Newest Literature Essays

"What lies behind us and what lies before us are small matters compared to what lies within us," stated Oliver Wendell Holmes. This eventually proves to be especially true for Hester Prynne, the main character in Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet...

"Please allow me to introduce myself, / I'm a man of wealth and taste, / I've been around for a long, long year / Stolen many man's soul and faith / ... / Pleased to meet you / Hope you guess my name" sings the gravelly voice of Mick Jagger at the...

"Like most uneducated Englishwomen, I like reading." Can these words really belong to Virginia Woolf, an "uneducated Englishwoman" who knew half a dozen languages, who authored a shelf's length of novels and essays, who possessed one of the most...

Writing from a point of view that concludes "that the novel, as a cultural artefact of bourgeois society, and imperialism are unthinkable without each other" , Edward Said views Robinson Crusoe as "explicitly enabled by an ideology of overseas...

Coleridge, in common with other romantic artists such as Wordsworth and Keats revolted against the artificial eighteenth century philosophy of a dislocation between man and nature. Coleridge developed an extremely analytical, passionate and...

Known as a fine interpreter of human thought and action, William Shakespeare often relied on gender roles and stereotypes to create within the audience an opinion of a character or event. Since Elizabethan society made such great distinctions...

William Shakespeare's The Tragedy of King Richard II, first published in a quarto edition in 1597, is the first in a sequence of four history plays known as the second tetrology, which deal with the early phases of a power struggle between the...

In chapter six of Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, protagonist Henry Fleming flees from battle in a panic. When, in the next chapter, he hears that the remaining members of his regiment defeated the enemy without his assistance, he...

After reading Stephen Crane's The Red Badge of Courage, one is faced with the question regarding whether young Henry Fleming is indeed, a hero, or if he, in fact, has changed through the course of the novel. I believe that the young soldier has...

The African-American experience of growing up in America changed dramatically throughout the course of the twentieth century, thus leading to differing views between the older and younger generations. In Lorraine Hansberry's play, A Raisin in the...

Prometheus Bound serves as an allegory radiant in theme. Yet, while the symbolism employed by Aeschylus is fairly ubiquitous, and while some scholars argue that the paramount issues of Aeschylus's play lie in both Prometheus's services to mankind...

Niccolo Machiavelli opens The Prince in full compliance with the behavioral laws he sets forth in following chapters; fitting with his brazen separation of ethics from politics, he meekly addresses Lorenzo de Medici with such words as "I hope it...

Within his work The Prince, Machiavelli presents a double perspective on rulership that works to focus the direction of outlook beyond the habitual leader to leader approach we have previously seen. Breaking from tradition, Machiavelli's idea that...

Robert Lowell's Fall 1961 crystallizes in words the sense of nuclear paranoia that lurked in both private and public spheres of the United States during the Cold War. From a dark, personal perspective the poem takes an unsettling look into the...

The Christmas dinner scenes divisive political and moral debate in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man underlines an essential obstacle to the artistic mind of Stephen Dedalus. Ireland imposes a set of oppressive binariesnamely in the form of...

Robert Frost is generally considered to be the premier American poet of his generation. He is identified almost exclusively with New England, for most of his poetry attempts to capture the essence of rural life in the New England states. He...

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was very influenced by the French symbolist movement and he is often regarded as the most important symbolist poet of the twentieth century. Yeats felt 'metaphors are not profound enough to be moving,' so his poems heavily...

"[H]ow it would come into being, if it ever were to come into being, you have, in my opinion, Socrates, stated well" (The Republic, 510a). The possibility of the Republic coming into being is the issue which sets the earlier Dialogues apart from...

Not all are equal in Plato's Republic or Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Politics. Plato and Aristotle argue that people possess a certain natural ability that determines their role in society. The fundamental character of one's soul, in part,...

Modern critics are quick to assert that Socrates failed in his role as a teacher to Alcibiades by refusing to engage in sexual relations. Upon closer investigation of both the traditional form and Socrates' own revised form of pederasty, the...

Plato's Symposium is not only a discourse on the subject of love, it is a tribute to Socrates and his way of life, and the entire course of the discussion is guided by the ultimate objective of presenting Socrates as the representation of love...

"Oh why is everything still my duty? When shall I be free from your fuss?" mutters Mrs. Moore as she collapses into the raving madness of spiritual despair (228). After serving as E.M. Forster's most sympathetic character through nearly all of A...

John Milton uses epic similes in Paradise Lost to accomplish many objectives. The most basic of these is to connect the past and the present, as the epic similes are often in present tense and involve a human figure that will not exist until after...

Harriet Wilson's sentimental narrative, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, draws on two specific literary areas to disclose the tale of a young, mistreated Mulatto heroine, encumbered by an excessive amount of injustice,...