Newest Literature Essays

In the epilogue of As You Like It, Rosalind discusses the nature of real and performed gender identity in a final bid to resolve the gender confusion extant throughout the play. The events leading up to the epilogue make such resolution necessary,...

Compare the relations between older and younger men in the following extracts; pay close attention to the use of dramatic language and the opportunities offered by the text for different emphases in production: 1 Henry IV, 2.4.109-62 (Bevington...

While it is likely that Oedipus Rex is the only character who completely embodies Aristotle's idea of a tragic hero, there are many characters who possess enough of his defined characteristics to qualify as the tragic hero of their respective...

The "Golden Age" of Greece is notorious for its many contributions to the creative world, especially in its development of the play. These primitive performances strived to emphasize Greek morals, and were produced principally for this purpose....

It is very difficult to label something as a first in literature. Much the way inventions are often adaptations of previously patented objects, most authors borrow ideas and techniques form pre-existing media. In order to truly classify something...

George Orwell's political fable Animal Farm portrays a reenactment of the Russian Revolution, with major characters cast as farm animals and communism renamed "Animalism." True to the historical story, the aristocratic players manipulate the...

The past permeates the lives of New York Society as portrayed by Edith Wharton in The Age of Innocence. Society appears to be an inherently conservative institution with extreme attention to ritual and tradition, evidenced by our introduction at...

In most Greek tragedies, the writer uses the chorus as a tool to comment on action in the play. The chorus does not play an active role in the story, such that if they were removed from the work, the plot would not be affected. However, in...

Virgil's Aeneid details the trials and tribulations of Aeneas and the Trojan people en route to Italy from Troy. The journey parallels the epic adventures of the Homeric hero Odysseus. Virgil borrows Homer's narrative style and frames a story that...

In The Aeneid, Virgil introduces the post-Homeric epic, an epic that immortalizes both a hero's glory and the foundation of a people. The scope of the Aeneid can be paralleled to the scope of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, which explores the origins...

Aristotle contends that the good man is dissimilar to the good citizen in ways he goes a great length to illustrate. He distinguishes the two for the purpose of facilitating his later arguments concerning the appropriate allocation of sovereignty...

This passage from Vergil's Aeneid comes from Aeneas' tale to Dido, as the Trojan leader describes his city and comrades on the night when Sinon released the Greeks from the Trojan Horse and opened the gate for the Greek armies on the beach. Aeneas...

When Mark Twain wrote The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after the Civil War, it was in part a response to Harriet Beecher Stowe's pre-Civil War novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin. While supporting many of Stowe's claims and motives, Twain also found fault...

Huckleberry Finn is a young boy who struggles with complex issues such as empathy, guilt, fear, and morality in Mark Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There are two different sides to Huck. One is the subordinate, easily influenced boy whom...

The afterlife, in accordance to the underworld, includes manifold mythological characters and symbols in the form of the river Styx, Cerberus, Charon, and Hades itself. The journey into the underworld begins with a person's death and journey for...

Humanism had a profound impact on European society during the Renaissance. This movement transformed the thinking processes of many Europeans, altering the way these people viewed themselves, their lives, and their place in the world. Literature...

In the words of Herbert Hoover, "Older men declare war. But it is youth that must fight and die. And it is youth who must inherit the tribulation, the sorrow and the triumphs that are the aftermath." War disfigures and tears away precious lives....

Write a concise analytical description of 'Postmodernism' in no more than 200 words.

Postmodernism was a movement which took place in the Arts from the 1930's to 1980's, which sought not just to act as a continuation of modernism, but to attempt...

Threads are rather insignificant by themselves. It is when a weaver connects them together that they form a beautiful tapestry. Each thread now contributes to the quality of the tapestry and are bound together by the common picture that form. In a...

Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart explores the struggle between old traditions within the Igbo community as well as Christianity and "the second coming" it brings forth. While on the surface, it appears the novel narrows its focus to a single...

Every year, incredible amounts of time and money are spent on court cases for sexual harassment and divorce. Perhaps a male supervisor made an unwanted advance on a female employee because he thought that her body language or clothing invited a...

Niccolo Machiavelli advocates many cutthroat policies in The Prince in his effort to model the perfect leader, one who would place the utmost importance on preserving his power and his state rather than dealing with moral dilemmas. He presents...

A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man is, if nothing else, a record of the psychological journeys of Stephen Dedalus as he progresses from child to adult, unlearned rural boy to intellectual student, sinner to saint to artist. Stephen's level of...

In the 19th century novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe portrays Uncle Tom, a black slave, as an heroic figure. Written shortly before the American Civil War, the novel attempts to change negative moral attitudes towards blacks....