Just vengeance or righteous follies; which Hamlet did you see?
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
William Richardson describes Hamlet's character as one “moved by finer principles, by an exquisite sense of virtue, of moral beauty and turpitude.” (Hoy 147) Richardson goes on to say that a man like Hamlet “will find [his sense of moral excellence] a source of pleasure and of pain...
William Blake's "Wall of words" on circular reasoning
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
“And the salt ocean rolled englob'd.” (Blake Pl. 28.23) The previous line comes from one of Blake's prophetic works, “The First Book of Urizen,” and is very typical of a Blake ending. More than a century before Stanley Kunitz was born, Blake had mastered the technique...
American Jews and politics in the selected works of Philip Roth and Joseph Heller
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The works of Joseph Heller and Philip Roth are frequently inhabited by American-born Jews. In The Counterlife Roth discusses the association between the American born “Diaspora Jew” to the State of Israel. In Plot Against America it is the reaction of a Jewish family to governmental...
Books that shaped our history of the Vietnam War
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
As long as there is war, and as long as the printing press continues to exist, there will be books about war. Yet as media proliferates, the content of these books changes dramatically. With the dearth of eyewitness accounts of earlier wars, save the journals and varying forms of correspondence...
Perfecting the Human race: Creator, thy name is Man
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Since many believe the notion that a higher power than man, “God,” created mankind, it is assumed that this undertaking can only be performed by God, and therefore anyone else attempting such a task would be blaspheming his efforts. The Promethean myth challenges that the creation of...
Radical poetry: William Blake and the fight against oppression
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The industrial revolution. The term conjures up images of unstoppable progress, the advancement of mankind, economic expansion, and technological achievement. At the same time, it also drags up such sights as the oppression of the common man, dehumanizing working conditions, and dreary and...
Alice in Plato land: The allegory of wonder
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
For millennia, philosophers from Plato to Descartes to Wittgenstein have argued over the nature of reality, its objectivity and apprehendability. Alice in Wonderland explores the nature of reality using logic, philosophy, and mathematics. The device of the rabbit hole, which establishes the...
Privilege does not pacify: Phillis Wheatley's writing protests slavery despite status
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Phillis Wheatley was brought to New England in 1761 to be a slave. While not every detail of Phillis' life is known, she is considered to have had a good life for someone who was legally property. The Wheatleys encouraged her education and later her career as a poet. After learning to read,...
Peyton Place: The Author, the bestseller and the legacy
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Artistic masterpieces can evolve from any genre. Pablo Picasso's abstract paintings are revered by some as just Leonardo Da Vinci's telling portraits are. The same principle can be applied to works of literature. Frontier adventure stories and political solutions written in the form of science...
The repression of memory in witchcraft study
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The readings for this week focused around the different approaches to the historical study of witchcraft and witchcraft trials: rationalism versus romanticism. Rationalism focuses more on historical and archeological studies in its attempt to discover a cohesive historical narrative, while...
Finding the man in the golem: Perfection through the word in Gustav Meyrink's "The Golem"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The Golem, according to legend, is a man-made creature, constructed out of wax, inanimate until a written Cabalistic scripture is placed in its mouth. Without the written word, the physical form of the Golem remains a mix of primal elements; without the clay to inspire, the written prayer remains...
Sight and reality in Chestnutt's "The Conjure Woman"
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
There has always been a fundamental distinction between reality and how our mind represents reality. What we see and observe (external sight) comes into conflict with what we interpret and feel (internal sight). Charles W. Chestnutt's The Conjure Woman explores the gulf between the eye and the...
Elsie Venner: A destiny of obscurity
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In it's own words, the novel Elsie Venner, written by Oliver Wendell Holmes, has been called “A Romance of Destiny” (Title), “a medicated novel” (Preface 1), and a “test [of] the doctrine of ‘original sin' and human responsibility” (Preface 1). I see very little...
'The oval portrait' and 'The birthmark': An insight to an era
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Documents, records locked away in vaults, and history books are all excellent way to learn about the past. These are all ways that facts can be found, but that is only part of what can be discovered about past. Literature gives an insight into the culture of the times that facts and figures...
Edgar Allan Poe: The man inside his work
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
The life of Edgar Allan Poe can easily be found throughout all of his stories and poems. It would be unfair to say that Poe only wrote autobiographical fiction, but his work does parallel his life. His life was a perfect match for great fiction. While it is true that his life was horribly...
