Newest Literature Essays

In Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Rime of the Ancient Mariner," considered by many scholars as the quintessential masterpiece of English Romantic poetry, the symbolic themes of mystery and the supernatural play a very crucial role in the poem's...

With "The Visionary Hope," Samuel Taylor Coleridge romanticizes the overpowering state of yearning without excluding the turmoil it causes in human life. Coleridge develops for the reader an almost picturesque cluster of emotional impulses and...

The new American edition of the novel A Clockwork Orange features a final chapter that was omitted from the original American edition against the author's preference. Anthony Burgess, the novel's author, provided for the new edition an...

"The woman looked at the tree: the fruit would be good to eat; it was pleasing to the eye and desirable for the knowledge it could give. So she took some and ate it; she also gave some to her husband and he ate it. Then they eyes of both of them...

Following the publication of his most notable work, A Clockwork Orange, Anthony Burgess commented on the function of literature in a mutable society. â There is not much point in writing a novel unless you can show the possibility of moral...

In Clarissa, Samuel Richardson finds "an exemplar to her sex." But her story does not provide a model to live by, as such a qualification may lead one to expect. Only in the afterlife does Clarissa presumably receive what she deserves. The life...

Sigmund Freud, author of Civilization and Its Discontents, is widely regarded as the father and originator of modern psychology. Through the formation of his now-famous four divisions of the human brainthe ego, the id, the libido, and the...

In the case history of Anna O., Freud's coworker Breuer makes no mention of when Anna coins the phrase "private theatre." The abstraction reveals in itself two distinct personalities, and thus a notable self-awareness. It cannot be that in the...

Actually - and I confess this to you with a struggle - I have a boundless admiration for you both as a man and a researcher, and I bear you no conscious grudge... My veneration for you has something of a "religious" crush.

--Carl Jung, in a letter...

Civilization and its Discontents, is, in great part, a philosophical treatise, in which Freud tries to replace a metaphysical, idealistic framework with a psychological one. He does so by using a performative, therapeutic style of argumentation,...

America has long been recognized as a democratic nation, a nation operating under the will of the people. The forefathers of America fought incessantly against British tyranny to start anew in a land of freedom and opportunity. Because America...

In Satire VI and In Catilinam I and II, Juvenal and Cicero both make attacks on their enemies' personal conduct to construct a Roman identity while appealing to "Roman values." Their projects are indeed very similar; both raise questions of class,...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's Chronicle of a Death Foretold is a relatively small book, yet it is open to countless interpretations as to the book's overall purpose. Here I will discuss two such interpretations: Isabel Alvarez-Borland's analysis sees...

In Christopher Marlowe's narrative poem Hero and Leander, a major obstacle confronts the reader in the form of attempting to separate the narrative voice of the poet Marlowe from that which W.L. Godshalk calls "the sensibility of a dramatized...

Like Christmas morning itself - when each present represents a discrete mystery, separate from the last - the Christmas Carol is divided into a set of episodes. The book's chapters are episodic, with the duration of each spirit a single episode....

An audience member's gleeful first-hand account of Charles Dickens's public reading of "A Christmas Carol" unwittingly exposes an often overlooked contradiction in the story's climax: "Finally, there is Scrooge, no longer a miser, but a human...

The fundamental questions of how and why we read have an infinitude of answers, none of which entirely 'do the job,' simply because they bear too closely upon the automatic, (and therefore, to us, secret) processes of the mind; the act of reading...

"All the darkness in the world could not put out the light of one small candle."

These words from the headstone of a Jewish holocaust victim perfectly define Chaim Potok's use of light as a symbol of knowledge and truth in a world of tradition....

The Chosen, by Chaim Potok, is a novel written about two Jewish boys growing up in Brookyln. Though they lived only five blocks from each other, Danny and Reuven lived very different lives, primarily because of the influence of their fathers. Reb...

Perhaps the strongest theme in The Catcher in the Rye is the main character Holden Caulfield's fascination and even obsession with the ideal of true innocence; a higher innocence from the superficiality and hypocrisy that he views as a plague on...

In his novel, The Catcher in the Rye, J.D. Salinger narrates the psychological and physical tribulations of Holden Caulfield, an overanalyzing, mentally unstable teenage boy, searching for satisfaction in an ever-changing world. In one selection,...

The Catcher in the Rye, written by J.D. Salinger, is seen throughout the narrative repeatedly asking the simple question, ³Where do ducks go in the winter?² The simplicity of this question reflects upon a predicament for Holden that remains of the...

The Catcher in the Rye and The Red Badge of Courage detail the gradual maturation of two immature boys into self-reliant young men. The steady speed at which Salingerís and Craneís language streams enables the reader to see the independent events...

Catcher in the Rye's pallid cover, adorned only with seven multicolored bands in its upper-left corner, is not what one would call eye-catching. Its reverse side lacks criticisms or reviews of any sort; in fact, it is bare of anything except a...