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...
"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...
Self-awareness: The problem of the self in the work of Samuel Beckett
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
We find ourselves in some deeply existential quandary: a problem beyond inquiry or conclusion; a problem that extends into the void of time and space; that avoids the very title of "problem". We are confined to a box, in Endgame, we are on a dead tree stump off an abandoned road, in Godot, and...
The young Shakespeare and his contemporaries: reconstructing convention in taming of the shrew
Essay - 9 pages - Literature
One purpose of theatre is perhaps to reiterate social phenomena and bring to light aspects of our identity, as an individual, culture, or audience, that have been passed as unquestioned tradition from times when they made sense. The Taming of the Shrew is one such work that presents an...
Review and reinterpretation of Mrs. Dalloway
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Through Space and Time: Reality and Experience in the Modern Age “This late age of the world's experience had bred in them all, all men and women, a well of tears” (Woolfe 9). Modernism marked the collapse of structures that had defined the individual and the relationship of that...
"I Am We": The duality of being one - published: 29/08/2008
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Who am I? Asked, the response begins: “I am…,” followed by the concept upon which the individual forms his or her identity. America has built itself upon this exchange; accenting the importance of the “I,” of the individual, and his or her ability to construct his or her...
Experience and emptiness in Gary Snyder's "Mountains and Rivers without end"
Essay - 20 pages - Literature
Language orders our experience of reality. It establishes a scale of binary opposition dictating where one ends and another begins, clearly defining the relationship between what is and what isn't. This relationship grounds our notion of self and creates the framework through which we interpret...
The nature of being and expression in the story of Christ
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
History is a story. A man, a woman is a narrative. With each moment of our beings, we sift through the scattered array of images and experiences woven through our discourse to create the illusion of a coherent, cohesive self. And, despite our attachment to this image, reality remains fluid. We...
Stephen Crane and the Red Badge of courage
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Born in 1871 to a Methodist preacher and social leader, Stephen Crane started his short, but compelling life in the Civil War torn society that was America- or more specifically, Newark, New Jersey. His parents held a belief, commonplace in their era, that valued God, acknowledged free will and...
Post-structuralism and deconstruction
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Literary theory has penetrated all spheres of modern day life. It has shifted from being a prerogative of Academia to being a part of a popular culture. Yet, how can the term "literary theory" be defined lucidly? According to McLaughlin, literary theory is the "debate over nature and function of...
Mind over matter in the works of Anne Bradstreet and Benjamin Franklin
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The quill pen and the printing press were two means of composing available to early American authors. They have different qualities; the pen is a more romantic and stylized, while the press is a practical and efficient industrial tool for the spread of knowledge. However, both the pen and the...
