Newest Literature Essays

Herman Melville's "Pierre" offers readers a world simultaneously driven by and struggling against its relationship with the past. Personal and ancestral histories dramatically affect the present interactions and psychology of the book's main...

The name "Odysseus" resonates in the creak of opening doors in the city of Troy, the murmur of waves, and the song of the Sirens. Over the course of the epic tale, Odysseus' heroism proves far more nuanced than the simple feats of his success at...

Moral Hierarchy

by Katherine Shepherd

April 11, 2002

Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice captures the essence of English Regency society while using unique characterizations to illustrate the effects of society on the individual. The evolution of one...

Emily Bronte's Wuthering Heights is a perfect parallel to the time in which it was composed. Heathcliff, her protagonist turned antagonist, was brought into a world in which he did not belong, in both a social and economic sense. As he joined the...

Not in entire forgetfulness,

And not in utter nakedness,

But trailing clouds of glory do we come

From God, who is our home.

- William Wordsworth, Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood, 62-65

Though Plato died nearly...

Viewed as a Naturalist novel, with its realistic prose, indifferent environment, and an aesthetic network built around motifs, the narrative of Ann Petry's The Street reads like a mid-century black version of Theodore Dreiser's Sister Carrie: a...

Wiesel's Novella, Night, can be labeled a 'religious book' when looked at in light of the unquestionably religious text, the "Gospel According to Mark" from the "New Testament" of Christianity's Holy Bible. This proves to be the case if one looks...

Although the characters of The Tragedy of Julius Caesar can not be easily classified because of their emotional depth and mental complexity, one can draw certain conclusions about them based on the attributes that they possess. Shakespeare uses...

This is that Hamlet the Dane whom we read of in our youth, and whom we may be said almost to remember in our after years; he who made that famous soliloquy on life, who gavethe advice to the players, who thought "this goodly frame, the earth," a...

From the satirical, biting wit of a "been there, done that," college co-ed to the death-defeating witticisms of a middle-aged mother, the monologic voice in Lorrie Moore's fiction hasn't changed as much as it has matured in the years separating...

William Wordsworth's "I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud" is a lyric poem, which deals with the speaker's state of mind. The description of the process, which the speaker goes through, is represented by a natural scene where the speaker, plants and the...

The Romantic Era was a time when people embraced imagination, emotion, and freedom - quite a contrast to the preceding Neoclassic Era, which emphasized the values of reason, judgment, and authority. The values of the so-called Romantics are...

Shakespearean romances are characterized by conclusions in which all conflicts are happily resolved. It is easy to see these resolutions as humorous but unlikely contrivances which the author invents to neatly tie together loose ends. There is...

Following the Industrial Revolution and urbanization in the United States and Europe, places such as Dublin, Ireland and Winesburg, Ohio would lie on opposite sides of the spectrum as far as geographic size, population, and industrial production....

The final sentence of Winesburg, Ohio imprints the image of the town fading away as George Willard departs for the city. In fact, to view the novel in larger units, the final chapter is conspicuously named "Departure," and for any reader who...

The sum of the partsthe vignettes of townsfolkof Winesburg, Ohio is greater than the whole novel. Winesburg, too, is only one town in all of Ohio, which is one of a host of states in the U.S. This magnification is at the heart of the novel, in...

The idea of voluntary creation, of giving birth to something utterly original from some established foundation, instantly attracts unanswerable inquiries of morality and the nature of novelty and life. However, when invention is attempted on a...

Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre are both relatively isolated women struggling to survive in a male-dominated society. Although both women are striving to attain similar goals of happiness, equality, and a sense of...

In his January 6, 1865 letter to fellow writer and self-confessed radical William O'Connor, Walt Whitman states in no uncertain terms that his poetry collection Drum Taps "delivers my ambition. . . to express. . . the pending action of this time...

In some works of literature, a character who appears briefly, or does not appear at all, is a significant presence. An example of this can be found in the play Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett.

The play deals with a hope for a change and a...

First published in 1516, Sir Thomas More's Utopia is considered as one of the most influential works of Western humanism. Through the first-person narrative of Raphael Hythloday, More's mysterious traveler, Utopia is described as a pagan communist...

Even today, with literature constantly crossing more lines and becoming more shocking, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin remains one of the most scandalous, controversial, and powerful literary works ever spilled onto a set of blank pages....

Topic: One theatre critic has said of Twelfth Night: "...the key question seems to me how much one regards it as a festive piece of saturnalia, written for a very specific occasion, and how much as a dark comedy about impermanence and pain." What...

In the study of three of Shakespeare's plays, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, The Tragedy of Richard II, and Henry IV, Part 1, one of the themes that is presented is the contrast of "appearance vs. reality." Sometimes the confusion is comedic,...