Newest Literature Essays

In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, heredity governs life. Through the narrative voice and the character's responses, Thomas Hardy explains how Tess' "slight incautiousness of character inherited from her race" (71) defines her life. More specifically,...

The classical stories of Oedipus The King and Sundiata tell the tale of two epic heroes who must seek out and fulfill their own unique destinies. Although the themes of fate and destiny play a major role in the lives of Oedipus and Sundiata, both...

The Big Bad Wolf, Prince Charming, and The Beast: many fairy tales provide images of men varying from the courageous to the very evil. Each tale encodes messages for young girls about men, marriage, or sex as a type of socialization. Charles...

At first glance, the poem Jabberwocky - as Charles Dodgson, a.k.a. Lewis Carroll, transcribed in Alice in Wonderland - appears to be pure unintelligible gibberish, a madman's ravings about some unfathomable and inexplicable beast. It rambles about...

The idea that our American literary culture has been influenced since its inception by Britain's is not a new one; after all, the two countries are rather like two branches of the same tree. Even though the mindsets are of distinctly different...

In his Republic, Plato enlivens the character of Socrates with his own views of how a just and virtuous city would grow into existence. In describing his ideal city-state, a society ruled by an aristocratic Philosopher-king, Plato also makes note...

"Cleanse the foul body of th'infected world / If they will patiently receive my medicine" (Shakespeare 304). William Shakespeare addresses an ailment known as melancholy through the character Jaques in As You Like It. In this quote, Jaques blames...

Across cultures, fire has been considered both a life-sustaining and destructive force - it has the ability to warm and the potential to burn. The duality of fire parallels that of a Homeric hero's pursuit of honor. On one hand, the pursuit is an...

In 1903 the controversial black rights leader W.E.B. DuBois wrote one of the most influential African-American books to date. In The Souls of Black Folk, DuBois proclaims that the "problem of the twentieth Century is the problem of the...

Us and the Other: Humanity in William Faulkner's The Bear

William Faulkner's short novel The Bear is a rich story of characters going through rites of passage to understand themselves in the context of the Other. The Other is represented by...

It is neither unique nor uncommon for great authors to weave themselves into the fabric of their own works; it is a technique that adds realism and believability to otherwise complex fictional characters. D. H. Lawrence's Sons and Lovers and...

The Oxford English Dictionary defines the prefix "sub-" to be "of something immaterial, a quality, state, etc," listing the root word "plot" as a term often associated with this definition. Therefore, to be a subplot means to be an immaterial...

When the general public studies and analyzes fiction, the plot, exposition of characters, climax, and resolution seemingly serve as the "critical" elements highlighted in its evaluation. Provocative literature, however, employs several less...

"Heathcliff was hard to discover, at first . . . that naughty swearing boy" (Wuthering Heights pp.51-3).

From his arrival, nearly all the inhabitants of Wuthering Heights treat young Heathcliff disdainfully and as "the other" who has intruded into...

The themes of money and rank are clearly present in both Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders and Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels. In both works, the quest for money and a high rank is depicted as a driving force behind human actions and the necessity...

Supernatural creatures play an important role in defining the hero in both the eighth century epic poem Beowulf, and the fourteenth century British Romance Sir Gawain and the Green Knight. Though both tales involve the hero's journey to find and...

In the Praise of Folly, Erasmus creates a character critical of, yet indebted to, philosophical wisdom. Through Folly, Erasmus weaves his own ideas into her message, confusing readers unable to distinguish between the two voices. In Praise of...

"Religion hides many mischiefs from suspicion" (I, ii, 279-280)

Religion, as Barabas describes in this quotation from The Jew of Malta, acts as a measure in defending one's actions as moral or just. Christopher Marlowe presents this use of...

"See the cat? See the cradle?" retorts the midget Newt in an attempt to explain the inspiration for a grotesque and confounding painting of his. This singular quote is the namesake for Kurt Vonnegut's novel Cat's Cradle, and embodies the leitmotif...

Quoted centuries before Shakespeare's birth, the Roman playwright Titus Maccius Plautus believed that "in everything the middle course is best; all things in excess bring trouble to men." Often times, society focuses its sights on the attainment...

There exists a debate between Rousseau, Plato and the philosophers of the Encyclopedia over the experience of the passions. While Plato and the philosophers choose to philosophically debate over the reasons behind love and sexuality, Rousseau, who...

The Federalist Papers, written by Jay, Madison, and Hamilton, were laid out in order to convince the individual states to ratify the new U.S. Constitution and defend a central government. Many times the words of these Founding Fathers echoed those...

Alice Walker's short story "Everyday Use" is a tightly woven tale that brings together many disparate elements of the story to reinforce the thesis put forward by W.E.B. DuBois that black Americans are trapped in a double consciousness between...

In his essay "Conrad's Darkness and Mine," V.S. Naipaul uses Joseph Conrad's short stories and novels as a basis for articulating his own views on narrative construction and the decline of the novel form. Naipaul states that Conrad was "the first...