Newest Literature Essays

The final sentence of Winesburg, Ohio imprints the image of the town fading away as George Willard departs for the city. In fact, to view the novel in larger units, the final chapter is conspicuously named "Departure," and for any reader who...

The sum of the partsthe vignettes of townsfolkof Winesburg, Ohio is greater than the whole novel. Winesburg, too, is only one town in all of Ohio, which is one of a host of states in the U.S. This magnification is at the heart of the novel, in...

The idea of voluntary creation, of giving birth to something utterly original from some established foundation, instantly attracts unanswerable inquiries of morality and the nature of novelty and life. However, when invention is attempted on a...

Antoinette Cosway in Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre in Jane Eyre are both relatively isolated women struggling to survive in a male-dominated society. Although both women are striving to attain similar goals of happiness, equality, and a sense of...

In his January 6, 1865 letter to fellow writer and self-confessed radical William O'Connor, Walt Whitman states in no uncertain terms that his poetry collection Drum Taps "delivers my ambition. . . to express. . . the pending action of this time...

In some works of literature, a character who appears briefly, or does not appear at all, is a significant presence. An example of this can be found in the play Waiting for Godot, by Samuel Beckett.

The play deals with a hope for a change and a...

First published in 1516, Sir Thomas More's Utopia is considered as one of the most influential works of Western humanism. Through the first-person narrative of Raphael Hythloday, More's mysterious traveler, Utopia is described as a pagan communist...

Even today, with literature constantly crossing more lines and becoming more shocking, Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin remains one of the most scandalous, controversial, and powerful literary works ever spilled onto a set of blank pages....

Topic: One theatre critic has said of Twelfth Night: "...the key question seems to me how much one regards it as a festive piece of saturnalia, written for a very specific occasion, and how much as a dark comedy about impermanence and pain." What...

In the study of three of Shakespeare's plays, Twelfth Night, or What You Will, The Tragedy of Richard II, and Henry IV, Part 1, one of the themes that is presented is the contrast of "appearance vs. reality." Sometimes the confusion is comedic,...

Although published three years before Sigmund Freud's "The Uncanny," Susan Glaspell's play "Trifles" is a literary embodiment of Freudian techniques. The dramatic tension in "Trifles" is marked by an acute sense of the unheimlich, or uncanny,...

"For there are moments where one can neither think nor feel. And if one can neither think nor feel, she thought, where is one?" (Woolf, 193-4)

In To the Lighthouse, Virginia Woolf illustrates a division between her male and female characters. The...

Titus Andronicus, the first tragedy written by William Shakespeare ca. 1590, is one of his most ambitious plays, full of recognizable themes and motifs which were later incorporated in his more mature works. Yet Titus Andronicus differs greatly...

A reader reading Albee will not fail to notice tricks of language in operation; a more interesting analysis is to consider how the characters themselves are aware of language, of reading and being read, as a text, by other characters. AlbeeÃÂÂs...

Zora Neale Hurston's novel, Their Eyes Were Watching God, utilizes a struggle W.E.B. Du Bois describes as "double consciousness" to chart the journey of Janie Crawford into selfhood. In "The Souls of Black Folk," Du Bois describes African...

Thomas Hardy, in Tess of the D'Urbervilles, takes great pains to relate the characters to their surroundings, especially in the parallelism between Tess' emotional disposition and her physical environment. It is not surprising, therefore, that the...

The exact nature of Dick Diver's descent throughout the course of Tender is the Night is difficult to discern. It is clear enough that his disintegration is occasioned by Nicole's burgeoning independence, but why or how her transformation affects...

In Shakespeare's romance, The Tempest, Miranda instructs Caliban, "I endowed thy purposes / With words that made them known" (I.ii.357-8), affirming the power of language to transform the insubstantial into a forceful and purposeful entity. As...

Images of the fierce and powerful sea are prevalent throughout Shakespeare's The Tempest. The play opens on a terrible storm at sea and all of the ensuing action takes place on an island that, by definition, is surrounded by ocean on all sides....

The destruction of sex, a noteworthy theme in Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, is specifically displayed in the relationship between the characters of Jake Barnes and Lady Brett Ashley. Because of Jake's impotence and Brett's promiscuity,...

The concept of tough love is one that is prevalent in many African-American fictional texts. Toni Morrison's Sula is one such example of the way that tough love manifests itself through African-American parent-child relationships. It can often be...

The themes of Tennessee Williams's Streetcar Named Desire follow Margaret Mitchell's Gone with the Wind: the emotional struggle for supremacy between two characters who sym - bolize historical forces, between fantasy and reality, between the Old...

The death of a loved one is typically one of the most emotionally distressing events people face, particularly when that person is a parent. In most societies, it would be considered taboo for a son to respond to his parent's demise with...

It is fitting to discuss the recollection of the past in an age advancing to an unknown futurity and whose memories are increasingly banished to the realm of the nostalgic or, even worse, obsolete. Thomas Pynchon and William Faulkner, in wildly...