Literature Essay Examples and Topics. Page 52

8,581 samples

“Sonny’s Blues”: Perspective and Plot Correlation

How might descriptions of places and characters be influenced by a particular narrator's perspective and the attitudes he holds? "Sonny's Blues" written by James Baldwin is a story that deals with very real aspects of [...]
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1809

Dangerous Women in the 19th-Century English Literature

By analyzing the characters of Maggie Tulliver and Lady Audley and identifying similarities and differences between them, the present paper will aim to explain what it meant to be a dangerous woman in the 19th [...]
  • Subjects: Gender in Literature
  • Pages: 10
  • Words: 2752

The Treatment of Childhood in Victorian Literature

The author analyzes the main features of childhood in Victorian novels and tries to explain the image of victimized children predominant in major nineteenth-century novels. The author analyzes the socio-economic conditions of the Victorian era [...]
  • Subjects: British Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1789

The Age of Enlightenment: Overview and Analysis

The Age of Enlightenment centered on France and two of the major philosophers who contributed to this age of Enlightenment were Voltaire and Montesquieu. In the realm of politics, the government was the focus of [...]
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 723

Racism in Shakespeare’s “Othello”

The purpose of this essay is to detect and analyze various traits of racism in Shakespeare's famous piece Othello and how it relates to the character of Othello.
  • 5
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 13
  • Words: 3780

The End of Writer’s Block for Harold Pinter

A masterpiece, "One for the Road" ended a painful period of writer's block for Harold Pinter in a manner swift and strange and led to an explicitly political agenda of his subsequent plays, "Mountain Language" [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 933

Critical Response on the Play Proof by David Auburn

The play deals with the genius persons of the world and it relates genius convincingly with the world of madness. Then the development of schizophrenia in Nash, which is "a severe mental disorder that distorts [...]
  • Subjects: Plays
  • Pages: 7
  • Words: 2156

Contrasting Deception in the Inferno and the Decameron

In the present work, we will analyze this similarity and will seek for possible differences using particular parts of the great epic poem and the collection of novellas, namely, we will explore the fifth story [...]
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1227

Creative Writing for Children in Primary School

This has the implication that the connections for such writing should be strong and should be in line with the ideas that have to be passed to the reader that is from the beginning to [...]
  • Subjects: American Novels Writing Style
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1779

Racial Fire in “We Wear the Mask” by P. L. Dunbar

The "we" in the poem is the black folk collective, the speaker a Dunbar persona, or perhaps the real Dunbar lifting the mask to speak plainly and unequivocally about the double nature of the black [...]
  • Subjects: Poems
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1226

Cat’s Cradle by Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut is a science fiction writer who tells about Cold War fears and the threat of the Bomb, the lurking dangers of overpopulation and food shortage on the one hand, and on the other government's [...]
  • Subjects: Comparative Literature
  • Pages: 7
  • Words: 2060

“My Sister’s Keeper” by Jodi Picoult: Book Analysis

Anna's ability not to be jealous of her mother's constant attention to Kate distinguishes the girl from other children. Anna realizes that her mother is extremely tired of the life that does not stop to [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 809

How to Win Friends and Influence People by D. Carnegie

The simple truths in the book were relevant to all generations and hence the book is of universal appeal."How to Win Friends and Influence People" tapped into the insatiable hunger for self-improvement and success in [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 7
  • Words: 2322

Kate Chopin’s Symbolism in Short Stories

The lightning becomes the conflict inside her and the beating of the rain on her roof is the beating of her heart as she finally expresses her passion with Alcee.
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 991

August Wilson’s “Fences” Review

At the same time, Troy tries the best way he knows how to direct the course of his own son's life away from the negative influence of the boy's ancestors.
  • Subjects: Themes in American Novels
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1267

Three Deserving Of Dante’s Hell

Considering the destruction, the loss of human lives and the reduction to slavery of even the Trojan Royalty, aside from the fact that the attack was done in stealth to a sleeping civilian population, Ulysses [...]
  • Subjects: Mythology
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 1217

“The Geography of Haunted Places” by Wilson Analysis

The audience and the nomadic performer are engaged in a dangerous game of discovery, desire, and possession that is intended to make the spectator understand the meaning of this play in the concept of contemporary [...]
  • Subjects: Plays
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1288

Shakespeare: A Feminist Writer

A careful analysis of Lady Macbeth's intensely complicated character and her role in the play proves that Shakespeare is actually a feminist writer.
  • Subjects: British Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 968

