Essays on Literary Genres

2490

William Wordsworth’s Expostulation and Reply: a Neoclassical and Romantic Analysis

5 pages / 2229 words

The first volume of William Wordsworth's Lyrical Ballads (1798) was published, as Wordsworth states in Preface to Lyrical Ballads (1802), "...as an experiment." (482). The introduction to Lyrical Ballads by William Richey and Daniel Robinson suggests that the experiment contested the valued literature of the...

Poetry Romanticism

2491

Motivation of The Narrator in Winter in The Blood

2 pages / 770 words

For the narrator of Winter in the Blood, by James Welch, motivation is at the root of all of his problems, from his need to leave his mother and the comfort of home, to his problems in dealing with the past, and finally to his...

Fiction

2492

Unavoidable Destiny: Flannery O’connor’s Southern Adaptation of Oedipus Rex

3 pages / 1470 words

Flannery O’Connor’s Wise Blood is a powerfully unsettling novel concerning a lost man in the grotesque, dark world of the American South. Published in 1949, Wise Blood’s protagonist Hazel Motes serves as a reflection of the power of mythology that continues to assert itself in...

Novel Oedipus Oedipus Rex

2493

Ree's Maternal Role in Winter Bone and Its Film Adaptation

2 pages / 985 words

In his book Winter’s Bone, Daniel Woodrell follows sixteen-year-old Ree Dolly in her struggle to help her family survive in the bleak Ozarks. The protagonist must constantly maintain a crucial balance between caring for her mentally incapacitated mother and younger siblings while hunting the hardscrabble...

Fiction Film Analysis

2494

Modern Romance: Reading "Queen Anne’s Lace"

2 pages / 1041 words

In the early 1900s, a woman’s purity was viewed as her most important aspect. So much so that it effected society’s perception of her personality and subsequent treatment of her. It often was a deciding factor in marriage arrangements. In fact, if a woman had...

Poetry

2495

"My English Grandmother" Still Lives: Tone, Perspective, and Emotional Progression

3 pages / 1205 words

William Carlos Williams’s poem “The Last Words of My English Grandmother” departs from traditional elegies in many ways. The composition does not follow elegiac meter or structure, though normally a poem with elegiac meter should consist of four iambs and have elegiac couplets. (For its...

Poetry

2496

The Performance of Religious Language in The Eighteenth-century Conversion Narrative

4 pages / 1961 words

In his writing on the physiology of reading in Restoration England, Adrian Johns recalls a story concerning the natural philosopher Robert Boyle. Finding himself with a ‘tertian ague’ whilst at school, Boyle was encouraged to divert his melancholy by reading romances, which far from curing...

Poetry

2497

Interwoven Romantic Messages in Bryant's "A Winter Piece"

4 pages / 1650 words

Representing a powerful reaction against Puritanism, an English Protestant literary movement based upon the rigid and logical belief in a God is ready and willing to Punish his followers, Romanticism challenged virtually all major Puritanical beliefs. The newfound trust in the human imagination, free will...

Poetry

2498

Morally Right Vslogically Correct in "Travelling Through The Dark"

3 pages / 1367 words

Encountering a dead deer on the road is not an unusual occurrence; oncoming drivers see the road block and handle the situation accordingly. Some drivers will swerve to miss the animal — it is safe to say that most drivers will swerve — but a...

Poetry

2499

"Editha": William Dean Howells’ Reflection of America

4 pages / 1910 words

William Dean Howells’ short story “Editha,” published in 1905, revolves around ideals about war and the romanticized vision of it. Through each character, Howells presents a contrasting view of war. Editha, and her view of God-intended glorious war, is able to push her fiancé George...

Short Story

2500

Escapism in William Dean Howells’ "Scene"

4 pages / 1727 words

The desire to escape, to break free from confinement or control, emerges in William Dean Howells’ short story “Scene,” where the actual tragedy of a suicide victim appears secondary to the importance of the diversion it creates for the characters involved: the Contributor and the...

Short Story

2501

Cara as an Unreliable Narrtor in Wieland

2 pages / 828 words

As the narrator of Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland, Clara is unreliable. The fantastic events she recounts are unbelievable and unexplained, leading readers to question the validity of her tale. For example, she introduces the theory of empiricism, which claims that all humans are born with...

Gothic Fiction Narrator Novel

2502

The Role of Family in Wieland and The Last of The Mohicans

3 pages / 1204 words

“There is nothing heavier than compassion. Not even one’s own pain weighs so heavy as the pain one feels with someone, for someone, a pain intensified by the imagination and prolonged by a hundred echoes.” Made-to-order essay as fast as you need it Each essay...

Gothic Fiction Last of The Mohicans Novel

2503

Social Order in Wieland and Charlotte Temple

2 pages / 854 words

The advent of democracy in America brought with it a slue of worries and concerns held by the newly independent colonists. Some felt like the lost, orphaned children of Great Britain while others pondered the uncertain future of the new nation. One of the gravest...

Gothic Fiction Novel

2504

A Close Textual Analysis of William Carlos William’s ‘the Widow’s Lament in Springtime’

2 pages / 1068 words

In his poem, ‘The Widow’s Lament to Summer’, William Carlos Williams explores themes of mortality, the fleeting beauty of life and emotional attachment through the perspective of a recently widowed woman. Through limited descriptive techniques and reversed associations and metaphor, Williams presents an ironic and...

Poetry

2505

Liberal Individualism and Simulation in Wieland

3 pages / 1466 words

Throughout Wieland the text circles around the possibility of social, and therefore national, progress during the period following the American Revolution. The eventual answers the text might provide are ambiguous and certainly outside the scope of this essay. However, one specific passage that contributes significantly...

Gothic Fiction Novel

2506

White Flight: The Graying of Suburbia in Delillo’s White Noise

6 pages / 2811 words

In addition to addressing the premonitory electricity of death, the title of Don DeLillo’s White Noise alludes to another, subtler, sort of white noise the muted death of suburban white identity. College-on-the-Hill is not only an elite academic promontory, but also a bastion for white...

Novel Postmodernism White Noise

2507

Originality and The Literary ‘readymade’ in Don Delillo’s White Noise

5 pages / 2079 words

‘Toyota Celica / A long moment passed before I realized this was the name of an automobile…The utterance was beautiful and mysterious, gold-shot with looming wonder. It was like the name of an ancient power in the sky.’ Made-to-order essay as fast as you need...

Novel Postmodernism White Noise

2508

The Postmodern World of White Noise

4 pages / 2003 words

Paula Geyh writes that “the term [postmodernism] is used by so many people in so many disparate ways, that it seems almost to mean or describe everything–and therefore, some of the critics of postmodernism would say, it means nothing” (1-2). Although the postmodern perspective is,...

Novel Postmodernism White Noise