Newest Literature Essays

Despite the fact that The Crying of Lot 49 is chock-full of the use of methods of communication, the only time when anything is actually communicated is when a few songs are sung by The Paranoids. Any letters mentioned in the novel are void of...

Before the telephone was invented, people wrote letters to each other to stay in touch. Soldiers would write letters to their wives and families conveying their love and, even today, people write letters to better communicate. Writing is a way of...

Written at the pinnacle of South Africa's social and racial crisis, Alan Paton's novel Cry, the Beloved Country traces the struggle of two families, black and white, through their shared suffering and the devotion to their beloved country that...

When Arthur Jarvis is shot and killed, a key event to the plot, the Bishop himself comes to the funeral and talks of "a life devoted to South Africa, of intelligence and courage, of love that cast out fear" (181). This idea of love versus fear is...

"'Why do you look at the speck of sawdust in your brother's eye and pay no attention to the plank in your own eye?'" (Matthew 7:3). Scholars are fast to uphold the severe wisdom of this advice, yet very few are entirely capable of following it....

Alan Paton's Cry, the Beloved Country exhibits the effects of living in Johannesburg; though it is a city divided by race, its inhabitants lead parallel lives (Cry, the Beloved Country 33-312). The lives of the two main characters, Stephen Kumalo...

In his classic drama The Crucible, Arthur Miller chronicles the horror of the Salem witch trials, an embarrassing episode of colonial America's history. At first reading, one might only view Miller's work as a vivid account of the tragedy of...

In Arthur Miller's powerful stage play The Crucible, written in 1953 as a metaphor for the McCarthy hearings on communism in America, the idea of conscience is greatly emphasized in many of the main characters. Miller himself once said that The...

"The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness." - Joseph Conrad

The Salem witchcraft trials illuminate a great human campaign to rid society of the wicked devil and his sinful...

A "Great Drama" is a play in which an audience can find personal relevance. It is something which an audience can relate to. A great drama should having meaning to audiences for multiple generations. Arthur Miller's "The Crucible" successfully...

Often in literature a minor character that appears only briefly nevertheless has a significant effect on such aspects of a work as theme and the development of other characters. This is especially true in the case of Marmeladov, the alcoholic...

"I like them to talk nonsense. That's man's one privilege over all creation. Through error you come to the truth! I am a man because I err!" (160) Dmitri Prokofitch Razumihin

The psychological realism apparent in the works of Fyodor Dostoyevsky...

Following his confession to Sonya, Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov attempts to explain the reasoning behind his murder. This segment of the novel illuminates the fundamental irrationality of Raskolnikov's ostensibly logical reasoning. It also...

A heroine can be defined in two different ways: the first, as the principal female character in a novel; or in the second way, as a woman noted for a courageous action or significant accomplishment. The heroines of King Lear, Crime and Punishment...

In his novel Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky uses nightmares to develop the story of Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, the depraved sensualist, to its dnouement, in which he fully accepts his dire situation and its inevitable outcome....

Fyodor Dosteoevsky's Crime and Punishment is a renowned 19th-century novel that has captivated audiences for generations. Part of the appeal for this classic text comes from the densely interwoven and constantly evolving thematic motifs and...

"The extraordinary...have the right to commit all kinds of crimes and to transgress the law in all kinds of ways, for the simple reason that they are extraordinary." [1] Dostoyevsky's main characters are divided into two philosophical categories....

Madness and sanity seem to exist on opposite poles of a binary; one is defined by the absence of the other. However, this binary, though present in Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment and Miguel de Cervantes' Don Quixote, is problematic. The...

Dreams are considered a link to one's unconscious, able to offer explanations that "... the dreamer could not invent for himself in his waking state," (46). Sigmund Freud made revolutionary strides with the psychological implications of dreams in...

Fyodor Dostoevsky once stated, "Nothing is more seductive for man than his freedom of conscience. But nothing is a greater cause of suffering" (Eiermann). Existentialism insists that human life is understood in terms of one's unique experience....

The primary conflict in Crime and Punishment is the internal development of Raskolnikov's character. In Raskolnikov's mind are two contrasting personalities, each demanding control over him. One side, brought out by poverty and egoism, is the...

George Crabbe's The Village has long been perceived as a response to the flowery pastoral poetry of the late Eighteenth century, a genre marked by its praise of the countryside and the simple lives of shepherds and peasants. Indeed, Crabbe...

Deception and disguise, classic elements of comedy, are found in both William Wycherly's The Country Wife and Richard Steele's The Conscious Lovers. These devices rely on gaps of knowledge between different characters, or between characters and...

Particularly interesting in a genre that by its definition is meant to be a crowd-pleaser, Shakespeare's play Coriolanus provides a protagonist who is not particularly likeable. Constantly insulting in his speech, prideful and short-tempered,...