Midaq Alley by Naguib Mahfouz

The extent of the openness of futurity for the human being lies in her present position and the objective reality the human being confronts.
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1268

The Bible God and the Greek God Comparison

Greek God and Goddess have not been given any proper mention in The Bible, but at more instances it has been given reference as unknown gods and the goddess to the people of Asian origin [...]
  • Subjects: Mythology
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 259

Gilgamesh Epic: The Life of a God-Man

Both the Eden story and the Flood Story have clear counterparts in the Gilgamesh epic, whose restless hero also has his parallel in Odysseus of the Iliad, even as Gilgamesh fated friendship with Enkidu can [...]
  • Subjects: Mythology
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 2018

Early Chinese Music, Ritual, and Performance Review

Ceramic production and the carving of the hardstones known collectively as jade are part of the earliest horizons of Chinese cultures in the Neolithic period, and the products of these activities have been made continuously [...]
  • Subjects: Poems
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1723

Hamlet by William Shakespeare: A Filmic Event

In bringing Shakespeare's classic story of Hamlet to the big screen and reset into a modern context, director Michael Almereyda is forced to reinterpret the role of Ophelia due to significant changes in modern women's [...]
  • Subjects: British Literature
  • Pages: 10
  • Words: 3274

Utopia by Sir Thomas More Review

The aim of the study is to relate the perennial appeal of the text to the particular point of view it presents on economics and political relations; on family life and social structure; on art [...]
  • Subjects: British Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1435

The Novel “Shame” by J. M. Coetzee Review

That is the theory; hold to the theory and the comforts of theory. To come back to the statement made by David, it seems that the novelist is talking about a way of life in [...]
  • Subjects: Romantic Literature
  • Pages: 6
  • Words: 1705

“Harry Potter” Movie and Novel: Plot Changes

The changes of the plot throughout the movie in comparison with the original novel are disturbing watchers since the times of cinema appearing and performance of the derivative movies.
  • Subjects: Comparative Literature
  • Pages: 17
  • Words: 4826

Book Proposal: Women of the Romantic Age

It will be dealt with Mary Shelley's biography and will also contain a detailed analysis of the most famous of all her books, Frankenstein.
  • Subjects: Comparative Literature
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1483

Antebellum Slavery in Mark Twain’s World

Twain's depiction of Jim and his relationship with Huck was somewhat flawed in order to obey the needs of the story, and also by Twains' interest in slave autobiographies and also in blackface minstrelsy.
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1554

“The Catcher in the Rye” by J.D. Salinger Review

Critics admit that Salinger's depiction of Holden Caulfield symbolizes the dilemma of the idealist in the contemporary world and shows the primary structural framework of a novel.
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 7
  • Words: 2291

Irish Literature In Irish Analysis

The main similarity of pre-WWII period and the Innti generation is close attention to Irish language and folklore. During the pre-WWII period of time, anxiety and desperation dominated in Irish poetry.
  • Subjects: Poems
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 935

Apollonian and Dionysian in Euripides’ “Bacchae”

The opposition between Apollonian and Dionysian can be described to be in the center of modern literary analysis since literary work is a difficult interrelation between form and contents, norm and abnormality, which can be [...]
  • Subjects: Mythology
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1285

Self-Awareness of Emma, Huckleberry Finn, and Asher Lev

This essay will portray the commonalities in these three novels and try to draw a contrast between them and discuss them in the light of three similar literary tools used, i.e.theme, antagonist, and irony in [...]
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 2529

American Literature. Harriet Jacobs and Walt Whitman

Whitman on the other hand demonstrates the idea that we are all part of a large whole, he explains, "And the pismire is equally perfect, and a grain of sand and the egg of wren".
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1388

Romance in Ying-Ying’s and The Western Wing Stories

The Story of the Western Wing is a love comedy that depicted adventures and relations between Oriole and Zhang. Secret love and romantic relations between a young scholar, Zhang Sheng, and a daughter of a [...]
  • Subjects: Romantic Literature
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1586

“The Kingdom of Matthias” by Johnson and Wilentz

The historical developments of that epoch were deeply connected with the growth and formation of a market society that deeply affected the lives of ordinary men and women and played a great role in the [...]
  • Subjects: Historical Literature
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1478

Nature as an Element in Romantic Literature

That his response to this vista is restorative and necessary is expressed within the second stanza, "These beauteous forms, / Through a long absence, have not been to me / As is a landscape to [...]
  • Subjects: Romantic Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 1002

