Newest Literature Essays

Although published three years before Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny," Susan Glaspell's play "Trifles" is a literary embodiment of Freudian techniques. The dramatic tension in "Trifles" is marked by an acute sense of the unheimlich, or uncanny,...

"For there are moments where one can neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?" (Woolf, 193-4)

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf illustrates a division between her male and female characters. The...

Titus Andronicus, the first tragedy written by William Shakespeare ca. 1590, is one of his most ambitious plays, full of recognizable themes and motifs which were later incorporated in his more mature works. Yet Titus Andronicus differs greatly...

A reader reading Albee will not fail to notice tricks of language in operation; a more interesting analysis is to consider how the characters themselves are aware of language, of reading and being read, as a text, by other characters. AlbeeÃÂÂs...

Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, utilizes a struggle W.E.B. Du Bois describes as "double consciousness" to chart the journey of Janie Crawford into selfhood. In "The Souls of Black Folk," Du Bois describes African...

Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, takes great pains to relate the characters to their surroundings, especially in the parallelism between Tess' emotional disposition and her physical environment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the...

The exact nature of Dick Diver's descent throughout the course of Tender is the Night is difficult to discern. It is clear enough that his disintegration is occasioned by Nicole's burgeoning independence, but why or how her transformation affects...

In Shakespeare's romance, The Tempest, Miranda instructs Caliban, "I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known" (I.ii.357-8), affirming the power of language to transform the insubstantial into a forceful and purposeful entity. As...

Images of the fierce and powerful sea are prevalent throughout Shakespeare's The Tempest. The play opens on a terrible storm at sea and all of the ensuing action takes place on an island that, by definition, is surrounded by ocean on all sides....

The destruction of sex, a noteworthy theme in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, is specifically displayed in the relationship between the characters of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. Because of Jake's impotence and Brett's promiscuity,...

The concept of tough love is one that is prevalent in many African-American fictional texts. Toni Morrison's Sula is one such example of the way that tough love manifests itself through African-American parent-child relationships. It can often be...

The themes of Tennessee Williams's Streetcar Named Desire follow Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: the emotional struggle for supremacy between two characters who sym - bolize historical forces, between fantasy and reality, between the Old...

The death of a loved one is typically one of the most emotionally distressing events people face, particularly when that person is a parent. In most societies, it would be considered taboo for a son to respond to his parent's demise with...

It is fitting to discuss the recollection of the past in an age advancing to an unknown futurity and whose memories are increasingly banished to the realm of the nostalgic or, even worse, obsolete. Thomas Pynchon and William Faulkner, in wildly...

In "The Sorrows of Young Werther", by Goethe, one of the prevalent themes is the control that passion wields over one's actions. Passion may cause one to act irrationally, a belief that Goethe espoused despite the paradigm that dominated the...

The French epic The Song of Roland (ca. 1100) loudly echoes the feudal values of its time. As it describes the transformation of France into a Christian nation united by loyalties to the king and country, the epic embodies the spirit of loyalty...

America used to be known as the land of opportunity. That was before the wars and the advent of technology. For post-modern authors, modernity and prosperity has turned America into a disappointment. Barthelme's Snow White and Pynchon's The Crying...

"King Arthur was counted most courteous of all." Line 26 of Part 1, one of the opening lines of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, reveals a society in which people are ranked in accordance with their adherence to a certain code of behavior: the...

In the most general sense, the Green Knight is an anomaly to the story of " Sir Gawain and the Green Knight," the only supernatural element in what is otherwise a very believable and wholly real rendering of a specific length of time. Gawain is...

Despite his left-of-centre, Fabian society background, D.H. Lawrence's early fiction displays little advocacy of political change. This is clearly not ignorance, but an opportunity to express concerns for the spirituality of man. If a man has a...

This sonnet is narrated by a man whose emotions are completely at the mercy of another. Its theme involves the vulnerability of the narrator's disposition and the power of love. Just when he reaches the lowest point of his depression, the...

The unique and extraordinary elements of dark beauty translate to an exotic alterity in the poets' eyes. The more obvious, and traditional, methods bestow the woman with godly attributes. Shakespeare first refutes this resemblance by underscoring...

In Self-Reliance, Ralph Waldo Emerson describes his vision of the individual, a man dependent on himself and refusing to conform to social standards and expectations. The individual, according to Emerson, stands alone against the wave of society,...

"This child hath come from the hand of the almighty, to work in many ways upon her heart. It was meant for a blessing, for the one blessing of her life! It was meant, doubtless, for a retribution too, a torture to be felt at many an unthought of...