Newest Literature Essays

Moliere, who built his reputation writing plays that satirize late 17th French society, develops two title characters in his dramas "The Would-Be Gentleman" and "The Misanthrope," the former, Monsieur Jourdain who attempts to recreate his self...

In William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream, the minor character Hippolyta functions in three ways. Her first role in the play is as an example of mature love in juxtaposition to the two immature Athenian couples. Her second purpose in the...

Salman Rushdie's creation, Saleem Sinai, has a self-proclaimed "overpowering desire for form" (363). In writing his own autobiography Saleem seems to be after what Frank Kermode says every writer is a after: concordance. Concordance would allow...

It is only as an historian that he [the author] has the smallest locus standi. As a narrator of fictitious events, he is nowhere. --Henry James

Marriage is a great institution, but I'm not ready to be institutionalized. --May West

One of George...

According to the evidence we have, it seems Shakespeare wrote his plays exclusively to be performed. We are repeatedly reminded of this fact; there are throughout many of his plays moments of self-conscious performance, performance that reflects...

What lends tragic literature its proximity to human nature is that the border between being a tragic villain and a tragic hero is extremely thin.

A question that this statement will certainly bring up is whether there is such a thing as a hero or a...

While the connection between Machiavelli and Marlowe is distinctly articulated in the preface to the latter's Jew of Malta, the parallels between Machiavelli's Prince and Shakespeare's Measure for Measure are less explicitly expressed, but...

"Oh I know everything is dead." So says Billy Waldron to Ruth Prynne in chapter two, 'Nickelodeon,' of the third section of John Dos Passos' 'Manhattan Transfer'. This statement embodies several techniques Dos Passos uses throughout his novel -...

In Gustave Flaubert's Madame Bovary, the quest for the sublime and perfect expression seems to be trapped in the inability to successfully verbalize thoughts and interpret the words of others. The relationship between written words and how they...

In Scene 2 of Act 2, Lady Macbethâs master plan to promote her husband to the throne finally comes to fruition. For the first time in the play, however, Lady Macbeth reveals some degree of weakness in her inability to actually murder Duncan with...

There is truth to Duncan's line "There's no art to find the mind's construction in the face," for throughout Shakespeare's play Macbeth, both Macbeth and Lady Macbeth are not what they most often appear to be. Even Macbeth does not know the extent...

The snake has long been used as a symbol of sly subtlety. A serpent's presence has been characterized by cunning cynicism dating as far back as biblical times, when the snake persuaded Eve to eat the forbidden fruit of Eden's garden. Even the...

T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" is a modern journey into and dissection of the mind of a society man, J. Alfred Prufrock. Prufrock is pushed in two opposite directions by his desires: his desire to have the favor of the woman he...

Despite the progression of civilization and society's attempts to suppress man's darker side, moral depravity proves both indestructible and inescapable; contrary to culturally embraced views of humanistic tendencies towards goodness, each...

D'autres fois, calme plat, grand miroir de mon dsespoir

-C. Baudelaire

Those acquainted with the works of Joseph Conrad know well enough that the author had a grand affinity for the sea. Certainly, this should be expected from a man who had spent...

In Nabokov's Lolita, an effectual force of individuality converges with a force of society into a prolific battle between what is morally justified by a community, versus what is justified by an individual, revealing the essential choice everyone...

In a 1964 article for Playboy, Vladimir Nabokov wrote of his most famous and controversial novel: "I shall never regret Lolita. She was like the composition of a beautiful puzzle its composition and its solution at the same time, since one is a...

In his "On a Book Entitled Lolita", Vladimir Nabokov recalls that he felt the "first little throb of Lolita" run through him as he read a newspaper article about an ape who, "after months of coaxing by a scientist, produced the first drawing ever...

Walt Whitman's "Spontaneous Me" (Norton 2151-2152) crystallizes his attempt to create poems that appear natural, impulsive and untamed. The natural effect is a carefully crafted technique that appears throughout his writing, hinting at a...

The Qur'an1 is reflective of and conducive to the patriarchal social system in which it evolved. Many verses of the text attempt to structure and reaffirm patriarchal order and to reduce any threat to the patriarchal system. While the Qur'an is a...

John Florio's English translation of Michel de Montaigne's Essays was published in 1603. William Shakespeare's King Lear was written between 1604 and 1605, after he wrote Othello and before he wrote Macbeth. The extremely close time relationship...

The first time the Fool enters in Shakespeare's King Lear he immediately offers Kent his coxcomb, or jester's hat. Lear asks the Fool "My pretty knave, how dost thou?" (1.4.98) This initial action and inquiry of the Fool is representative of the...

If Shakespeare penned two King Lears, he created three King Lears. There is the Quarto's hero, the Folio's hero, and the hero who exists somewhere in the interplay. The last of these is not the same Lear who emerges variously in various conflated...

In King Lear, the recurring images of sight and blindness associated with the characters of Lear and Gloucester illustrate the theme of self-knowledge and consciousness that exist in the play.

These classic tropes are inverted in King Lear,...