Newest Literature Essays

Dramatic tragedies are by definition plays that enact the struggle and downfall of their main character or characters. "The Tragedy of Macbeth", by William Shakespeare, is a perfect example of this; the entire play portrays the fatalistic...

In Shakespeare's time, having children was, arguably, even more important than it is today. In a society dominated by rules of inheritance and birthright, children were important, not only as the means of carrying on a name and genetic material,...

Time plays a crucial role in Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. Like all Shakespearian tragedies, the main character is necessarily at odds with time. By its very nature, a tragedy must end with the death of the hero. The hero, therefore, must bide...

Starting with the witches' assertion that âfair is foul, and foul is fair,â? it is clear that Macbeth is a play in which appearances will be deceiving and morality will be muddled. From the dialogue between King Duncan, Malcolm, and the wounded...

Come you spirit,

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.

--Lady Macbeth

More so than any other Shakespearean play, Macbeth functions the most vividly as a psychoanalysis of the state of humanity's development of a sense of sexual self. Now, in a...

The collective minds of people in England during the time of Shakespeare struggled to explain the unexplainable; they struggled to understand randomness and human nature. They believed that from the beginning of time a certain cosmic order had...

In Shakespeare's, Macbeth, there seems to be an uncanny connection between the images of sleep and nature. The play refers to the results of nature being thwarted, and since sleep is the primarily natural function of every human being, its seems...

In Greek tragedy, inevitability plays an important role, portraying the protagonists as pawns of the fates, whose roles in the tragedy are distributed arbitrarily and without justice. The outcomes of these roles are decided before the play even...

Separating qualities common to one 'set' or 'type' of Shakespeare's plays which are not common to the plays as a whole is a difficult task: it would no doubt be possible to find evidence of any feature uniting 'the Tragedies' within any of...

A central theme of William Shakespeare's Macbeth is the title character's willingness to accept his fate. Macbeth's attitude toward the prophecies of the witches varies depending on how much he likes the prediction. At first, he follows along with...

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Macbeth undergoes a profound and gradual evolution throughout the play. He regresses from a logical, compassionate, caring, and conscientious man, to an entirely apathetic, amoral paradigm of cynical numbness. Macbeth's...

Literary critic Frances E. Dolan states, "No critic has suggested that the play [Macbeth] might more properly be called, The Macbeths, thereby asserting that Lady Macbeth's role in Macbeth is not given adequate recognition1. Professor A.C. Bradley...

The iniquitous nature of unrequited love plays man the subservient jester to his indifferent queen. In his poem "The Cap and Bells" W. B. Yeats seeks to convey the message that unrequited love causes a man to give and give of himself until he has...

As its title suggests, "M. Butterfly" is essentially a play about metamorphosis. It is, firstly, the metamorphosis of Giacomo Puccini's famous opera "Madame Butterfly" into a modern-day geopolitical argument for cultural understanding. Author...

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" depicts an image of the modern city that is marked by paralysis, alienation, decay, and repression. Prufrock is a modern man who can see the superficiality of the social values of middle class society, and yet...

T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" begins with an epigraph from Dante's Inferno. Translated, it reads: "If I thought that I was speaking/ to someone who would go back to the world,/ this flame would shake no more./ But since nobody...

And would it have been worth it, after all

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

...

Twenty some years after the death of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot began where Hopkins had left off. In one of his earliest poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Eliot picked up the hopelessness - hopelessness motivated by a sense of...

An imminent era of lovesickness persuades the course of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza's love affair; it is this pending ailment - as Gabriel Garcia Marquez' title Love in the Time of Cholera suggests - that fuels the lovers' final movement...

Reconciliation with the past is a major theme throughout Tolkien's trilogy, and the gap between the powerful, undying beings of the past and the mortal men of the present and future is starkly evident when the characteristics of the ancient...

Lord of the Flies ends on a bleak note in order to emphasize the recurring theme throughout the novel: the idea that every human contains the beast within him/herself. By making the finale of the book so depressing, Golding illustrates the...

When freed from the moral manacles of society, humans must embrace moderate, disciplined lifestyles in order to avoid a fatal plunge into barbarism. In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, marooned schoolboys exchange the confines of civility for...

Oscar Hammling has said, "We die ourselves every time we kill in others something that deserved to live." Man's relationship with death from the hour of his birth and his inherent concern for himself above others are themes often used in literary...

William Golding's Lord of the Flies is "An unfashionable aberration, a throwback to earlier, simpler forms of literature in which symbolic, fablelike elements predominate over psychological or social realism" (Magill 1126). Lord of the Flies, a...