Newest Literature Essays

At the root of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud's differences regarding the nature of human happiness are their almost diametrically opposed models of human nature. Freud describes human nature in terms of universal, instinctive drives, the fulfillment...

"It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I know trees fear man," (23) uttered the protagonist of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Such words of meekness were characteristic of Celie's speech ...

As both the protagonist and narrator of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, the character of Alex is an intriguing study from start to finish. Specifically, in comparing part one and part three of the novel, Alex's world, internally and...

On the afternoon of June 11, 1814, at the home of Lady Sitwell, George Gordon, Lord Byron, upon seeing his cousin Lady Anne Wilmot Horton in "a mourning dress of spangled black" (Leung 312), was so moved that by the next day he had written "She...

In Literature and Language we are told that literary characterization is accomplished in three ways: "The reader learns about a character through the character's words and actions,...and through what other characters say about him...(p.44)" In...

Daniel Issacson, the narrator of Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, is perhaps not as beloved and well-known as Holden Caulfield, the voice behind Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It could be that we can empathize more easily with a misguided...

Humour, introspection, and allegory aside, The Canterbury Tales stands alone as one of the greatest social commentaries in the history of the English language. Chaucer uses a collection of prologues and tales to explore the issues that lie at the...

The Wife of Bathâs tale is appropriate to her character, and perfectly complements the description of the Wife in the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucerâs late 1300s literary masterpiece The Canterbury Tales. The Wife of Bath creates a heroine...

In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales there is one pilgrim whose overriding character trait seems to be hypocrisy itself: the Pardoner, basking in sin and, at the same time, preaching violently to the masses against precisely his immoral behavior. Indeed,...

The Wife of Bath, with the energy of her vernacular and the voraciousness of her sexual appetite, is one of the most vividly developed characters of 'The Canterbury Tales'. At 856 lines her prologue, or 'preambulacioun' as the Summoner calls it,...

Poetry can often be described as "painting with words." It is a poet's attempt to give linguistic form to thoughts and emotions, to create vivid imagery with only a minimum of language, achieved by any number of creative methods. In the lyric poem...

In his essay, "The Brothers Karamazov: Idea and Technique" Edward Wasiolek examines two aspects of Dostoevsky's work. He begins with an exposition of the scene in Elder Zosima's cell and Ivan's internal struggles with religion, and then follows...

"You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate questions!"(said to Ivan by "The...

As 1950s America engulfed itself in a widespread fear of Communism, government officials became extra vigilant in finding and punishing possible spies and traitors. Suspects were arrested for saying the wrong thing, being seen in the wrong place...

While Genesis, the first book of the Bible, seems to follow a distinct (male-dominated) pattern of history in the story it relates, tracing first Adam and Eve and their sons and then Abraham, his son Isaac, Isaac's son Jacob, and Jacob's son...

The setting of Endgame is characteristic of a Beckett play; a décor reduced to the barest minimum. A naked stage, both a poetic symbol and a parody of traditional theater, with only two dust bins, a chair, and a backward painting to look at. High...

The characters of Agave and Eve, while subordinate to their male counterparts, Pentheus and Adam, play extremely important roles within The Bacchae and Genesis, respectively. Their characters are portrayals of typical women who, because of...

In her novel Between the Acts, Virginia Wolf explores the dichotomy that arises when two entirely separate social classes live under one roof together. Likewise, Jamaica Kincaid gives an intimate portrayal of a young au pair working in a wealthy,...

Beowulf, the Old-English epic poem, is characteristic of its Nordic-Germanic roots as a tale of a great Scandinavian warrior - Beowulf - who saves a neighboring kingdom from the wrath of the destructive, blood-thirsty monster, Grendel, and...

The main characters in Toni Morrison's "Beloved" are former slaves; their main struggle, after having been stripped of their humanity and identity by the white men who owned them, is to reclaim self-ownership and form identities independent of...

In 1873 slavery had been abolished in Cincinnati, Ohio for ten years. This is the setting in which Toni Morrison places the characters for her powerfully moving novel, Beloved. After the Emancipation Proclamation and after the Civil War, Sethe,...

Though set in the underworld of thievery, John Gay's The Beggar's Opera codifies a set of Marxist sexual politics in which marriage stands as the great equalizer of desire and power. An often aphoristic overview of the traditional power struggle...

The idea of hubris is monumental in a plethora of Greek mythological works. In many ways the excessive pride of certain characters fuels their own destruction. This is certainly true with respect to the characters of Pentheus, Antigone, and...

Leonce Pontellier, the husband of Edna Pontellier in Kate Chopin's The Awakening, becomes very perturbed when his wife, in the period of a few months, suddenly drops all of her responsibilities. After she admits that she has "let things go," he...