Newest Literature Essays

The fantasy world of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" mimics reality, a world where as people mature from children to adults, they become more verbally aggressive. In the real world, adults often grow more confident as they grow older and more...

Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland provides a physical removal from reality by creating a fantastical world and adventure in the mind of a young girl. In this separation, Carroll is able to bend the rules of the temporal world. Although this...

Although Edith Wharton describes a society that had disappeared in order to make way for the progress of a later age, she both criticizes and lauds the unrecoverable culture that helped to define New York City in the 1870s. Throughout The Age of...

Edith Wharton's novel The Age of Innocence lends itself as a work of social criticism against the tyrannous ideals of Old New York society through the experiences of Newland Archer and his torn love between two women. Wharton's plot, set in the...

New York Society, in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence (1920), is paradoxically immortal and mortal. Like the Olympic pantheon of mythological Greek antiquity, New York Society cavorts and carouses, bickers and condemns while it feasts on ambrosia...

Aeschylus' Oresteia is undebatably one of antiquity's greatest surviving tragedies. Driven by the universal struggles of justice versus injustice, fear versus obligation and parent versus child, the play follows one ill-fated family through the...

Cassandra's final monologue in Aeschylus's Agamemnon plays a transformative role in terms of the movement of the plot and, upon close examination, functions as a key for many of the tragedy's larger themes. She begins by equating prophecy, be it...

Marx defines the "underclass" as a social group, conscious of itself, that is being oppressed and exploited by the ruling class and thus possesses a common hostility towards this higher class. This concept is reflected in various literature from...

Historically, Greek tragedies have been used as a means to convey particular political and ethical testimonials about society, usually in order to convey certain morals or to ensure order. In such chronicles, a protagonist grapples with a...

In both Virgil's The Aeneid and books Genesis and Exodus of the Old Testament, dreams, visions, signs, wonders and divinations serve as powerful testaments to the universal knowledge and might of the pagan Roman gods and the Jewish god. Revealing...

'[Robinson Crusoe is] the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races.' Explore.

Unquestionably Robinson Crusoe is a novel of unbridled popularity; it has...

An important recurring image throughout Virgil's Aeneid is that of the serpent, which appears both realistically and metaphorically. The serpent icon is a harbinger of death and a symbol of deception. These two elements represented by the snake...

In lines 2.730-2.742 of Virgil's Aeneid Aeneas is describing the terror that hefelt when he finally realized that Troy was falling to the Greeks. In these ten linesVirgil uses careful diction to create an image of a solitary Aeneas pausing for a...

Mythological accounts constantly transform themselves in crossing cultures and enduring time, but two versions of the story of Dido and Aeneas, one by a shy, serious, government-sponsored poet; the other by an often lighthearted author, a future...

Duty is a recurring theme throughout Virgils The Aeneid. It plays a crucial role as a key character trait for the individuals that we encounter. If one takes the protagonist Aeneas aside and analyzes his persistent adherence to his own destiny,...

As a modern reader approaching the epics, one inevitably brings certain expectations and standards formed throughout the course of our experiences; one's literary appetite is accustomed to a certain kind of satisfaction, and one of the most...

'I sing of arms and of the man, fated to be an exile', begins Virgil, and it is on precisely the issue of this man of arms that critical debate in recent years has tended to centre. Scholars continue to disagree on whether or not Aeneas is...

Even though Tom Sawyer is just a young boy in the chapter "Here a Captive Heart Busted," his actions cross the boundary of child's play and enter into the boundaries of wrongdoing. This comical, yet tedious chapter in Mark Twain's The Adventures...

Tom Sawyer is a boy's boy. He's mischievous, he's adventure seeking, he's fascinated with bugs. Yet while much has been written about these first two personality traits, it is the third one the unexamined territory of Tom's insectuous...

"But you knowed he was running for his freedom, and you could a paddled ashore and told somebody" (Twain 95). As is epitomized by the preceding quote, in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain one of the central conflicts is that of the...

Mark Twain's satiric masterwork The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn has, over time, manifested itself as a novel of pronounced controversy proportionate to its tremendous literary worth. The story of an "uncivilized" Southern boy and the intrigues...

"My idea of our civilization is that it is a shoddy, poor thing and full of cruelties, vanities, arrogances, meannesses, and hypocrisies," Mark Twain once reflected. Morality does not flourish in such a society, as illustrated by its rampant...

In The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Mark Twain paints, through the southern drawl of an ignorant village boy, the story of America as it existed in the quickly receding era of his own childhood. While written about childhood adventures,...

Written during a time in which racial inequality is the norm, and people of color are looked upon as lesser beings, Mark Twain, in his landmark novel The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, pens a character in Jim who is the epitome of restrained...