Endgame

The setting of Endgame is characteristic of a Beckett play; a décor reduced to the barest minimum. A naked stage, both a poetic symbol and a parody of traditional theater, with only two dust bins, a chair, and a backward painting to look at. High...

The Bacchae

The characters of Agave and Eve, while subordinate to their male counterparts, Pentheus and Adam, play extremely important roles within The Bacchae and Genesis, respectively. Their characters are portrayals of typical women who, because of...

Beloved

The main characters in Toni Morrison's "Beloved" are former slaves; their main struggle, after having been stripped of their humanity and identity by the white men who owned them, is to reclaim self-ownership and form identities independent of...

Beloved

In 1873 slavery had been abolished in Cincinnati, Ohio for ten years. This is the setting in which Toni Morrison places the characters for her powerfully moving novel, Beloved. After the Emancipation Proclamation and after the Civil War, Sethe,...

Antigone

The idea of hubris is monumental in a plethora of Greek mythological works. In many ways the excessive pride of certain characters fuels their own destruction. This is certainly true with respect to the characters of Pentheus, Antigone, and...

Antigone

The "Golden Age" of Greece is notorious for its many contributions to the creative world, especially in its development of the play. These primitive performances strived to emphasize Greek morals, and were produced principally for this purpose....

Antigone

It is very difficult to label something as a first in literature. Much the way inventions are often adaptations of previously patented objects, most authors borrow ideas and techniques form pre-existing media. In order to truly classify something...

Agamemnon

In most Greek tragedies, the writer uses the chorus as a tool to comment on action in the play. The chorus does not play an active role in the story, such that if they were removed from the work, the plot would not be affected. However, in...

The Aeneid

Virgil's Aeneid details the trials and tribulations of Aeneas and the Trojan people en route to Italy from Troy. The journey parallels the epic adventures of the Homeric hero Odysseus. Virgil borrows Homer's narrative style and frames a story that...

The Aeneid

In The Aeneid, Virgil introduces the post-Homeric epic, an epic that immortalizes both a hero's glory and the foundation of a people. The scope of the Aeneid can be paralleled to the scope of the Oresteia of Aeschylus, which explores the origins...