Webster’s vs. Shakespeare’s Women in Their Plays

The comparison is expected to reveal the differences and similarities in the authors' manner of depicting women and the way they influenced the overall message of the plays.
  • Subjects: Gender in Literature
  • Pages: 18
  • Words: 4623

Sonny’s Blues by Baldwin: Short Story Analysis

It is clear that the narrator disapproves the way chosen by his younger brother."I did not like the way he carried himself, loose and dreamlike all the time...and I did not like his friends, and [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 646

Depression in “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Gillman

The paper provides a discussion of the short story and analyses the theme of emotion and depression that the main character Stetson Gilman undergoes and her advent into insanity caused by the wrong treatment given [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 1218

Women’s Role in World Literature of Enlightenment

In Hinduism, the reward of a proper woman is rebirth as a man, ancient Chinese women were considered to be the property of their fathers or husbands and in Japan, women were dressing in men's [...]
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 1447

World Literature Reflecting Enlightenment Thinking

Literature as a constant reflector of the current events and ways people percept the world around cannot stand aside and fail to exhibit the characteristics and ideas of the new way of thinking.
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1069

Gilgamesh’s and Joseph’s Dreams Comparison Review

The functions of dreams in both works are studied by the researcher, their significance is underlined, differences and parallels between the usage of dreams in both works are established, the enduring values that the works [...]
  • Subjects: Poems
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 599

Julia Alvarez’s Long Journey to Become a Writer

Being now a famous American writer of Dominican origin Julia Alvarez in the above-mentioned works establishes her goals and reasons for writing and elaborates on the role of reading in her choosing the profession of [...]
  • Subjects: Writers
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1547

“The Once and Future King” by T. H. White

The books referred to were "book 1-The Sword in the Stone, book 2-The Queen of Air and Darkness, book 3-The Ill-Made Knight and book 4-The Candle in the Wind, The author Terence Hanbury White who [...]
  • Subjects: British Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1172

Chapter 33 of “The Old Curiosity Shop” by Dickens

With the end of the Victorian period, the sexuality of the English society that did not find its reflection in the cultural phenomenon was striving to express itself in graphic art and at the beginning [...]
  • Subjects: British Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1309

Shakespearean Macbeth as a Tragic Hero

In addition to fighting for his king, Macbeth is quickly and well rewarded for his efforts as King Duncan makes him the new Thane of Cawdor in addition to his already holding the title of [...]
  • Subjects: Plays
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 1105

Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “The Scarlet Letter” Novel

The theme of sin is depicted through emotional sufferings and experience of the main heroes of the novel: Hester Prynne, her husband Roger Chillingworth and Hester's lover, Dimmesdale.
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 957

Emily Dickenson’s Life through Poetry

The travel from the physical world of the body to the world of the spirits is symbolized by the gentle ride in a carriage shared with a pleasant company.
  • Subjects: Writers
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1535

Military Career of Edgar Allan Poe

Often overlooked, however, is the story of Poe's life: the heartbreak, financial struggles, success, mysterious death, and of course his military career. The success of the ominous poem gave Poe a steady income and cemented [...]
  • Subjects: Writers
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1238

Francis Weed in “The Country Husband” by John Cheever

The short story "The Country Husband" by John Cheever reveals the darker side of Suburbia, "the side which traps its residents in a web of conformity," and the protagonist of the story Francis Weed, is [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 641

The Novel The Outsider Camus: Character Analysis

It is the wearing of black as a show of mourning and the sustained sadness that forbids the beginning of a liaison on the day following the burial of Meursault's mother.
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 870

Feminism in Ibsen’s Hedda Gabler

Hedda Gabler, upon the discovery that her imaginary world of free-living and noble dying lies in shivers about her, no longer has the vitality to continue existence in the real world and chooses self-annihilation. At [...]
  • Subjects: Plays
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 880

“Empire of the Sun” by J. G. Ballard

In the sky to the northeast of Shanghai, he searches for a flash that temporarily overpowers the dawn and overflows the stadium with a strange light.
  • Subjects: British Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 825

Coincidences Led to Consequences

Still, Tess realizes the bitter irony of her situation and at a slight provocation from Alec she stabs him to death:
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 906

Representation of the Sophoclean Hero Aspects

Would God no Argo e er had winged the seas To Colchis through the blue Symplegades No shaft of riven pine in Pelion's glen Shaped that first oar blade in the hands of men Valiant [...]
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1360

Family Relationship: Lawrence and Joyce

The revolt of Stephen Dedalus begins in Joyce's The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man with his rejection of the blind religious attitude found existing in his family.
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 960

Understanding the Past in Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!

