Keats' Poems and Letters

John Keats' poems "When I Have Fears" and "Bright Star" are remarkably similar, yet drastically different at the same time. The Shakespearean sonnets share rhyme scheme as well as subject matter, yet deal with different facets of the same topic....

Bread Givers

Anzia Yezierska's Bread Givers is the story of Sara Smolinksy, a young Jewish girl, growing up in New York City in the early twentieth century. Even as a young girl, Sara rejects the Orthodox Jewish teachings of her father, a rabbi. She refuses to...

Brave New World

In the science fiction novel Brave New World, Aldous Huxley shows a "revolution of revolutions" resulting from technological advances. He does so by portraying a future BNW society that is supposedly perfect in every way. Everyone is happy....

Brave New World

Brave New World, by acclaimed author Aldous Huxley, is not so much a novel about individuals as it is about a society as a whole. It is a story of a dystopia, of a cold scientific world order and the people who inhabit it. Against this harsh...

Brave New World

Aldous Huxley's Brave New World portrays a world in which pain and suffering have been all but eliminated, where pleasure is perpetual, and where society is immersed in stability. In a world such as this, the novel argues, there is no need for God...

Brave New World

It has been said that Muhammad is the "Seal of the Prophets," meaning that he was the last. However, our world has recently been graced by another prophet in Aldous Huxley. Huxley's prophetic vision is unmistakable in his science-fiction novel,...

Bluest Eye

Among Toni Morrison's works, "images of music pervade her work, but so also does a musical quality of language, a sound and rhythm that permeate and radiate in every novel" (Rigney 8). This rhythmic style of writing is particularly evident in The...

Black Boy

In his autobiographical account, Black Boy, Richard Wright instills in the reader the hunger that he felt for knowledge, as this drive had been suppressed by his environment. Wright's quest for knowledge and literacy parallels that of W. E. B....

Black Boy

Richard Wright's novel Black Boy is not only a story about one man's struggle to find freedom and intellectual happiness, it is a story about his discovery of language's inherent strengths and weaknesses. And the ways in which its power can...

The Odyssey

Generalizations and associations seem to permeate the culture of every human society. If this were not the case, there would be no need for the sociological study of ethnocentricity. The Odyssey of Homer strongly exhibits this quality of judging...

Billy Budd

To read Herman Melville's Billy Budd is to experience feelings of intense agony and helpless injustice. Billy Budd, a "Handsome Sailor," adored by his shipmates for his intrinsic goodness, is condemned to death by a seemingly formalistic and...

The Bible

The book of Luke in the New Testament offers a promise of salvation. John the Baptist proclaims, from the book of Isaiah, that "all flesh shall see the salvation of God" (Luke 3.6). However, earlier in Luke, an angel says, "Glory to God in the...

The Bible

With the development of psychoanalysis as a form of literary criticism, there have been many controversial new interpretations of religious texts, including the Bible. One such interpretation is that the Abrahamic religions, Judaism, Christianity,...

The Bible

In the first 18 lines of John, the story of Jesus is introduced with a jarringly brief and emphatic summary of history from the beginning of time to the birth of Christ. This passage formalizes the concept, suggested more subtly in Genesis, that...

The Bible

The central, overarching story in Genesis is the account of the fathers of Israel, which contains the individual stories of Abraham, Isaac, Jacob and finally Joseph. Although each account is compiled together, there is a fundamental shift in the...

The Bible

As a philosophical treatise in which the author considers the meaning of man's existence on earth, the Book of Ecclesiastes is an exceptional section of the Tanakh that differs from the traditional didactic narratives surrounding it. The Preacher...

The Bible

The God of the Old Testament is no less omnipotent today. By definition, the theoretical notion of an all-consuming being points to human limitation and protects the God from being touched by constantly varying human perception. The ultimate,...

The Bible

Before the year 1611, many different translations of the bible existed, but none were very consistent. At this time, at the command of King James the First, forty-seven scholars from various theological and educational backgrounds, separated into...

The Bible

An emphasis on the relationship between speech and sin is present from the inception of the test of Job's virtue. Satan challenges God that, if misfortune befell Job, he would "curse [him] to [his] face," making Job's sin not a psychological or...

The Bible

The Bible builds its literary foundations upon the themes of Knowledge and Sin, two topoi that are reflected again and again in various parables, allegories, and tales found within this sacred text. Genesis 9:20-27 exemplifies the synthesis of...