Newest Literature Essays

"It [the tiny bloom] had called her to come and gaze on a mystery. From barren brown stems to glistening leaf-buds; from the leaf-buds to snowy virginity of bloom. It stirred her tremendously" (13). Zora Neale Hurston, an African-American author,...

Constantine Levin, a hero of Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, longs to discover some harmonious part of himself through experiencing the peasant way of life. He believes there to be something profoundly rewarding in the simple act of working as one's...

Many individuals are adept at recognizing changes in their environment, others, and themselves. To these people, whatever the "change" might be-a new hairstyle, a new article of clothing, or an affected spoken dialect-rarely goes unnoticed....

AUTHOR'S NOTE: The following paper received first place at the 2005 Concordia University President's Showcase, Tier Two, and was presented at the Southern California Conference on Undergraduate Research at the University of California, Riverside....

War has, undisputedly, been an element of every civilization's history throughout time, but the cause of war, however, is a topic of dispute. Is war something that humans bring on themselves, or has it been deemed inevitable, no matter the...

George Eliot writes that a marriage is either a "gradual conquest or irremediable loss of union" (Eliot 832). In other words, marriage is a joint venture that has the goal of eventually culminating into the union of two separate persons. In...

Christianity's mythic war between God and Satan for the heart of mankind has long fascinated the Christian world. The twentieth century seems in particular to contemplate the idea that perhaps, looking at the trajectory of its history, Satan is...

I.

Artist M.C. Escher, famous for his deceptive manipulations of vignettes, once asserted that "Reality cannot exist without illusion, and illusion not without reality." There is no telling why Escher or countless others are preoccupied with the...

The history of literature is arguably a cycle of repetition. It is the nature of the mind to return to subjects of perpetual interest, and to exorcise the eternal concerns of the human condition via artistic labor. The subjects upon which creative...

In an essay first printed in "The Examiner," Jonathan Swift writes: "In describing the virtues and vices of mankind, it is convenient, upon every article, to have some eminent person in our eye, from whence we copy our description" (Firth 1). One...

Layers of Significance in Susan Glaspell's "Trifles"

Susan Glaspell's decision to change the title from "Trifles" to "A Jury of Her Peers" when converting it from stage play to short story ironically robs readers of a metaphor that not only...

In The Awakening, by Kate Chopin, unsatisfied Edna longs for something to sweep her off her feet. When it does, in the form of fresh love Robert, Edna realizes that she must choose between her family and her own mind and soul. At this realization,...

Melville's Political Thought in Moby-Dick

Herman Melville was heavily influenced by the philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Because Rousseau died in 1778, 41 years prior to Melville's birth, Melville had access to all of Rousseau's writings....

Jean-Jacques Rousseau and his predecessor, Thomas Hobbes, both encounter the issue of language while constructing a concept of the state of nature and the origin of human society, a favorite mental exercise of seventeenth and eighteenth century...

"Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

of that man skilled in all ways of contending,

the wanderer, harried for years on end,

after he plundered the stronghold

on the proud height of Troy.

He saw the townlands

and learned the minds of many...

Ernest Hemingway's Farewell to Arms and F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby revolve around one primary character who serves as a vessel that reveals the major theme of the book. The Great Gatsby chronicles Jay Gatsby's pursuit of love, while...

According to Aristotle in his book Poetics, the cathartic effects of a tragedy are its purpose, which is mediated through its form. An examination of Shakespeare's King Lear in relation to the Aristotelian elements of tragedy - focusing on his...

The New Gnosticism:

Reading Romantics in Wuthering Heights

Like the romantic poets who so influenced her, Emily Bronte explores the redefining of religious categories in her most famous novel, Wuthering Heights. Through the relations between her...

William Blake and John Keats were both prolific English poets of the Romantic era. Blake, an early Romantic along with Wordsworth and Coleridge, produced a poem called "Night" in 1789, which is part of a series of illustrated poetry called "Songs...

"Is there any greater evil we can mention for a city than that which tears it apart and makes it many instead of one? Or any greater good than that which binds it together and makes it one?...And when all the citizens rejoice and are pained by the...

A pragmatic approach to literary criticism enhances the 21st-century reader's understanding of Shakespeare's King Lear in a multitude of ways. The pragmatic approach was the popular canon at the time of Shakespeare's composition, and continued to...

Honore De Balzac's Cousin Bette is a novel about obsession, but what makes the premise so fantastic is the manner in which each obsession is related to the others. The characters are obsessed with art, but the bourgeois universe of post-Napoleonic...

Bleak House, by Charles Dickens, is chiefly a novel about the consequences of abandonment. Dickens utilizes a mixture of nameless third-person narrative and the personal narrative of Esther Summerson, thereby balancing social criticism with a...

Throughout western history, enormous gender differences have been evident in both monotheistic and polytheistic cultures. Indeed, the patriarchal hierarchies in both social systems have emphasized the superiority of the male sex; however, greater...