Melts in your Mouth: A Look at Humbert Humbert's Lolita
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
Humbert, throughout Lolita, creates an inescapable defeat through his interactions with Lolita and his antagonist, Clare Quilty. These interactions contradict his early confidence in possessing Lolita. These characters consciously threat Humbert's exclusive relationship with Lolita. Their...
Investigating Madness Within Power Structures
Essay - 6 pages - Literature
Kafka's The Metamorphosis is full of power structures that dictate the actions of each character. Each character finds him or herself in a role of accountability and responsibility that dictates how he or she acts, particularly towards other characters. Gregor, for instance, is accountable to his...
Eying Down Sanctuary: A Study of the Effects of Representation upon Readers
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Laura Tanner, in her Intimate Violence, points out that, while reading, one becomes detached from victims of violence in particular texts such that the reader is able to observe the act of violence without suffering its consequences (Tanner, 9). While Tanner is correct in her assertion that...
Sex With Necks: An Investigation of Phallic Imagery
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In literature, the vampire bite is often interpreted as a symbol of coitus between the vampire and his or her victim. However, when one takes a closer look into the anatomy and functions involved in the sex of particular blood-sucking scenes found in vampire literature, it becomes clear that the...
Stein's Translation of Art to Literature
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Because Gertrude Stein works within the medium of writing instead of painting, it is easier for her audience to view her separate from Cubism or Post-Impressionism though it still stands that they influenced her. She shares many values and ideals held by the members of those two painterly...
A Contrast of Lovers An Analysis of "To His Coy Mistress" and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Is it better to have loved and lost, than never loved at all? When considering the abstractness and relativity of love, poetry is an art form unrivaled. T.S. Eliot and Andrew Marvell, each poets of incredible vision, analyzed love in two entirely different lights while concurrently capturing...
Faust and Nature: A Look Goethe's Faust
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The thinker's woe at his own ignorance, despite some great deal of learning, has been a common literary predicament since the Age of Reason. While many of the mathematicians and scientists kept insisting upon the reducibility of existence to laws, educated men of other fields have not always...
Reflection on Lowell's "For the union Dead"
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Robert Lowell opens his poem, For the Union Dead, with an image of destruction, despair, and the loss of something that represents his youth. This opening stanza sets the tone for the rest of the poem. For the Union Dead is ultimately more discouraging than inspiring. Its disheartening tone can...
The Earle Perry Charlton Story
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
The Earle Perry Charlton biography, the Charlton Story, is about one of America's greatest entrepreneurs, in the early 1900's. The book chronicles Charlton's life from birth to death, and explains in detail his business relationships and tactics. Overall the main topic of the book was how...
Courtly Romances: Literature or Theatre?
Tutorials/exercises - 6 pages - Literature
The definitions of theatre and, less specifically, performance, have been in constant flux since theorists set about trying to create them. Oscar Brockett, in his History of the Theatre, opens his text with the statement that “performative elements are present in every society, no matter...
The American History of Race & Gender in Literature
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Throughout the course of American history, the literature of the nation has served to reflect the social climate of the time in which it was written. Society's values in regards to both race and gender have thus been contextualized in history by American writers. In some cases, American literary...
Fate versus Free Will: Dave Boyle
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The explicit mention of fate occurs only once in regard to Dave Boyle in Dennis Lehane's Mystic River, but the battle between fate and free will in his life is evident throughout the novel. Dave Boyle, a tragic character, has little free will to change the pre-determined forces that have shaped...
Breaking Through the Trappings of Stereotyped Femininity
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Edna Pontellier is a victim of the mother/whore duality, unable to escape the conditions of her culture that prevent her from being capable of self-actualization, and so walks into the ocean and never comes out again. This is the conclusion to Kate Chopin's novel The Awakening, in which she...
Post impressionism in To the Lighthouse
Case study - 5 pages - Literature
Very little endures in Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse; by the third book most of the characters have died tragic and largely overlooked deaths, or they have disappeared almost without mention. Only two characters, the neurotic philosopher Mr. Ramsay and the lone artist Lily Briscoe are...
The Liminal Period in the Cinderella Fairy Tale
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
In “The Little Glass Slipper”, Cinderella is undergoing what anthropologist Victor Turner, in his theory regarding rites de passage, would regard as a transitional period between being a girl under the protection of her mother and a woman under the protection of a husband. During this...
