Newest Literature Essays

Within his work The Prince, Machiavelli presents a double perspective on rulership that works to focus the direction of outlook beyond the habitual leader to leader approach we have previously seen. Breaking from tradition, Machiavelli's idea that...

Robert Lowell's Fall 1961 crystallizes in words the sense of nuclear paranoia that lurked in both private and public spheres of the United States during the Cold War. From a dark, personal perspective the poem takes an unsettling look into the...

The Christmas dinner scenes divisive political and moral debate in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man underlines an essential obstacle to the artistic mind of Stephen Dedalus. Ireland imposes a set of oppressive binariesnamely in the form of...

Robert Frost is generally considered to be the premier American poet of his generation. He is identified almost exclusively with New England, for most of his poetry attempts to capture the essence of rural life in the New England states. He...

W. B. Yeats (1865-1939) was very influenced by the French symbolist movement and he is often regarded as the most important symbolist poet of the twentieth century. Yeats felt 'metaphors are not profound enough to be moving,' so his poems heavily...

"[H]ow it would come into being, if it ever were to come into being, you have, in my opinion, Socrates, stated well" (The Republic, 510a). The possibility of the Republic coming into being is the issue which sets the earlier Dialogues apart from...

Not all are equal in Plato's Republic or Aristotle's Nichomachean Ethics and Politics. Plato and Aristotle argue that people possess a certain natural ability that determines their role in society. The fundamental character of one's soul, in part,...

Modern critics are quick to assert that Socrates failed in his role as a teacher to Alcibiades by refusing to engage in sexual relations. Upon closer investigation of both the traditional form and Socrates' own revised form of pederasty, the...

Plato's Symposium is not only a discourse on the subject of love, it is a tribute to Socrates and his way of life, and the entire course of the discussion is guided by the ultimate objective of presenting Socrates as the representation of love...

"Oh why is everything still my duty? When shall I be free from your fuss?" mutters Mrs. Moore as she collapses into the raving madness of spiritual despair (228). After serving as E.M. Forster's most sympathetic character through nearly all of A...

John Milton uses epic similes in Paradise Lost to accomplish many objectives. The most basic of these is to connect the past and the present, as the epic similes are often in present tense and involve a human figure that will not exist until after...

Harriet Wilson's sentimental narrative, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, draws on two specific literary areas to disclose the tale of a young, mistreated Mulatto heroine, encumbered by an excessive amount of injustice,...

As Othello, Laurence Olivier entreats the Venetian nobles to relate the true account of his actions and motivations. Olivier's words seem almost imploring, suggesting that he is an outsider seeking approval from those with foreign sympathies. At...

Shakespeare is often recognized for a contributing to the canon in a way that causes the adage "there is nothing new under the sun" to ring true. His talent for developing old literary and mythic plots and themes in order to address contemporary...

It is no secret that Darwin's theory of Natural Selection and Evolution, put forth in Origin of Species, has been applied to social theory, giving rise to Social Darwinism. But are we correct to assume that Social Darwinism is simply an extract of...

R.P. McMurphy is not an average mental patient stuck on a ward at an institution. In fact, McMurphy is one of the most unique patients the ward in "One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest" has ever seen. While most of the men on the ward committed...

In the day we sweat it out in the streets of a runaway American dream.

-Bruce Springsteen, "Born to Run"

And I said, "That last thing is what you can't get, Carlo. Nobody can get to that last thing. We keep on living in hopes of catching it once and...

Dickens' Oliver Twist , which ultimately celebrates a protagonist who journeys from innocence to experience without capitulating to the evil forces that hinder his progress, addresses the pervasive problem of evil in society and human nature....

"Anyone who has common sense will remember that the bewilderments of the eye are of two kinds, and arise from two causes, either from coming out of the light or from going into the light,which is true of the mind's eye, quite as much as the bodily...

Pioneering, or the act of breaking new ground, is what has established the United States as the enormous international presence it is today. From ideals represented by manifest destiny, the Declaration of Independence, institutions such as...

Essay Prompt:

Writers often highlight the values of a culture or society by using characters who are alienated from that culture or society because of gender, race, class or creed. Discuss Bigger Thomas as such a character and show how his...

Courage, intellect, and success: three typical characteristics which could easily be attributed to the hero of any story. Take cunning, manipulation, and eventual failure, and you have yourself the typical villain. In The Name of the Rose, Umberto...

Although considered light and delightful entertainment, Shakespeare's plays of comedy often address serious issues confronting Elizabethan values of propriety and social decorum. Anti-Semitism, death and homosexuality are frequent themes woven in...

For both "The Mower Against Gardens" and "The Garden", the primary terms in opposition are the same: the world of nature, the world of men. The former is a realm of leisure, the latter of ceaseless, pointless toil. And yet the status granted to...