Newest Literature Essays

Our society revolves around the question of what is good and what is evil. We usually characterize humans as essentially malevolent or benevolent. The world contains, however, a minority of people characterized by ambiguity, a unique emotional...

By Justin J.R.K. Kirkey

An Involved Essay: The Comparison of

One Hundred Years of Solitude with Things Fall Apart

Things - and societies - fall apart. Societies are born; they grow, thrive, decline, and finally perish. Their procession through...

In her 1862 poem "A Musical Instrument," Elizabeth Barrett Browning returns to the mythical figure of Pan, a favorite topic of hers as well as a popular and traditional metaphor for poets since classical times. Barrett Browning had already written...

Assignment: Discuss the treatment of female independence and the independent heroine in two Victorian novels.

Jane Eyre, by Charlotte Bronte, and The Portrait of a Lady, by Henry James, both utilise the Victorian convention of the orphaned heroine...

In the short story "The Lame Shall Enter First," author Flannery O'Connor describes a widower's attempts to mask his grief over his wife's death. In order to fill the void in his heart, the widower, Sheppard, throws himself into miscellaneous...

Cisnero's acclaimed work The House on Mango Street explores a variety of themes in her photographic stories which capture everything from the seemingly banal triumphs of a small child to the tragedies suffered at the hands of cultural and social...

In The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne demonstrates the need for humans to abide by the laws of nature and conscience, rather than the laws of man, to achieve happiness.

The laws of nature, enforced only by the human conscience, govern every...

The most gripping aspect of Fyodor Dostoevsky's writing is his characters' compelling internal struggle. No matter how shocking or far-fetched his characters' struggles may first appear, one quickly discerns that these struggles are precisely...

Kate Chopin's The Story of an Hour is a feminist parable criticizing the romantic ideal of "true love" and the benefits of marriage. Chopin presents her critique of marriage by using the final hour in the life of Louise Mallard, whose joyful...

One of the key indicators of the effectiveness of a romantic tale is whether those who hear it fall entirely under the spell of the hero as he takes on an idealized, larger-than-life status, becoming everything which the listener could ever want...

It seems fitting that Yossarian's nickname in Catch-22 is "Yo-Yo." A yo-yo is a perfect metaphor for the recurring images of circularity and linearity that characterizes the chaotic world of Joseph Heller's novel. On one hand, a yo-yo follows the...

Charlotte Gilman's story "The Yellow Wallpaper" focuses on the slow mental degeneration of a young woman forced to undergo the "rest cure," examining both the causes and the nature of her madness. Shortly after moving into a new place of...

Ted Hughes's book, Crow: From the Life and Songs of the Crow, is a collection of 67 disturbingly dark poems that explore the evil aspects of life, and human tendency towards violence. The book, dedicated to Hughes's dead second wife Assia Wevill...

The concept of universal human suffering permeates through William Blake's dolorous poem "London," which depicts a city of causalities fallen to their own psychological and ideological demoralization. Though the poem is set in the London of...

How does Stoppard's Transformation of Hamlet reveal a shift in ideology?

Stoppard's transformation of Shakespeare's Hamlet shifts in values and world-view from the original. These changes are a result of the change in context between the two texts....

Jordan Reid Berkow

Final Paper

Medieval Court

December 14, 2002

Behind the Courtly Facade:

The Function of Irony in ChrÃtien de Troyes' Le Chevalier de la Charrette

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see

The pretty follies that themselves commit.

-...

Walt Whitman and Herman Melville were both affected by the Civil War to such a degree that they each published a volume of poetry concerning the conflict. Although both men confront similar issues and feelings, particular in their poems about...

A Streetcar Named Desire and Blues for Mister Charlie are both concerned to a large extent with tensions between different ethnic groups and, since in both plays the ethnicity of each group defines its social position, different social groups as...

With "Porphyria's Lover" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," Browning provides two dramatic monologues of madmen in which the narrator's sheer ignorance of his own insanity is a basic premise integral to the work. Throughout both these poems,...

Fifteenth-century England, in which Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, was ruled by a Christian morality that had definite precepts regarding the ideal character and behavior of women. Modesty and chastity in both manner and speech were...

A preacher enters the cell of a young man condemned by all before the trial has even begun, and begins powerfully exhorting the young man to give himself to the Lord Jesus and be redeemed. And yet this young man, standing at the very edge of...

Charlotte Bronte's greatest error in her preface to Wuthering Heights is her striking underestimation of Emily Bronte's understanding of the world and human nature. Charlotte writes that her sister had little knowledge of the practicalities of the...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Rome of Augustus

TF: Brian Jobe

February 22, 2003

Caesar Augustus, Hero or Tyrant?: The Effects of Hindsight on Dio Cassius' Portrayal of Caesar

Caesar Augustus, during the time of his reign as princeps of the Roman people,...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Final Paper

Rome of Augustus

April 17, 2003

"Make Panic Look Fetching": The Eroticization of Rape by Ovid

In both the Ars Armatoria and Metamorphoses, Ovid presents highly detailed, compelling scenes of rape, crafting these moments...