Newest Literature Essays

By focusing on sex and violence, Malory's rendering of the Arthurian legend becomes something quite distinct from the French originals. Malory unveils a complex cast of characters including Arthur, who is both Christ-like and Herod-like by turns....

In Harold Pinter's Moonlight, discordant scenes create a state of transition for the characters, who are facing the death of family patriarch Andy. Throughout the play, Pinter sets up scenes which would not fit logically into a linear story. Old...

In an age in which promiscuity, free living and women's liberation were not the catch phrases they have grown to become in this modern era, the title character of Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders lives a life of sexual independence that was shunned in...

In studying the development of the early American novel, one might find it helpful to compare Ishmael's relationship with Queequeg in "Moby Dick" to Huck's relationship with Jim in "Huckleberry Finn". In each case, the "savage" actually humanizes...

Captain Ahab, the fifty-eight year old commander of the Pequod, is one of the most fascinating mortals in literary history. The reader witnesses him teetering between sanity and madness, with the latter winning each slight battle and eventually...

With his novel Moby-Dick, Herman Melville uses the voyages of a New England whaler as a metaphor for the expansionist society in which he was living. Completed in 1851, the novel condemns America's values during the middle of the 19th century....

The traditional human condition plagues every individual; each suffers, and consequently, thirsts for personal freedom and utter fulfillment in whatever way possible. While Western culture recognizes this tendency as rooted in religiousness or...

With its alternately overt and subtle use of symbolism, Nathanael West's 'Miss Lonelyhearts' works on three separate yet interrelated symbolic levels: a simple symbolic level, in which objects, people, and events in a particular scene are...

In Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts and Thomas Pynchon's The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonists search for order and meaning. The books are similar in that both suggest the possibility of meaninglessness in America's modern state of chaos....

In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzche discusses at length the duality inherent in the development of art. This duality is caused by two opposing principles termed Apollinian and Dionysian. These two principles are employed in August Strindberg's Miss...

In William Shakespeare's Midsummer Night's Dream, Hermia seems to be the strong woman, while Helena is seen as weak and easily dominated. In Gohlke's article, for example, she describes the "exaggerated submission of Helena to Demetrius" (151),...

In a fine example of Shakespearean irony, scholars have suggested that A Midsummer Night's Dream was originally written as entertainment for an aristocratic wedding. The Lord Chamberlain's Players provided the noble bride and groom, the ultimate...

William Shakespeare frequently used his literary works to make statements on social issues. A Midsummer Night's Dream obviously addresses the conflict between men and women by portraying several relationships, father and daughter, husband and...

In Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream and As You Like It, feminine homoeroticism emerges as an interplay of passive and aggressive opposition. Women take the sphere of romantic love -- one sphere to which they have access in the midst of an...

As critic Ronald Miller so eloquently declared, "The complex and subtle intellectuality of Shakespeare's comic art was never better illustrated than by A Midsummer Night's Dream and, in particular, by Shakespeare's employment of the fairies in...

The character Puck, or Robin Goodfellow, is most often associated with the mischievous little hobgoblin fairy in Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream. Even before Shakespeare's interpretation of Puck though, the little imp had been one of the...

In A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare plays with ideas of sight and reality. Sight, eyes, and the gaze become crucial themes in this seemingly light-hearted play. They appear constantly in the language of all of the characters, beyond...

By the time A Midsummer Night's Dream reaches its final act, the major conflicts of the play have already more or less been resolved. Thus, instead of serving its usual function, this comedy's Act V offers the audience a chance to reflect on what...

When James Joyce was a teenager, a friend asked him if he had ever been in love. He answered, "How would I write the most perfect love songs of our time if I were in love - A poet must always write about a past or a future emotion, never about a...

Shakespeare anticipates the Freudian concept of the dream as egoistic wish-fulfillment through the chaotic and mimetic desires of his characters in "A Midsummer Night's Dream." The play also utilizes a secondary meaning of the word "dream" -...

William Shakespeare's A Midsummer Night's Dream is a journey through the three phases of a Shakespearean festive comedy. The audience is taken from unhappiness to confusion to finally reunion. Anything is possible in this story and the reader must...

Considered one of William Shakespeare's greatest plays, A Midsummer Nights Dream reads like a fantastical, imaginative tale; however, its poetic lines contain a message of love, reality, and chance that are not usually present in works of such...

A Midsummer Night's Dream begins in the city that was, to the Renaissance imagination, the center of ancient Greek civilization. (Romanticized) Athens stands as a testament to what human beings know and are able to know. But throughout this play,...

George Eliot's unwillingness to write a Positivist novel has been clearly documented in her letters. Her responses to Frederic Harrison's suggestion that "the grand features of Comte's world might be sketched in fiction in their normal...