Newest Literature Essays

How does Stoppard's Transformation of Hamlet reveal a shift in ideology?

Stoppard's transformation of Shakespeare's Hamlet shifts in values and world-view from the original. These changes are a result of the change in context between the two texts....

Jordan Reid Berkow

Final Paper

Medieval Court

December 14, 2002

Behind the Courtly Facade:

The Function of Irony in ChrÃtien de Troyes' Le Chevalier de la Charrette

But love is blind, and lovers cannot see

The pretty follies that themselves commit.

-...

Walt Whitman and Herman Melville were both affected by the Civil War to such a degree that they each published a volume of poetry concerning the conflict. Although both men confront similar issues and feelings, particular in their poems about...

A Streetcar Named Desire and Blues for Mister Charlie are both concerned to a large extent with tensions between different ethnic groups and, since in both plays the ethnicity of each group defines its social position, different social groups as...

With "Porphyria's Lover" and "Soliloquy of the Spanish Cloister," Browning provides two dramatic monologues of madmen in which the narrator's sheer ignorance of his own insanity is a basic premise integral to the work. Throughout both these poems,...

Fifteenth-century England, in which Geoffrey Chaucer wrote The Canterbury Tales, was ruled by a Christian morality that had definite precepts regarding the ideal character and behavior of women. Modesty and chastity in both manner and speech were...

A preacher enters the cell of a young man condemned by all before the trial has even begun, and begins powerfully exhorting the young man to give himself to the Lord Jesus and be redeemed. And yet this young man, standing at the very edge of...

Charlotte Bronte's greatest error in her preface to Wuthering Heights is her striking underestimation of Emily Bronte's understanding of the world and human nature. Charlotte writes that her sister had little knowledge of the practicalities of the...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Rome of Augustus

TF: Brian Jobe

February 22, 2003

Caesar Augustus, Hero or Tyrant?: The Effects of Hindsight on Dio Cassius' Portrayal of Caesar

Caesar Augustus, during the time of his reign as princeps of the Roman people,...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Final Paper

Rome of Augustus

April 17, 2003

"Make Panic Look Fetching": The Eroticization of Rape by Ovid

In both the Ars Armatoria and Metamorphoses, Ovid presents highly detailed, compelling scenes of rape, crafting these moments...

The Dangers and Benefits of Emotion in 19th Century American Literature

by, Katie Skalski

November 8, 2004

Many of the popular texts found in 19th century American literature represent emotion, the effects of which can be perceived as both...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Personal Response

Lambert

December 14, 1998

The Love Poems of Rich, Marvell and Campion: Realism vs. Idealization

Adrienne Rich's "Twenty-One Love Poems," which explore the nature of lesbian love, differ strikingly from classic love...

Jordan Reid Berkow

Women's Literature

Lambert

September 19,1998

An Audience Member's Perspective on A Room of One's Own

A young, female reader of Virginia Woolf's A Room of One's Own would experience an array of emotional responses to the author,...

Part 1: The Book of Exodus and its Message

In his theory of forms, the philosopher Plato proposes that the objects and situations encountered in the mundane world are often indicative of a higher and fuller reality. While Plato did not have the Old...

In "David Copperfield", Charles Dickens reveals that discipline is like a weapon: those who misuse it are cruel, unjust, and a danger to everyone around them, while those who fail to use it at all endanger themselves and lower their defenses. Only...

"Heart of Darkness" is about a man's journey into a darkness both physical and metaphorical: he travels to both the inner depths of the Belgian Congo and to the deepest regions of the human heart. In the novel, the shadowy world of Africa has been...

Prufrock's Social Anxiety

by, Anonymous

April 15, 2005

Though the poem is specifically about Alfred Prufrock, it embodies the idea that every modern person struggles with these social barriers at some point in life. Eliot's skillful use of...

Discovery of Existentialism in Crime and Punishment

by, Anonymous

January 1, 1995

Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment can be read as an ideological novel because those typically represent the social, economic, and political concerns of a culture....

Petruccio and Katherine: Mutual Love within Hierarchy

by, Anonymous

March 14, 2004

Petruccio and Katherine: Mutual Love within Hierarchy

In her famous speech at the end of The Taming of the Shrew the formerly shrewish Kate proclaims:

Thy husband is thy...

When two men confront similar situations and meet distinct fates, the perennial question emerges. Why does Orestes in Aeschylus' The Eumenides win redemption, and Pentheus in Euripides' The Bacchae die ignobly? Both address the same moral dilemma...

"This above all, to thine own self be true" (1.3.88). As Polonius offers this advice to his departing son Laertes, he also states one of the defining principles of the philosophical branch known collectively as existentialism. A paradigm firmly...

William Blake's collection of illuminated poems in Songs of Innocence and of Experience depict, as the title page explains, "the Two Contrary States of the Human Soul" (Blake 1). Although Songs of Innocence, written in 1789, was crafted five years...

Emily Dickinson's poetry covers a broad range of topics, including poetic vision, love, nature, prayer, death, God, Christ, and immortality. There is a unity in her poetry, however, in that it focuses primarily on religion. Full of contradictions...

Vestiges of Hal in Shakespeare's Henry V

by, Anonymous

October 17, 2004

Over the course of Shakespeare's Henry IV and Henry V plays, the character of Henry V evolves from a reckless youth to a great King and revered hero. In 1 Henry IV the Prince...