Petrarch's rime sparse
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The reader of Petrarch's Rime Sparse is compelled as early as the first sonnet to impose narrative onto the poems. In Voi ch' ascoltate in rime sparse il suono, a poet-figure emerges and addresses the reader as he reflects on what he calls his primo giovenile errore. Finding herself at such an...
Is "Sicilian truth" an oxymoron?
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tomasi di Lampedusa's Il Gattopardo is by no means the kind of text that invites the reader to take it lightly and straightforwardly. The subtle irony running through the piece constantly implores the reader to interpret and re-interpret various scenes and the characters within them—in...
Circumstance in Jane Austen's early novels
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Circumstance and money figure heavily in Jane Austen's first two novels—Sense and Sensibility and Pride and Prejudice—particularly in the way these social and financial considerations impact marriage. They can cause multiple problems, thwarting passionate romance, such as in the cases...
Teaching themes of empathy through children's literature
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
As Christians we are called to treat all individuals with understanding and compassion, extending to them the same unmerited favor that God has extended to those who follow Him. But how do we extend a sense of understanding to those whose personalities and experiences are quite different from our...
Real-World relevance of fantastic creation: An examination of "High Fantasy" and the goals of literal and historical writing.
Tutorials/exercises - 4 pages - Literature
For the most part, fantastic or otherwise impossible methods of storytelling are ignored in the world of modern and classical literature. In order to accurately appreciate the quandary of the modern “Fantasy” author, one must be aware of the commonplace practice of division and...
Troilus' unwilling free will
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Chaucer's “Troilus and Criseyde” consistently and emphatically stresses the absolute nature of courtly love and its proclivity to incite moral responsibility with relation to one's sense of free will and personal obligation. Chaucer toys with the notion of Troilus' free will versus his...
Denial: Internal struggle of a homosexual
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
James Baldwin's” Giovanni's Room” explores the internal struggle of a homosexual in denial. The main character, David, faces an internal conflict that eventually destroys every relationship he encounters in his personal life. His own struggle with his sexuality began at an early age and...
The Wife of duplicity
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The Wife of Bath's Tale, from Geoffrey Chaucer's “The Canterbury Tales”, was a veiled social critique. Her tale was a treatise of social commentaries on the role of gender, the church, and nobility in society. Geoffrey Chaucer used the duplicity of his character, The Wife of Bath, and...
Tool or trifle: The moral question of style
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
“You know not what hurt you do to learning that care not for words, but for matter, and so make a divorce betwixt the tongue and the heart.” (Roger Ascham) I am thirteen. Almost every afternoon I shove a book in my pocket, a hat on my head, and I wander out into the scurry-flurry of a...
Death of a Salesman: Tragedy or not?
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
The great authors of old, such as Aristotle, Sophocles and Homer, all wrote incredible tragedies that immortalize the classical notion of a tragic hero. But what of today? Are there no tragedies that occur in the society of today? Where is Oedipus Rex in the world of the twentieth century? In...
But the sun also rises
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In Ernest Hemingway's book, The Sun Also Rises, both the title and epigraph create commentary on the attitude of the characters. By using both a Gertrude Stein quote and a passage from the book of Ecclesiastes, Hemingway shows how his generation was viewing life and, in contrast, how his...
Modern tragedy-The crucible
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In the history of the theatre, tragedies have always existed as a window to human nature. They depict man at his best, ready to sacrifice everything, even his life for the cause. The different types of tragedy include Sophocles's Greek tragedy, Shakespearean romantic tragedy, and modern...
American art : An interface with the modern art
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout the history of art, different movements arise as a result of the social, political, economic, and emotional state of mind that both people and nations are experiencing at a given time. Modern art and postmodern art are no two exceptions to these circumstances and have come to be for...
Fitzgerald and modernism
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Throughout periods of literature, Modernism has revolted against former social standards and subject matter that is both prohibited and restricted in conversation and literature alike. The early 1900s were a time when writers were determining for themselves what they deemed to be important and...
The path to freedom
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
This book as a whole does not tell a story; that is, the trace of events and the overall course of Irish independence don't go from beginning to end and tell. Rather, each chapter depicts a significant time period in the history of Ireland that Collins, the author, witnessed. Everything is more...
Edgar Allan Poe: The relationship between symbolic imagery and the human psyche in "Metzengerstein" and "A Tale Of The Ragged Mountains"
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the best known authors in American literature. John Kehoe (1997) discusses Poe's life in his brief biographical article “Edgar Allan Poe.” Kehoe explains that Poe is considered to be one of the major literary figures of the Romantic Movement that existed...
