Newest Literature Essays

Both The Things They Carried and Apocalypse Now explore the trauma of the Vietnam War and its influence on soldiers' fears. Similar characters appear in both works, their identities crafted to represent different aspects of human nature. The...

"He who influences the thoughts of his times, influences all the times that follow. He has made his impress on eternity."

--Anonymous, ThinkExist.com

Choice Verses Chance: A Boethian Reading of The Knight's Tale

For centuries, Geoffrey Chaucer's ...

Shaken by the effects of World War I and forever changed by the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, 1920s Germany found itself in a dilemma: how to cope with increasingly pervasive technology and the rapid evolution present in every segment...

Being Taken In

How much of a role does deception play in courtship? In marriage? In Volume I of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Henry and Mary Crawford engage in a conversation with their sister, Mrs. Grant, concerning this very question. The...

While the word "epiphany" suggests positive enlightenment, it is only negative in Eugene O'Neill's disturbing "Long Day's Journey into Night." Each family member undergoes a bitter revelation within the course of only twenty-four hours. Through...

Octavia Butler's novel Dawn shows the collapse of a definite, individualized "human nature" through the coercive, hegemonic actions of an alien "other" known as the Oankali. Human identity in its present form does not survive the entire book, but...

In his essay "A Defence of A Womans Inconstancy," John Donne wrote of the female race that "for all their fellowship will they never be tamed, nor Commanded by us." His affinity for the grace and beauty of women is evident in his many works. Yet...

The issue of the gender of the writer playing a crucial part in her or his writing has been much discussed in contemporary critical debate. Feminist critics argue that the patriarchal ideology of society makes it imperative for male writers to...

Many characters in Shakespeare's plays disguise themselves in one way or another. An important component of many of the his plays is the masked revels. A character adopting a new outward persona is not at all unusual. This use of contrasting the...

Achilles, the swift, godlike warrior of Greek lore, is among the most complex of Homer's epic characters. Achilles and his ill-fated tendon figure prominently in the Western archetypal notion of a tragic hero; however, the application of the term...

A Beacon in the Abyss

The voice of reason in this modern morality play, the physically flawed, socially inept Piggy serves as a confidant in The Lord of the Flies, providing Ralph with a balancing presence while embodying the principles of...

In The World Without a Self: Virginia Woolf and the Novel, James Naremore discusses how one is struck, not only by a "certain ... diversity" among the six voices within Virginia Woolf's The Waves, but simultaneously by the "sameness of things"...

Shakespeare's Hamlet is a play rife with moral dilemmas. Religious codes often clash with desires and instinctual feelings in the minds of the characters, calling into question which courses of action are truly the righteous paths. In Hamlet's...

"Irony is the gaiety of reflection and the joy of wisdom." Through this statement, Anatole France, a 1921 Nobel Prize recipient, states his belief that irony is only lighthearted reflection. However, Nathaniel Hawthorne employs irony to reveal...

In the novel The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne, Brian Moore closely examines the theme of alcoholism and its effect on the protagonist Judith Hearne. Moore highlights Hearne's loneliness in the novel, which appears to be the source of her...

Nella Larsen began writing during a time when women, especially black women, did not have a place in society. Her novels consisted of stories re-iterating the lives of the oppressed during the Harlem Renaissance. In her story Passing, Larsen...

Fredrick Nietzsche, a renowned German philosopher, believed that one of the strongest governing drives that humans possess is their desire for power. This theme is omnipresent in Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man, Shakespeare's Othello, and Sophocles'...

Shakespeare's Hamlet and King Lear both contain a multitude of driving forces at work behind the actions of the main characters, but common to both works exists an obvious Freudian interpretation of what is driving two of the most interesting...

John Keats' sonnet "When I have Fears that I may Cease to Be," written in 1818 when the poet was twenty-three years old, deals with the young man's fears that he will not live long enough to accomplish what he wants to in life. He is afraid that...

James Joyce's "Clay" is a remarkable explication of Irish folklore and the societal issues that plague turn-of-the-century Dublin. Following Maria on the night of Halloween, the story combines imagery and symbolism throughout. In S. A. Cowan's...

Though contextually deviant from one another, the voices of "Professions for Women" and "The Yellow Wallpaper" both embrace the same themes: the potential creativity and splendor of the female mind, and the oppression a woman must overcome to...

The classification of Upton Sinclair's novel The Jungle is ambivalent as it contains elements characteristic of both fiction and historical writing. These elements, including imaginary events which define fiction or literature, and the real events...

Sophocles's Theban plays tell the story of families afflicted by generations of personal tragedy. Unlike epics such as the Iliad, whose portrayals of whole-scale war, death, and destruction convey a sense of near-apocalyptic despair, Sophocles's...

Perception of time represents a major motif in modernist literature. Many works address the subjectivity of our experiences, including how we process and consider the passage of time. Due to the modernist and post-modernist emphasis on style and...