Alisoun, Dorigen, and the Conventions of Women
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Domestic and social propriety are the most important concerns of wives of the era exemplified in The Canterbury Tales. Volumes of texts -- also known as deportment books -- are used to expound on domestic and social propriety and to teach young women the expectations of women in general, and in...
When China Ruled the Seas
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When China Ruled the Seas is a discourse on the histories of China's naval prowess. The book begins with early Chinese history, detailing China's first ships, and the somewhat disputable evidence of China's colonization and exploration of places such as Japan, North America, Australia, and the...
Universal Science Fiction
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
According to Jane Donawerth in Frankenstein's Daughters, the only way for women to write science fiction, is for them to change the rules. This is certainly the case with Octavia Butler's “Bloodchild”. In Butler's Nebula award winning short story, Butler tells the tale of Gan, a young...
Japanese Culture
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Although the books, Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami and Temple of the Golden Pavilion, by Yukio Mishima, are completely different works, both have uncannily similar characters. Each main character from these two books has at least one character in the other book who shares some of their...
Medea
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When first comparing the play Medea and Aristotle's Poetics, many people feel that the lead character, Medea, breaks every requirement for being a tragic character. But when we take a step back and view Medea at a different angle, we see that she does actually fit every aspect of Aristotle's...
The Effects of Christ
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
One of the central themes of Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, is love. Stowe felt that love could bring an end to the evils of slavery, and be a redemptive force. There is one character in this novel that embodies complete, unfaltering, and unconditional love: this character is Eva...
What's Your Perspective?
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Most experienced readers do not have a hard time discerning authorial intent within an individual work or analyzing themes within that piece. Herman Melville's Benito Cereno however, provides a challenge. Melville intricately weaves this story so that no single interpretation fits, and it forces...
Sexual Taboo: Vampire Myths and Stories
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The belief in vampires has been around for most of recorded history, dating back before the bible and Ancient Egypt to Babylonian demonology and very early Sumerian mythology . Although, it was never the mythology that we think of today; in those times it was a belief rooted just as strongly as...
Antigone Commentary
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Sophocles wrote three plays about Thebes and while the tragedy of Antigone is chronologically the third and last of these, it was ironically written first out of them. It opens up, giving little background, with the two sisters Antigone and Ismene discussing their two now deceased brothers in...
Postmodernism: Moving Toward Transcendence
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The conception of a utopian society has both motivated and haunted countless civilizations since the dawn of time. Sublime and intangible, the aspiration to reach a “perfect” society is arguably the heart of one of the world's most significant movements; modernism. Proponents of...
An Animal's place in America
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
In 1975, an Australian philosopher by the name of Peter Singer first published his controversial book Animal Liberation. It has since become widely known as the beginning of the current “animal liberation movement” in America. The book preached the virtues of vegetarianism and vilified...
The Good-Morrow
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
“The Good-Morrow” is a story written by John Donne that talks about two lovers finding each other, and realizing that nothing in the world ever has or will matter. I believe that the lover's Donne is speaking about are himself and a lover of the past. However, the poem is not just about...
Masculinity in The Woman in White
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
The novel, The Woman in White, “seeks to revise recent accounts of the model of male identity posited by the first sensation novel”(Ablow, Par. 4). In The Woman in White, the author, Wilkie Collins, presents masculinity through the character of Marian Holcombe at a time when femininity...
Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One is a novel that with its darkly scathing humor attempts to impart the message that the plasticity of the present tense is illusory by exposing the superficialities of California's mortuary business. The contemporaneous effect that living in a world where a perverse...
Notes From Underground: The Autonomic Remonstrance of a Persona
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Dostoevsky's classic, Notes From Underground maintains the transient ability to pass through the realm of classic literature and into the incendiary realm of the literary fiends who feed on accumulated grotesqueries. This transmutability is painfully not shared with the fabricated persona of the...
Bleeding Death: Mortality and Acceptance in Catch-22
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
The death toll during World War I surmounted fifteen million. The second World War erased the lives of fifty-five million, nearly five million of which were civilian Jews exterminated throughout Hitler's tyranny. Nine million died during the Russian Revolution, and twenty million more died...