Anne Frank's "The Diary of a Young Girl" and Elie Wiesel's "Night": A literary analysis and comparison of Holocaust literature
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
The Holocaust of the 1940s is one of the most abominable periods in world history. Approximately eleven million Jews lost their lives during World War II due to Nazi genocidal policy enforced by Adolf Hitler. Jews were beaten to death, starved, burned in human crematoriums, enslaved, and...
Mind control and nineteen eighty-four and brave new world.
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Dystopia is, “an imaginary place or state in which the condition of life is extremely bad, as from deprivation, oppression, or terror.” (Dictionary) In Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, and George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-four, we are introduced to two different dystopian societies. Mind...
Literature's ladder
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Each age of British Literature- from Romanticism to Post-Modernism, can be seen as a rung on a ladder that ushered in the next age. As each age instigates, encourages, and nourishes change and progress, a new age is ushered in. And just as one can not get to the top of the ladder without the...
Facing adversity : Women and religion in Alice Walker's "The Color Purple"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Alice Walker's “The Color Purple” is one of the most well known novels in contemporary literature. This book places the author among the top literary canon of American writers. Since its first publication in 1982, the novel continuously gains both positive acclaims and ambivalent...
Unifying mankind through asexuality and abstraction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The unprecedented bloodshed, terror, and violence that blanketed Europe during World War I left the people at the War's end saddened and detached, and the world, “chaotic and fragmented” (Tepper, p.79). Over ten million people had died, had been slaughtered, not counting those who...
Portrayals of traditional and contemporary views on marriage in Postwar Vietnam through modern Vietnamese literature
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Marriage is a historically worldwide phenomenon. However, different times and cultures hold distinct views towards marriage. What constitutes a traditional or untraditional marriage varies greatly from culture to culture and even from time to time within a particular culture. Examining the...
The lady of Shalott" by William Holman Hunt
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
To begin, the referenced version of Hunt's The Lady of Shalott holds a history and meaning unparalleled to most paintings. Most significantly, this was the final painting completed by Hunt before passing away in 1910 (Stilo, par. 2). The finished product of this painting is derived from its...
Take that Baudrillard: The absurdity of narrative and the possibility of meaning in Candide
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Voltaire has been said to have been mocking Leibniz's popular theory that “whatever is, is right,” (Pope, l.294) in Candide. While that is true, it only scratches the surface. The more significant fact is that the language and logic with which Candide satirizes Leibniz mock the very...
Empire of the Sun by James Graham Ballard
Book review - 20 pages - Literature
Jim, an eleven year old boy, and his parents are living in a wealthy European area in Shanghai during World War II. The novel begins the evening before the Japanese attack Pearl Harbor. Most of the European families had already been evacuated from China, and there were many scrambling to get...
Humor as a Mask for Anguish in I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
As the quote from The New York Times points out on the back cover of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Maya Angelou's novel is “Simultaneously touching and comic.” Through language, choice of detail, and the story itself, Angelou introduces humor and comic relief to a narrative filled...
Jo Shapcott's Mad Cow
Essay - 7 pages - Literature
Jo Shapcott is considered to be a contemporary British poet with traits of a Desperado poet. I explore the literal and figurative meaning of the cow in some of her Mad Cow poems as well as the issues that have influenced the usage of this persona. The essay begins with a quote from the Sunday...
Coleridge and the Poetic Imagination:The Link Between True Life and True Poetry
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
There is no single theme that pervades every one of Coleridge's many poems, but a body of motifs relating to familial relationships and friendship imbue both his conversation poems, such as Frost at Midnight and The Eolian Harp, and his “mystery” poems, including The Rime of the Ancient...
Fruitless Labor : Love and Marriage in Joyce's Dubliners
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
In his first novel, a collection of short stories meant to express the paralytic nature of turn-of-the-century Dublin, James Joyce establishes an image of the Irish urban center as a degenerate bed of unhappiness, deprivation, depression, and imprisonment. All of his characters face the daily...
Into the Darkness: Marlow's Discovery of the Relationship between Darkness and Civilization
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
In his novel Heart of Darkness, published in 1902, Joseph Conrad explores the deepest reaches of the African continent, and at the same time, the innermost secrets of human nature. The novel is narrated mostly by Marlow, a seaman known for his “inconclusive experiences,” who has, over...
