Newest Literature Essays

Plato presents a complicated theory of human psychology spread out amongst his various works. In Republic, Phaedo, Phaedrus, and others, Plato develops a view of human psychology centered on the nature of the soul. He presents the bulk of his...

The philosophical debate that is the focus of Plato's Symposium culminates in the speech of Diotima. She is a mysterious figure, a brilliant woman with the powers even to put off a plague. What she does here is miraculous too: she manages to tie...

Amid the feverish horror of rampant sickness and death, The Plague is a parable of human remoteness and the struggle to share existence. In studying the relationships which Camus sets forth, the relationship between man and lover, mother and son,...

Looking back on the mountain-view that was described as the main character's of Fenimore Cooper's The Pioneers caught sight of Templeton, their hometown, in the distance, Elizabeth, the primary female character, "felt as if all the loveliness of...

John Bunyan, as he tells us in his prefatory remarks, didn't mean to write Pilgrim's Progress; it all happened while he was otherwise engaged. His Apology, at least at first, takes on the word's modern connotations. He regrets having inflicted the...

The measure of a manâs character is what he would do if he knew he never would be found out.

Thomas Babington

Morality is the very foundation of goodness and the pillar of righteousness. Immorality, however, is the threshold towards conspicuous...

Jane Austen uses her novels to express her disdain for nineteenth century English marital practice. She herself defied convention by remaining single and earning a living through her writing. Austenâs novels, including Emma, Pride and Prejudice,...

In her towering box at the fashionable opera house, Mme de Beausant "was scanning the theatre with her opera-glasses, and though apparently taking no notice of Madame de Nucingen, did not miss her slightest move" (112). The vicomtesse, as though...

In the first paragraph of his novel Pere Goriot, Balzac describes his primary setting, the Maison Vauquer, as a "respectable establishment" that has never been sullied by any "breath of scandal" (1). This statement significantly defines the house...

Paradise Lost explores the natural aspiration to stand alone and to be distinguished from the multitudes. Adam, Eve, Satan, even God himself strain to assert their superiority and godliness by attempting to wield the most visible proof of godly...

In Metaphysics, Aristotle creates a series of dualities which are intrinsically "male" or "female." Included in this original set of oppositions are light and darkness and good and evil - the former of each duo being inherently associated with the...

Satan's account

I

169: But see the angry victor hath recalled

170: His ministers of vengeance and pursuit

171: Back to the gates of heaven: the sulphurous hail

172: Shot after us in storm, o'erblown hath laid

173: The fiery surge, that from the...

Part of Milton's genius lies in his ability to stack motif on top of motif, theme on top of theme and image on top of image with high density, without losing any of the effectiveness of his words; in fact, that density increases the effectiveness....

John Milton's Paradise Lost is an epic that has influenced the Christian perception of God, Satan, sin, and the origin of mankind for centuries. His poetic account of the creation story, though, clearly expands on several aspects within the most...

The world of Milton's Paradise Lost is a world of discourse, full of divine as well as human speech. When God creates Christ, he calls him "thou my Word, begotten son, by thee/ This I perform" (VII. 165-6). Indeed, the concept of the "Word" (Greek...

In Milton's Paradise Lost, angels and men are arranged in a divinely established hierarchy based on their relative proximity to God. Through the course of the epic, characters develop different and often conflicting conceptions of the spiritual...

In Paradise Lost, Milton plays with the preconceived notions of his readers by presenting perspectives perhaps never before imagined. God is not strictly the protagonist and Satan is not strictly the antagonist, on the contrary Satan is presented...

Perhaps the most seductive method of interpreting existence is through the bifocal lenses of morality. Whether in a religious or non-religious sense, almost every civilization, institution, and human has had its own demarcation of Good and Evil....

"...[F]rom what state

I fell, how glorious once above [the Sun's] sphere;

Till pride and worse ambition threw me down

Warring in Heav'n against Heav'n's matchless King:

Ah wherefore! He deserved no such return

From me, whom he created what I was

In that...

In Milton's epic poem, Paradise Lost, God's only two commandments to his newest creations, the humans Adam and Eve, contradict each other. This is because God incorporates the contradictory notions of both faith and reason into the law by which he...

Nabokov's "Pale Fire" fractures the traditional doppelganger story (as do other novels of his, such as "Despair," "The Real Life of Sebastian Knight," and "Lolita"), which often relies on clear black-and-white doubles (Stevenson's "Dr. Jekyl and...

Ovid and Horace, Roman poets in the age of Augustus, collectively captured a very broad range of sentiments and atmosphere in the empire at this time. Horace wrote odes, satires, and epistles that glorify Augustus himself and his reforms and...

"I must weep, / But they are cruel tears," says Othello near the end of his soliloquy in Act Five, Scene Two, right before killing Desdemona. Traditional Shakespearean murderers do not shed tears prior to killing their victim; in Shakespeare's...

Shakespeare's Othello (Shakespeare, 1604) is a tragedy that unfolds based on the actions and language of one character: Iago. As a result, the plot is linear, yet the play manages to maintain a multidimensional effect. Shakespeare uses the...