Newest Literature Essays

Tales of women as sorceresses and magic-wielders abound in the literature and mythology of cultures that promote the gendered binary of culture over nature, activity over passivity, and reason over superstition. In these patriarchal societies,...

In any artistic work, aesthetic style is a crucial aid to the viewer's understanding of the piece as a whole. Art Spiegelman's remarkable publication Maus breaks the conventional barriers of the past between comics and what were then considered to...

"All the world's a stage/ And all the men and women merely players."

-As You Like It II.vii.139

A large portion of the plot of Jane Austen's Mansfield Park (Austen, 1814) describes the young gentlemen and ladies of the estate preparing a performance...

The novels of Jane Austen primarily reveal satirical glimpses into the inner workings of Nineteenth-century England's upper classes. With a mocking overtone, the author ridicules the plight of young women as they desperately seek a worthy husband....

In a letter to her brother dated 1814, Jane Austen boasted about a compliment she had received from a friend on her most recent work, Mansfield Park: "It's the most sensible novel he's ever read" (263). Austen prided herself on creating literature...

In The Picture of Dorian Gray, Oscar Wilde writes of a beautiful young man with an ugly secret. While Dorian Gray will forever retain the innocent looks of his youth, his portrait will degenerate with every wrong he commits. Unburdened and...

Berthe appears only a few times in Flaubert's Madame Bovary and is too young to contribute much to the novel by her speech or actions, but she is nevertheless extremely important to the story. Emma's lack of maternal aptitude and weakness of moral...

In Madame Bovary, Gustave Flaubert attacks all sorts of vice and virtue; his targets include adultery, romance, religion, science, and politics. The characters are almost universally detestable; those who are not are merely pathetic. But the...

The literary set piece of the Agricultural Fair is the stuff of cinema. The set piece is a linear pan-opticon of images and events, given unity through the magic of editing. Flaubert, as the cameraman, moves in and out of focus, craning in to...

As Gustave Flaubert wrote the novel Madame Bovary, he took special care to examine the relationship between literature and the effect on its readers. His heroine Emma absorbs poetry and novels as though they were instructions for her emotional...

Dramatic tragedies are by definition plays that enact the struggle and downfall of their main character or characters. "The Tragedy of Macbeth", by William Shakespeare, is a perfect example of this; the entire play portrays the fatalistic...

In Shakespeare's time, having children was, arguably, even more important than it is today. In a society dominated by rules of inheritance and birthright, children were important, not only as the means of carrying on a name and genetic material,...

Time plays a crucial role in Shakespeare's tragedy Macbeth. Like all Shakespearian tragedies, the main character is necessarily at odds with time. By its very nature, a tragedy must end with the death of the hero. The hero, therefore, must bide...

Starting with the witches' assertion that âfair is foul, and foul is fair,â? it is clear that Macbeth is a play in which appearances will be deceiving and morality will be muddled. From the dialogue between King Duncan, Malcolm, and the wounded...

Come you spirit,

That tend on mortal thoughts, unsex me here.

--Lady Macbeth

More so than any other Shakespearean play, Macbeth functions the most vividly as a psychoanalysis of the state of humanity's development of a sense of sexual self. Now, in a...

The collective minds of people in England during the time of Shakespeare struggled to explain the unexplainable; they struggled to understand randomness and human nature. They believed that from the beginning of time a certain cosmic order had...

In Shakespeare's, Macbeth, there seems to be an uncanny connection between the images of sleep and nature. The play refers to the results of nature being thwarted, and since sleep is the primarily natural function of every human being, its seems...

In Greek tragedy, inevitability plays an important role, portraying the protagonists as pawns of the fates, whose roles in the tragedy are distributed arbitrarily and without justice. The outcomes of these roles are decided before the play even...

Separating qualities common to one 'set' or 'type' of Shakespeare's plays which are not common to the plays as a whole is a difficult task: it would no doubt be possible to find evidence of any feature uniting 'the Tragedies' within any of...

A central theme of William Shakespeare's Macbeth is the title character's willingness to accept his fate. Macbeth's attitude toward the prophecies of the witches varies depending on how much he likes the prediction. At first, he follows along with...

In Shakespeare's Macbeth, Macbeth undergoes a profound and gradual evolution throughout the play. He regresses from a logical, compassionate, caring, and conscientious man, to an entirely apathetic, amoral paradigm of cynical numbness. Macbeth's...

Literary critic Frances E. Dolan states, "No critic has suggested that the play [Macbeth] might more properly be called, The Macbeths, thereby asserting that Lady Macbeth's role in Macbeth is not given adequate recognition1. Professor A.C. Bradley...

The iniquitous nature of unrequited love plays man the subservient jester to his indifferent queen. In his poem "The Cap and Bells" W. B. Yeats seeks to convey the message that unrequited love causes a man to give and give of himself until he has...

As its title suggests, "M. Butterfly" is essentially a play about metamorphosis. It is, firstly, the metamorphosis of Giacomo Puccini's famous opera "Madame Butterfly" into a modern-day geopolitical argument for cultural understanding. Author...