Newest Literature Essays

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...

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...