Newest Literature Essays

Can the ocean be considered a lover? Is it possible for someone to find a strong infatuation with the rolling waves and the smell of salt water? Does the sea have the capacity to love someone? Looking out into the waters, the female character in...

Since the beginning of history, language has been the most important means of communication and development amongst humans. Because of language's enormous significance, manipulating it to control a large group of people is extremely effective. In...

In Aldous Huxley's novel Brave New World, he creates a utopian society that achieves happiness at the expense of humanity. Though thoroughly repugnant to the reader, the world Huxley creates seems almost plausible because he fashions it out of...

Mel Gibson's recent film, The Passion of the Christ, opens with an ominous scene where Satan endeavours to dissuade Jesus from bearing the cross for the entire human race. What is peculiar about Satan's temptation are the questions that he...

What does an author intend to convey when he repeats certain words throughout a novel or a play? William Shakespeare uses this rhetorical strategy in his famous historical play, King Richard II. The two words "sacred" and "subject" are repeated...

In Homer's epic The Iliad and Sophocles' play Oedipus the King, the characters Andromache and Jocasta are confronted with tragedy and strife. Andromache endures the loss of her beloved husband while Jocasta struggles with the fruition of an...

The monologue of King Herod just preceding the Dance of the Seven Veils (Wilde, 50-53) demonstrates the depth of the King's desperate neuroses. While his intention is to implore Salome to dance for him, Herod ends up delivering a capricious,...

In the novels Invisible Man and Siddhartha, the protagonists find it necessary to completely isolate themselves from the influences of society in order to reach a stage of serene understanding, or "enlightenment." Both Siddhartha and the Invisible...

A predicatable response to reading Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House might be a distaste for Nora's feeble-minded obsession with money, possessions, and culture through the first two acts that is then, suddenly and unexpectedly, reversed as those...

Arguably, Hal, Prince of Wales, underwent a gargantuan transformation throughout the course of 1 Henry IV. As an audience we are thrust into the middle of conflict concerning the prince. At the onset of the play, the Son of the King is portrayed...

The classical love story, the timeless tale of pairs whose only destinies are to be together, is an abhorred notion to Proust in In Search of Lost Time. Love stories in this Roman-fleuve are not be all, end all events; rather, they are temporary...

The traditional Christian message Christopher Marlowe was working with during the time he wrote Doctor Faustus stated that one should avoid leading a life of temptation and sin, the origins of which were rooted in an enterprising proprietor of...

According to Friedrich Nietzsche, "'free spirits'...do not exist, did not exist" but "could one day exist" (18). Mr. James Duffy, the protagonist of James Joyce's "A Painful Case" in Dubliners, has characteristics similar to that of Nietzsche's...

In his short story "A Hunger Artist," Franz Kafka uses the extreme example of the fictional hunger artist to discuss the dichotomy between art and life. Usually, an artist uses his life to create his art. Thus, an artist alienated from the world...

In his works "Tonio Kröger," "Death in Venice," and "Tristan," Thomas Mann discusses the artist's struggle in terms of who he is, who he should be, and who he will be. In the three works, the artistic protagonists struggle with either a...

Platonic literature is famously recorded in the form of the dialogue. Dialogue is the method by which synthesis can occur in its purest form. Plato's contemporaries were fundamentally fearful of writing, which was a new technique at the time,...

It is the natural inclination of all men to dream. Some may have short-term goals, and others may have life-long ambitions. Despite what cynics say, the American people are hopeful and waiting for something great. In Of Mice and Men, John...

In Questioning Racinian Tragedy, John Campbell takes issue with analyses of Phaedra that simplistically map Jansenist belief onto the play, or make assumptions about authorial intent as, "an uneasy amalgam of theology, biography, and tragedy"...

It has been said that in writing his novella Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad set out to create a difficult work; exceedingly difficult, in fact, to his contemporary Victorian audience, for whom a thin veneer of "surface-truths" constituted the...

In his collection of short stories about a simple American country town, Winesburg, Ohio, Sherwood Anderson offers a critique of the emerging modern society of the early 20th century. Anderson establishes his disillusionment toward modernity by...

The Roles of Family in Wieland and The Last of the Mohicans

"There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one's own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a...

"What happened in Grendel was that I got the idea of presenting the Beowulf monster as Sartre, and everything that Grendel says Sartre in one mood or another has said, so that my love of Sartre kind of comes through as my love of the monster,...

Jack Kerouac's novel On the Road follows Sal Paradise on journeys through America. Sal spends most of his time traveling by foot or car; however, the novel focuses on his time spent in three American cities: New York City, Denver, and San...

The story of Oedipus the King is the epitome of tragedy. A great hero, who was once revered as an equal to the gods, fell from grace when it was learned that he had killed his father and married his mother. In the time of Sophocles, Oedipus was...