Dr. Faustus and Eve's Sins and Judgments
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Milton's Eve and Marlowe's Doctor Faustus were duped into spiritual doom in pursuit of knowledge, both seeking knowledge bought power at the expense of their spirit. Doctor Faustus sells his soul to Satan, exchanging it for knowledge of magic, while Eve ignores God's command not to eat the fruit...
Alienation in the Butcher Boy
Book review - 5 pages - Literature
In the Butcher Boy, Patrick McCabe paints a picture of the perfectly dysfunctional family in The Bradys, who are shown in stark contrast to the perfectly normal family, the Nugents. From the start, Francie Brady's family was the epitome of unstable. Francie's father was an alcoholic who abused...
Style vs. Substance in The Sea
Book review - 4 pages - Literature
The Sea is no doubt, a difficult novel to read. John Banville's language can be quite strenuous, and at some times, enigmatic. No major events or plot points seem to occur in The Sea, that is, externally. There is not much of a linear plot, if any. Almost everything that happens in the main...
Chinese Mythology, Religion and History: Look At The Journey to The West
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Often times, there is a distinct line between fact and fiction - between history and mythology, and even religion. However, in many of China's classic novels this line is blurred to the point of non-existence. A perfect example of this is Wu Cheng'en's The Journey to the West. Wu Cheng'en...
The Time Machine and the Plight of the Chinese Immigrant in 19th Century American West
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
The Time Machine, written in 1895, describes the adventures the Time Traveler as he explores the 800 thousandth century and the unknown eons unto the dying of our sun. The bulk of the story occurs in the year 802,701, where the Time Traveler stops and encounters a strange species called the...
Fraud: A night-time adventure leads to more trouble than expected
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Adventures in the middle of the night were something I was always very fond of. For the most part they never seemed to get me into much trouble; I just coveted the feeling of being able to sneak out of my house without getting caught. For a fifteen-year-old, it was definitely a thrilling feeling....
Bartleby: A Christ-figure
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Nothing so aggravates an earnest person as a passive resistance,” concludes the lawyer in Melville's “Bartleby the Scrivener” (Arp and Johnson 589). This statement rings true, as any reader of the enigmatic short story will find himself or herself equally aggravated by the strange...
Freedom That is Never More Authentic Than When it is Within the Walls of a Prison Cell
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
Whether it is read from an historical, psychological, literary, or any other sort of applicable perspective, the reader must admit that Toni Morrison's novel Sula allows itself be read in many different ways. Perhaps that is one of the beauties of the book: people from many different backgrounds...
The Fall of Greece, The Rise of Rome
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Greece: City-States in Conflict The Peloponnesian War was waged mostly between Sparta and Athens, although both had outside allies. After Sparta defeated Athens, the balance of power should have shifted to leave Sparta in the role of empire-builder, but the Spartans were unable to unify the...
Darkness and Light in "Heart of Darkness"
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
The battle between light and darkness is being waged right now, in every corner of the earth. This war has been fought since time began. In every realm of society, opposites counterbalance each other. The balance of powers in the government allows the American people to have a say in the...
The Open Boat
Book review - 3 pages - Literature
In the story of “The Open Boat”, Stephen Crane has taken the time to masterfully portray a story that is so very dear to his life. Back in 1897, Crane went through the horrific experience of crashing his boat and being stranded for nearly 30 hours. This experience became so near and...
The Making of the Lady of Shalott's Soul
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Tennyson's “The Lady of Shalott” is the story of an isolated woman who breaks free of her prison in order to enter the world around her. Through the use of vivid imagery and the strategic placement of words and phrases within the narrative structure of the poem, Tennyson builds a...
Bakhtin's Dialogism In The Big Sleep
Essay - 8 pages - Literature
Mikhail Bakhtin is a philosopher and theorist who defies easy categorization. He has been associated with Marxist Literary critics, Russian Formalists and structuralists. While he has elements in common with all three, he also differs greatly from them in fundamental ways. His works and...
Reflections on 'A Clockwork Orange'
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
It's a 1st person narrative through Alex's eyes. The first 3-4 pages are used in describing the ‘Korova Milk Bar' and its inhabitants. It sells milk laced with drugs. It appears that he is the leader in a gang. There is a brief description of the members in his gang. He seems to be the...
The Parent-Child Dynamic: Ernest Hemingway Vs Winesburg
Book review - 6 pages - Literature
Ernest Hemingway's first collection of stories, In Our Time, published in 1925, was heavily influenced by his then friend Sherwood Anderson's 1919 collection Winesburg, Ohio. The most notable difference in the times in which the stories are set is Winesburg, Ohio is set before World War I, and...
