Essays on Literary Genres

3383

Howl’s Moving Castle: Breaking The Past Traditions of Creative Writing

5 pages / 2309 words

Everyone has his or her own idea of literature and what separates a work of literary fiction from a work of popular fiction. Generally speaking, a work must adhere to literary traditions, convey a deeper meaning, and present conventional themes in order to be recognized...

Fantasy Novel

3384

The House of Mirth: Features of Naturalistic Tradition

4 pages / 1916 words

Lily Bart, the heroine of Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth, is understood from chapter 1 to be a female of remarkable beauty. Throughout the novel she is classified as uniquely attractive, a woman to be desired by men and subtly threatening to women. But...

House of Mirth Novel

3385

From Wealth to Poverty: The Role of a Social Class in House of Mirth

5 pages / 2473 words

The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton offers a multidimensional and fluid analysis of social class. Initially, Lily attempts to belong to the upper class. However, through a series of unfortunate decisions, we witness Lily’s inevitable descent into dinginess, poverty, and death. Towards the end,...

House of Mirth Novel

3386

Lily's 'Heart of a Fool' in The House of Mirth

2 pages / 1110 words

In Edith Wharton’s novel, The House of Mirth, the beautiful but helpless Lily Bart is never able to escape from the follies and superficialities of the society that she is born into. According to a verse in Ecclesiastics which the novel was titled after- “The...

House of Mirth Novel

3387

Class Differences in House of Mirth

4 pages / 1775 words

Edith Wharton’s IThe House of Mirth] tells the story of Lily Bart’s fall from the upper reaches of the social spectrum to the lowly depths of the working class. The characters in the novel represent all levels of society, from the urban poor to the...

House of Mirth Novel

3388

Analysis of Lily's Choice in The House of Mirth

5 pages / 2145 words

Near the beginning of The House of Mirth, Wharton establishes that Lily would not indeed have cared to marry a man who was merely rich: “she was secretly ashamed of her mothers crude passion for money” (38). Lily, like the affluent world she loves, has...

Character House of Mirth Novel

3389

The House of Mirth and The Role of Women Characters

4 pages / 1936 words

The relationship between the ideal and the reality is many times pictured in black and white. The ideal can be defined as a conception of something in its perfection, whereas reality is defined as something that exists independently of ideas concerning it. In The House...

House of Mirth Novel

3390

The View of Nature in The House of Mirth

4 pages / 1624 words

Nature, whether in the form of the arctic tundra of the North Pole or the busy street-life of Manhattan, was viewed by Naturalist writers as a phenomena which necessarily challenged individual survival; a phenomena, moreover, which operated on Darwin’s maxim of the “survival of the...

House of Mirth Novel

3391

Wharton’s Analysis of The Victorian Age in The House of Mirth

4 pages / 1593 words

Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth presents an interesting study of the social construction of subjectivity. The Victorian society which Wharton’s characters inhabit is defined by a rigid structure of morals and manners in which one’s identity is determined by apparent conformity with or transgression...

House of Mirth Novel

3392

Salden’s Perception of Lily Bart

5 pages / 2078 words

One of the tragedies in The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton is that Lily Bart is unable to marry Laurence Selden and thereby secure a safe position in society. Their relationship fluctuates from casual intimacy to outright love depending on how and where Selden...

Character House of Mirth Novel

3393

The Role of Carry Fisher in The House of Mirth

12 pages / 5514 words

Commonly called “a novel of manners” because of the way characters are shown thinking and speaking about how people in society ought to conduct themselves, The House of Mirth by Edith Wharton focuses chiefly on Lily Bart, a woman whose social decline and fall is...

House of Mirth Novel

3394

Analysis of Mirth in "The House of Mirth"

4 pages / 1740 words

Which of the domestic palaces in Edith Wharton’s The House of Mirth claims itself as the titular source of the tragic novel? Each offers strong evidence in its own favor. There is the bucolic decadence of the Trenor’s Bellomont; the old money severity of Mrs....

House of Mirth Novel

3395

The House of Mirth: Analysis of The Depicted Society

5 pages / 2254 words

In Edith Wharton’s The House Of Mirth, money is the most evident and most basic value held by the characters who populate the author’s turn-of-the-century New York. Essentially, money is valued for only one reason – it provides the means by which those in possession...

House of Mirth Novel

3396

Hope Leslie: How Women Impose Law and Order

8 pages / 3461 words

In her novel Hope Leslie, Catharine Maria Sedgwick explores the influence laws arising from religion, nature, and society have on the development of a new nation. Specifically, her historical romance analyzes the culture created by seventeenth-century Puritans who left England behind to settle in the...

Novel

3397

Memories and The Past in Hotel on The Corner of Bitter and Sweet

3 pages / 1481 words

The past acts as a tabernacle for experiences and memories. The past not only lives in Henry but also makes up Henry’s very nature. Henry is his past. Life’s faded memories shape choices. Author Jamie Ford builds the relationship between experience and conscience through Henry,...

Novel

3398

The Role of Interior The Hotel on The Corner of Bitter and Sweet

5 pages / 2359 words

As a historical novel, Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet[1] alludes to many occurrences, people, places, government acts, and organizations confirming the novel’s veracity by employing history. The book covers the period 1941-1986, a period of over forty years. During this time, Henry...

Novel

3399

Try not to Do The Unimaginable, Simply Make The Wisest Decision: Henry’s Profound Qualities in Ford’s Novel

2 pages / 881 words

Courage is not the absence of fear, but the will to overcome it. Jamie Ford’s novel Hotel on the Corner of Bitter and Sweet shows this characteristic as a central element of its narrative. Henry is a Chinese boy who is living during World War...

Novel

3400

Hippolytus: Analyzing Phaedra

2 pages / 936 words

In the play Hippolytus, Euripides depicts characters in a realistic fashion by displaying their warring emotions in the wake of dramatic events, as well as their deceit in achieving their objectives. A prime example of such tactics is the character Phaedra, who is content to...

Tragedy

3401

Breaking Down The Poetry for an Emperor: Ovid and Horace

3 pages / 1241 words

Ovid and Horace, Roman poets in the age of Augustus, collectively captured a very broad range of sentiments and atmosphere in the empire at this time. Horace wrote odes, satires, and epistles that glorify Augustus himself and his reforms and intentions for Rome. Ovid, on...

Ancient Rome Poetry