Pilgrim’s Progress is a work by John Bunyan that is considered to be one of the most well-known allegories of a spiritual journey. For one to even begin to understand this work, it is necessary to embark on one’s own personal spiritual journey. Biblical references...
John Bunyan’s work The Pilgrim’s Progress, is one of the most renowned Christian books to read, but it is not in fact within Christian rules, according to the Bible, thus unveiling a logical fallacy. With careful analysis of The Pilgrim’s Progress and the New and...
The idea of religion is abstract and often met with a variety of both positive and negative connotations. To some, a church may be a symbol of hope and a reflection of moral resilience, to others, church may stand for hypocrisy and moral betrayals. In...
The literary compositions of Edgar Allan Poe, especially his short stories of terror based on supernatural or psychological manifestations, continue to be highly praised by a select group of readers who relish the dark, nightmarish worlds of human existence with their roots firmly established in...
Often, the elements of the mind and past developments play a key role in understanding events and writings. In Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe crafts tales that reveal the inner cravings that motivate action and...
Overwhelming obsession and guilt often lead to deadly consequences. In “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat,” Edgar Allan Poe presents us with two men who each commit brutal murders motivated by overwhelming obsession. The narrators differ in their dispositions but fall victim to the...
Introduction In his stories “Ligeia,” “Berenice,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe presents a series of women in transit. These women exist in a liminal space between life and death, highlighting the fluidity of their existence. This perpetual state of transition emphasizes...
Edgar Allan Poe
Short Story
The Fall of The House of Usher
The very first lines of Poe’s “The Man of the Crowd” imply that this is a secretive story by nature, for Poe suggests that this particular narrative may not “permit itself to be read” (p.1561). The story itself takes on a responsibility independent of that...
As an aspiring Southern gentleman, Edgar Allan Poe longed for the glamour of fame and wealth, prominence and prosperity. To gain this through his writing, Poe understood that he must be able to sell his writing to make money, but he also must appeal to...
Although “hardboiled” narratives became a popular literary genre in the early- to mid-twentieth century, these writers were not the first to create characters and stories in this genre. Early creators of the tough detective were preceded by the first “hardboiled” literary detective, Edgar Allan Poe’s...
Edgar Allan Poe
Short Story
Get a personalized essay in under 3 hours!
Expert-written essays crafted with your exact needs in mind
John Bunyan, as he tells us in his prefatory remarks, didn’t mean to write Pilgrim’s Progress; it all happened while he was otherwise engaged. His Apology, at least at first, takes on the word’s modern connotations. He regrets having inflicted the reader with the book,...
Larkin’s poetry reflects a certain dark humor, with an often-witty conveyance of a powerful message. There is certainly control and elegance in Larkin’s work; the subject matter is apposite and therefore has an impact on his reader rather than an expression of elegance in the...
Philip Larkin’s wrote his collection of poems The Less Deceived in 1955, and it became a work which garnered him public recognition. His poems often include a deep sense of his feelings of inadequacy and contain his view that he did not belong within society...
‘Dockery and Son’ is a reflective, pensive and uncertain poem in which Larkin produces a sense of life drifting away and considers “how much had gone of life, / How widely from the others.” Although it cannot be assumed that the narrator is Larkin, the...
When one reads the title Church Going, one is inclined to think the poem that follows is going to be deeply religious. However, Philip Larkin’s “Church Going” introduces an interesting play of words; when one goes on to read the poem, it becomes clear that...
In the classic allegory The Pilgrim’s Progress, John Bunyan explains the journey of a newly-saved believer. Bunyan’s story unraveled in a dream of a man named Christian. After reading a section in the bible, Christian tells his wife and children that he must find a...
Herman Melville’s “Pierre” offers readers a world simultaneously driven by and struggling against its relationship with the past. Personal and ancestral histories dramatically affect the present interactions and psychology of the book’s main characters, particularly Pierre and Isabel. The link between present and past events...
Persian Letters seems like a hopeless account lobbying against female empowerment. Starting from each of the wives’ opening letters to Usbek and continuing to Roxana’s death by suicide at the end of the novel, at first glance, these letters reek of despair and cyclical dread...
Writing, like oration, is a deliberate act. Those who speak or debate for a living hone their skills so well that they are capable of arguing either side of a case with equal passion and persuasion. Any reasonably skilled writer is capable of doing the...