Essays on Literary Genres

3801

Redefining The Symbol of The Infant: Works by Coleridge and Strickland

3 pages / 1162 words

The infant has always been a versatile and powerful symbol for a variety of themes; themes such as new life, innocence, potential, and even loss. While in both Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s "To a Friend, Who Asked How I Felt, When the Nurse First Presented My...

Poetry

3802

The Importance of Secondary Characters in Ancient Greek Drama

3 pages / 1149 words

In Aeschylus’s Oresteia, the Chorus of Agamemnon and Cassandra share several common traits. The chorus, a large group made up of miscellaneous elders, would, as individuals, all function as secondary characters. Cumulatively these individuals create one main character that offers supplementary information and commentary to...

Character Drama

3803

Gender Confines and Growing Up: Exploring Sexual Identity in Ai’s "The Kid"

3 pages / 1408 words

Since its publication in 1978, Ai’s thirty-two-line dramatic monologue poem “The Kid” has shocked and intrigued readers with its brutal subject matter of a murdered family. Within the poem, the speaker, who identifies himself as a fourteen-year-old boy, methodically annihilates his family, which consists of...

Poetry

3804

Cassandra’s Final Monologue

5 pages / 2161 words

Cassandra’s final monologue in Aeschylus’s Agamemnon plays a transformative role in terms of the movement of the plot and, upon close examination, functions as a key for many of the tragedy’s larger themes. She begins by equating prophecy, be it the physical act or the...

Tragedy

3805

Adrienne Rich’s Evolution as a Poet

5 pages / 2156 words

Adrienne Rich’s poems in The Fact of a Doorframe dramatize the conflict between what patriarchal society dictates women should be and what they are. In her earlier poems, like “Aunt Jennifer’s Tigers” she uses tight rhyme and careful control as she struggles to keep the...

Poetry

3806

Analysis of Anton Chekhov’s Short Story "Agafya"

2 pages / 925 words

Chekhov’s stories often describe the little intricate moments in Russian life, focusing in on one character’s experience of a normal event and in doing so commenting on the character themselves. Agafya is one of Chekhov’s longer short stories, and is told from the perspective of...

Short Story

3807

Analysis of Adrienne Rich"s "Song"

3 pages / 1179 words

Adrienne Rich’s “Song” plays out an uncomfortably intimate melody concerning a woman’s feelings of inescapable loneliness. Adrienne asserts the tortured song of this woman’s soul so beautifully, teasing the reader early on with passivity, and then cunningly slips into prose so lovely that the reader...

Literature Review Poetry

3808

True Storms: "Storm Warnings" Analysis

2 pages / 757 words

Everyone has dealt with troubled times, which can accurately be described as ‘dark times’ or ‘internal storms.’ In the poem “Storm Warnings”, Adrienne Rich organizes the poem’s main statement in the middle of the poem in order to mimic the buildup and aftermath of a...

Poetry

3809

Adrienne Rich's Use of Free Verse in "Diving into The Wreck"

3 pages / 1398 words

Adrienne Rich uses free verse to separate herself from the male-dominated literary tradition in her poem “Diving Into the Wreck”. Her poem addresses the role of women in past literature while promising hope for the future generations. Rich’s reclamation of the literary tradition is achieved...

Poetry

3810

True Love in Shakespeare’s Sonnet 116 and Adrienne Rich’s "Living in Sin"

3 pages / 1312 words

Both Rich and Shakespeare address the theme of true love in their respective poems Living in Sin and Let Me Not to the Marriage of True Minds. The subject matter of both poems deals with the nature of true love, various implications of which are...

Poetry

3811

Aegisthus: Insight on a Fool

3 pages / 1289 words

The Oresteia by Aeschylus is a trilogy of tragedies expressing the strength women possess, but, on the flip side, it also expresses the cowardice of some men—one man in particular. This man’s name was Aigisthos. Aigisthos is only present in the first and second plays...

Tragedy

3812

Being One and Twenty

2 pages / 758 words

Turning 21 defines a threshold into adulthood where an individual’s actions define them further in life. By allowing leniency and the assurance to make mistakes and learn, 21 year old’s live free of obligation and constraint. Both “To Sir John Lade, on his Coming of...

Poetry

3813

Criticism and Correction: Satire and Praise in Dryden, Pope, and Beyond

5 pages / 2135 words

‘The true end of satire is the amendment of vices by correction. And he who writes honestly is no more an enemy to the offender, than the physician to the patient, when he prescribes harsh remedies to an inveterate disease’ Made-to-order essay as fast as...

Poetry Satire

3814

Order in Peaches

2 pages / 1113 words

Societal dictum and etiquette are fluid concepts, changing and differing dependent largely on location, culture, time period, and other factors. With reference to carting a carriage of Peaches through rural Japan in the middle of a cold winter night, the narrator of Abe Akira’s Peaches...

Book Review Short Story Society

3815

The Role of Trees in a Tree Grows in Brooklyn

3 pages / 1169 words

Hope in the face of hardship is a recurring theme in much of literature today. As human beings, it is in our DNA to survive—despite circumstances that make it difficult to do so. A human beings innate ability to survive shows itself in the way...

Novel

3816

Shifting Points of View in a Visit into The Minds of The Goon Squad

3 pages / 1368 words

In Jennifer Egan’s A Visit From The Goon Squad, each chapter brings with it a different point of view that adds new dimensions that build upon the story arc. To emphasize characters’ thoughts and feelings and to offer different perspectives of recurring characters, Jennifer Egan...

Novel

3817

The Issue of Technology and Children in "A Visit from The Goon Squad"

4 pages / 1714 words

In the digital era, children are exposed to digital devices and the internet practically at birth through iPods, iPads, and iMacs–an element of modern childhood completely foreign to the parents raising these children. In the chapter “Pure Language” from A Visit From the Goon Squad,...

Character Novel

3818

Absolving Frankford: Analyzing "Kindness" in a Woman Killed with Kindness

4 pages / 1666 words

It is easy for a modern audience to look upon the actions of Master Frankford in Thomas Heywood’s A Woman Killed with Kindness and recoil in disgust. While his actions may be starkly seen as emotional abuse today, within the world of the play his...

Tragedy

3819

Yiyun Li’s Use of Repetition to Define What Love is

3 pages / 1144 words

Many authors use different types of form in order to inform content, enhance their stories, and stress the messages that they are trying to get across. Yiyun Li effectively uses this technique in her short story collection, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers, by using...

Short Story