Newest Literature Essays

Inventor and scientific pioneer Albert Einstein once commented that "It has become appallingly obvious that our technology has exceeded our humanity." Though he was not referring to the industrialization of England during the nineteenth century,...

"The Rime of the Ancient Mariner" is a striking example of how Samuel Taylor Coleridge failed to attain his vision of perfect poetic unity. The work in question leaves the reader with unanswered questions regarding its stated moral, its failure to...

Canterbury Tales: The Power of Lust

Seven deadly sins. Eight tales. In Canterbury Tales, Geoffrey Chaucer offers insight into human characteristics and actions. Of the seven deadly sins, lust remains a reoccurring characteristic in several tales....

Homer's epic The Odyssey is superimposed on the backdrop of a typical ancient Greek society. As the main character, Odysseus, and his companions travel from place to place on their way to their hometown of Ithaka, various people welcome them in a...

In his novella The Death of Ivan Ilych, Count Leo Tolstoy offers readers a glimpse into the life and death of a socially ambitious Russian gentleman, Ivan Ilych. During the story, Ivan's character is revealed in several different ways: firstly,...

In the voyage to Brobdingnag section of Jonathan Swift's Gulliver's Travels, the title character fits a common psychological profile over 150 years before the theory describing it was technically defined. The story manifestly presupposes the...

The word 'romantic' is derived from the medieval romaunt, which was a tale of chivalry, written in a romance language, that often took the form of a quest. In the 18th and 19th centuries, this idea of romance became an intellectual or artistic...

In Tess of the d'Urbervilles, Thomas Hardy primarily showcases man's inability to elude fate. Society's constraints highlight the futile nature of attempting to change the course of one's life, for the inability to transcend one's social classes...

In the novel Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev explores the inevitability of man's integration into society by implementing effectiv structural devices. The parallel trips of the central characters highlight their emotional and intellectual paths...

Mark Twain's masterwork, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, has over time, created controversy proportionate to its tremendous literary worth. The story of an "uncivilized" Southern boy and a runaway slave traveling up the Mississippi River...

The debate over the fragmentary nature of Samuel Taylor Coleridge's poem "Kubla Khan" has continued from the time the poem was written in 1797 to the present day. Some critics believe "Kubla Khan" to be a complete work in its totality, while...

Authors often use religious allusions to further the significance of a novel. It is when the reader recognizes and understands these influences that the importance of the novel can be truly understood. In John Steinbeck's The Grapes of Wrath,...

In his novel Joseph Andrews, Henry Fielding uses irony to express satire and offer social commentary. Irony "results when there is a disjunction between what an audience would expect and what really happens." The dominant form of irony in Joseph...

In an elaborate concoction of political allegory, social anatomy, moral fable, and mock utopia: Gulliver's Travels is written in the voice of Captain Lemuel Gulliver, an educated, seafaring man voyaging to remote countries for the purpose of...

Some stories depend more heavily on their environment to advance their plots and themes than others. Such is the case with Juno and the Paycock by Sean O'Casey. The play follows the plight of a working class family in Ireland during the civil war...

The evolution of the tragic heroic archetype in post-roman literature can be traced from one of the most well known of medieval heroes, King Arthur of Camelot, to such fictional creations as Aragorn, from Tolkien's twentieth century masterwork The...

In Emily Bronte's famous novel Wuthering Heights, Heathcliff is indisputably an evil character. He commits innumerable atrocious acts, yet Bronte ensures that one cannot help but feel sympathy towards him. One reason that the book is considered a...

"Our knowledge in all these enquiries reaches very little farther than our experience" (Essay). Locke asserts the principle that true knowledge is learned. As humans, our knowledge about the world around us and the subjects within it come from a...

The English Restoration significantly impacted the work of the artists of the day. As England moved from a monarchy under Charles I, to a commonwealth under the leadership of Oliver Cromwell, and then back again to a monarchy with Charles II on...

The Wife of Bath is often considered an early feminist, but by reading her prologue and tale one can easily see that this is not true. In Geoffrey Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath believes that a wife ought to have authority and...

In Chapter V of Part IV of Crime and Punishment, Dostoevsky uses the physical and emotional fluctuation of the characters to highlight the mounting turmoil within Raskolnikov and accentuate the semantic threshold at which he finds himself. To see...

Critic Northrup Frye has evaluated Hamlet as a play without catharsis, Ã,ÂÃÂÃÂa tragedy in which everything noble and heroic is smothered under ferocious revenge codes, treachery, spying and the consequences of weak actions by broken wills.Ã,ÂÃÂÃÂ...

The Chaste Chase: Britomart's Naivety in The Faerie Queen

Juliette Tang

June 1, 2005

For a text of Elizabethan literature, Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene is unique in its portrayal of chastity-a virtue generally associated with the domestic...

Throughout Alfred Tennyson's In Memoriam, the speaker (assumed to be the poet himself) battles with the grief and confusion caused by the untimely death of his friend Arthur Henry Hallam. Over the course of the poem, indeed over the seventeen...