Newest Literature Essays

Throughout time, succeeding generations have rebelled against the values and traditions of their parents and grandparents. This continual pattern of insurgence is the key theme of Pa Chin's Family, in which the new generation of "enlightened"...

Fidessa's character in Edmund Spenser's "The Fairy Queene", introduced in the second canto of book 1, is essential to the understanding of one of Spenser's main messages in the poem: the Roman Catholic Church is corrupt and falsely interprets...

The Romantic era saw a wave of primitivism sweep through its literature and art. The dissatisfaction of the present led to a glorification of the past, and it was explored and philosophized by looking at the 'noble savage'. However, a branch of...

Textual, mnemonic, and physical gaps leave room in which identity is found through body and environment in Michael Ondaatje's The English Patient and Toni Morrison's Jazz. Ondaatje's characters retrieve their absent personas by mutually colonizing...

Jane Austen's many novels contain a complexity of thought and a depth of character that distinguish them from other stories; Emma is no exception to this general rule. In fact, Emma's most winning trait may well be the well roundedness of its...

Emily Dickinson's "Wild Nights--Wild Nights!" is as enigmatic as it is condensed. Most critics agree that it is an essentially erotic poem, but interpretations vary widely within that shared recognition of its eroticism. There is disagreement as...

There are many complex personalities in John Webster's classic play, "The Duchess of Malfi". Webster's character named "Bosola" is perhaps the most complex of any. Throughout the play, one may notice a variety of emotional traits in each of the...

Though James Joyce's realist short story "The Dead" and T.S. Eliot's mock-epic poem "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" both describe a climate of self-conscious emotional inarticulacy and division, the protagonists of each work deny themselves...

The issue of social class and its effects upon society in Victorian-era Europe is a theme central to Bram Stoker's novel Dracula. On the surface, the novel seems to be a story of a battle between good and evil; upon further analysis, it could be...

Don Quixote is among the most influential novels ever written. It explores a myriad of imperative themes that profoundly effect human nature. Such gargantuan themes include the shifting boundaries of truth and illusion, how society views justice...

In A Doll's House by Ibsen, the author takes the preconditions and viewer expectations of the play format established by earlier writers and uses them to shock his audience rather than lull them into oblivion with simple entertainment. Ibsen...

'Until death do us part.' Well, not always. Everywhere one looks, divorce is plaguing society, and it has become widely accepted throughout the world. Now the violent shredding of a family is shrugged off like the daily weather, and the treasured...

In Boris Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago there is an adulterous love affair between Yurii Andreievich Zhivago and Larisa Feodorovna Guishar that is carried on throughout the novel. Although the affair is essential for the movement of the story, it is...

The journey of introspection can lead to unbound places and uninhibited realizations. In the course of his travels throughout the Inferno, Dante Alighieri encounters the damned souls of the underworld and experiences their prodigious punishments....

Poor Ivan Ilych is plagued by not one, but two diseases. While his "floating kidney" ends his life, it is a temporal disease - which is actually healed as his kidney disease progresses - that ruins his life. Ivan spends his life in a small...

From its very infancy, the American continent was often equated with boundless opportunity. In A Description of New England John Smith characterized the early colonies of 1616 as a land of economic potential, declaring that "If a man work but...

Just before the morning rush hour, she got out of a jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in the red, downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible - knuckles black with eye-liner and mascara...

When reading Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" one is flooded with a deluge of historical references (dates, places, events) and, unless a historical genius, probably feels confused as to the historical accuracy of such references. As critics have...

Fyodor Dostoevsky uses Crime and Punishment as a vehicle for his critique on the moral deterioration of society caused by the encroaching poisonous, impersonal rationalism of modernity. He focuses his critique by utilizing a defining component of...

Written in a time of emerging new philosophies and ideals, Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment exemplifies the author's strongly held viewpoints on religion, morality, society, and philosophy, while offering insight into the innermost...

After discussing the possibility of confession with Porfiry in part six of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov debates whom to go see, Svidrigaylov or Sonya. He says of Sonya:

"She represented an irrevocable sentence, an unchangeable resolution. He...

Anyone who has had any exposure to theatre has at least once heard the colloquialism, "there are no small parts, only small actors." Some may mock this platitude, pointing out the fact that, of course there are small parts; most literary works...

Martin Luther, one of the foremost leaders of the Protestant Reformation, sought to reject much of the doctrine and authority of the Catholic Church, yet many of his theological and political ideas are extremely reflective of the Catholic luminary...

Differentiation, decomposition, alienation, estrangement: these words appear again and again in MarxÃÂÂs writings as descriptions of the failures of capitalism. For him, an emphasis on community and equality was the solution to the degrading...