Newest Literature Essays

The House on Mango Street and Cry, the Beloved Country both involve themes emphasizing the home and family. From the old umfundisi seeking for his prodigal son to Esperanza searching and wanting a place of her own, both of these prolific stories...

Francis Scott Fitzgerald, a celebrated U.S. author, once alleged, "Family quarrels are bitter things. They don't go according to any rules. They're not like aches or wounds, they're more like splits in the skin that won't heal" (1927). The Trueba...

It has almost become an everyday slogan, in light of present events, that behind everything that seems so perfect there is some horrible mistake, or some terrible sin waiting to come back and rear its ugly head. Nathaniel Hawthorne could not have...

Ostensibly a tale of the effects of sin and guilt as manifested through successive generations of a New England family, Hawthorne's The House of the Seven Gables is a richly detailed novel with multiple levels of meaning and ambiguities that have...

In an attempt to write a more cheerful novel then his brooding Scarlet Letter during a time when optimism was the one quality shared by all, Hawthorne writes, what critics call today, a contrived ending for his House of Seven Gables. When all...

The House of Mirth, by Edith Wharton, chronicles the tragic life of Lily Bart in New York's fashionable high society. Exquisitely beautiful, Lily was trained to think of herself not as a woman capable of defining her own goals and making emotional...

In Edith Wharton's The House Of Mirth, money is the most evident and most basic value held by the characters who populate the author's turn-of-the-century New York. Essentially, money is valued for only one reason - it provides the means by which...

He had a confused sense that she must have cost a great deal to make, that a great many dull and ugly people must, in some mysterious way, have been sacrificed to produce her. He was aware that the qualities distinguishing her from the herd of her...

In Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, the cold and unforgiving world of New York's high society never favors the perspective of the outsider, or the looker-on. But the author seems to award a great deal of credit to those characters who adapt to...

You are Ibsen. Review House of Mirth.

Which of the domestic palaces in Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth claims itself as the titular source of the tragic novel? Each offers strong evidence in its own favor. There is the bucolic decadence of the...

Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth, is understood from chapter 1 to be a female of remarkable beauty. Throughout the novel she is classified as uniquely attractive, a woman to be desired by men and subtly threatening to...

Nature, whether in the form of the arctic tundra of the North Pole or the busy street-life of Manhattan, was viewed by Naturalist writers as a phenomena which necessarily challenged individual survival; a phenomena, moreover, which operated on...

The society in Edith Wharton's House of Mirth is immersed in an economy of risk. The men work as businessmen, trading on the fluctuating stock market; the women spend their time at the bridge table wagering their family savings. Wharton makes a...

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth creates a subtle, ironic, and superbly crafted picture of the social operation of turn-of-the-century New York. In her harsh expression of community, she succeeds in portraying a world of calculation operating...

Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth presents an interesting study of the social construction of subjectivity. The Victorian society which Wharton's characters inhabit is defined by a rigid structure of morals and manners in which one's identity is...

The principal concern of a literature student is to try to infer what the author's intentions are. However, we often include our own perspectives and forget the author altogether. Take a look at The Hobbit. Many people assume Tolkien wanted Bilbo...

<i>"Mr. Baggins began as a comic tale among conventional and inconsistent fairy-tale dwarves, and got drawn into the edge of it - so that even Sauron the terrible peeped over the edge."

-J.R.R Tolkien, letter to his publisher (quoted in...

While Moses Herzog sits in the Chicago police station after he has crashed his rental car, the narrator of Saul Bellow's work exclaims angrily, "See Moses? We don't know one another" (299). This is the lone moment in the book where the narrator...

Saul Bellow's Herzog is a complicated and multifaceted novel. Moses Herzog, the protagonist, has a powerful though meandering intellect which does not seem to discriminate much in its choice of object. These myriad reflections can make the novel...

In Henry V, Shakespeare presents the king as a man who is exceptionally deft with his use of language and politics. Henry conquers France in a relatively short amount of time with a small army, and after his victory he declares, "Let there be sung...

"In many different societies, women, like colonised subjects, have been relegated to the position of 'Other,' 'colonised' by various forms of patriarchal domination. They thus share with colonised races and cultures an intimate experience of the...

In Henry IV, Shakespeare presents a troubled England with a king whose grip on the throne is tenuous at best. Those who had supported his rise to the throne when he overthrew Richard II are now turning against him. The king even doubts the loyalty...

In spite of its title, Henry IV, Part 1 is, without question, the story of a prince as he stands, however uncertainly, on the threshold of kingship. Yet Shakespeareâs literary account of this historical figure is not merely a diary of a royal...

In Part 1 of Henry IV, "blood" is the defining characteristic, separating the players into two distinct groups easily designated by their relationship to blood and providing the basis for the two lifestyles that Hal leads. The nobility's obsession...