Newest Literature Essays

Who says what - and how and when - may be the most compelling way William Faulkner constructs his characters in Absalom, Absalom! Storytelling is not just an act in which the saga of the Sutpens is recounted, revised, and even recreated; it is a...

Absalom, Absalom displays two narrators standing at opposite poles in their understanding of time. The first of these, Rosa Coldfield, narrates to a patiently listening Quentin Compson what one might call the life and times of Thomas Sutpen. This...

The novel Absalom Absalom! by William Faulkner is filled with biblical references, from the creation story to Abraham, from David and Goliath to the story of Ham. Faulkner infuses the novel with biblical language, making it impossible to ignore...

The difference between the methods of control in 1984 and BRAVE NEW WORLD is the difference between external control by force and internal control, enforced only by the citizen's own mind. While 1984's method has real-world precedent and seems...

The title year of George Orwell's most famous novel is nineteen years past, but the dystopian vision it draws has retained its ability to grip readers with a haunting sense of foreboding about the future. At the heart of many of the issues touched...

"When Thomas More wrote Utopia in 1515, he started a literary genre with lasting appeal for writers who wanted not only to satirize existing evils but to postulate the state, a kind of Golden Age in the face of reality" (Hewitt 127). Unlike a...

In George Orwell's 1984, the differences and relationships between the proles, the Outer Party, and the Inner Party reflect different aspects of human nature and the various levels of the human psyche. The most base, savage level of humanity is...

Following the political upheaval and struggle for power after the second world war, George Orwell's novel 1984 cautions against the dangers of oppression and exemplifies the consequential nightmarish world of the near future. The plot traces the...

"On each landing, opposite the lift shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption beneath it...

Mark Twain's Huckleberry Finn so innocently reveals the potential nobility of human nature in its well-loved main characters that it could never successfully support anything so malicious as slavery. Huckleberry Finn and traveling companion Jim, a...

The opening of Book Two of 1984, in which Winston meets Julia and begins the erotic affair he has so deeply desired, commences the main section of the novel and strikes an immediate contrast between the two lovers. Unlike Winston, Julia is neither...

Previous tradition held that Homer, the ancient, blind poet who sang of a heroic age that was long past even in his own day, composed this magnificent poem. Contemporary literary theory disputes not only Homer's claim to complete authority over...

The eagle's eyes roam the landscape from its perch, searching for its quarry from above. Suddenly a rustle of movement captures its full attention: a dove, perching lightly on the branch of an olive tree. Immediately, the eagle rises from its own...

Near the beginning of Book 23 in The Odyssey, the reader is struck with a scene so subtle in its beauty that it seems unreal, especially following the brutal slaughter of the suitors and serving women. In the complex and tender passage describing...

The characters in Homer's The Odyssey are forever at the mercy of the Gods, those immortals who live in the heights of Mount Olympus, and who, on occasion, walk the lands of earth. Throughout the epic poem the main characters are visited quite...

When reading the works of Homer, we find that an ever-present theme in his poetry is the relative insignificance of mortals and their creations. Relative, that is, to the much grander scale of the natural world. Yet in Homeric terms the natural...

In both Homer's The Odyssey and Sophocles' Antigone, violence and war seem to be considered honorable; great fighters such as Antilokhos, Akhilleus and Odysseus of The Odyssey and Eteocles of Antigone are glorified and celebrated as exemplary...

Homer's The Odyssey is the epic tale of Odysseus and his travels home from the Trojan War, facing monsters, mutiny, and other countless setbacks. Throughout the story, Odysseus is stuck maneuvering between two gods, Poseidon and Athena. Their...

From its beginnings, literature has been characterized to a remarkable degree by narratives and images of journeys. What gets many texts started and what keeps them going is very commonly a journey of some sort. However, these journeys are not...

The foreboding dark mist in âthe gloom of the nightâ? (141) shadowing Odysseusâ arrival to the island of the Cyclopes suggests a sinister and frightening site. Recounting the unnaturalness of the occupants and the horror of the ensuing events,...

Which scenes of the Odyssey between Odysseus' return to Ithaca and his slaughter of the Suitors show Homer at his best as a story teller.' (Books 14-24)

In the Odyssey Homer has created a poem to stir the depths of an audience's emotions, able to...

In the Homeric world, the very roots of stories were gendered. The Muses, who inspired humans to create story and song, were women, the daughters of Memory. Stories thus have gendered identities from their very inception, and in the Odyssey, the...

Odysseus' disastrous encounter with the Laistrygones is a useful reference point for analyzing the nature of guest-host relationships in The Odyssey. When it is compared with his arrivals at the lands of the Phaiakians and the hands of the...

In his epic poems, Homer often chooses commonplace objects to symbolically encompass many themes of the story. In The Iliad, a golden nail-studded scepter embodies the major themes of the epic, and the marriage bed of Odysseus and Penelope serves...