Newest Literature Essays

In his work, Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy tells the tale of two people hopelessly in love, fighting against both internal and external conflicts to pursue that love and have some semblance of a normal life together. Set in England in the late...

In A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe uses several methods to

create convincing history out of fiction. In developing a false journal

entry, Defoe creates authenticity primarily through the narrator, H.F..

The style and language of H.F.'s...

The literature produced during the Puritan era was striking in its ever popular sermon format and its condescending tones. Authors like Jonathan Edwards and Michael Wigglesworth were not reluctant to use fear and intimidation to get their messages...

During the main thrust of the First Great Awakening, when swarms of Americans were being cajoled, terrified, shocked back into church pews, influential preacher John Edwards was busy converting his fair share. Set apart by his subdued style from...

In Villette and Jane Eyre, Charlotte Brontë creates protagonists who are markedly strange and isolated people. Throughout both books, their awkwardness in society and difficulty communicating is a continuous concern. These women are also our...

In all of Shakespeare's tragedies, sudden change and transformations are the catalysts of the disaster that will soon become the plot. Lear, King of England, holds great power and status as King, but blindly he surrenders all of this power to his...

"There was an unspeakable charm in being told what to do, and having everything decided for her"

--George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss

The feminist literary critics, Gilbert and Gubar, claim, in their famous essay on Jane Eyre in The Madwoman in the...

Subjective novelists tend to use personal attitudes to shape their characters. Whether it be an interjection of opinion here, or an allusion to personal experience there, the beauty of a story lies in the clever disclosure of the author's...

"Reader, I married him," proclaims Jane in the first line of Bronte's famous conclusion to her masterpiece, Jane Eyre (552). The reader, in turn, responds to this powerful line by preparing for what will surely be a satisfying ending: the...

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"Each picture told a story; mysterious often to my undeveloped understanding and imperfect feelings, yet ever profoundly interesting." --Jane Eyre (9)

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There is something extraordinary and spiritual about Jane Eyre's artwork. In...

In Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, the setting is used as a tool to reflect the hardships its protagonist, Jane Eyre, experiences. The locations Jane resides in play an integral part in determining what actions she is to take next. Her transient...

Imagine a girl growing up around the turn of the nineteenth century. An orphan, she has no family or friends, no wealth or position. Misunderstood and mistreated by the relatives she does have, she is sent away to a school where the cycle of...

"Now this is the Law of the Jungle---as old and as true as the sky/

And the Wolf that shall keep it may prosper, but the Wolf that shall break it must die."

~Rudyard Kipling, "The Law of the Jungle" [i]

In his novel "The Invisible Man" Ralph Ellison...

What means does Charlotte Bronte employ to create mystery and suspense in Jane Eyre?

Mystery and suspense in Bronte's novel Jane Eyre provides a crucial element to the reader's interpretation of the novel, allowing Bronte to subtly aid the reader...

Keats' ode 'To Autumn' deals predominantly with the passage of time, described within the imagery of the season of Autumn. The ode is a celebration of change, involving life, growth and death. Keats makes use of many literary and textual tools,...

How can a commonplace item such as food entail such profound meanings? How can the incorporation of symbols dealing with food into a novel discussing personal identity and invisibility be possible? Ralph Ellison's novel, Invisible Man, manages not...

In Invisible Man, the trope of invisibility functions as a criticism of racist American society, but it also encompasses the novel's subtext of gender erasure. Both black and white females throughout the novel are underdeveloped and virtually...

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man is the story of an educated black man who has been oppressed and controlled by white men throughout his life. As the narrator, he is nameless throughout the novel as he journeys from the South, where he studies at an...

In "An Inspector Calls", J.B. Priestley uses the characters and attitudes of the Birling family, especially Mr. Birling, to make the audience feel sympathy for Eva Smith. The family is "prosperous" and "comfortable", and Mr. Birling's ostentatious...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez's "The Incredible and Sad Tale of Erendira" is a frustrating story. It is full of beautiful images, fascinating characters, and puzzling events. The frustration lies in trying to figure out why the characters behave they way...

Although this is an era when violence is frowned upon and war deplored, still the soldier has remained an esteemed figure. Even more appealing to the imagination are tales of tyrants and the courage of the underground guerillas that oppose them....

John Steinbeck wrote two novels in the thirties concerning human behaviors during the depression entitled The Grapes of Wrath in 1939 and In Dubious Battle in 1936. The Grapes of Wrath is the better novel because it fulfills the requirements of...

Oscar Wilde creates a successful, complex comedy by maintaining consistent conflict and contradiction in the action, dialogue, and characters of The Importance of Being Ernest. Dramatic or comedic action is essentially exaggerated conflict. Wilde...

In the closing lines of the first act of Oscar Wilde's "The Importance of Being Earnest," Algernon remarks, "I love scrapes. They are the only things that are never serious," to which Jack responds, "Oh, that's nonsense Algy. You never talk about...