Newest Literature Essays

In a revision of his enduring poem Rime of the Ancient Mariner, Samuel Coleridge added a pointed Latin epigraph, perhaps to clarify what he hoped the poem would convey upon his readers. The added lines ask us to reevaluate our perceptions of man...

"It is reasonable to argue that the German cinema is a development of German Romanticism, and that modern technique (cinematography) merely lends a visible form to Romantic fancies", Lotte Eisner asserts. Both Romanticism (late 18th-19th Century)...

From the very opening of William Shakespeare's tragic historical drama Richard III, the isolation of the main protagonist is made quite clear, for Richard progressively separates himself from the other main characters and gradually breaks the...

And lived with looking on his images;

But now two mirrors of his princely semblance

Are cracked in pieces by malignant death,

And I for comfort have but one false glass

That grieves me when I see my shame in him.

Thus does the Duchess of York lament...

Shakespeare's Richard III and Coriolanus are both characters who possess all the qualities of potentially invincible, fearless, and heroic warriors. They fail to emerge as heroes because neither of them are able to live beyond their idealistic...

In William Shakespeare's Richard III, Richard opens the play by informing the audience that, since he is "not shap'd for sportive tricks " (I.i.16) that are expected in the peacetime following the York's victory, he can only prove a spiteful,...

'Distortum vultum sequitur distortio morum.'

[Distortion of character follows a distorted countenance.] --Thomas More

Shakespeare's Richard III from the so-titled play shares the unsettling characteristic of being expressly "determined to prove a...

Shakespeare's Richard III is a play pervasive in figurative language, one of the most notable being the symbolic image of the sun and the shadow it casts. In an examination of a short passage from the text, it will be argued that Richard is...

Thus I play in one person many people,

And none contented. Sometimes I am king,

Then treasons make me wish myself a beggar,

And so I am.

V:v:31-34, King Richard II

While entangled in the throes of dramatic suspense, the self-reflexive concept of...

When Edmund challenges himself to conjure the worst prophecy he can think of for the forthcoming eclipse, he not only anticipates the plot of King Lear, but also highlights the fears of Tudor political society as

unnaturalness between the child and...

Richard II, like most of Shakespeare's history plays (though, notably, unlike his comedies and tragedies), establishes a theatrical world dominated by men and masculinity. Female characters are few, and those that appear on the stage tend to say...

Shakespeare's genius in character and plot development is exemplified in two of his most complex history plays, Richard II and Henry IV, Part I. With these sequential plays, Shakespeare vividly develops characters and sets up complicated plots by...

How valid is the distinction between history and tragedy in Richard II?

An attempt to sort Shakespeare's plays into neat categories may appear to have its benefits when striving to understand his work, but even a superficial reading of Richard II...

"Hardy summons into us a graphic dimension, and then, apparently without realizing the danger in doing so, he allows another Eustacia to enter his novel. This Eustacia emerges, through a consistent patter of speech and action as a creature unfit...

John Gardner once said that there are only two types of stories: someone leaving home or a stranger coming into town; The Return of the Native meets both of these in a way. Eustacia wishes to leave, while Clym returns, but seems to be almost a...

In his novel The Return of the Native, Thomas Hardy creates an unreliable world of misconceptions and coincidences by paralleling the setting of Egdon Heath to reality, as perceived through human nature, to convey his theme. Throughout the novel,...

The Victorian novel often focuses on prominent, relevant issues of the time during which it is written. These issues can range from class, ambition, and gender to love, sexuality, and desire. Authors of the Victorian era delivered insight on these...

The Return of the Native, by Thomas Hardy, begins with personification of a majestic heath, the setting for this novel: "The face of the heath by its mere complexion added half an hour to evening; it could... retard the dawn, sadden noon,...

In The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui, by Bertolt Brecht, a violent gang gains power through the vegetable trade, attaining near dictatorial status in a chillingly short amount of time. One thing leads to another in a rapid sequence of events that...

Kurt Vonnegut's novel Slaughterhouse-Five is, at first glance, nothing more than a science fiction tale of one man's travels to another planet and his ability to view his life out of chronological order because of his power to time travel. There...

Henry Fleming, after receiving his red badge of couragea blow to the headtakes over the role of color-bearer during a vicious combat. As he sees his comrade sink to the ground in pain, he fights with his friend Wilson for the esteemed position of...

Stephen Crane, in "The Red Badge of Courage", makes numerous references to flags, references that are all fraught with meaning. Flags themselves hold a great deal of symbolic value. They began as a way to distinguish tribes in battle, but came to...

The world of Stephen Crane's fiction is a cruel, lonely place. Man's environment shows no sympathy or concern for man; in the midst of a battle in The Red Badge of Courage "Nature had gone tranquilly on with her golden process in the midst of so...

Stephen Crane's pieces are written with the intent to establish individualism as an unfavorable quality. He establishes that group goals are more important than that of the individual and creates groups to which each character should conform....