Newest Literature Essays

There is truth to Duncan's line "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face," for throughout Shakespeare's play Macbeth, both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are not what they most often appear to be. Even Macbeth does not know the extent...

The snake has long been used as a symbol of sly subtlety. A serpent's presence has been characterized by cunning cynicism dating as far back as biblical times, when the snake persuaded Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of Eden's garden. Even the...

T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a modern journey into and dissection of the mind of a society man, J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock is pushed in two opposite directions by his desires: his desire to have the favor of the woman he...

Despite the progression of civilization and society's attempts to suppress man's darker side, moral depravity proves both indestructible and inescapable; contrary to culturally embraced views of humanistic tendencies towards goodness, each...

D'autres fois, calme plat, grand miroir de mon dsespoir

-C. Baudelaire

Those acquainted with the works of Joseph Conrad know well enough that the author had a grand affinity for the sea. Certainly, this should be expected from a man who had spent...

In Nabokov's Lolita, an effectual force of individuality converges with a force of society into a prolific battle between what is morally justified by a community, versus what is justified by an individual, revealing the essential choice everyone...

In a 1964 article for Playboy, Vladimir Nabokov wrote of his most famous and controversial novel: "I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a...

In his "On a Book Entitled Lolita", Vladimir Nabokov recalls that he felt the "first little throb of Lolita" run through him as he read a newspaper article about an ape who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever...

Walt Whitman's "Spontaneous Me" (Norton 2151-2152) crystallizes his attempt to create poems that appear natural, impulsive and untamed. The natural effect is a carefully crafted technique that appears throughout his writing, hinting at a...

The Qur'an1 is reflective of and conducive to the patriarchal social system in which it evolved. Many verses of the text attempt to structure and reaffirm patriarchal order and to reduce any threat to the patriarchal system. While the Qur'an is a...

John Florio's English translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays was published in 1603. William Shakespeare's King Lear was written between 1604 and 1605, after he wrote Othello and before he wrote Macbeth. The extremely close time relationship...

The first time the Fool enters in Shakespeare's King Lear he immediately offers Kent his coxcomb, or jester's hat. Lear asks the Fool "My pretty knave, how dost thou?" (1.4.98) This initial action and inquiry of the Fool is representative of the...

If Shakespeare penned two King Lears, he created three King Lears. There is the Quarto's hero, the Folio's hero, and the hero who exists somewhere in the interplay. The last of these is not the same Lear who emerges variously in various conflated...

In King Lear, the recurring images of sight and blindness associated with the characters of Lear and Gloucester illustrate the theme of self-knowledge and consciousness that exist in the play.

These classic tropes are inverted in King Lear,...

The images of sight given, taken, or abused resonate deeply in King Lear from Kent's first imperative, "See better, Lear" (I.i.158), to the painful images of a stumbling, eyeless Gloucester. Such imagery, drawn both dramatically and verbally,...

Daniel Defoe's A Journal of the Plague Year gives the modern reader insight into the tense atmosphere of disease-infested urban London. However, the most important insights we gain from H.F.'s narrative are his observations on human behaviour,...

In the novel Jane Eyre, author Charlotte Bronte places great importance on the appearance of her characters, repeatedly evaluating their attractiveness through narrative descriptions and dialogue. Her heroine, Jane, is mentioned countless times as...

In his essay ÃÂÂWhat America Would Be Like Without Blacks,ÃÂ? Ralph Ellison argues that ÃÂÂThe nation could not survive being deprived of their [the NegroÃÂÂs] presence because, by the irony implicit in the dynamics of American democracy, they...

Names play a pivotal role in Oscar Wilde's drama "The Importance of Being Earnest." The naming of the characters is deliberate and well thought-out. Their name alludes to the pigeonhole for each of their characters. A name is a typecast and in...

During the first 125 lines of Book 18 in the Iliad, the character of Achilleus undergoes a metamorphosis as he responds to the death of his beloved friend, Patroklos. Tragically, Achilleus finally finds his role in the Trojan War just as he...

The Iliad, in that it is more about the Greek hero Achilles than any other particular person, portrays the Achaean in surprisingly shocking light at times throughout the story. In his encounter with Lycaon, who had previously been taken prisoner...

The Iliad by Homer is an epic poem focused on the wrath of the character Achilles. This wrath guided Achilles to be a great warrior for the Greeks during the Trojan War, but this wrath also extended into his relationships with his fellow Greeks...

By the 19th-century, according to Hawthorne and Melville, a man's home was no longer his castle, but an effete parlor-room, a locus of stripped and castrated masculinity that hampered the development of classically intellectual and original...

To be a paradigm of a Gothic novel, The House of Seven Gables needs to include many elements, all which center on the ideas of gloom, horror, and mystery. The action of a Gothic novel takes place in a "run-down, abandoned or occupied, mansion or...