Eyre, each episode Charlotte Brontë tells of Jane's life recounts a new struggle, always featuring a man and his patriarchal institution: John Reed's Gateshead, Brocklehurst's Lowood, Rochester's Thornfield, and St. John's Moor House. In...

In our modern world, the frequency of terrorist activity and the ubiquitous threat of attack has greatly affected the way Western culture has come to regard the religion of Islam. Skewed by the media, society's perceptions have reverted to the...

In Book IV of Virgil's epic The Aeneid, the gods' messenger Mercury advises the hero Aeneas that "An ever uncertain and inconstant thing is woman" (IV.768-7). As Aeneas makes his journey from the ruins of Troy to the potential glory of Latium, he...

Let your women keep silence in the churches:

for it is not permitted unto them to speak.

-I Corinthians 14:34

It is a good thing that women religious writers, especially Marguerite Porete, did not listen to this scripture and spoke up in church....

The very form of the sentence does not fit her.

It is a sentence made by men;

It is too loose,

Too heavy,

Too pompous for a woman's use

-Virginia Woolf, in her Collected Essays, 'Modern Fiction.'

Eliza Haywood's novels are important documents not only...

The narrator and Bartleby - principle characters of Herman Melville's Bartleby, the Scrivener - are opposite sides of the same coin. Their perspectives and connections to life seem to be similar. However, the narrator thrives in the...

Pablo Picasso, father of cubism and pioneer of neo-expressionism, immortal in his fame, once said, "Everything you can imagine is real". To the layperson, Picasso's notion may smack of enigmatic evasiveness; the transcendence of reality is not...

Salman Rushdie's Haroun and the Sea of Stories is in many ways a simple fairy tale about magical people in a magical land. Rushdie himself admits that he first came up with the basic idea for the novel while telling stories to his son in the...

The speaker in John Donne's "The Funeral" appears to have reasoned through the problem of death. He writes that "Whoever comes to shroud" him after he passes should not disturb "That subtle wreath of hair" which adorns his arm; he attests that the...

"What wastes my heart away is the corrosive power that lies concealed in the natural universe - in Nature, which has brought forth nothing that does not destroy both its neighbor and itself." (Goethe, 66)

In Johann Wolfgang Von Goethe's novella, ...

The author Izaak Walton noted, "The person that loses their conscience has nothing left worth keeping." The characters in Hamlet constantly struggle with the power of their consciences, as they are tempted to satiate their innermost desires....

Christina Rossetti's Goblin Market beautifully illustrates sin and sacrifice in the lives of twin sisters Lizzie and Laura. These sisters are so alike and separate they can be likened to the ying and yang. It has been argued that they are one...

The Sun Also Rises offers a snapshot into Hemingway's world and allows the reader to see first-hand the societal changes taking place around the time of World War I. In this era, a new class of woman, free from the stifling ties to men,...

The work of T. S. Eliot frequently presents society as degenerate and infertile. The deterioration of the post-war world is represented through the oppression and suffering of women - a concept explored most notably in Eliot's 1922 work The Waste...

The introduction of Ariel in the second scene of The Tempest raises some of the central issues in William Shakespeare's 17th-century play. Most notably, the themes of power, nature, and magic prove to be integral in shaping the audience's...