Newest Literature Essays

Question:

In what ways and for what ends does Mary Shelley utilise the myth of Prometheus in her novel, Frankenstein?

Mary Shelley wrote Frankenstein as a modern day version of the legend of Prometheus. Prometheus created men out of clay and taught...

In Frankenstein, Mary Shelley warns that with the advent of science, natural philosophical questioning is not only futile, but dangerous. In attempting to discover the mysteries of life, Frankenstein assumes that he can act as God. He disrupts the...

Setting plays a pivotal role throughout Mary Shelley's Frankenstein. Nature is presented as possessing an immense curative power: the beauty of the natural world heals Victor when he is too miserable to find solace anywhere else. The Arve Ravine...

In Mary Shelley's <I>Frankenstein</I>, the paradoxical quality of the concept of "discovery" echoes that found in Milton's <I>Paradise Lost</I>: initial discovery is joyful and innocent, but ends in misery and corruption....

Victor Frankenstein, like many Romantics, relies upon his unusual capacity for sensitivity and creativity to aid him in his ambitions. In contrast to Robert Walton, who ventures to the North Pole to find "beauty and delight" (Shelley 15) amidst...

Both Robert Louis Stevenson's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and Mary Shelley's Frankenstein tell cautionary tales of scientists abusing their creative powers to exist in another sphere where they cannot be directly blamed for their actions. Though...

In "Everything that Rises must Converge" Flannery O' Connor compares the robustness of different methods of maintaining identity. The two identity schemas being compared are those of Julian, the highly individualistic, cerebral main character and...

"sometimes a word is put down with a sign of negation, when as much is signified as if we had spoken it affirmatively, if not more" John Smith (225)

Thomas More's Utopia is a work that embodies and embraces ambiguity. In fact almost every aspect...

Female speech in Jane Austen's novels is heavily dictated by the whims of her male characters, and although "[f]emale speech is never entirely repressed in Austen's fiction, [it] is dictated so as to mirror or otherwise reassure masculine desire"...

In Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen creates her protagonist, Elizabeth Bennet, to be a strikingly unconventional female with respect to her time. Elizabeth tends to relate less to her female companions, and instead needs to define herself by her...

Place: The particular portion of space occupied by or allocated to a person or thing.

It is interesting to observe Dictionary.com's definition of the word "place" in relation to "person". Especially when it comes to Pride and Prejudice, where...

While the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen does not openly display Marx's idea of the oppressed and the oppressor, it does clearly demonstrate Marx's ideas of society as a history of class struggle. Austen portrays class divisions and...

"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife" (Austen 1). From the first, very famous sentence of Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen introduces to her readers a satirical view...

Two English literary works, one a comedy and the other a tragedy, by two different authors of separate centuries, both have their fair share of characters who illustrate the admirable and the not-so-admirable of dispositions. Jane Austen's...

The world of Pride and Prejudice revolved around the relationships between its men and women. Austen made this theme obvious from the opening sentence. "It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune,...

The concept of "design" and calculation plays a prominent role in Pride and Prejudice. Design is used as an indicator of values, particularly in marriage, and presents the characters with a challenge in balancing scheming and morality in its use....

In the society described in Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, money was as much a social currency as it was a means of exchange for goods and services. Money was often commensurate with social rank, yet there was a feeling against parvenus who...

In the novel Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, she displays a stark contrast between two characters in the story. Austen does so by discussing the theme of pride throughout the novel. The concept of pride can be defined in two ways: positive and...

"And they lived happily ever after." This picturesque phrase can hardly be described as a typical ending to a Flannery O'Connor work. In a 'standard' O'Connor piece, one can expect to find several allusions to religion, sardonic situations, and...

In his masterpiece, A Tale of Two Cities, Charles Dickens strengthens his theme of paired opposites by juxtaposing the characters of Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay. Initially, it seems as though Carton and Darnay are completely bipolar. While...

The storming of the Bastille, the death carts with their doomed human cargo, the swift drop of the guillotine blade - this is the French Revolution that Charles Dickens vividly captures in his famous novel, A Tale of Two Cities. With dramatic...

The chaotic and churning society of the eighteenth century is well-depicted in Dicken's A Tale of Two Cities. As France goes through its intense revolution, England remains in its peaceful state. Dickens compares the two countries and their...

In both the tragedies of King Lear and Othello, the plot is affected by one character's malicious actions, which exacerbate any tensions that are already inherent in the relationships between the characters. Iago in Othello and Edmund in King Lear...

The literary compositions of Edgar Allan Poe, especially his short stories of terror based on supernatural or psychological manifestations, continue to be highly praised by a select group of readers who relish the dark, nightmarish worlds of human...