Newest Literature Essays

The plight of the oppressed in medieval England was paramount to the emergence of iconic works of fiction. In turn, the future comprehension of feudal society is dependent upon these works. To rely on monastic chroniclers alone, in understanding...

In “Here Follows Some Verses upon the Burning of Our House, July 10th, 1666” Anne Bradstreet delves into the topic of a tragic fire in her home. In the poem, her house is represented as a keepsake for all of her memories made within it and now the...

George Orwell’s 1984 portrays a dystopian society whose values and freedoms have been marred through the manipulation of language and thus thought processes. Language has become a tool of mind control for the oppressive government and...

In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the reader is confronted with a cast of enigmatic characters, though the “character” the reader receives the most exposure to is perhaps the least easily understood, and for the simple fact that it should not be a...

Virginia Woolf'sTo the Lighthouse is an experimental novel, in which Woolf uses stream of consciousness to portray family dynamics, gender relations, and attitudes toward the ontology of art and the artistic subject. Thelighthouse itself is an...

Analysis of Plato’s The Republic, City-Soul Analogy

In an elaborate effort to comprehend individual justice, Socrates engages in a lengthy debate which explores intricate details, structures, and overarching principles of a just city. This...

“A Death blow is a Life blow to some” says Emily Dickinson in poem 816 (Dickinson 816). Emily Dickinson did not commit suicide-- she died of her numerous medical conditions at the age of 55 in 1886. Her personal life was famously enigmatic, as she...

Throughout the course of Kurt Vonnegut’s novel Slaughterhouse-Five, the reader is taken through the life events of Billy Pilgrim, a character who amazingly lives through the Dresden firebombing and many other tragedies. Ironically, Billy finds...

Aristotle breaks down the plot of the tragedy into three parts, reversal, recognition and catharsis. Shakespeare includes all three components of plot in his play,Henry IV Part I. He establishes a tragic hero, Harry Percy, and allows him to rise...

Virginia Woolf’s essay A Room of One’s Own (1929) explores the complex nature of the numerous elements that are needed to write good fiction. A Room of One’s Own is a partially fictionalized narrative that is written from the perspective of an...

Mark Twain’s 1884 novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has long been regarded as both a literary masterpiece and a source of extreme controversy. With its central themes of race and the development of morals, Huck Finn brought to light the most...

Suffering is a major thematic element in Mary Shelly’s novel Frankenstein. The Wretch constantly struggles mentally with negative experiences of rejection. The psychological suffering endured illustrates self-realization through a new found...

When one considers the criticism of Beowulf, from the beginnings to more recent writings the early lack of interest in Grendel’s mother is very apparent. In 1936 J. R. R. Tolkien dismissed her as a secondary figure to her son. Major feminist...

Tom Stoppards Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are Dead is a postmodernist adaptation of the lives of two seemingly appurtenant characters from Shakespeares Hamlet. In the story, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern search for meaning in their isolated...

Nathanial Hawthorne successfully exposed the puritanical lifestyle in its’ entirety within his celebrated novel, The Scarlet Letter. He was born during the 19th century, but set his story in the 17th century, revealing his keen knowledge on the...

Contrary to the optimistic nature of the title, “Easter 1916”, Yeats’ poem speaks of death, sacrifice, rebellion and politics. It is not often that Yeats deals with the subject of the Irish Independence movement. The only other expressly political...

James Joyce’s A Mother is a short story based around the life of Mrs. Kearney, a strong-willed woman whose breach of convention results in the destruction of her acclaimed reputation. Joyce’s linguistic use of naturalism, modernism, and feminism,...

Friedrich Nietzsche, a German philosopher, and William Golding, an English author, lived and died in two seemingly separate worlds. They came from different time periods, places of origin, and had perceptions of humanity that draw no mass...

A comparison between the texts of Hemingway and Faulkner lies in the same fruitless category as comparing apples to oranges. The contrasting elements that set them apart from each other establish two immensely different reading experiences, both...

In William Shakespeare’s tragic play Julius Caesar, the contrast between honor and power in a leadership position is presented as many individuals work to better Rome with their own ideals of national glory. Brutus and his followers pursue the...

Civilization, at its core, was created to suppress barbaric instinct. However, in extreme circumstances, it is possible for instinct to prevail over civility. William Golding’s timeless Lord of the Flies is a prime example of instinct overpowering...

In Great Expectations, the word “taint” describes Pip's soiled conscience and shame for his identity, which he confuses with low class status and physical filth (Dickens 249). Pip's usage of it in the passage about his feeling of 'taint' shows the...