Newest Literature Essays

"Sex is one of the constants in human experience; sexuality, one of the variables."

Bruce Smith, Homosexual Desire in Shakespeare's England.

Sexuality in Renaissance England was ambiguous. The current common idea or definition of "homosexual" did...

The word apocalypse derives from the Greek word meaning "revelation", lending its name to the last book of the New Testament, The Book of Revelations. It refers to a prophetic vision which, through elaborate and often violent symbolism, signals an...

"And that was the October Week when they grew up overnight, and were never so young anymore..."

So begins Ray Bradbury's dark carnival fantasy, Something Wicked This Way Comes. Age and the loss of innocence are strong themes in this story: the boys...

Through experience and suffering, one tightens one's grasp on reality. In William Shakespeare's King Lear, the characters' impressions of their society change as their status changes. Lear's and Gloucester's views of their once perfect society is...

In his impassioned paean "Ode to the West Wind", Percy Bysshe Shelley focuses on nature's power and cyclical processes and, through the conceit of the wind and the social and political revolution prompted by the Peterloo massacre of August 1819,...

We meet the character of Mark Antony three times before Julius Caesar's death, though he speaks little and we do not get much of an indication of his character. Antony fully enters the play exactly halfway through, when he makes a gripping speech,...

Although Adam Smith is considered a great defender of commercial society and Jean-Jacques Rousseau one of its prominent critics, both thinkers share certain criticisms of the division of labor. The two acknowledge that splitting tasks among people...

Although Simone de Beauvoir is widely considered a primary influence on contemporary feminism, she notably criticizes women in her most famous book, The Second Sex. In illustrating the history of female oppression, Beauvoir emphasizes all the...

The Alfarabi and Averroes texts take unique approaches to topics discussed by Aristotle in Politics and by Plato in his Republic. It is important to understand these approaches in relation to each other because it is the similarities and...

Nathaniel Hawthorne's popular short story "Young Goodman Brown" incites mystery and intrigue in its readers for several reasons. "Young Goodman Brown" produces a multitude of questions and interpretations as to the precise events of the...

In "Two Lectures," Michel Foucault criticizes historical materialism for inadequately explaining social phenomena. He derides academics that use bourgeois domination to explain a diverse range of social trends, including the exclusion of madness...

The entertainment of a Harlem cabaret hypnotizes Helga Crane, the protagonist of Nella Larsen's Quicksand. She loses herself in the "sudden streaming rhythm" and delights in the sexually suggestive moves of the dancers. Helga is "blown out, ripped...

The late 19th and early 20th centuries marked a time of empire-building for much of Europe. In Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad deals with one specific problem of European hegemony-the treatment of natives. Critics accuse Conrad of holding...

Book Six of John Milton's Paradise Lost is a continuation of the angel Raphael's discourse to Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. He is recounting the fall of Satan, and focuses on the battles that take place between the angels and rebel angels....

In Emily Dickinson's 419th untitled poem, more commonly known by its first line, "We grow accustomed to the Dark-", the speaker describes two distinct situations in which people must gradually adjust to "darkness". The first portion is fairly...

An event marked by sex and celebration, the wake in Wallace Stevens's "The Emperor of Ice-Cream" is inescapably bizarre. Though one might expect an air of sobriety, importance, or - at the very least - reflection to characterize a discussion of...

Throughout To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf details the many struggles of the Ramsay family and their houseguests to secure happiness and order within their lives. There are many obstructions to this basic human pursuit, but loss is one of the...

The motifs of greed and possession run throughout Frank Norris's 1899 novel, Mcteague. At the beginning of the novel, we see greed in its most undiluted and disgusting form in the Polish Jew, Zerkow, and again in a more unstable, neurotic form in...

Memories, the good and the bad, shape the character of the people that we become, as Mark Jarman demonstrates in his 1997 poem, "Ground Swell." The author effectively recreates his chilly summer mornings of surfing for the reader, through use of...

The poem "The Four Quartets" by T. S. Eliot illustrates an intricate link between the various problems and limitations of language and those of religious thought. This direct relationship is expressed through the poem's first two quartets, "Burnt...

To say that "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a typical romantic ode to the wonders of love, as the title may suggest, is quite far from the truth. To the contrary, this poem enters the straggling mind of J. Alfred Prufrock, a man plagued...

The characteristics of Homeric epic are many and varied, but the key elements of the Odyssey and the Iliad can be narrowed down to two main things: a focus on one hero (Achilles and Odysseus, respectively) and the need for that hero to attain...

Far off in the bending sky was the pearly light and the manifold wakings of men to labour and endurance. She was a part of that involuntary, palpitating life, and could neither look out on it from her luxurious shelter as a mere spectator, nor...

Wide Sargasso Sea was published in 1965, and immediately caught the attention of critics. Its publication helped to save Jean Rhys from the obscurity into which she had fallen after her previous novels, published between the First and Second World...