Newest Literature Essays

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...

In Goethe’s Faust, Faust’s perception of women is a representation of his own inadequacies, while the portrayal of women - the witch’s relationship with magic, and Gretchen’s clear-sightedness - highlight Faust’s own inability to see himself as he...

Percy Bysshe Shelley’s poetry usually includes romantic themes typical for his writing period, such as imagination, love, or beauty. However, he is also famous for his poems concerning political issues, and many of his works include radicalism and...

Babylon Revisited by F Scott Fitzgerald tells the story of father Charlie Wales trying to regain custody of his daughter, Honoria, seven years after the death of his wife. He has spent that time working to be a better man for himself, for his late...

When does redemption cross the lines between righteousness and damnation? When does the end truly justify the means? Sometimes, it can be hard to discern when it is acceptable to right a wrong with another wrong. However, in the cases of the...

Henryson’s Testament of Cresseid is a story about transformation both physically and narratively, enacted upon Cresseid as a punishment – physically – and – narratively – to make a moral point. The reader first learns that her lover, Diomeid, has...

Othello’s final speech explores his guilt over murdering Desdemona, as well as Othello’s own struggle with identity as a black Muslim in Venice. Before delivering his speech, Othello becomes convinced by Iago that Desdemona has been unfaithful to...

Religion is often an important feature in Gothic literature. Authors use religion in a number of ways throughout these texts, and it is interesting to consider how their representation of religion impacts the stories that they create. One of the...

Both Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale and Cymbeline are about persuasion in one form or another. Key features of the plot hinge on the characters’ varying level of success in convincing others to do or believe something. If Paulina had persuaded...