Antigone

The trio of classic Greek texts, The Last Days of Socrates, Antigone, and The Eumenides all strike a contrast between public and private morality. In each work one person carries forth an unpopular action that he alone believes in, and must later...

Antigone

A little boy went to the corner store to pick up the newest edition of his favorite comic; Batman. The boy entered the store and despite his efforts to withhold his excitement, dashed straight to the massive stack of magazines the store had...

Anna Karenina

The question of judgment and sympathies in Anna Karenina is one that, every time I have read the novel, seems to become more complicated and slung with obfuscation. The basic problem with locating the voice of judgment is that throughout the...

The Turn of the Screw

In "The Turn of the Screw" by Henry James, the central character, the governess, feels so isolated that she will do anything necessary to quench the feeling. She decides that the way to do so is to be in love. Unfortunately, because she is located...

Anna Karenina

Two clashing movements existed within Russia in the 19th century. In the rural areas existed a movement that could hardly be called a movement. It was, in fact, more of a planted fixture. The indigenous foundation that had existed for time...

All the King's Men

Jack Burden, the chronicler and one of two possible protagonists of Robert Penn Warren's All the King's Men, is anything but a static narrator. His character is quite possibly even more dynamic than that of Willie Stark, the novel's man of the...

Alice in Wonderland

The fantasy world of "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" mimics reality, a world where as people mature from children to adults, they become more verbally aggressive. In the real world, adults often grow more confident as they grow older and more...

Alice in Wonderland

Lewis Carroll's Adventures in Wonderland provides a physical removal from reality by creating a fantastical world and adventure in the mind of a young girl. In this separation, Carroll is able to bend the rules of the temporal world. Although this...

The Age of Innocence

New York Society, in Edith Wharton's Age of Innocence (1920), is paradoxically immortal and mortal. Like the Olympic pantheon of mythological Greek antiquity, New York Society cavorts and carouses, bickers and condemns while it feasts on ambrosia...

Agamemnon

Aeschylus' Oresteia is undebatably one of antiquity's greatest surviving tragedies. Driven by the universal struggles of justice versus injustice, fear versus obligation and parent versus child, the play follows one ill-fated family through the...

Agamemnon

Cassandra's final monologue in Aeschylus's Agamemnon plays a transformative role in terms of the movement of the plot and, upon close examination, functions as a key for many of the tragedy's larger themes. She begins by equating prophecy, be it...

Agamemnon

Historically, Greek tragedies have been used as a means to convey particular political and ethical testimonials about society, usually in order to convey certain morals or to ensure order. In such chronicles, a protagonist grapples with a...

The Aeneid

In both Virgil's The Aeneid and books Genesis and Exodus of the Old Testament, dreams, visions, signs, wonders and divinations serve as powerful testaments to the universal knowledge and might of the pagan Roman gods and the Jewish god. Revealing...

Robinson Crusoe

'[Robinson Crusoe is] the true prototype of the British colonist, as Friday (the trusty savage who arrives on an unlucky day) is the symbol of the subject races.' Explore.

Unquestionably Robinson Crusoe is a novel of unbridled popularity; it has...

The Aeneid

An important recurring image throughout Virgil's Aeneid is that of the serpent, which appears both realistically and metaphorically. The serpent icon is a harbinger of death and a symbol of deception. These two elements represented by the snake...