Newest Literature Essays

Of Mice and Men and The Grapes of Wrath, two novels published concurrently by John Steinbeck, both depict camaraderie between dust bowl migrants. The main characters in Of Mice and Men, George and Lennie, form a bond, while struggling to reach...

Motivation is the condition of providing something as need, belief, or desire that induces a character to act. In the historical fiction Night, by Elie Wiesel, action and setting contribute significantly to the motivation of the central...

In not more than 300 words, make an analytical description of naturalism and one kind of anti-naturalism. In not more than 1200 words, demonstrate what each description might contribute to an understanding of one scene from 'Miss Julie', (pages 78...

Writers involved in the naturalist movement believed that actors' lines should be spoken naturally, and that mechanical movements, vocal effects, and irrational gestures should be banished. A return to reality was proposed, with the old theatrical...

Stephen Crane's interpretations of life are spawned from his own opinions of the world. These opinions correspond with naturalistic train of thought. He makes use of an observation technique to show the natural law of the universe: One can either...

Les Miserables is a story of redemption, forgiveness, charity, salvation and moral obligation. The main character, Jean Valjean, enters the novel as a thief, having spent nineteen years in prison. He is given this second chance by M. Myriel, a...

"On December 10, 1950 , [William Faulkner] delivered his [Nobel Prize] acceptance speech to the academy in a voice so low and rapid that few could make out what he was saying, but when his words were published in the newspaper the following day,...

Shakespeare's Julius Caesar opens with the concurrent celebrations of Caesar's defeat of Pompey and the annual fertility festival of Lupercal. The coupling of the two historically separate events each celebrating distinct gender roles dramatically...

In Franz Kafka's "A Hunger Artist" and in Gabriel Garcia Marquez's " A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings," an understanding of the cruelty of mankind is revealed through an examination of the themes and the characters in both of their stories....

"The hallmark of the psychopath is the inability to recognize others as worthy of compassion."

-Shirley Lynn Scott, What Makes Serial Killers Tick?

"They are not near my conscience."

Hamlet, after condemning childhood friends to death.

Most readers...

T.S. Eliot's famous poem The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock shares many correlating themes with William Shakespeare's Hamlet. Despite their evident similarities in style, Eliot criticizes Shakespeare's Hamlet in his essay Hamlet and His Problems,...

Hamlet is the most baffling of the great plays. It is the tragedy of a man and an action continually baffled by wisdom. The man is too wise. The dual action, pressing in both cases to complete an event, cannot get past his wisdom into the world....

Many of Edward Albee's plays are "overrun with devouring mothers, castrating wives, and remote husbands. . ." (Hirsch 18). As a result, a typical Albee marriage is one of domestic warfare. The women endlessly battle with their men in order to...

It is a volatile point in history: the intersection of science and religion at the height of the Inquisition; it is a time when the Church reigns and a man, a physicist, must choose life or death, himself or science. Galileo Galilei's legendary...

Probably no other twentieth century short story has called forth more attention than Joyce's "Araby." Some universality of experience makes the story interesting to readers of all ages, for they respond instinctively to an experience that could...

Much like a ghost, Beloved's Sethe is caught in limbo between her past and future. She constantly struggles between the remembrances triggered by Beloved and the opportunities afforded by Paul D. Having never matured into the present, Sethe finds...

In contrast to many other Depression-era novels, in which the teamwork of the common man is seen as society's glue, Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio looks with great admiration at one family's struggle to keep above water. Through the travails of a...

The four didactic interludes present in Tillie Olsen's Yonnondio: From the Thirties are vitally important in relation to the rest of the text. These narrative intrusions, as Constance Coiner prefers to call them, not only change but also deepen...

The Victorian rest cure, a diagnosis set forth to upper class, white, Victorian women who were believed to be suffering from "hysteria", or "trauma related to an unsuccessful role adjustment" sought to instill in them a "childlike submission to...

Charlotte Perkins Gilman was one of the most prominent feminists and social thinkers at the turn of the century. Her best fiction, The Yellow Wallpaper, is also her least typical. It is about a young wife and mother's mental deterioration as...

"Personally, I disagree with their ideas." One of the opening statements of "The Yellow Wallpaper" by Charlotte Perkins Gilman, this quote sums up the point of the text. Gilman becomes incensed at the way doctors and society view women. This short...

In the well-known work Women and Economics, Charlotte Perkins Gilman emphasizes her belief that "dependence on men not only doom[s] women to live stifled lives but also retard[s] the development of the human species" (Kirszner 449). Those words...

"The pattern is torturing. You think you have mastered it, but just as you get well underway in following, it turns a back-somersault and there you are. It slaps you in the face, knocks you down, and tramples upon you."

As her madness progresses...

Emily Bronte, in her novel Wuthering Heights, characterizes the protagonist Heathcliff as both a recipient and a perpetrator of the continually domineering forces of both love and revenge existing within the novel. Through complex...