Newest Literature Essays

From her manipulation of the tragic hero to the “fiend-like queen” epitaph Malcolm assigns to her, there is evidence aplenty to suggest that Lady Macbeth is “a study of evil”. Undoubtedly, a Jacobean audience would have found it difficult to...

In the meditations, Descartes aims to provide a sound basis for science, and to vindicate rationalism by proving that true source of scientific knowledge lies in the mind and not the senses. In order to prove that the mind should be the true...

Red Sky at Morning and All the Pretty Horses by Richard Bradford and Cormac McCarthy are two novels that encompass a young man’s coming of age experience. Through the use of the unhealable wound, the hunting group of companions, the parent/child...

The power of words is enough to control an entire nation. Although many would consider physical power and brute force to be absolute power, George Orwell’s 1984 demonstrates a dystopian society where language is the ultimate form of power. The...

Since the birth of Aesop’s Fables, originating over two thousand years ago, “animal literature” has been used as a teaching tool. That is, when a certain piece of literature centers on an animal, there is usually a certain moral, emotional, or...

“The Yellow Face,” by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and “Désirée’s Baby,” by Kate Chopin, both touch on themes such as racism, gender equality, hypocrisy, and identity. These stories can best be understood through one another and, when juxtaposed, reveal...

Despite being published in 1798, William Wordsworth’s “The Thorn” gracefully tackles many topics still controversial today in the 21st century. Themes such as pregnancy out of wedlock, murder, abortion, and ghosts are presented and addressed....

The Cosmological argument is ‘a posteriori’ – it is reliant upon and fits with our experience of the world around us, with our own experience of causal chains provoking questions over how we, and the universe as a whole, came to be. The aim of the...

Bisclavret is the only lai of Marie de France’s that deals with a couple falling out of love (Creamer 259). The lycanthropic theme is used by the poet as a test of love and respect for one’s husband, as the baron’s wife doesn’t approve of his...

In Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, appropriately titled after its main character, young Robinson is a middle-class man in search of a career. Though pressed by his family to study Law, Robinson yearns for oceanic adventure, longing to escape to a...

Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea comes to a tragic end where the protagonist, Antoinette, is left as a mad woman in an attic. Rochester asks “Have all beautiful things sad destinies?”(Rhys 51). It is clear that Antoinette is a beautiful thing with a...

‘The Red Badge of Courage’ by Stephen Crane is not merely a war novel. It is an account of a young man’s struggle to understand both himself and the world, as well as deal with the burdens that come with it. Henry, the young soldier and...

Dorothy M. Johnson’s short story “A Man Called Horse” transgresses some of the conventions of the classical Western genre. In this sense, Johnson’s text can be read as a “revisionist Western”, in so far as Johnson does not merely adhere to the...

In Shakespeare’s A Midsummer Night’s Dream, it is during Act IV that the four “lovers” awaken along the boundary of the woods in which they spent the prior evening and attempt to explain and understand the previous night’s happenings. This...

In James Weldon Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the narrator presents the story of his life as a black man passing as white, and the different stages he progresses through while doing so. In both his life and the lives of many...

Tradition and change are as much at war as the people are in Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart. The events that define this war are centered on and around the main character, Okonkwo, who finds himself unable to adapt to the changes taking...

The narrator and focal character of Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita, who has appointed upon himself the pseudonym Humbert Humbert, strikes the reader as one of the most despicable and unorthodox protagonists in classic literature. He embodies numerous...

Homer’s Iliad features many sacred cultural principles present in the ancient Greek culture, but the importance and gravity of fate are communicated at the forefront of the work.

While the exact properties of fate and how it can be changed are a...

Hiketeia is a ritual supplication in which an individual embraces the knees of another in solicitation of a favor or errand. The use of hiketeia in The Iliad establishes a nature of authority in characters of power, including Zeus and Achilles, by...

Language in the “Birthday Party” is seen as a major theme of the play, despite its absurd nature. Through the use of language, Pinter creates silences that are monumental to the meaning and overall understanding of the play. With language, Pinter...

In John Steinbeck’s “The Chrysanthemums,” nature represents Elisa Allen’s confinement, the chrysanthemums symbolizes Elisa herself, and the tinker embodies Elisa’s wants. The narrator compares the Salinas Valley to “a closed pot” because “[a] high...

Chaucer, at least on the surface, recreates the commonly perceived stereotype of a vile woman in Alisoun; and as D.W. Robertson in Chaucer’s Exegetes states, “She is but an elaborate iconographic figure designed to show the manifold implications...

Critics and historians are of varied opinions when it comes to the authenticity of Homer’s text. Amidst everything else, it is often disputed whether The Iliad was even written by the man known as Homer, just as Shakespeare’s authorship is...

Being a devout Christian, reasonable freethinker and a popular writer with a political consciousness, John Milton took upon himself the ambitious task of writing a modern Christian epic in English, inspired by the classical pagan tradition of epic...