Newest Literature Essays

Allen Ginsberg's poetry reflects both the era in which he began to write it and the psychedelia that allowed him to accept his own work as an expression of a higher truth. Usage of the word "psychedelia" refers not only to psychedelic drugs, such...

The Real Thing was written by Henry James in 1891. According to his notebook entry on February 22, 1891, the idea for the story came in the form of an actual incident divulged by his friend George du Maurier. James juxtaposes an upper-class...

Coleridge's Poetry in "Conversation"

Nothing about Samuel Coleridge's "conversation" poems is conventionally conversational. These poems do not create a dialogue between two characters, but instead focus on an internal dialogue that Coleridge's...

In Dante's Inferno, Virgil, the Roman poet, guides Dante through Hell. Virgil first encounters Dante at the beginning of Inferno when Dante strays from the True Way, a term used by Beatrice to represent a righteous and religious life. Beatrice,...

Lewis Carroll has a lot of fun playing with language in Alice in Wonderland. He points out its flexibility, inadequacies, and the confusion that it can produce when taken at face value without common sense and interpretation. His playfulness is...

Jane Austen novels tend to exhibit a certain kind of life: parties, walks in the park, trips to London or Bath, posturing for a particularly advantageous marriage - in a word, privilege. In addition, this world is structured according to a...

Nate Ragolia

Professor Jones

English 4564

7 December 2003

Exploring the Sublime: Burke and Frankenstein's Monster

Wholly defining the sublime seems to lead to a near endless compilation of puzzle pieces, all of which fill in only a small portion of...

In Sophocles' Antigone, Creon, the King of Thebes, is entrusted to care for Antigone and Ismene, the daughters of the deceased Theban King Oedipus. However, Creon and the strong-willed Antigone clash on the issue of the burial of Antigone and...

The fantastic [...] lasts only as long as a certain hesitation: a hesitation common to reader and character, who must decide whether or not what they perceive derives from "reality" as it exists in the common opinion. At the story's end, the...

The last page in Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights leaves the reader with many new connections and symbols, as well as a feeling of satisfaction that peace has been restored to the Earnshaw and Linton families. The three members of the older...

Much of the critical debate surrounding Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders centers around whether the author makes good on the promise he makes in the preface that the story will be morally instructive. For instance, Ira Konigsberg writes that...

In Hard Times, Charles Dickens uses the character of Signor Jupe to portray the clash between love and reality. Signor Jupe reveals his philosophy of love as a meaningful force through his actions at the start of the novel. By accepting...

"Oh fuck me, another leaflet? You can't fucking move-pardon my French-but you can't move for leaflets in Norf London these days" (373). Leaflets, brochures, letters, and other forms of publication and circulation are recurrent motifs in White...

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is at once a comic poem as well as a trenchant satire on the low aspects of urban life. Its speaker, a man going bald and self-conscious about his every gesture, represents a sexual as well as spiritual...

In his short stories, Ivan Bunin frequently showcases the inability to attain earthly happiness. This reality is often manifested in his characters' attempts to return to the past, when the evanescence of joy was still a mystery to the...

The title characters of Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra are difficult to fully understand due to their seemingly illogical actions towards one another. At times, they seem to be in direct opposition to each other's causes, yet still fully and...

Awakening via the Omniscient Narrator

In Kate Chopin's The Awakening, Edna Pontellier transforms from a wealthy product of mid 19th century Creole society into an independent, beautiful soul that acknowledges none of the boundaries of societal...

The roots of republican government and democratic ideals are firmly planted in James Madison's "The Federalist No. 51, The Structure of the Government Must Furnish the Proper Checks and Balances Between the Different Departments." Written on...

Fyodor Dostoevsky's novel Crime and Punishment is one of the most memorable and substantial literary works in history. It deals with the psychological, emotional, mental, and physical struggles of several residents of nineteenth-century St....

The England of Charles Dickens was one plagued with disease, pollution, and poverty. This is the England that gave rise to the Salvation Army, the gin craze, and Benthamism, and it is no coincidence that Charles Dickens' Bleak House has much to...

"Hamlet is a tragedy without catharsis, a tragedy in which everything noble and heroic is smothered under ferocious revenge codes, treachery, spying and the consequences of weak actions by broken wills." In truth, this statement is not a...

"Feminist readings often discuss the "jobs" that are traditionally assigned to women, such as tending a home, caring for a husband, and bearing children, and the ways in which these jobs are used to keep women in a powerless position. Female...

Duality and Paralysis in "Two Gallants"

James Joyce's "Two Gallants", from Dubliners, is at first glance the tale of two men driven by greed to manipulate a slavey. Lenehan and Corley enjoy their mischievous banter as they stroll through Dublin,...

The English Patient has been referred to as "a poem disguised as a novel." Much emphasis is directed toward Michael Ondaatje's language, which "takes center stage, gliding and soaring, drifting into the hidden rooms of his character's souls,...