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...
Analysis of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
In the popular short story The Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Allen Poe reveals the horrid theme that each person has a vicious wicked side or a dark side that can provoke the person into committing unthinkable sins for no apparent reason. Poe was an expert in writing thrillers which the psyche of the...
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 parallel tragedies of Lily Bart and Tess Durbeyfield: An examination of Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
Edith Wharton's The House of Mirth and Thomas Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles are powerful examples of the American and British realist novel. Both depict the harsh Victorian society in which women were held to unattainable standards of perfection, and both are social commentaries about the...
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...
Early existentialism in Julius Caesar
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
There is a saying among political scientists that the citizens of a nation deserve their leader. In other words a dictator or tyrant will never appear out of a vacuum, but as the result of countless historical events, and as an expression of the society's current values and priorities. As such,...
Major themes in Tim O'Brien's "The Things They Carried"
Thesis - 5 pages - Literature
The effects of the Vietnam War left men with terrible everlasting images and countless troubles, according to Tim O'Brien's novel that portrays a war that was meaningless and strung out. O'Brien's book, “The Things They Carried” describes the everyday issues that war soldiers...
Research on techniques for online promotion
Tutorials/exercises - 6 pages - Literature
Being able to choose a research topic presented a special opportunity and also a harrowing realization that being interested in a wide array of topics, narrowing in on one would be a difficult task. I knew that I would have to spend many hours reading about and searching for the information I...
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...
"Harlem" and "Harlem [1]" by Langston Hughes
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
In two poems entitled “Harlem (A Dream Deferred)” and “Harlem [1],” Langston Hughes conveys his strong personal opinions and emotions about racial tension and racial issues in America during the first half of the twentieth century. Though each poem concentrates on Hughes'...
The reality of perceiving environment
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
“Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird” by Wallace Stevens presents the reader with exactly what its title expresses—thirteen distinct perspectives all involving a blackbird in some form. These perspectives each provide a kind of brief snapshot into thirteen unique realities....
Erupted states, Corrupted hearts, Disrupted narratives: Sleep and Sleeplessness in Hamlet and Macbeth
Essay - 12 pages - Literature
In so many plays, Shakespeare's night crawls with offending shadows. Though the witching hour sees graves' tenants off to their malicious machinations, humans take refuge in cozy beds. Sleep can thus protect mankind from wandering evils, but further yet, sleep is a rejuvenative force than can...
Inhabiting the Myth of Dune
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The structures of everyday life are embodied in patterns that align with an internal concept of the mythic. The extent to which all societies are guided by some sense of the mythic is proportional to a culture's dependence on language, religion, or historical foundation; for these structures that...
