Newest Literature Essays

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...

When writers use quotations, allusions, or traditions, they are referring to a piece of work or an event that has occurred prior to the moment of their writing. They use the past to help shape the work that they are crafting in the present. T.S....

"The inner truth is hidden-luckily luckily"

-Marlow, Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad's renowned novella, Heart of Darkness, is a work which has sparked great controversy and heated debate with regards to its meaning. Since its publication over one...

Two epigraphs, the first a quotation by American poet Gertrude Stein, and the second a passage from Ecclesiastes, preface Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises. Stein's quotation offers a pessimistic view of the forever changed values of the...

Although Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment has a primarily social theme, it offers an interesting approach to the Christian interpretation of man. Through the self-destructive experiences of Raskolnikov, the reader is drawn to see the fallacy of...

E.M. Forester's Howards End illustrates the social interaction between economic classes present in nineteenth century England. Forester's novel focuses specifically on England's middle class on several varying levels: the upper middle class,...

T.S. Eliot is considered one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century and his poetry was greatly influenced by Dante Alighieri. Eliot's introduction to Dante was in his college years at Harvard, where he studied philosophy. Eliot read...

Elizabeth Bishop

Pink Dog

(Rio de Janeiro)

The sun is blazing and the sky is blue.

Umbrellas clothe the beach in every hue.

Naked, you trot across the avenue.

Oh, never have I seen a dog so bare!

Naked and pink, without a single hair...

Startled,...

Peter Weir's The Truman Show is a film of great satirical intellect and poignancy. However, beneath the facade, this "comedy" conveys important social messages that provide a warning for the future. It mocks human beings' automatic acceptance of...

In Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice," Gustave von Aschenbach is described as "the watcher" (73), who becomes interested in the young Tadzio, eventually leading to a dangerous obsession that causes his death. In the novella, Mann uses Aschenbach's...

In Demian, Herman Hesse discusses the meaning behind an apparently futile war under the guise of one boy's search for personal identity. While Hesse spends much of the novel illustrating Emil Sinclair's search for meaning, the tying in of the...

Malvolio and Parolles both appear as relatively unlikable characters due to their inflated egos, and convince themselves that they are socially greater than they are in reality. In Twelfth Night, Malvolio, a mere steward, behaves with utter scorn...

The description of the two different battle scenes wherein Beowulf slays the monsters are described in great detail, and are both quite different. Beowulf's battle with Grendel occurs in the Danish king's mead hall-a civilized and comfortable...

Catch-22 is a novel that tells many stories, but the crux of the novel concerns Joseph Yossarian, a bombardier stationed at the United States Army Air Force base on the fictional Mediterranean island of Pianosa. A war rages between the Allies and...

Edith Wharton's IThe House of Mirth] tells the story of Lily Bart's fall from the upper reaches of the social spectrum to the lowly depths of the working class. The characters in the novel represent all levels of society, from the urban poor to...