Newest Literature Essays

To many Americans, wealth and happiness are inextricably intertwined. After all, the democratic ideals of our country are predicated on the notion of the âself-madeâ? man. Ironically, it is sometimes the striving for wealth or the striving for...

The Great Gatsby and "Babylon Revisited," both by F. Scott Fitzgerald, are stories about the emptiness and recklessness of the 1920s. Each story has its distinctions, but Fitzgerald's condemnation of the decade reverberates through both....

Renowned author F. Scott Fitzgerald became "the most famous chronicler of 1920s America, an era that he dubbed 'the Jazz Age.'" (Phillips 1). His fame grew in part from his widely published short stories, and also from the art of his novel, The...

The central theme of <I>The Great Gatsby</I> is the decay of the American Dream. Through his incisive analysis and condemnation of 1920s high society, Fitzgerald (in the person of the novels narrator, Nick Carraway) argues that the...

<blockquote>[G]audy ... primary colors, and hair shorn in strange new ways, and shawls beyond the dreams of Castile. ... [T]he air is alive with chatter and laughter, and casual innuendo and introductions forgotten on the spot, and...

In the first part of Dicken's Great Expectations, Pip confesses to his readers that "I had known, from the time when I could speak, that my sister, in her capricious and violent coercion, was unjust to me" (63). During Pip's first visit to Satis...

The fledgling years of post-industrial Britain were tumultuous ones, as are the beginnings of all eras that dismantle century-old beliefs and traditions. It was the advent of capitalism, signifying endless opportunities for wealth through industry...

"We have no choice, you and I, but to obey our instructions. We are not free to follow our own devices, you and I." (265).

The question of self-determination is central in Great Expectations. Dickens struggles to determine and express to what...

The forms that stand in closest competition with those undergoing modification and improvement will naturally suffer most.

--Darwin, The Origin of the Species (1859)

Christopher Ricks poses the question, in his essay on Dickens' Great Expectations,...

It is difficult to classify the personality of any one person as being entirely one way or another. So, too, it is difficult to classify a rich, round character like Pip in Charles Dickens' Great Expectations as being essentially passionate or...

One of the most important and common tools that authors use to illustrate the themes of their works is a character that undergoes several major changes throughout the story. In Great Expectations, Charles Dickens introduces the reader to many...

The indefatigable spirit of unity emerges as the one unfailing source of strength in John Steinbecks migrant worker classic The Grapes of Wrath. As the Joad familys world steadily crumbles, hope in each other preserves the members sense of pride,...

Steinbeck's intercalary chapters in The Grapes of Wrath have nothing to do with the Joads or other characters of the novel, but help describe the story in different terms. They are similar to poems, offering different viewpoints of the migration,...

John Steinbeck wrote the The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 to rouse its readers against those who were responsible for keeping the American people in poverty. The Grapes of Wrath tells the story of the Joad family, migrant farmers from Oklahoma...

The Grand Inquisitor

The mind is its own place, and in itself

Can make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.

- John Milton

The questions proposed in Fyodor Dostoyevsky's The Grand Inquisitor challenge the very essence of human existence. The idea of...

The Gorgias by Plato has long been considered a disparaging dialogue that denounces both rhetoric and its practitioners for the unethical wielding of eloquence. However, numerous scholars have agreed that Plato's account of rhetoric is both...

Margaret Mitchell's romantic epic, Gone With the Wind, owes its remarkable popularity to the climate of sudden self-destruction and dreariness the Depression created. The Old South's grandeur, coupled with its Civil War-era decadence, provided...

The shape of American drama has been molded throughout the years by the advances of numerous craftsmen. Many contemporary playwrights herald the work of Anton Chekhov as some of the most influential to modern drama. Tennessee Williams has often...

In Katherine Mansfield's "The Garden-Party", the socioeconomically-derived false consciousness discussed by Michael Bell in "The Metaphysics of Modernism" initially blinds the protagonist Laura from viewing the world in any context outside of her...

In Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche details the shortcomings of the Judeo-Christian tradition. He focuses on the fact that the followers of this tradition have developed in such a way that impedes happiness and the normal will power of a strong...

...books, books. Tall cases lined three walls of the room, filled to and beyond capacity. The overflow had been piled in stacks on the floor. There was little space left for walking, and none whatever for pacing.

-J.D. Salinger, Franny and Zooey

As...

Too much exercise destroys strength as much as too little, and in the same way too much or too little food or drink destroys the health, while the proportionate amount increases and preserves it. The same is true of temperance and courage and the...

Mary Shelley's novel Frankenstein curdles readers' blood not merely with dreary nights and gruesome murders, but through a tale of man's most morbid undertakings. While the monster itself constitutes the most concretely catastrophic effect of...

"The Glass Menagerie" is fundamentally a memory play, in that both it's style and content are shaped and inspired by memory. The lighting effects emphasise these incessant reminiscences, as do the unique stage directions and screens, which appear...