Newest Literature Essays

The Dangers and Benefits of Emotion in 19th Century American Literature

by, Katie Skalski

November 8, 2004

Many of the popular texts found in 19th century American literature represent emotion, the effects of which can be perceived as both...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Personal Response

Lambert

December 14, 1998

The Love Poems of Rich, Marvell and Campion: Realism vs. Idealization

Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems," which explore the nature of lesbian love, differ strikingly from classic love...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Women's Literature

Lambert

September 19,1998

An Audience Member's Perspective on A Room of One's Own

A young, female reader of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own would experience an array of emotional responses to the author,...

Part 1: The Book of Exodus and its Message

In his theory of forms, the philosopher Plato proposes that the objects and situations encountered in the mundane world are often indicative of a higher and fuller reality. While Plato did not have the Old...

In "David Copperfield", Charles Dickens reveals that discipline is like a weapon: those who misuse it are cruel, unjust, and a danger to everyone around them, while those who fail to use it at all endanger themselves and lower their defenses. Only...

"Heart of Darkness" is about a man's journey into a darkness both physical and metaphorical: he travels to both the inner depths of the Belgian Congo and to the deepest regions of the human heart. In the novel, the shadowy world of Africa has been...

Prufrock's Social Anxiety

by, Anonymous

April 15, 2005

Though the poem is specifically about Alfred Prufrock, it embodies the idea that every modern person struggles with these social barriers at some point in life. Eliot's skillful use of...

Discovery of Existentialism in Crime and Punishment

by, Anonymous

January 1, 1995

Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment can be read as an ideological novel because those typically represent the social, economic, and political concerns of a culture....

Petruccio and Katherine: Mutual Love within Hierarchy

by, Anonymous

March 14, 2004

Petruccio and Katherine: Mutual Love within Hierarchy

In her famous speech at the end of The Taming of the Shrew the formerly shrewish Kate proclaims:

Thy husband is thy...

When two men confront similar situations and meet distinct fates, the perennial question emerges. Why does Orestes in Aeschylus' The Eumenides win redemption, and Pentheus in Euripides' The Bacchae die ignobly? Both address the same moral dilemma...

"This above all, to thine own self be true" (1.3.88). As Polonius offers this advice to his departing son Laertes, he also states one of the defining principles of the philosophical branch known collectively as existentialism. A paradigm firmly...

William Blake's collection of illuminated poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience depict, as the title page explains, "the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" (Blake 1). Although Songs of Innocence, written in 1789, was crafted five years...

Emily Dickinson's poetry covers a broad range of topics, including poetic vision, love, nature, prayer, death, God, Christ, and immortality. There is a unity in her poetry, however, in that it focuses primarily on religion. Full of contradictions...

Vestiges of Hal in Shakespeare's Henry V

by, Anonymous

October 17, 2004

Over the course of Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V plays, the character of Henry V evolves from a reckless youth to a great King and revered hero. In 1 Henry IV the Prince...

In Ovid's "Metamorphoses", there are a great many instances that link love and war, thus creating a disconcerting antithetical comparison prominent throughout the canon of literature. In particular, this theme can be seen in and around the region...

A seemingly impenetrable solitude permeates human life in D. H. Lawrence's two short stories, "Odour of Chrysanthemums" and "The Horse Dealer's Daughter". Inside Lawrence's fictional worlds, the thematic isolation of individuals from one another...

Unholy Mothers: Mothers as Negative Characters in Richard III, Cymbeline, Hamlet, Macbeth and The Tempest

by, Barret Buchholz

April 15, 2005

The mothers presented in Shakespeare's plays encompass a broad range of social positions, personalities,...

As Leopold Bloom goes through the ordinary motions of a single day, he tries at times to add excitement and mystery to his life so that he may imagine himself as an extraordinary man with exceptional problems. Bloom does this so as to dispel the...

In two of the concluding paragraphs of "Return of the Soldier", both Jenny and Margaret grapple with the moral dilemma of whether to or not to "cure" Chris. Although the women, while looking over Oliver's toys in the nursery, convince one another...

Flannery O'Connor's Intellectuals: Exposing Her World's Narrow "Field of Vision"

by, Robin K. Brubaker

June 24, 2004

Some critics would argue that a fiction writer's Christianity, or understanding of ultimate reality in terms of the Fall of...

SHADOWS ON THE SUN: THE IMPERFECTIONS OF PLATONIC POLITICAL THEORY

by, Michael Jin

December 5, 2004

Plato and Aristotle both reject the moral relativism of the sophists and address the question of how man can achieve absolute virtue. In The Republic,...

White as Death

by, Aaron Chan

December 10, 2004

White as Death

Don DeLillo's novel White Noise confronts the primal fear of death much in the way his own characters do-- by nullifying or minimizing this otherwise terrifying human phenomenon. What is...

Coleridge's Philosophy of Imagination

February 1, 2005

In Kubla Khan, Samuel Coleridge depicts the great Mongol ruler Kubla Khan creating a palace representative of his great power and ability to induce fear. But near the end of the poem Coleridge...

"Here I saw people more numerous than before, on

one side and the other, with great cries rolling

weights by the force of their chests" (Inferno 7.25-27)

"The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill man's heart. We have to imagine...