Newest Literature Essays

Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot and James Joyce's Ulysses are strikingly similar in style, content, and most significantly a philosophy of life. The idea of language as doubly futile and liberating is central to both works. It is found in the...

"O divine power, but lend yourself to me

So that I may show the shadow of that blessed

Kingdom which is embedded in my brain"

The above passage is excerpted from Canto I of Longfellow's translation of Dante Alighieri's Paradiso (22-24). In this third...

Patched together from different marriages, various mothers and fathers, the nuclear family in Don DeLillo's White Noise is nothing if not impacted and constructed by modernity. This explication of a typical American lifestyle does not examine the...

Don Dellilo's protagonist in his novel "White Noise," Jack Gladney, has a "nuclear family" that is, ostensibly, a prime example of the disjointed nature way of the "family" of the 80's and 90's -- what with Jack's multiple past marriages and the...

During the early years of the French Revolution, England became a place of new beginnings, where the idea of the individual emerged, the world of literature was reborn and authority was thoroughly questioned and often uprooted. Great poets and...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a modern Colombian author, explores both the natural and the supernatural in his short story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings." Although the plot revolves around the character of a winged man who has fallen to earth,...

In Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," one may find a fascinating adventure story about the sailor named Raphael Hythloday. However, below the surface of this adventure story lies a deep sea of social criticism. In a time period where speaking against the...

Though Sir Thomas More took an active role in politics and the corrupt government of King Henry VIII, he remained rooted in his political and religious convictions. Famous for his willingness to die rather than betray his ideals, More showed...

A man named Nonsenso begins any debate at a disadvantage. What kind of information or argument can be expected of such an individual? Can he articulate a rational idea, deduce a logical conclusion? Is the authority of his discourse to be trusted?...

'During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens . . . [I] at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of...

The cultural repercussions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, are undeniable. Uncle Tom's Cabin became one of the most widely read and profoundly penetrating books of the nineteenth century. Richard Yarborough remarked that,...

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, written during the period of boiling tumult that was to erupt into the Civil War, has struck it's readers in more ways than one. Wildly popular, Uncle Tom's Cabin was made into theatrical pieces and...

While lying on her death bed, in Chapter 26 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, little Eva says to the servants in her house who have gathered around her, "You must remember that each one of you can become angels" (418). In this chapter...

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, the inquisitive Tereza ponders what makes her unique. While staring at herself in a mirror she wonders if changing her physical features can affect who she is on the inside; whether her...

If we examine Ulysses for the use of animals, we soon realize that Joyce draws on an extensive bestiary which includes basilisks, wrens, pigs, eagles, hyenas, panthers, pards, pelicans, roebucks, unicorns, dogs, bats, whales and serpents among...

In Episode 8 of Ulysses, Joyce sends Bloom and the reader through a gauntlet of food that enlarges one of the novels main linguistic strategies, that of gradual digestion. While Episode 10 may seem like a more appropriate choice for a spatial...

With all the irregular movements in Nausicaa Gerty's limping walk, Bloom's masturbation, the jerky flight of a hovering bat , the abrupt and erratic changes of scene and perspective, and finally the seasick movement of the sea (1189; 1162, "Do...

T.S. Eliot declared that Ulysses was a masterpiece because it demonstrated the futility of all prior literary styles. Indeed, the episodes of "Oxen of the Sun" and "Aeolus" could be taken as challenging primers on English style and rhetoric. This...

It has often been said that "the clothes make the man." It could never seem truer than in Twelfth Night where disguises and mistaken identities run the gamut of use. The identity of people, things and ideas are swept away under the facade of...

In Twelfth Night, Shakespeare creates a duality between the worlds of the nobility and its associates and the said "outsiders." There is a great element of selfishness involved in the actions of the characters deemed "in" as they peruse through...

In both plays, Twelfth Night and Doctor Faustus, there exists a high and a low (or comic) plot. This plot division serves as a parallel - the actions and characters in the low plot coincide with the actions and characters in the high plot. The...

Theatre began as a presentation of stories and ideas, mostly revolving around festival times in the calendar of the church year. This concept was carried on in Shakespeare's times and is exemplified in his plays Twelfth Night, or What You Will and...

In Shakespeare's Twelfth Night, the Feste's role might originally appear to be as a minor character, but in actuality his role is of principal significance. Because the action of the play occurs during the revelry of the holiday season, the clown...

To be female is to be frivolous and inconstant. This is the position that Geoffrey Chaucer takes in his love poem, "Troilus and Criseyde". The lovely Criseyde, with whom Troilus falls madly in love, is the epitome of frivolity and inconstancy, in...