Newest Literature Essays

Throughout the novel, Like Water for Chocolate, by Laura Esquivel, Tita, the struggling protagonist wages an emotional battle with herself. Given that the tale takes place in early 20th century Mexico, the concepts of uncontested familial...

Both Ibsen and Zola were firm believers in portraying their characters and works from a realistic perspective. Zola founded the naturalist movement in fiction and shared the same general perspective on society as Ibsen, who was the first of a new...

Roddy Doyle's novel 'Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha', set in 1960's Dublin, in the fictional suburb of Barrytown, is narrated in first person by Paddy, a 10 year old boy. Doyle effectively crafts the text to reassemble Paddy's thoughts by manipulating the...

Virgil borrows many stories and themes from the Homeric epics and revises them for the Roman tradition in the Aeneid. Aeneas’ journey in search of the Latium shores parallels Odysseus’ journey to Ithaca, except the latter knows what home he is...

W.B. Yeats is considered one of the greatest Irish writers due to his eloquent, ‘otherworldly’ early poetry and many of his later dramas and works for which he received the Nobel Prize. Often associated with the Irish Literary Revival, Yeats’...

Chaplin’s Modern Times was a silent film, an unusual sight in the burgeoning era of “talkies,” or films with synchronized human voices. Chaplin felt that the art of filmmaking was already at its peak and that adding additional features such as...

Jeffrey S. Uzzel

Dr. Katarina Gephardt

English 4480

29 November 2007

“Meta-Art, Exorcism, and Existentialism in The Masterpiece”

The Masterpiece is perhaps the most blatantly autobiographical work in Emile Zola’s Rougon-Macquart series. In the novel,...

Part 7 forms the dramatic climax of the poem in which the Mariner returns to his own “countree”. Coleridge uses the focal character, the eponymous Ancient Mariner, to narrate the aftermath of the journey and his life since and includes dialogue...

Educating Rita is a play about change and transformation. Susan White, a working class girl, wants to escape the trappings of the class system and become “educated”, thinking that this will allow her to “sing a better song“. By the end of the...

Camus wrote that “the world is ugly and cruel, but it is only by adding to that ugliness and cruelty that we sin most gravely”.

Dystopian novels can be both a mirror and a magnifying glass, reflecting our world and exaggerating aspects of it to...

In Act 1 Scene 1, Marlowe continues to subtly parody the structure of a typical Aristotelian tragedy, following the Chorus’ unusual introduction with a seemingly orthodox dialogue from the protagonist, Dr Faustus. However, he does not interact...

“‘How do you do that? I mean, how do you get somebody to love you?’ But Frieda was asleep. And I didn’t know” (Morrison 32). The innocent question posed by Pecola from Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye is representative of a recurring theme in the...

In Theodore Roethke’s poem, “In a Dark Time,” the speaker crosses over into the undiscovered world of insanity and communicates perceptions that others have disproved. Likely representative of Roethke’s own personal struggles with schizophrenia, “...

The role of death, both physically and mentally, has a heavy effect on characters in Toni Morrison’s Sula. Shadrack survives as a soldier during World War I, dealing directly with death that he sees all around. Like Shadrack, Plum returns home...

“Brave New World”, “The Day of the Triffids” and “Watchmen” all use their dystopian worlds to engage in moral discussion, critically assessing the morals that the world deems to be ‘correct’. In the face of destruction, the characters in the...

While Art sits at his drawing board, a pile of emaciated Jewish bodies lies below him, seemingly unnoticed while reporters and businessmen climb over them (II.41). These bodies represent the grave nature of Art’s subject matter, the millions of...

Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying is about 29-year-old poet Isadora Wing, who is bored in a bourgeois marriage. She dreams of a sexual encounter with a stranger, and when she travels with her husband to Vienna and meets the attractive Adrian Goodlove,...

In “The Swimmer”, John Cheever's protagonist embarks on an epic journey that challenges readers' perception of the world around them. As Neddy embarks on his journey down the “Lucinda River”, Cheever paints a strictly realist portrayal of suburban...

Writing towards the end of the twentieth century, German literary scholar Hans Wagener reflects on the deep resonance of war literature, stating: “When we think about certain periods of history, epoch-making books come to mind that capture the...

In his 1987 study The Way of the World, literary scholar Franco Moretti states that the Bildungsroman “stands out as the most obvious of the (few) reference points available in that irregular expanse we call the “novel””. Indeed, while the reader...

"Hemingway’s art," Alan Pryce-Jones asserted, “especially his innovative dialogue, might turn out to be his enduring memorial as a writer” (Pryce-Jones 21). While there has been much criticism on the biographical content of Hemingway’s work,...

T. C. Boyle, author of The Tortilla Curtain, stated in defense of his harsh depiction of characters Kyra and Delaney Mossbacher that, "If it's satire, it has to bite somebody, has to have teeth in it, otherwise it's useless" (Penguin Group). This...

In James Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues," the abundance of darkness reveals the beauty of light. Despite how uncomfortable and painful it is to be in the dark, the main character, Sonny empowers himself by stepping into the light and incorporating his...

India – a subcontinent defined by its exceptional diversity, caused by its outstanding history. It has always been a country easy to love, but hard to describe. Salman Rushdie is said to be one of the first authors to have truly written from the...