Literature Essay Examples
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” takes place during the Spanish Inquisition. The morbid short story consist on an innocent man’s fears coming to life after he is sentenced to death. “The Pit and the Pendulum” showcases the theme of terror and cruelty by developing descriptive setting, intense plot, and creative irony. Setting…
My wrists started to ache terribly as I trudged along the hard concrete road. Usually, when I took this route home, I passed all sorts of strange looking people. Where we lived, was an odd place, the people there were very friendly, but sometimes too friendly, getting in the way of your private life, asking…
Oedipus Rex was written by Sophocles as a tragedy highlighting the inevitability of fate in the lives of human beings. The finality of fate underlies in the entire theme of the play. To quote Charles Segal, “The story of Oedipus is the archetypal myth of personal identity in Western culture. It is the myth par…
The narrator’s jealousy of Rebecca permeates the majority of the novel. Because of her youth and insecurity, the narrator is unable to understand why Maxim chooses to marry her. As she learns more and more about Rebecca, she begins to compare herself to Maxim’s first wife, who seemed to be far more beautiful, elegant, and…
In Wilfred Owen’s poem “Dulce et Decorum Est,” the narrator is Owen himself. The story tells the tale of one particular day when he has to watch one of his fellow soldiers gruesomely suffocate to death from inhalation of chlorine gas. Owen paints the soldiers as not necessarily heroic, but rather more desperate and terrified,…
The Tragedy of the Dutchesse of Malfy, originally published under this name in 1623, is a Jacobean drama written by John Webster in 1612-13. The play starts off as a love story with the Duchess secretly marrying the steward of the household Antonio; a man beneath her class who she has fallen in love with….
How Does Steinbeck Create Tension in Chapter Three in Of Mice and Men Steinbeck creates tension by making the atmosphere before Curley’s dog gets shot very awkward. He does this by writing about how small noises draw everyone’s attention in the room to it: “He rippled the edge of the deck nervously, and the little…
Friar Laurence’s interference in the families of Romeo and Juliet set much of the fighting, rage and death of these characters into motion. Romeo and Juliet is the title of a great tragedy. This tragedy has been caused by Friar Laurence’s involvement in the marriage of Romeo and Juliet, the Friar’s lying to Capulet and…
Marjane Satrapi‘s graphic novel Persepolis is an autobiography that depicts her childhood up to her early adult years in Iran during and after the Islamic revolution. Throughout the novel Satrapi incorporates character development, religion, and the conflict of freedom vs. confinement in order to develop a greater appreciation between two opposing eastern and western cultures….
Noli Me Tangere. It is a novel written by Filipino writer and national hero Jose Rizal and was first published in 1887 in Berlin, Germany. This novel was written to remind us the bad things that Jose Rizal experienced during his time by the Spanish. From the very start of this novel, the first plan…
Anne Frank is the diary of a little girl following the events surrounding a thirteen year old girl who grows up Jewish and lives in Amsterdam during the Holocaust. As the events of World War II began Anne was a typical girl who attended school and was aware of the war and world around her,…
First of all, Susan Hill uses personification to describe the fog in London, which creates a foreboding atmosphere. She uses very negative words to describe the fog such as “creeping”, “swirling”, “smeared and stained.” The sibilance in these words link to the idea of evil and foreshadow the awful events that are about to come….
1. Rao, V. (1993). The rising price of husbands: A hedonic analysis of dowry increases in rural India. Journal of Political Economy, 666-677. Motivation and objective : Attempts to investigate the reasons behind the increase in dowry . Methods : It adapts Rosen’s implicit market model to the Indian marriage market and tests predictions from…
The plot of “A Rose for Emily” separates from the structure of most short stories by not following the normal chronological order. William Faulkner uses flashbacks to give a better understanding of the internal conflict between the protagonist, Miss Emily, and society. The nonlinear plot structure of “A Rose for Emily” gives life to the…
The main theme of “The great Gatsby” is that the great dream of American is dead. The American dream is defined by people as “The belief that everyone in the United States has the chance to be successful, rich, and happy if they work hard enough”. Three features of the American Dream are shown as…
