Newest Literature Essays

In 1381, John Wycliffe led a group of people disenchanted with the Catholic Church called the Lollards in an early Protestant movement. In this movement, he attacked the sale of indulgences, pilgrimages, the excessive class hierarchy in the...

Historians have noted that works of literature often adopt the mood of the times in which they were written. It is thus not surprising that The Grapes of Wrath, written by John Steinbeck in the desperate nadir of the Great Depression, appears to...

âTo love, honor and obeyâ? is a common part of the modern marriage vow. It is taken for granted that both partners will strive toward an equal union, in which neither is completely dominant or completely submissive to the other. While this may...

Alison in "The Miller's Tale" is described as young and wild, like an animal: "Thereto she koude skippe and make game/ As any kyde or calf folwynge his dame", and we know that she would be willing to follow any idea as long as it is "fun". We...

Early in Chaucer's General Prologue to the Canterbury Tales, the narrator makes clear how his fellow pilgrims are to be introduced: "Me thinketh it accordant to reosoun / To telle you al the condicioun / Of eech of hem, so as it seemed me, / And...

In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, each tale's genre is an integral component of its respective meaning. The task of interpreting the meaning of a tale from its genre, however, is complicated by Chaucer's frequent deviation from a genre's...

The Man of Law's Tale is in many ways marks a new beginning in the middle of the Canterbury Tales, a break from the bawdy and secular tales that precede it. While Chaucer could have made it a more straightforward recentering of the tales on a...

Long before enlightened women of the 1960's enthusiastically shed their bras, in an age when anti-feminist and misogynistic attitudes prevailed, lived Geoffrey Chaucer. Whether Chaucer was indeed a feminist living long before his time, or whether...

In Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, the Franklin's Tale and the Wife of Bath's Tale represent marriage in different ways. The most striking contrast is the role of power in relationships in the two stories, and for the two tellers. The Franklin...

The Wife of Bath, a pilgrim in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, holds strong views on many topics, such as sex, marriage, men, and the Bible. She speaks her mind clearly and at length, but she is also a manipulative, subtle, and untrustworthy...

The Pardoner of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales is representative of the darker side of the corrupt church of the Middle Ages. A pardoner was a church official who had the authority to forgive those who had sinned by selling pardons and indulgences to...

Despite its glorified accounts of the chivalrous lives of gentlemen, the Knights Tale proves to be more than a tragically romantic saga with a happy ending. For beneath this guise lies an exploration into the trifling world of the days...

Chaucer's excessively overt satire of the Prioress in the General Prologue is undeniable. With so much emphasis drawn to her misplaced ideals, the words scream of something terribly amiss. A cursory examination reveals a woman severely out of...

Geoffrey Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale," a relatively straightforward satirical and anti-capitalist view of the church, contrasts motifs of sin with the salvational properties of religion to draw out the complex self-loathing of the emasculated...

The Bible is an infinitely plastic text. The Wife of Bath illustrates this plasticity by, in effect, reworking Scripture and molding it to fit her specific argument. In an exploration of both the Prologue to the Wife of Baths Tale and the Tale...

The characters introduced in the General Prologue of The Canterbury Tales each represent a stereotype of a kind of person that Chaucer would have been familiar with in 14th Century England. Each character is unique, yet embodies many physical and...

Chaucer's "The Wife of Bath's Prologue and Tale" is a medieval legend that paints a portrait of strong women finding love and themselves in the direst of situations. It is presented to the modern day reader as an early tale of feminism showcasing...

In the Franklin's Tale, Dorigen's hasty (and unserious) promise precipitates a crisis when Aurelius completes a task that Dorigen felt certain was impossible. Aurelius faces a similar problem when, consumed by his inordinate passion, he...

In the Book of Genesis, Adam and Eve eat from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, which gives them greater powers of perception but also causes their expulsion from Paradise. The story creates a link between clear vision and the ability to...

The Wife of Bath's extraordinary prologue gives the reader a dose of what is sometimes missing in early male-written literature: glimpses of female subjectivity. Women in medieval literature are often silent and passive, to the extent that...

In the "Franklin's Tale," Geoffrey Chaucer satirically paints a picture of a marriage steeped in the tradition of courtly love. As Dorigen and Arveragus' relationship reveals, a couple's preoccupation with fulfilling the ritualistic practices...

Although the main characters in Voltaire's Candide supposedly resign themselves to work and cultivation rather than philosophizing in the end, it is necessary for them to survive struggle and turmoil in order to come to this realization. The...

Bourgeois society enslaves the individual such that any attempt to transcend one's environmental limitations results in self-destruction. Nietzsche "slave morality" theory is applicable to the works of Dostoyevsky, Mann, and Ibsen, and posits that...

In Robert Browning's dramatic monologue, "Porphyria's Lover," the love-stricken frustrations of a nameless speaker end in a passionate, annihilating response to society's scrutiny towards human sensuality. Cleverly juxtaposing Porphyria's innocent...