Like the Thomas Sutpen story that has been dispatched by different narrators in William Faulkner's novel Absalom, Absalom, the past becomes a burden in the present for Quentin and Shreve because he sensed an impermeable [...]
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 832

Characters in “The Scarlet Letter” and “Hamlet” Film

Hester returns to Boston just before her death, in order to be buried in the same grave as Dimmesdale, with 'A' inscribed on their tombstone. Much to her son's anger and disgust, she marries Claudius [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 622

First World War’s Impact on Sartre’s Works

Through the medium of Drama, Sartre attempted to essentially portray man as he actually is thereby using drama as a medium to enable the people to become conscious of the basic nature and tendency of [...]
  • Subjects: Writers
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 586

Ancient Civilizations. Odysseus and Polyphemus

Odysseus and his men reach the land of the Kyklopes, a rough and uncivilized race of one-dyed giants. Groaning in pain, the giant hurls boulders at them and prays to his father, Poseidon to wreak [...]
  • Subjects: Mythology
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 734

Analysis of King Lear and Paradise Lost

One son in particular, Edmund, allows the pain of being born a bastard and the rejection of his father to skew his view of the world and the intentions of his ambition.
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 7
  • Words: 2131

Social Norms in ‘Bread Givers’ by Anzia Yezierska

Sara is shocked at the turn of events and their mother is a mute spectator to her daughters' miserable lives. The harsh realities of life have made her a mature woman, a Jewish woman of [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 642

The One Who Walk Away from Omelas by Ursula Le Guin

Those running away are not sure of where they are going as Le Guin put it at the end of the story "The place they go towards is a place even less imaginable to us [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 781

Hero in Plautus’ “Pseudolus” Play

He is some kind of Robin Hood of the times when Plautus lived."As in both the plays of Aristophanes and Mevander, the Roman playwright Plautus addresses the issue of class consciousness and status in his [...]
  • Subjects: Plays
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 581

Feminism in “A Long Day in November” by Ernest Gaines

The situation, however, was aggravated by his attachment to his car and staying out late until the early mornings as a sign of his manhood, and the symbol of masculinity and independence in American culture.
  • Subjects: Concepts in American Novels
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 631

Human Relations in Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex” Play

Sophocles' Oedipus Rex is constructed so that readers will become analysts of the cause in the past for a present malaise; they become priests examining the entrails of a story to discover the cause. Using [...]
  • Subjects: Plays
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 874

The Acts of Heroism in Sophocles’ “Oedipus Rex”

The story revolves around Oedipus and his search for the cause of the blight on his city finding it to be himself while Iocaste is Oedipus' wife and mother who was very supportive of Oedipus' [...]
  • Subjects: World Philosophy Literature
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 726

Shakespearean Sonnets from Critical Perspectives

The excellence of the sonnets is the excellence of parts. Although the sonnets proclaim his affection for the young man and his indulgence of him, they also disclose the attitudes which Shakespeare takes to both [...]
  • Subjects: Poems
  • Pages: 14
  • Words: 5734

Simon’s “Lost in Yonkers” and Alvarez’s “Yo!”

Though Lost in Yonkers and Yo! both address family problems, the play and the novel differ in their approaching them due to the following points: the way the women and their roles in the family [...]
  • Subjects: Comparative Literature
  • Pages: 5
  • Words: 1622

Family Structure in ‘The Good Earth’ by Buck

The rules in a conventional Chinese family are obligatory, where a wife has to be subservient to her husband, so also the children to their father, and each and every person including the husbands, wives [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 3
  • Words: 969

“The Book of Not” by Tsi­tsi Dangarembga

The mental condition of the main character of the book is the main point of this paper's concern. The main character's moral state is determined by her aspiration to the ideals of the colonial system, [...]
  • Subjects: World Literature
  • Pages: 4
  • Words: 1109

Walker’s “Jubilee”: Oral History in Lyrical Melodies

Margaret Walker's Jubilee is a lyrical novel that captures and shapes the saga of the African American experience by using the lyrics of slave songs and spirituals that give testimony to the legacy of her [...]
  • Subjects: American Literature
  • Pages: 9
  • Words: 2647

Parent-Child Relations in Poetry

Robert Hayden is probably one of the best known for his verses that discover and articulate the African-American practice, from the epoch of slavery, and the times of Civil War, up to the time he [...]
  • Subjects: Poems
  • Pages: 2
  • Words: 584
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