Newest Literature Essays

Eliot's "The Waste Land" is perhaps a prime example of the experimentation in poetic technique occurring during the period encompassing the Modernist movement. Loathed and adored by critics and students alike, the complexities of technique,...

T.S. Eliot peppers "The Wasteland," his apocalyptic poem, with images of modern aridity and inarticulacy that contrast with fertile allusions to previous times. Eliot's language details a brittle era, rife with wars physical and sexual,...

Realism, as described by William Dean Howells in the late nineteenth century, replaces the high art and style of the literature of the preceding decades by permitting such characters as Howells' Silas Lapham to have a distinct place in the...

Throughout War and Peace, Pierre exhibits Tolstoy's ideals of passivity, humility, and passion. However, even Pierre succumbs to self-centered willfulness. He uses a highly contrived occult numerology and calculates the value of almost every...

With the end of the civil war in America came the huge task of inventing a national identity. America wished to cut its European ties, and forge a new voice through literature, as it is through the word that a nation expresses itself. However even...

One of the more superficial lessons often gleaned from Thoreau's Walden is the superiority of the "natural" laws of time over those of commercially-motivated, fast-paced humans. This viewpoint has its supports in Thoreau's almost constant...

The 1930's worlds of Clifford Odets and Tennessee Williams portray assertive and domineering women as the center of families in the age of the depression. Women in the plays are always fighting poverty in any way they can. The mothers often...

In his play "Waiting for Lefty" Clifford Odets attempts to stir up the weary American public of the 1930s by providing examples of everyday people who, with some coaxing, rise above the capitalist mess they've inherited and take control of their...

In Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, the playwright bestows upon his work the veneer of comedy, but invests the heart of it with the "absurd", the tragic. He employs the gags and the routines, the circus comedy and the songs of the "lowbrow"...

GUILDENSTERN: All your life you live so close to truth, it becomes a permanent blur in the corner of your eye, and when something nudges it into outline it is like being ambushed by a grotesque. ~ Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, Tom...

Samuel Beckett's Waiting For Godot and James Joyce's Ulysses are strikingly similar in style, content, and most significantly a philosophy of life. The idea of language as doubly futile and liberating is central to both works. It is found in the...

"O divine power, but lend yourself to me

So that I may show the shadow of that blessed

Kingdom which is embedded in my brain"

The above passage is excerpted from Canto I of Longfellow's translation of Dante Alighieri's Paradiso (22-24). In this third...

Patched together from different marriages, various mothers and fathers, the nuclear family in Don DeLillo's White Noise is nothing if not impacted and constructed by modernity. This explication of a typical American lifestyle does not examine the...

Don Dellilo's protagonist in his novel "White Noise," Jack Gladney, has a "nuclear family" that is, ostensibly, a prime example of the disjointed nature way of the "family" of the 80's and 90's -- what with Jack's multiple past marriages and the...

During the early years of the French Revolution, England became a place of new beginnings, where the idea of the individual emerged, the world of literature was reborn and authority was thoroughly questioned and often uprooted. Great poets and...

Gabriel Garcia Marquez, a modern Colombian author, explores both the natural and the supernatural in his short story, "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings." Although the plot revolves around the character of a winged man who has fallen to earth,...

In Sir Thomas More's "Utopia," one may find a fascinating adventure story about the sailor named Raphael Hythloday. However, below the surface of this adventure story lies a deep sea of social criticism. In a time period where speaking against the...

Though Sir Thomas More took an active role in politics and the corrupt government of King Henry VIII, he remained rooted in his political and religious convictions. Famous for his willingness to die rather than betray his ideals, More showed...

A man named Nonsenso begins any debate at a disadvantage. What kind of information or argument can be expected of such an individual? Can he articulate a rational idea, deduce a logical conclusion? Is the authority of his discourse to be trusted?...

'During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens . . . [I] at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of...

The cultural repercussions of Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel, Uncle Tom's Cabin, are undeniable. Uncle Tom's Cabin became one of the most widely read and profoundly penetrating books of the nineteenth century. Richard Yarborough remarked that,...

Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, written during the period of boiling tumult that was to erupt into the Civil War, has struck it's readers in more ways than one. Wildly popular, Uncle Tom's Cabin was made into theatrical pieces and...

While lying on her death bed, in Chapter 26 of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, little Eva says to the servants in her house who have gathered around her, "You must remember that each one of you can become angels" (418). In this chapter...

In The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera, the inquisitive Tereza ponders what makes her unique. While staring at herself in a mirror she wonders if changing her physical features can affect who she is on the inside; whether her...