Newest Literature Essays

This essay concentrates on Act 111, Scene 4 of Shakespeare's King Lear, a tragic and powerful scene in which we witness Lear's mind tragically giving way to the menace of madness, which has relentlessly pursued him throughout the play. However,...

In The Tragedy of King Lear, William Shakespeare drags his audience through horrific tragedy to get to the core of truth. Violence, pain, betrayal, and finally death come crashing down upon almost every character, good or bad. This peeling away of...

A recurring theme throughout William Shakespeare's King Lear is the perpetual struggle between order and chaos, played out in the arena of human existence. While such characters as Lear, Cordelia, Albany and Edgar try to impose their sense of...

In Shakespeare's King Lear, the characters in a position of power are most often the ones who are blindest to the truth. Only after losing that power are they able to gain a clear understanding of the events occurring around them and to realize...

Throughout most of Shakespeare's King Lear, the hero is mad; when not, he is deluded. In his gorgeous speech of V.iii.8-26, Lear displays a newfound, optimistic view of his future with Cordelia moments before Edmund orders her death. Lear's...

As the audience gears up for King Lear's death, as they bite their nails at the coming sword fight between the two separated brothers, they notice that within all this royal drama a silly cat fight has developed between Regan and Goneril. We can...

"There is a cliff, whose high and bending head

Looks fearfull in the confin'd deep.

Bring me but to the very brim of it...

... From that place I shall no leading need."(IV.i.73)

It is often difficult to gain entry into a work of such complete and...

King Lear, as both head of state and paterfamilias, has multiple claims to power, and to obedience. His spectacle of dividing the kingdom between his daughters confuses their obligations to him as subjects with their filial obligations, duties...

'All's Cheerless, Dark and Deadly' Are Kent's Words a Fair Summary of The Tragedy of King Lear?

Samuel Johnson asserted that the blinding of Gloucester was an 'act too horrid to be endured in a dramatic exhibition', and that he was 'too shocked'...

Auden once asserted that Shakespearean tragedy is necessarily parabolic, pertaining to the only myth that Christianity possesses: that of the 'unrepentant thief'. We as the spectators are thus implicated in the action since each of us 'is in...

In the first scene of the first act of King Lear Cordelia, Lear's youngest daughter, is banished from his sight forever. As per his decree, she does not return to the stage until the end of the drama. Yet Cordelia's actions and attitude...

A common practice that William Shakespeare employs in many of his works is the experimentation with gender politics. Shakespeare often shows how notions of gender become unstable as a result of social forces. To discuss Shakespeare's treatment of...

A major theme in George Eliot's novel, Middlemarch, is the role of women in the community. The female characters in the novel are, to some extent, oppressed by the social expectations that prevail in Middlemarch. Regardless of social standing,...

In Elizabethan times, the role of a fool, or court jester, was to professionally entertain others, specifically the king. In essence, fools were paid to make mistakes. Many of the fool's quips and riddles were made at the expense of the king. The...

In order to unpack KiplingÃÂÂs complicated stance toward English imperialism in his novel Kim, one can begin with an investigation of the role of the occult in the novel. Some critics have read KiplingÃÂÂs use of the occult as fantasy, a tool for...

Throughout Kipling's Kim, the protagonist, Kim, moves between the white and nonwhite worlds in India with the ease and skill of a chameleon. His unique ability to ignore caste divisions and experience true freedom of motion allows Kipling to...

"The Eve of St. Agnes" tells the fantastic story of a bewitching night when two lovers consummate their relationship and elope. It takes place on the Eve of St. Agnes, a night when "young virgins have visions of delight," giving the action of the...

The cursory reading of this poem is that it is merely a story of a knight bewitched by beauty, who becomes abject slave to a fairy woman, and who falls asleep, waking up alone and dying on a hillside in the meadow. However it could be perceived as...

John Keats is known for his vibrant use of imagery in his poetry. At least twenty paintings have been rendered as a result of his expressive imagery. In Ode to a Nightingale, he uses synesthetic imagery in the beginning by combining senses...

Twenty-first century domestic statistics scream with divorce. Although the relationship between husband and wife is far more equal since the days of Kate Chopin's "The Dream of an Hour," rampant divorce and single-parent families still make it...

In his work, Jude the Obscure, Thomas Hardy tells the tale of two people hopelessly in love, fighting against both internal and external conflicts to pursue that love and have some semblance of a normal life together. Set in England in the late...

In A Journal of the Plague Year, Daniel Defoe uses several methods to

create convincing history out of fiction. In developing a false journal

entry, Defoe creates authenticity primarily through the narrator, H.F..

The style and language of H.F.'s...

The literature produced during the Puritan era was striking in its ever popular sermon format and its condescending tones. Authors like Jonathan Edwards and Michael Wigglesworth were not reluctant to use fear and intimidation to get their messages...

During the main thrust of the First Great Awakening, when swarms of Americans were being cajoled, terrified, shocked back into church pews, influential preacher John Edwards was busy converting his fair share. Set apart by his subdued style from...