Free English Literature Essays
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Essay title - The Accidental Tourist by Anne Tyler
Penned by Anne Tyler, the novel relates the story of one man, caged in his cocoon, unable to find the meaning of his life and the strength to deal with it when he meets a woman who has answers to all his problems, yet appears daunting and intimidating to him. It is the story of a mismatched couple, when one of them is unwilling to commit to an emotional relationship while the other, with her feisty, wild, vital nature, is ready to browbeat him into it. Macon, a travel writer by profession, has recently divorced his wife after the violent death of their son Ethan, and has moved back into his old home with his eccentric brothers and sister where he can finally lead a life with safe, unbroken routines that soothe him. After meeting Muriel Pritchett, his dog-trainer, his life looses some of the soothing regularity into which he had returned to find refuge... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Analysis and Critique: “Things Fall Apart”
Chinua Achebe’s novel Things Fall Apart has often been called the first truly African novel, as well as the best. This paper uses literary criticism to help analyze the novel from a feminist perspective... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Seminar in Fiction Writing: ‘Amira’
The shadows of night fell cold as darkness swept across the land from west to east. The refugees wept as they marched up the road, leaving their homes and lives behind, escaping with few possessions as the paramilitary soldiers, tanks, and armoured trucks moved in to occupy their villages. Behind them, behind the rows of ragged men, women, and children, plumes of smoke and pillars of fire spiralled into the black sky. The soldiers were looting their homes, mosques, and churches, then burning them to the ground... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - The use of Animals in Narrative texts
The use of animals in the narratives ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ by Geoffrey Chaucer and ‘The Company of Wolves’ by Angela Carter allows the reader to further understand the meaning that the composer has created within the text. ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’ is an example of Chaucer testing the bounds of a beast fable genre. Beast fable is a tale where ‘animals are used as embodiments or caricatures of human virtues, vices, prudence’s, and follies ... and other typical qualities of mankind.’ (Coghill & Tolkien 12). ‘The Company of Wolves’ is the reconstruction of the folktale Little Red Riding Hood. The female character in the narrative ends up in the wolf's arms instead of his stomach contradictory to the fairy tale which challenges the narrative of masculine desire. With these examples we can clearly see the animal influence within these texts.... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - King Arthur and the link to the medieval romanace Sir Gawain & the Green Knight
The commencement of the anonymous European medieval romance, known as Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, provides a striking representation of the Arthurian Court. The first impression is one of dramatic immediacy, as the ambience of Camelot at the festive time of Christmas and New Year is conveyed with an air of intimacy, vitiating much of the Arthurian mythic tale. This living presence is cast through the highly skilled depictions of the key features of the court, including its King and Queen, its knights and ladies, the typical behaviours of these courtly personalities and crucially the values of the Arthurian court and ways they manifest themselves through the narrative... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay extract - Social Interaction of Autism
Most of these researches are talked about the social interaction is a communication performance of people to interact with the outside world. Everyone should need interaction to enlarge his or her social area. Without this, people may become alone. Moreover, Social interaction can show the importance on how people communicate with others. In the social community setting, social interaction is the way to show how people form the relationship with other people. According to Bailenson et al. (2004), Social scientists may realize that social interaction involves the communication of both verbal and nonverbal signals. For the.verbal signals, it includes spoken, written, and signed language. While the nonverbal signals includes gaze, gestures and postures, facial expression, touch, etc. It showed that social interaction is a kind of communication of people to interact with others or outside world. Social interaction may occur in our everyday life through different situation, such as in school, workplace, etc... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Can we defend the view that fairytales are simple stories to be enjoyed, without consideration of any supposed secondary meaning?
