Newest Literature Essays

Poor Ivan Ilych is plagued by not one, but two diseases. While his "floating kidney" ends his life, it is a temporal disease - which is actually healed as his kidney disease progresses - that ruins his life. Ivan spends his life in a small...

From its very infancy, the American continent was often equated with boundless opportunity. In A Description of New England John Smith characterized the early colonies of 1616 as a land of economic potential, declaring that "If a man work but...

Just before the morning rush hour, she got out of a jitney whose ancient driver ended each day in the red, downtown on Howard Street, began to walk toward the Embarcadero. She knew she looked terrible - knuckles black with eye-liner and mascara...

When reading Pynchon's "The Crying of Lot 49" one is flooded with a deluge of historical references (dates, places, events) and, unless a historical genius, probably feels confused as to the historical accuracy of such references. As critics have...

Fyodor Dostoevsky uses Crime and Punishment as a vehicle for his critique on the moral deterioration of society caused by the encroaching poisonous, impersonal rationalism of modernity. He focuses his critique by utilizing a defining component of...

Written in a time of emerging new philosophies and ideals, Dostoyevsky's novel Crime and Punishment exemplifies the author's strongly held viewpoints on religion, morality, society, and philosophy, while offering insight into the innermost...

After discussing the possibility of confession with Porfiry in part six of Crime and Punishment, Raskolnikov debates whom to go see, Svidrigaylov or Sonya. He says of Sonya:

"She represented an irrevocable sentence, an unchangeable resolution. He...

Anyone who has had any exposure to theatre has at least once heard the colloquialism, "there are no small parts, only small actors." Some may mock this platitude, pointing out the fact that, of course there are small parts; most literary works...

Martin Luther, one of the foremost leaders of the Protestant Reformation, sought to reject much of the doctrine and authority of the Catholic Church, yet many of his theological and political ideas are extremely reflective of the Catholic luminary...

Differentiation, decomposition, alienation, estrangement: these words appear again and again in MarxÃÂÂs writings as descriptions of the failures of capitalism. For him, an emphasis on community and equality was the solution to the degrading...

At the root of Karl Marx and Sigmund Freud's differences regarding the nature of human happiness are their almost diametrically opposed models of human nature. Freud describes human nature in terms of universal, instinctive drives, the fulfillment...

"It all I can do not to cry. I make myself wood. I say to myself, Celie, you a tree. That's how I know trees fear man," (23) uttered the protagonist of Alice Walker's The Color Purple. Such words of meekness were characteristic of Celie's speech ...

As both the protagonist and narrator of Anthony Burgess' A Clockwork Orange, the character of Alex is an intriguing study from start to finish. Specifically, in comparing part one and part three of the novel, Alex's world, internally and...

On the afternoon of June 11, 1814, at the home of Lady Sitwell, George Gordon, Lord Byron, upon seeing his cousin Lady Anne Wilmot Horton in "a mourning dress of spangled black" (Leung 312), was so moved that by the next day he had written "She...

In Literature and Language we are told that literary characterization is accomplished in three ways: "The reader learns about a character through the character's words and actions,...and through what other characters say about him...(p.44)" In...

Daniel Issacson, the narrator of Doctorow's The Book of Daniel, is perhaps not as beloved and well-known as Holden Caulfield, the voice behind Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye. It could be that we can empathize more easily with a misguided...

Humour, introspection, and allegory aside, The Canterbury Tales stands alone as one of the greatest social commentaries in the history of the English language. Chaucer uses a collection of prologues and tales to explore the issues that lie at the...

The Wife of Bathâs tale is appropriate to her character, and perfectly complements the description of the Wife in the General Prologue of Geoffrey Chaucerâs late 1300s literary masterpiece The Canterbury Tales. The Wife of Bath creates a heroine...

In Chaucer's Canterbury Tales there is one pilgrim whose overriding character trait seems to be hypocrisy itself: the Pardoner, basking in sin and, at the same time, preaching violently to the masses against precisely his immoral behavior. Indeed,...

The Wife of Bath, with the energy of her vernacular and the voraciousness of her sexual appetite, is one of the most vividly developed characters of 'The Canterbury Tales'. At 856 lines her prologue, or 'preambulacioun' as the Summoner calls it,...

Poetry can often be described as "painting with words." It is a poet's attempt to give linguistic form to thoughts and emotions, to create vivid imagery with only a minimum of language, achieved by any number of creative methods. In the lyric poem...

In his essay, "The Brothers Karamazov: Idea and Technique" Edward Wasiolek examines two aspects of Dostoevsky's work. He begins with an exposition of the scene in Elder Zosima's cell and Ivan's internal struggles with religion, and then follows...

"You see, like you, I suffer from the fantastic and so I love the realism of earth. Here, with you, everything is circumscribed, here all is formulated and geometrical, while we have nothing but indeterminate questions!"(said to Ivan by "The...

As 1950s America engulfed itself in a widespread fear of Communism, government officials became extra vigilant in finding and punishing possible spies and traitors. Suspects were arrested for saying the wrong thing, being seen in the wrong place...