Newest Literature Essays

In Act 4 Scene 1 of Romeo and Juliet, Friar Lawrence, Paris, and Juliet converse about the upcoming marriage of Juliet and Paris. In the scene, Juliet’s new identity of an independent woman is forged through her vigor in dealing with Paris and the...

William Butler Yeats articulates a variety of opinions concerning the arts in his poem Lapis Lazuli. As the poem begins the speaker appears to refute a definition of artistic purpose, but as the poem closes the speaker’s words illuminate a...

In 1916, Susan Glaspell chose to publish a controversial play entitled Trifles. The play investigates the murder of a man with the main suspect being his wife. This piece of literature, like others at the time, was ridiculed for its feminism. What...

“And he has bought / With his sweet voice and eyes,

from savage men, / His rest and food.”

- Percy Shelley’s Alastor

In Shelley’s Alastor, the Poet is initially presented as an “early youth” relying upon his “sweet” words to obtain his nourishment....

“For he alone knew, what no other initiate knew, how

easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world.”

– Kafka’s “A Hunger Artist”

What does it mean to willfully fast, or to deny hunger, the most fundamental of human drives? The short...

Aphra Behn and Alexander Pope both present various situations of crisis and uprising in their works, Oroonoko and The Rape of the Lock, respectively. Although the nature and intensity of the crisis situations are very different, both authors use...

Poets in the Romantic period were not preoccupied with reason, unlike most of the intellectuals in the Eighteenth Century. Rather, they were able recognize the importance of non-rational processes in the mind. S.T. Coleridge was particularly...

Nourishment as a Symbol in The Grapes Of Wrath

In The Grapes of Wrath, families traveling to California suffer starvation and exhaustion because of malnourishment. The Dust Bowl is a physical embodiment of their starvation. Possibly more important...

The Scarlet Prayer: Genesis Allegory and Christian Symbolism in The Picture of Dorian Gray

Dorian Gray and the Bible (NKJV) seem to agree on at least one semblance of doctrine, if only partially. They both maintain that the body is a temple,...

In Shakespeare's Othello, the primary obstacle in Othello and Desdemona's relationship is Othello’s race, and hence, his status as an outsider. This difference becomes a barrier when Brabantio objects to their marriage, however, it plays much more...

There is much debate amongst literary critics over L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. The arguments stem from the whether or not it should be defined as a feminist novel and what the narrative really implies about women. L.M. Montgomery...

In the Oresteia, Aeschylus presents his three books (“Agamemnon”, “The Libation Bearers”, and “The Furies”) so that the narrative progresses from madness and lack of justice in “Agamemnon”, where Clytemnestra receives no penalty for her homicide,...

Sir John Falstaff in Henry IV is one of the most outrageous and memorable characters in the entire Shakespearean Canon. His charisma that ensnared even Queen Elizabeth. In fact, the character of Falstaff inspired Shakespeare to write another play,...

The Power of Music in Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man

In Johnson’s The Autobiography of an Ex-Coloured Man, the narrator is able to marry the two halves of his musical identity in a way that he is unable to do with his racial...

Cormac McCarthy, the author of No Country for Old Men, said about the purpose of human existence, “The point is there ain’t no point.” This nihilistic outlook on life became common long before McCarthy's time. The highly industrial and...

In her 1960 poem “Black Rook in Rainy Weather,” American-born Sylvia Plath relays the feeling that a miracle has alighted in the form of a black rook. The bird’s beauty takes her off guard in a preternatural way on an otherwise dreary day, and she...

Rajiv Joseph’s characters in Bengal Tiger at the Baghdad Zoo wander through the war-torn Iraqi landscape looking for answers and finding none. The characters span a wide range of humanity: from young, ignorant American soldiers to a former...

A hero is a man with distinguished courage or ability. Many people identify heroes in their lives, and often, one models his or her ambitions around those heroes' example. Children, young men in particular, often have a hero of some sort that they...

Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer has remarked: “Unlike our ancestors, white people never reveled in their names, they glorified in knowledge and power. But the deceiver is still the deceiver, the liar is still the liar with his knowledge...

Sutton E. Griggs’s Imperium in Imperio and Edgar Rice Burroughs’s Tarzan of the Apes bring to consideration the connection between the physical body and one’s state of citizenship within the United States. Published on the brink of the twentieth...

Since the rise of the subculture, punk rockers have been re-appropriating a variety symbols and everyday items. The primary intention of this bricolage is to shock on-lookers and make some sort of statement. An interesting example of this appears...

"[Wit] means something pithy, penetrating, profound, aptly and forcefully expressed (and by extension, someone who is apt to speak in this way)" (Palmer 136). The female figure of wit was widely unaccepted in 18th and 19th century Britain. It was...

Michel Foucault begins his essay “We ‘Other’ Victorians” with a description of what he calls the “repressive hypothesis” (Foucault 10). This hypothesis holds that openly expressing sexuality at the beginning of the seventeenth century was...

The technical innovations of Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane range from the depth of focus to his lightning mix. He utilized graphic and acoustic matches to depict the narrative of a man’s meteoric rise to power and his painful slip into oblivion....