Newest Literature Essays

Chaucer's 'Troilus and Criseyde' opens to the ringing tones of Troilus's 'double sorwe'. From the first lines it is ascertained that he is the main character of the poem, no matter how attractive Pandarus and Criseyde appear. Troilus' heartbreak,...

Why, she is a pearl

Whose price hath launched above a thousand ships

And turned crowned kings to merchants. (2.2.81-3)

The world of ShakespeareÃÂÂs Troilus and Cressida does not distinguish decidedly between the Greeks and the Trojans. Though the...

In Beowulf and Beroul's The Romance of Tristan, the heroes Beowulf and Tristan are magnificent fighters. Their numerous victories against seemingly insurmountable odds and powerful enemies are testaments to their battle-talents. Yet the two heroes...

Nihilism is "the destruction of everything without pity" (Palmieri, 3). A completely different movement that is sometimes lumped together with Nihilism is Existentialism, which is a belief that "the world is without meaning or purpose." It also...

In order to address the paradoxes of eroticism and human desire for intimacy in The Trial, it is important to recognize the ongoing theme of bondage (in the classic master/slave sense). Without this undercurrent of power and servitude, it is...

One particular climax in the story "Treasure Island" occurs when Jim Hawkins unwittingly stumbles into enemy camp and is captured by Long John Silver and his pirates. This passage is of particular importance because it ultimately allows Jim to...

To the Lighthouse is a novel about Mrs. Ramsay; her ways, her wiles, and her lasting impact. Though she dies with half the novel left to read, there is no doubt that, whatever intention Woolf had, Mrs. Ramsay is the main character for she is...

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf bases her exploration of consciousness on the premise that men and women perceive the world in vastly different ways. However, Woolf believes that creativity can (and must) transcend the boundaries of gender....

A "splendid mind," is Mr. Ramsay's most coveted and powerful instrument, the one constantly at his disposal for perceiving, judging and dissecting the universe. His is an intelligence comparable to a mechanism with gears which move steadily in one...

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf focuses in great detail on the workings of dark and light on the relationships between her characters. The presence of light or dark tends to govern certain scenes: light brings people together in a harmony...

The method of Virginia Woolfâs To the Lighthouse is intensely related to its story. The two are so conflated that the novel is almost about itself. Every character struggles to find a balance between elucidation, creation and representation,...

Virginia Woolf's To the Lighouse is ultimately a celebration of the human spirit. In the novel, time is synonymous with the ocean and darkness, and this triumvirate of forces, in essence, acts as the antagonist. Time ebbs and flows, continuing on...

Virginia Woolf's claim that plot is banished in modern fiction is a misleading tenet of Modernism. The plot is not eliminated so much as mapped out onto a more local level, most obviously with the epic structural comparison in Ulysses. In To the...

Throughout literature the ideology of the society in which the author was living is evident in the text. This can cause certain groups within a text to be empowered while the other groups are marginalised and constrained by the social restrictions...

From the invisible to the visible is but a step, and a very quick step at that. The task of the metaphor is to render concrete and palpable, through analogy, the abstract and unseen, and Virginia Woolf peppers To the Lighthouse, especially the...

The rigid class structure and social stratification of Maycomb County had a profound effect on the events in the novel, To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee. The impact of this class structure and the underlying prejudice was especially evident in...

The modern fireplace is a marvel of invisible technology, a contained conflagration sparked by the flip of a switch and without human error or intervention. Only recently, and in the comforts of home, has building a fire been so simple. As the...

England's unexpected victory over the Spanish Armada in 1588 did much to bolster England's national spirit and usher in a new era of exploration and imperial sentiment. Exploration of the world beyond the boundaries of the British Isles "was...

I found Rome a city of bricks and left it a city of marble -Augustus Caesar (63 BC - 14 AD)

In his essay, Titus Andronicus and the Mythos of Shakespeare's Rome, Robert Miola uncovers and explores the myths Shakespeare uses as bedrock for the...

Feste, the fool character in Twelfth Night, in many ways represents a playwright figure, and embodies the reach and tools of the theater. He criticizes, manipulates and entertains the other characters while causing them to reflect on their life...

In their respective works Things Fall Apart and The Joys of Motherhood, both Chinua Achebe and Buchi Emecheta depict the effects of colonialism on Igbo society.

While Achebe demonstrates the gradual process of colonial imposition, Buchi Emecheta...

The concept of balance in Achebe's novel, Things Fall Apart, is an important theme throughout the book. Achebe introduces this idea with an excerpt from William Butler Yeats's poem, "The Second Coming." The notion of balance is stressed here as...

The Alpha Female

Zora Neale Hurston's 1937 novel Their Eyes Were Watching God shows the Southern black women not as the weak and submissive slaves of their husbands, but rather, Eyes traces the development of Janie as the independent black woman....

In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Zora Neale Hurston uses metonymy several times in order to express motifs which appear throughout the novel. For instance, one of the clearest examples of metonymy, the porch, appears as a whole or general entity,...