Hemingway's art of anxiety: The visual-to-verbal relationship in "The Sun Also Rises"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Hemingway's style depends upon vividness and exactness of visual detail to create the atmosphere of modernism which permeates his works both large and small. Though this richness is due to influence from other writers of the modernist period (as well as the application of his own theory of...
The traveling musician as the other in two of Eudora Welty's short stories
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Eudora Welty was a writer who sought to identify her native Mississippi in terms of her concept of place. By focusing so often on place, Welty often used the concept of outsiders to emphasize the nature of the place in which the outsiders have come to interact. The outsider characters in...
The eccentrics of Margery Kempe, an aspired Saint
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Margery Kempe, the daughter of John Burnham, a popular mayor of Bishop's Lynn, England, was born in 1373. Although she could not read or write, Kempe dictated a biography of herself to be written, that begins with her marriage at the age of “twenty year of age or some deal more”...
The Peanut-Crunching Crowd and the Rubber crotch: How Sylvia Plath's legacy has suffered by the hands of sexism, over-eager feminists, schadenfreude, and gender politics?
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
O'Rourke goes on to say that although poems like “Daddy” or “Lady Lazarus” seem “crudely self-involved,” the majority of Plath's poetry is abstract, symbolic, and in general quite distant from the confessional poets with whom she is grouped. Despite this, Plath's...
The (Wo)Man of our dreams: Gender-bending in Takarazuka
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
An extraordinarily attractive actor, with large, dark eyes fringed by long lashes and chiseled features, suddenly appears on an audience walkway (“silver bridge”), much to the delight of adoring fans (Brau 88). With arms extended widely, the actor begins serenading the enraptured crowd...
Is she fact or fiction? : Blurring boundaries in Angela Carter's 'Nights at the Circus'
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
In Nights at the Circus, Angela Carter succeeds in creating a heroine so untraditional, so much larger than life in both physique and personality, that the topic of who Fevvers is and what she represents is discussed even more by critics than it is by the book's other characters. The winged woman...
Archetypal criticism - Hamlet, Prince of Denmark
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Hamlet, Prince of Denmark by William Shakespeare is one the most acclaimed and widely read pieces of literature in the history of Western civilization. It is the story of a young prince named Hamlet who must battle his adversaries and his own demons in order to avenge the fratricide committed...
Masculine and Feminine ideology in the Knight's and Squire's tales
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Chaucer's inclusion of a father-son relationship—represented by the Knight and the Squire—demands an analysis of their inherent connection, their individual characterizations and the themes they represent in their Tales. Each must consciously or subconsciously reveal information about...
Strategies to increase performance of Delmonte Garage: Literature review
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Globalization has brought about myriad changes on our planet—some frightening and tragic, others moving and magical. However, this paper will not be addressing those larger issues, important as they may be. Instead it will look at microcosm of those changes, examining the ways in which those...
Garcia girls
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Throughout time, people from many different religious and cultural backgrounds have relied on language to communicate effectively with one another. Although there are thousands of various languages, the goal within each is usually the same: to express one's opinion and reveal something that may...
Feral women: Female characters in Wuthering Heights, The Moonstone, and Hard Times
Essay - 10 pages - Literature
Once upon a time, not so very long ago, women had no place within the pages of fiction. Indeed, men were usually the sole creators of literature; women, on the other hand, were silent (those few women who did choose to write were often forced to use a male pseudonym in order to be taken...
Is "Maurice" a hopelessly flawed text, or a thoughtful adaptation of the novel form to the subject matter and a strong intervention in debates of the time?
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
E.M Forster dedicated his novel “Maurice” to a “happier year”, affirming his intention of the novel's purpose as an insight into the future evolution of sexual desire and relationships, leading some to attach significance to the text as a protagonist of controversial debate of...
Time, space and being in North Indian classical music
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Martin Clayton writes, “the highest aim of our music is to reveal the essence of the universe it reflects” (Clayton 10). To hear North Indian Classical Music is to engage one self in an experience of being in which music becomes an external expression of one's internal self. It reflects...
Perceptions of Kali's tongue
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Through the last century the western world has been faced with the relatively new concepts of feminine equality and power. Academia has been influenced by theorists such as Simone de Beauvoir, and more recently Judith Butler, who have created a terminology to help define the subtleties of gender...
Forming and performing the female identity in Daniel Deronda
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
The Victorian era thrived on ideals; knowing their world is more than knowing the facts of British politics, of documented interactions, or popular amusements, it is striving to understand the light in which they saw themselves, the real or ideal roles society endeavored to fulfill. As Lynn...
