Newest Literature Essays

In 1915, during the Taisho period of Japanese history, native Japanese author Ryunosuke Akutagawa created a collection of short stories entitled Rashomon and Other Stories. The progenitor of the modern Japanese short story form, Akutagawa's...

Lucrece's tragic downfall in Shakespeare's "Rape of Lucrece" can be largely blamed on male competition. Her hapless story begins with a contest to determine which man possesses the chastest wife, "among which Collatus extolled the incomparable...

Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun challenges the stereotype of 1950's America as a country full of doting, content housewives. The women in this play, Mama, Ruth and Beneatha, represent three generations of black women who, despite their...

When Harry 'Rabbit' Angstrom returns to Brewer to seek the help of his old high school basketball coach Marty Tothero in John Updike's 'Rabbit Run,' a third-person narrator establishes the scene "Rabbit glances up hopefully at the third-story...

On the title page of Pygmalion, George Bernard Shaw describes the play as 'A Romance in Five Acts'. Throughout the play, readers might assume that the heroine and hero of Pygmalion will end up romantically together. In fact, a common complaint...

Aeschylus' play Prometheus Bound centers on the struggle between Prometheus and Zeus. Prometheus is an intelligent god who is concerned with the welfare of others. Zeus is a tyrant who acts rashly according to his emotion. The two figures clash...

The 1920s is an era somewhat paradoxically described as an anachronistic one rife with social upheaval. Willa Cather's The Professor's House sheds light on this awkward time as she details the life of Godfrey St. Peter, an academic caught between...

The Prince is more of a manual for successful leadership then a book. It was the first book written that did not make any mention of god and at the time was considered controversial for its lack of morals. The Prince describes the two principal...

In 1532, a divisive pamphlet was published which established the foundation of modern political science while merging classical pagan philosophy with Renaissance humanism. (Fry) The Prince, written by Niccolo Machiavelli, was condemned immediately...

Using the model of Cesare Borgia in The Prince, Machiavelli proposes a new theory of virtue that is consistent with no moral standard other than what is called for by necessity. To do this, Machiavelli first discusses Cesare's virtue, and then...

The concept of virtu is central to Machiavellian political theory in The Prince. The problematic nature of this term makes a concise definition difficult to formulate. Varying definitions often lead to different interpretations of Machiavelli. In...

Machiavelli's The Prince is an ambitious attempt to outline the steps necessary to ensuring success in leadership. The work dissects the elements of power; it identifies the sources from which it springs and the tactics required for its...

The ideal of a complex nation state, one that possesses a central power and does not operate in a feudal manner or under the control of the Church, came into being during a rather turbulent period of political transition. The political realities...

At first thought, this question seems simple enough. After all, Nicolo Machiavelli did more or less write an "autocrat's handbook" when he authored The Prince. In this text, Machiavelli explains how an autocrat rises to power, when an autocrat can...

In The Prince, Niccolò Machiavelli, the author, generally lays forth a system of ethics for rulers. Given the strength of Christianity at the time that he wrote this work, Machiavelli's instructions to aspiring rulers are surprising. His...

In "Portrait d'une Femme," Ezra Pound examines the fragmented nature of the modern woman; cluttered with culture and accumulated intellect, her character exhibits mere parts of a whole that is both inscrutable and alluringly fascinating....

In "A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man", Stephan Dedalus's evolving image of the female derives from his shifting and inconsistent perspective on religion and spirituality. Whichever religious belief he holds during each adolescent phase is...

A caterpillar must crawl, inch by inch, across the earth before it can mature, grow wings, and soar beautifully above the land in which it was born. So too, in James Joyce's A Portrait Of The Artist as a Young Man, must the central character,...

...His mother said:

-O, Stephen will apologise.

Dante said:

-O, if not, the eagles will come and pull out his eyes.

This capsule of utterance, which comes at the climax of the short first passage (or first independent "poem" of the book, as Fisher...

"On her long journey from Rome her mind had been given up to vagueness; she was unable to question the future. She performed this journey with sightless eyes and took little pleasure in the countries she traversed, decked out though they were in...

Alexander Pope is known for his scathing but intelligent critiques of high English society. His acclaimed poem The Rape of the Lock does support female passivity and subordination in marriage; however, the fact that they are endorsed in Pope's...

Pope's "An Essay on Man" can be read as a self-conscious consideration of the idea of formal systems, both at the level of the poem and of the world. Pope moves philosophically from the lowest- to the highest-ranked levels of being and back,...

In Pope's "Epistle: To a Lady of the Characteristics of Women", he condemns the "wise wretch" of a woman who is not only too wise, but has "too much spirit", "too much quickness" and does "too much thinking". He bitterly exposes what "Nature...

The poem "Mending Wall" by the prominent American poet Robert Frost has often been viewed as one of his favorite pieces of verse. The basic context of this poem concerns the construction of a stone wall between two neighbors and their individual...