Newest Literature Essays

"The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" depicts an image of the modern city that is marked by paralysis, alienation, decay, and repression. Prufrock is a modern man who can see the superficiality of the social values of middle class society, and yet...

T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock" begins with an epigraph from Dante's Inferno. Translated, it reads: "If I thought that I was speaking/ to someone who would go back to the world,/ this flame would shake no more./ But since nobody...

And would it have been worth it, after all

After the cups, the marmalade, the tea,

Among the porcelain, among some talk of you and me,

Would it have been worth while

To have bitten off the matter with a smile,

To have squeezed the universe into a ball

...

Twenty some years after the death of Gerard Manley Hopkins, T.S. Eliot began where Hopkins had left off. In one of his earliest poems, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock", Eliot picked up the hopelessness - hopelessness motivated by a sense of...

An imminent era of lovesickness persuades the course of Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza's love affair; it is this pending ailment - as Gabriel Garcia Marquez' title Love in the Time of Cholera suggests - that fuels the lovers' final movement...

Reconciliation with the past is a major theme throughout Tolkien's trilogy, and the gap between the powerful, undying beings of the past and the mortal men of the present and future is starkly evident when the characteristics of the ancient...

Lord of the Flies ends on a bleak note in order to emphasize the recurring theme throughout the novel: the idea that every human contains the beast within him/herself. By making the finale of the book so depressing, Golding illustrates the...

When freed from the moral manacles of society, humans must embrace moderate, disciplined lifestyles in order to avoid a fatal plunge into barbarism. In William Golding's Lord of the Flies, marooned schoolboys exchange the confines of civility for...

Oscar Hammling has said, "We die ourselves every time we kill in others something that deserved to live." Man's relationship with death from the hour of his birth and his inherent concern for himself above others are themes often used in literary...

William Golding's Lord of the Flies is "An unfashionable aberration, a throwback to earlier, simpler forms of literature in which symbolic, fablelike elements predominate over psychological or social realism" (Magill 1126). Lord of the Flies, a...

In real life, common objects that are used everyday are often taken for granted and even unusual sights, as well as ideas, are often unrecognized. However, this is seldom the case with similar objects and ideas that literary characters encounter....

William Golding was inspired by his experiences in the Royal Navy during World War II when he wrote Lord of the Flies (Beetz 2514). Golding has said this about his book:

The theme is an attempt to trace the defeats of society back to the defects of...

In modern parlance, the word âromanticâ? is often and understandably used with a positive connotation. A romantic individual is most often recalled with fondness, if also with pity. The faults of such a person might be limited to mere naivete: âHe...

Despite the popular conception that Joseph Conrad's novel, Lord Jim, is merely a fanciful tale about sea-faring adventurers, this carefully crafted novel reaches far beyond its oceanic setting. Conrad's tale is a bittersweet portrayal of the...

Byron's "The Prisoner of Chillon"[1], a dramatic monologue narrated by a prisoner, Francois de Bonnivard, was written immediately after the poet's famous sailing expedition on Lake Geneva with Percy Shelley. When visiting the thirteenth-century...

Of all the English poets that comprise the Romantic period, George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788-1824), John Keats (1795-1821), and Samuel Taylor Coleridge (1772-1834) stand as the quintessential masters of Romantic poetry. Their contributions to the...

Most novelists do not kill off half of the characters in their book to prove a point, but this one does. The tragic, bloody deaths in the novel only enforce the fact that the West was wild and could not be conquered by any one human, no matter how...

In Sherman Alexie's "The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven", the past is never really past. The aftershocks of 500 years of Native American persecution, oppression, and neglect continue to haunt the world of the reservation, in the form of...

In Lolita's afterword, Nabokov describes two opposing views of the book, displayed by two readers. One felt that Lolita was a tale of " 'Old Europe debauching young America,'" while another saw it as " 'Young America debauching old Europe'"(p....

In this brief essay, I will draw upon Lolita to demonstrate how Vladimir

Nabokov uses the techniques of rhetoric to create an explication of the female body, encapsulated in the characters of both the adolescent Lolita and her older, less nubile...

In Vladimir Nabokov's novel Lolita, Humbert Humbert narrates the story of his love affair with a twelve-year old 'nymphet,' of whom he takes charge, as both lover and quasi-father figure, after her mother's death. Humbert's conversation with...

"... in the destructive element immerse..."(from Lord Jim, by Joseph Conrad)

Through the lens of Humbert Humbert's obsession with la nymphette Lolita, ("Lo-lee-ta... light of my life, fire of my loins..."(9)), Nabokov explores and illuminates the...

You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style. So says Humbert Humbert at the start of Lolita in his account to the "Ladies and gentlemen of the jury" (9). He refers to himself as a murderer (he is, after all, "guilty of killing...

I. If there is one word that sums up the pervading atmosphere of Little Dorrit, it is claustrophobic. From the very first chapter, the reader is inducted into a world primarily made up of rigidly enclosed spaces; every level of the novel is in...