Newest Literature Essays

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...

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...