Newest Literature Essays

“Art is the signature of man,” says G.K. Chesterton in The Everlasting Man. If this is true– that where man is, there is art– then art, or creative expression, must be an inherent characteristic of man. This is a recurring theme in Arthur C....

Sebold’s employment of Susie as our dead homodiegetic narrator allows for a fantastical view into characters’ personal spaces when they are alone, a technique that could not occur through a live narrator. As part of Susie’s newfound maturity in...

In both Terry Pratchett’s Mort and William Goldman’s The Princess Bride, the Authors make use of their novels to make commentary about the reality of fairness and justice. Both authors explore how the concepts of fairness and justice effect people...

The relationship between the human and the divine in The Saga of the Volsungs is best exemplified by Odin and the Volsung family, firstly in Odin’s efforts to ensure the continuation of the Volsung family line, then in the manner in which Odin...

In Thomas Kinsella’s translation of The Táin, the relationships between the heroic and the monstrous, the warrior and the divine, are closely intertwined in the character of Cúchulainn, standing in stark contrast against his human traits. What...

In Chrétien de Troyes’s The Story of the Grail, Perceval is first introduced to the reader as a young boy who lives in the woods with his widowed mother, so isolated from society that when he gets his first glimpse of a party of knights, he...

In Shakespeare’s Love’s Labor’s Lost and Comedy of Errors, confusion is central to the plot, as well as perceived and subsequent enlightenment. In Love’s Labor’s Lost, confusion and enlightenment are played out through the lenses of education, and...

In Goethe’s Faust, the devil Mephistopheles plays many roles for the benefit of our titular character, but none more overarching, nor all-encompassing, than the Fool. The archetypal Fool can wear many faces, as Mephistopheles assumes the roles of...

The Song of Roland is a song about war, and thus, inescapably, about death. Death on the battlefield comes in many colorfully gory forms, from being ‘pierced through the body by four spears(155.2084)’ to being ‘sliced through the head right down...

From Neanderthal ceremonial burials 50,000 years ago to today's race for the vaccine, humanity's relationship with death is a matter as old as the first human to become conscient of their undeniable fate. In Albert Camus's 1947 book "The Plague,"...

Both Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and Aeschylus’s ‘Prometheus Bound’ carry heavy themes of bondage, both physically and metaphorically. Indeed, the fact that Frankenstein is often titled Frankenstein: The Modern Prometheus demonstrates that the two...

In Chaucer’s Parlement of Foules, the dreamer is a lover and a writer of poetry; his dream occurs primarily in a series of images and interactions, left ultimately in a question unanswered by the formel eagle. This is a moment of synecdoche, in...

Margaret Atwood's story “Giving Birth”became famous for a complex narrative structure and feminist approach. The story first appeared in her 1977 collection of short stories, Dancing Girls. It focuses on an unnamed female narrator, who is writing...

The words of critics Todorov, Harvey, and Short gesture to various narrative aspects in Henry James’s short stories, including the existence of an essential secret, a dramatized consciousness, and a length and complexity of sentences. These...

Of Tennyson’s In Memoriam, T. S. Eliot wrote that ‘its faith is a poor thing, but its doubt is a very intense experience,’ while Christopher Ricks wrote, similarly, that its ‘poems of most intense feeling…tend to be the darkest.’ Neither of these...

The first stanza of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s The Wreck of the Deutschland is, in essence, a snapshot of the entire poem in miniature, for its lines encompass the poet’s doubt and fear but end in the promise of rebirth, the promise that God has...

In Gawain and the Green Knight, the Gawain-poet employs a remarkable clarity of language and detailed imagery, giving the reader very precise, glowing pictures of the action. Yet a central tension of the plot is that things are not what they...

In considering the matter of Emily Dickinson’s poem LXV of Part Four: Time and Eternity, it is worth noting that she wrote in one of her letters that ‘To be human is more than to be divine, for when Christ was divine, he was uncontented until he...

As the titles Bleak House and Hard Times suggest, there is an abundance in both of imagery, metaphor, and overarching plot that is unpleasant, rendered in such relishing detail as to suggest that Charles Dickens had, in the words of John Forster,...

In Shakespeare’s Cymbeline, death appears in many forms. Posthumus wishes death on Imogen, and, as a consequence, himself; Imogen rejects death by her own hand in favor of Pisanio’s; later, Imogen assumes the appearance of death; murder is both...

In Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde, Criseyde’s character is something of a paradox, for while the reader is able to see a great deal of her thoughts, her character itself remain somewhat ambiguous, capable of being interpreted in multiple...

Much of Robert Browning’s poetry establishes voice through his use of a narrator within the poem, as in the case of Porphyria’s Lover, and through use of dramatic monologue, such as in The Bishop Orders His Tomb at Saint Praxed’s Church and Fra...

Chaucer’s Book of the Duchess is a poem largely about what poetry can and cannot do. Poetry, as literature, is inherently removed from life; the written word, for all its power to conjure image and emotion, can never quite be that image or...

William Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’ deals with falsity on multiple levels, primarily as incurred by love, and inherent within women. As women are false, and love makes one act in a way that is false, love itself is feminized, linked...