Children never question the fairy tales they hear. To them they are little more than beautifully woven stories to dress their dreams with. Yet a fairy tale, like so many other things in life is a subtle and perhaps one of the more beautiful mechanisms by which man has managed to convey life. For what can be more expressive of life than the idea that nothing is ever as it seems.... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay extract - France and England in A Tale of Two Cities - The French Revolution
In the eighteen-fifties, Charles Dickens was concerned that social problems in England, particularly those relating to the condition of the poor, might provoke a mass reaction on the scale of the French Revolution. In a letter written in 1855, for example, he refers to the unrest of the time as follows:
I believe the discontent to be so much the worse for smouldering, instead of blazing openly, that it is extremely like the general mind of France before the breaking out of the first Revolution, and is in danger of being turned … into such a devil of a conflagration as never has been beheld since. (qtd. in I. Collins 42)... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - A Commentary On Chaucers General Prologue
Influenced by Norman conquerors and a new ruling class in the early 11th century, the English people were coerced into straying from their Germanic, Anglo-Saxon roots in their adoption of French and Latin vocabulary into everyday conversation. In addition to altering commonplace conversations, the French language affected Middle England's institutions such as courts, high society, and government. French became the official language of the English court, and even church services were soon held in Norman French. Geoffrey Chaucer (ca. 1343-1400) exemplified the transition from Anglo-Saxon England to the age of Norman influence in his The Canterbury Tales, particularly in the section of its General Prologue entitled "The Prioress' Portrait." Bernard Felix examines the French linguistic effect as a means of cultural description in Chaucer's The Canterbury Tales, while Charles Muscatine's Medieval Literature, Style, and Culture: Essays examines the literary phenomena of fabliaux in Middle English storytelling ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Discuss In Relation To Walter Scotts Heart Of Midlothian And Redgauntlet, And Jane Austens Pride And Prejudice Or Mansfield Park
For the novelist, forming the persona of a narrator involves many creative factors ultimately influential to the narrative structure of the text as a whole. The character of the narrator, their level of presence in the narrative and consequent relationship between narrator and reader, and whether the narrative is conveyed in first or third person are just some of the considerations to be made. Austen and Scott were contemporaries of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, writing in a patriarchal society lacking in opportunity for female members of society outside of marriage and motherhood. The domains of law, medicine, the military and religion were all male-dominated professions. Having said this, the female writer was prolific in the eighteenth century - both writing a large proportion of published novels in this period and also forming the majority of the novel's readership. Regardless of the writer's sex, it is inevitable that the novel will be influenced by the social codes of conduct, opinions and attitudes of its time ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Explore The Extent To Which The Control Of Language And Meaning Is Of Central Importance In The Societies In 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' And 'The Handmaid's Tale'
Both Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale represent unusual future visions, framed in experimental science fiction. Atwood's text is grounded in contemporary concerns, as it is partly an attempt at imagining what kind of values might evolve if environmental pollution had finally rendered most of the human race sterile. It has also sprung from the debates raging within the feminist movement of the past thirty years, a movement that Atwood has been very much a part of, although she has never spoken for any specific group- insisting on her individual perspectives. Dystopias such as Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale isolate certain social trends and exaggerate them, magnifying their most negative qualities. They are cautionary tales, meant less as predictions of a likely future and more as a commentary on the present ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Discuss The Function Of Father Figures In Quentin Tarantino's Pulp Fiction
There are no real 'father figures' in Pulp Fiction. Marsellus Wallace could be interpreted as a father figure of sorts to the other men in the film, but as he employs them to do his dirty work he can only really be thought of as their 'boss'. None of the main characters are fathers themselves, and we do not meet any of their fathers. The only mention of a father comes in Story Two, 'The Gold Watch', and is of Butch's father, who has been dead since he was a small child. Perhaps we can draw similarities here to director Quentin Tarantino's own life – he too was brought up by a single mother when his father left ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Discuss Robert Frost's Lyrical Poem - 'Mowing'
Robert Frost's lyrical poem, 'Mowing', is rich in poetical elements that fuse together to form an organic whole. The poem's employment of sound, rhythm, and tone, for example, and its simple yet effective evocation of subject matter bring the various strands of the poem together to create a number of unusual poetic effects. The first-person speaker that governs the poem lends it an intimate tone as addressing the reader in this manner establishes a sense of identification between him/her and the 'I' of the poem. The questions that the speaker asks him/herself throughout the poem, and which possess a mystical and contemplative tone as the speaker considers the almost magical connection between humanity and the natural world that humanity seeks to control, are also questions for the reader as s/he is drawn in by the subjective nature of the poem ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Is Edward Said's Book Orientalism (1995) Of Vital Importance
Edward Said's book Orientalism (1995) is of vital importance, not only to our notions of the ways in which the West constructs representations and portraitures of the East but, to how the ideology of Othering is facilitated through Art and literature. Using Foucauldian methodologies, Said asserts the importance of hegemony in the creation of definite social symptoms that both concretize the dominant group and suppress the narrative of the Other. For Said, as for Foucault, this process is one of enunciation through power that is, not so much socio-political, as psychosocial ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - What Was More Important In Defining Robert Owen's Views On Society
