Newest Literature Essays

While the magic of Prospero, the deposed duke of Milan at the center of Shakespeare's The Tempest, is frequently associated with art or creativity, this reading of the text seems incompatible with a substantial amount of textual evidence. Most...

Throughout history, women have often been relegated to trivial and demeaning roles. From one standpoint, women in Heart of Darkness appear to have much more power than traditional roles have allowed. For example, Marlow's aunt has significant...

Introduction: The Multi-Faceted Appeal of the Book of Esther

The book of Esther is one of the greatest pieces of literature in the Hebrew Bible. Its narrative is intricate, inventive, and colored with complex characters. It is the basis for the...

One of William Faulkner's most celebrated qualities is his inventiveness. As I Lay Dying has fifteen unique narrators, one of them a dead woman, and the novel avoids traditional ideas of linear and chronological structure. Faulkner's style demands...

In Wuthering Heights, author Emily Bronte depicts Heathcliff, one of the main characters, as an incarnation of evil. Heathcliff is first introduced in the novel as the unpleasant, unwelcoming landowner of Wuthering Heights, and from this first...

"Fiction is obliged to stick to possibilities. Truth isn't." This witty aphorism, although intended as a commentary on society, also reveals some of Mark Twain's beliefs about literature. By asserting that fiction must stay in the realm of...

Roberto Bolaño's novel By Night in Chile itself is almost a parody of the "confessional narrative" style that Idelber Avelar accuses of having met its "historical limit" in his book The Untimely Present: Postdictatorial Latin American Fiction. By...

A thorough analysis of the linguistic features of Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman (1949) will illustrate how, for a conscientious reader, all we need to know about performance is supplied within the written text. Focusing on the dramatist's...

Peter Lerangis' Sleepy Hollow is a magnificent example of romantic fiction. It contains and expounds upon all of the vital elements of romanticism. Lerangis includes an exemplary romantic hero and his quest to find truth in an abstract issue. An...

In the first chapter of Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, a solitary rosebush stands in front of a gloomy prison to symbolize "some sweet moral blossom, that may be found along the track, or relieve the darkening close of a tale of human...

"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...