Much of the critical debate surrounding Daniel Defoe's novel Moll Flanders centers around whether the author makes good on the promise he makes in the preface that the story will be morally instructive. For instance, Ira Konigsberg writes that "One of the book's contradictions that...
The seventy-year-old Moll Flanders who narrates her own life story considers herself a reformed criminal. But to what degree should her perceived transgressions cause her to actually be understood as such? After all, Defoe’s novel makes it clear that a number of different factors ultimately...
Peter Abrahams’ Mine Boy illustrates in beautiful and haunting prose the oppression black citizens of South Africa faced in the years preceding apartheid. The country’s white minority imposed its power over black South Africans in several ways, the most significant of which are succinctly listed...
With its alternately overt and subtle use of symbolism, Nathanael West’s ‘Miss Lonelyhearts’ works on three separate yet interrelated symbolic levels: a simple symbolic level, in which objects, people, and events in a particular scene are representative of one small symptom of the overall weariness...
In Nathanael West’s Miss Lonelyhearts and Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49, the protagonists search for order and meaning. The books are similar in that both suggest the possibility of meaninglessness in America’s modern state of chaos. Although both books portray a dismal and...
In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzche discusses at length the duality inherent in the development of art. This duality is caused by two opposing principles termed Apollinian and Dionysian. These two principles are employed in August Strindberg’s Miss Julie through the main character of Miss...
In the novel Midaq Alley, author Naguib Mahfouz depicts a poorer middle eastern alley. This measly Alley doesn’t act only as a physical barrier, but a societal one as well. Midaq Alley is shielded from the rest of the world, and has little outside influence....
Naguib Mahfouz, winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, revolutionized the world of Arabic narrative. Neither the novel nor the short story were common forms of expression until Mahfouz’ works became popular in the 1950s and 1960s. His writing is unique, both in Arabic culture...
Throughout Naguib Mahfouz’s 1947 masterpiece Midaq Alley, the alley’s microcosmic nature turns its powerfully crafted characters into living renditions of sin. More specifically, Mahfouz creates characters to represent the Christian church’s Seven Deadly Sins, with almost each and every character fitting perfectly into a respective...
Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, Midaq Alley, is a story about a group of people living in an alley in Egypt in the 1940’s. Already, from that description, the reader can see that the women of this tale have a significant disadvantage in equality. Surprisingly enough, the...
Symmons Roberts presents to us the idea of primal instinct and savagery which still is a part of human nature; he is comparing our natural demeanour to that of birds. The poem is obviously not about birds attacking people despite the link to the Hitchcock...
Fritz Lang’s 1927 science fiction epic, Metropolis, recalls the Christian creation and apotheosis narrative through a dystopian lens. The main characters in Metropolis personify Jesus and his apostles and close associates in a postmodern society. The city of Metropolis itself represents the relationship between humanity...
Shaken by the effects of World War I and forever changed by the Industrial Revolution of the 19th century, 1920s Germany found itself in a dilemma: how to cope with increasingly pervasive technology and the rapid evolution present in every segment of society? With technology...
From the beginning of Metropolis, there is a stark divide between the upper class and the working people. We see working people walk like soldier into huge elevators, heads hanging in clear misery, descending into what we can only assume is their version of hell,...
Jeffrey Eugenides’s novel Middlesex is one full of interesting and somewhat unique themes. There is no question as to why the work has gone so far as to win a Pulitzer Prize: it follows a pattern that has proven successful for thousands of years. Just...
Although the past has chronologically been removed from present time, “the past is never dead and buried. In fact it’s not even past,” said William Faulkner. The theme of time is a common expression in American literature, as is seen in The Lacuna, by Barbara...
At the end of the Metamorphoses, Ovid boldly states “I will be borne, /The finer part of me, above the stars, /Immortal, and my name shall never die” (XV. 877-78). For Ovid, metamorphosis is a path to eternity and the preservation of time. Characters no...
Ovid’s Metamorphoses is a work about transience, and perhaps no two things in the natural world are more fleeting than life and beauty. Artists aim to preserve these two qualities in their work by simultaneously imitating the natural world to give the appearance of life...
In Ovid’s “Metamorphoses”, there are a great many instances that link love and war, thus creating a disconcerting antithetical comparison prominent throughout the canon of literature. In particular, this theme can be seen in and around the region of Thrace: home to a “primitive, warlike,...