What was more important in defining Robert Owen's views on society: enlightened ideas or his practical experience as an employer? The famous human and social rights campaigner, Robert Owen, remains an enigmatic figure in the history of the Industrial Revolution. Owen, the sixth child of a prosperous working class family, began training from the age of ten as a draper. Moving to Manchester after his apprenticeship in 1787, however, brought Owen to the heart of the English Industrial Revolution. Beginning a career in industrial enterprise, Owen quickly achieved success as the owner and manager of the famous New Lanark spinning factory in Scotland ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Consider The Ways In Which Some Of The Issues Prominent In The Romantic Period Are Reflected In Its Drama
With specific reference to particular texts consider the ways in which some of the issues prominent in the Romantic period are reflected in its drama (e.g. imagination, nature, revolution, individualism, liberty etc). As George Ross Ridge suggests in his The Hero in French Romantic Literature (1959), "Romanticism is the point of departure in modern literature" (Ross Ridge, 1959: p.1) and as such can be seen as heralding from a time of enormous social and political flux, representing also a similar departure in the psychology of the individual and the wider society ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - The Term "Tragedy" Is One That Elicits Presupposition In A Modern Context Within Comic Relief
The term "tragedy" is one that elicits presupposition in a modern context. Tragedies such as Hamlet by William Shakespeare (1564-1616) and Endgame by Samuel Beckett (1906-1989), though written in completely different eras hundreds of years apart, both serve as sources of boundless pessimism and situational comedy. Though their themes are bleak and sometimes wholly depressing in nature, playwrights often capitalize on extreme negativity to yield more impacting comic relief. Both Hamlet and Endgame have pessimistic themes in common; one of Hamlet's recurring themes is the inevitability of death and the inescapability of destiny, no matter the amount of procrastination ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Discuss The Treatment Of Social Class In: Madame Bovary By Flaubert, Sentimental Education By Flaubert, Nana By Zola
Discuss the treatment of social class in one or more of the following literary texts: Madame Bovary by Flaubert, Sentimental Education by Flaubert, Nana by Zola. During the latter half of the nineteenth century France was undergoing immense social upheaval, resulting in the rise of a new middle class - the bourgeoisie. The bourgeoisie gained their fortunes through commercial endeavours rather than inheritance and as a class, were largely characterised by a gaudy materialism. Flaubert found their moral conservatism and unsophisticated tastes appalling and in Madame Bovary used the form of the novel to bring attention to bourgeois mediocrity. The characteristics and effects of social class on the individual are evident throughout the novel, the stifling nature of middle class life eventually contributing to the downfall of the protagonist, Emma Bovary ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - What Ways Do You Think Burgess And Atwood Explore The Representation Of Language In Dystopian Societies
By comparing the two novels, in what ways do you think Burgess and Atwood explore the representation of language in dystopian societies? Introduction - The dystopian novel has become the mainstay of science and near future fiction, from its beginnings in the 1950s with Aldous Huxley's Brave New World and George Orwell's 1984 to the more recent cyberpunk works of Jeff Noon and William Gibson, the creation of a future world that is both terrifying and antithetical to humanity allows writers to both exercise their imaginations and comment on their contemporary society ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - How Far Does The Story Of Mrs Forester Reflect The Evolution From The Old Order To The New
"How far does the story of Mrs Forester reflect the evolution from the old order to the new?" A Lost Lady by Willa Cather is a novel that centres around its contradictory heroine, Mrs Marian Forrester. It charts the transitional period between the pioneering days of the Burlington railroad and the ushering in of the new generation of young people with their new methods of doing business and their equally new ways of living. Early on in the novel, the reader is told that Mrs ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - The Impact Of Critical Reception In The Novels Of Melvin Burgess
The Impact of Critical Reception in the Novels of Melvin Burgess. Introduction - The critical reception of an author can have a major influence on that author's work. It can affect how and by whom that author's novels are read in a number of ways. The novel's reception by the audience for whom it is intended is of course one way of gauging a novel's success. However, there is much more involved than the reaction of the targeted audience ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - From The Point Of View Of 'Text' And 'Canon', What Is 'Shakespeare'
From the point of view of 'text' and 'canon', what is 'Shakespeare'? In the light of recent scholarly debates, the creation of a definitive boundary for the body of work known as 'Shakespeare' is a complex issue. In the limited confine of an essay, it is necessary to attempt to reduce some of this complexity and so a choice has been made to limit the area of discussion to the best-known and most studied aspects of what we refer to as 'Shakespeare', not Shakespeare the person, nor his other poetry, but his dramatic works ... Read the full English literature essay here
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Essay title - Suicide And Mental Health
Suicide and Mental Health - I- Introduction: The unit of WHO responsible for overseeing mental health needs of people, the Department of Mental Health and Substance Abuse provides guidance for the achievement of two broad objectives:, namely (a) closing the gap between what is needed and what is currently available to reduce the burden of mental disorders worldwide, and (b) promoting mental health. (WHO, 2005) - WHO has recently launched mental health Global action Programme (mhGAP) which focuses on partnerships to help countries combat stigma of mental illness and reduce the burden of mental disorders and promote mental health ... Read the full English literature essay here
