Newest Literature Essays

Canto IX of Dante's Inferno is remarkably representative of the work as a whole. It includes a number of prominent themes, among them the role Virgil plays as the manifestation of human reason and the argument that faith can achieve what reason...

To tell a story is to narrate events, or to give an account. Within literature, storytelling becomes a frame within a frame, a story within a story. A character from the outer frame of the book creates a smaller frame in the form of his or her...

In Canto XI of Dante's Inferno, Virgil carefully explains the layout of hell to his student, Dante. Toward the end of his speech, Virgil says that "Sodom and Cahors" are "speak[ing] in passionate contempt of God," (XI, 50-51), and divine will thus...

"What is fame? Fame is but a slow decay Even this shall pass away." Theodore Tilton

The Divine Comedy, by Dante Alighieri, is a poem laden with such Christian themes as love, the search for happiness, and the desire to see God. Among these...

Instead of leaving all of Inferno's sinners to burn in the traditional flames of Hell, Dante successfully uses contrapasso to build a world with unique psychological depth, and therefore a deeper potential for suffering. Contrapasso distinguishes...

Dante's Inferno, itself one piece of a literary trilogy, repeatedly deploys the leitmotif of the number three as a metaphor for ambiguity, compromise, and transition. A work in terza rima that details a descent through Nine Circles of Hell, The...

Often when we set out to journey in ourselves, we come to places that surprise us with their strangeness. Expecting to see what is straightforward and acceptable, we suddenly run across the exceptions. Just as we as selfexaminers might encounter...

In Jack Kerouac's novels and poetry he is always searching for something to believe in, be it himself, God, or something else. Surprisingly, he manages to also simultaneously be constantly running away. Fear of responsibility and conformity is...

There are several subtle images in Walter Mosley's detective novel Devil In a Blue Dress that suggest the unusual ending. Throughout the novel, the main character, a black man named Easy Rawlins, sees people as either black or white. He is...

Vladimir Nabokov manipulates language's ambiguous properties in Despair and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight. By toying with words' sounds and meanings he creates an atmosphere of duplicitous layers that resonates with the novel's thematic...

Poetic Justice, with her lifted scale,

Where in nice balance, truth with gold she weighs,

And solid pudding against empty praise.

-Alexander Pope

In the Seventh Story of the Eighth Day in Boccaccio's Decameron, the storyteller states "Many of the...

Ivan Ilych is dead. His death is hardly what one would call "mourned", and his family and friends think only of how they can profit from his timely demise. He has led a terrible life, and suffered through a generally meaningless existence. One...

Like death or abandonment, alienation is one of the deepest-rooted fears experienced by human beings. As social creatures, humans have the need to identify themselves as one of a group, whether that group is a family, a culture, or a religion. The...

"It is as if I had been going downhill while I imagined I was going up. And that is really what it was. I was going up in public opinion, but to the same extent life was ebbing away from me. And now it is all done and there is only death."

--The...

Arthur Miller's American masterpiece Death of a Salesman, first presented on the stage in New York City in 1949, represents a successful literary attempt at blending the themes of social and personal tragedy within the same dramatic framework. Yet...

Throughout time, men have used previously written literary texts as models for compositions of their own. This borrowing of ideas and concepts can been seen quite clearly in the works of Roman authors, who, for the most part, imitated the style of...

Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman is a deceptively simple play. The simplicity of the play, however, quickly dissolves into a respectful ambiguity through Miller's ingenious stage directions, nonverbal expressions and, most importantly, his...

In Arthur Miller's Play Death of a Salesman, the dreams of the major characters are the central focus of the plot. The Lomans, particularly Willy, struggle to realize their dreams while fearing that these goals are unreachable. Yet this fear is...

A wise and possibly very cynical man once said "Nothing fails like success." Even if one is not familiar with Gerald Nachman, or the other rebel comedians of his time, we can all appreciate the clever irony in this quotation. In the complex and...

"The jagged edges of a shattered dream." Do you find that the play leaves you with such an impression?

Death of a Salesman tells the story of a man confronting failure in the success-driven society of America and shows the tragic trajectory which...

In George Eliot's Daniel Deronda, a theme of subjugation through observation becomes a unifying tie between Jews and women, two primary categories of characters in the novel. Eliot's female characters provide a complex commentary on the...

Daisy Miller is a potent social commentary that considers the ideologies of transplanted Americans residing in Europe. During the late nineteenth century, the United States surfaced as a political and economic power. Wealthy Americans, anxious to...

He said to himself that she was too light and childish, too uncultivated and unreasoning, too provincial, to have reflected upon the ostracism or even to have perceived it. Then at other moments he believed that she carried about in her elegant...

In Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, standard hierarchical structures are abandoned in a setting of postmodern cultural chaos. The use of fragmented pop culture contributes to many aspects of the book, namely the sense of combined freedom in...