A Fictional History: Shakespeare, England and the Importance of Historical Fiction
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
It is almost amazing, the overwhelming feeling of disgust that infiltrates a high school classroom whenever the subject is history. A kind of primitive competition to find the few kids who actually enjoy the class and bribe them for photocopies of notes and exam answers suffocates like a humid...
Essay about The Once And Future King by T.H White, Henry IV by Shakespeare, linked to the archetypal values in Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Adventure.
Essay - 4 pages - Literature
Perhaps the very word “hero” should suffer a live vivisection for all of its purported morality and bloody, patriarchal implications. There are many universal components of the hero as explored and anatomized by Joseph Campbell in The Hero's Adventure. You've seen it many times before;...
Flannery O'Connor
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
Flannery O'Connor was the unmitigated master of her particularly esoteric craft of assaulting the all-devouring gray spaces of the humanistic spectrum. To those who merely make a skeletal browsing of her work or simply are first time readers may find her to be unnaturally grotesque in her stark...
Frakenstein
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
When Mary Shelley set herself to the task of writing Frankenstein she consciously wanted to create a story “which would speak to the mysterious fears of our nature and awake the thrilling horror—one to make the reader dread to look round, to curdle the blood, and quicken the beatings of...
Dracula and Fear of Female Sexuality
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Bram Stoker's Dracula is undoubtedly one the most consciously sentient and hyperbolic literary incarnations of the excessive fear of women's sexuality that still survives with a vast legitimacy for its content today. Much like Mary Shelley's Frankenstein the novel is satiated with the fear of the...
Book Review of Beloved by Toni Morrison
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
It is easy for cataclysmic traumatism to press to obscurity past history because of the weakness and shame of the human spirit itself. History is never a clean palindrome backward and forward, because during its recollection there is always an emotional motive, and nearly every motive is bruised....
All Quiet on the Western Front
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
Eight and a half million people dead and another 20 million injured, it was a disaster unparalleled in human history. There was nothing great about this "Great War" except for the death and destruction. Erich Maria Remarque's novel, All Quiet on the Western Front describes the pointlessness...
The Battle of the Sexes in Ancient India
Case study - 2 pages - Literature
For time immemorial, mankind has been locked in a vicious and never-ending struggle against an enemy that is cunning, resourceful, and not above hitting below the belt; in short the one enemy that is capable of presenting a formidable challenge on every conceivable field of battle: womankind....
Upton Sinclair and "The Jungle"
Essay - 5 pages - Literature
“The Jungle,” by Upton Sinclair, was a revolutionary novel that changed American history, especially the history of the Chicago meatpacking industry. When the book was published in 1906, it aroused anger and disgust among the American public. The horrors of the meatpacking industry were...
Homer's Oddessy and Gluck's Circe's Power
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
The Odyssey is filled with a large number of secondary characters that are, for the most part, very one-dimensional. Despite being very different in regards to themselves, as a whole they can be easily identified: they are briefly mentioned; they have limited dialogue; and they serve one of two...
Comparison: Everything that Rises Must Converge and Girl
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
“Everything that rises must converge,” By Flannery O'Connor, and “Girl,” by Jamaica Kincaid are completely different texts that share a common theme. The story by O'Connor is about the feelings and emotions of a boy named Julian. He is strongly opposed to his mother's view of...
The Bluest Eye
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “The Bluest Eye,” Toni Morrison explores racial tension in the town of Lorain, Ohio, immediately following the Great Depression. The novel follows the lives of a number of African Americans, including Claudia MacTeer, the narrator, Pecola Breedlove, the main character, and Pauline...
Clouds and Apology
Essay - 2 pages - Literature
In “Clouds,” by Aristophanes, and “Apology,” by Plato, Socrates is portrayed in completely different ways. In “Clouds,” Aristophanes attempts to ridicule Socrates and his followers, the Sophists. In his play, Aristophanes demonstrates that Socrates is corrupting the...
Portrayal of Women in Bram Stoker's Dracula
Essay - 3 pages - Literature
Horror stories are known to be misogynistic in their portrayal of women; Bram Stoker's Dracula is no exception. The novel offers a stereotypical, character archetype of the female in various forms: Mina Harker, Lucy Westenra, and the Succubi. The women are used to embody ideas and values of the...
