Samples of analysis of literature

Analysis of Canterbury tales

No man of Chaucer's wide experience and clear vision could have been blind to the scandals in the church at the time when the Canterbury Tales were written--the Great Schism, the corruption of the minor clergy and of ecclesiastical parasites, the indecent scramble in higher places for money, preferment, and power. The effect of all this upon the English people had been marked and bitter. But it would be a great mistake to think of Chaucer as a Wicklifite or a Lollard, or as anticipating the ideas of the Reformation. In the Tales he strikes at the corruption of typical individuals, never at doctrines. Nothing in his ironical portraits suggests the moral indignation of Langland.

canterbury tales analysis

But that is one thing, and a formal schematizing of the Seven Deadly Sins in the Canterbury Tales is quite another. To deny the second is by no means to gainsay the first." Lowes further points out that "Chaucer is thoroughly mediaeval in his use of exempla . . . . Chaucer has used exempla and has used them with consummate art -- an art whose fine appositeness Mr. Tupper's theory has done much to blur. Nothing more artistically perfect than the employment of the exemplum by the Pardoner, the Nun's Priest, the Monk, the Summoner, the Friar, and the Prioress, could well have been devised."

analysis of crime and punishment

The bottom layer was the layer of the basement courts -- justice and police courts -- and of the police. Here the sheer volume of business was breathtaking. Hundreds were arrested for drunkenness, assaults, disturbing the peace, fighting, gambling, violating ordinances, raising hell. Countless incidents of course never made their way to court. They began and ended on the streets, or informally, in the station house. Statistically speaking, the main function of this layer was not crime control at all. The main function was order, not law; discipline, not punishment. Control was relatively mild; and it was exercised mostly over members of the working class.

analysis of death of a salesman

At one time, this would have been highly daring and experimental in the theatre. We once had a jargon for things like these--"expressionistic," "constructivist," "centrifugal." But Death of a Salesman belongs in none of the categories. It is a fresh creation in a style of its own. Mr. Miller has mastered his material and turned it directly into the grievous life of an affable man. Strictly speaking there is a moral basis for the catastrophe in the last act. Willy has always believed in something that is unsound. He has assumed that success comes to those who are "well liked," as he puts it. He does not seem to be much concerned about the quality of the product he is selling.

analysis of doctor Faustus

The first subject was perhaps more in keeping with Marlowe's personality; he has nevertheless developed the second so convincingly that it attains a matchless grandeur. Despite its faulty workmanship and the garbling it may have suffered, Doctor Faustus remains for us an infinitely richer work, since it deals not so much with the possibilities offered to man's ambition in the present life as with the problem of his destiny. From a moral standpoint it appears as a compromise between the strict orthodoxy of the legend and a more modern, more charitable, hence more truly Christian interpretation. At times, the protagonist is depicted as an obdurate sinner, a reprobate whom it is fitting to leave to his frightful fate.

analysis of don Quixote

But, wherever the meeting with Roque Guinart took place, Don Quixote remained with him in those craggy solitudes for three days, moving about with the gang and finding "matter for observation and wonder." "Here they began the day; there they dined; sometimes they fled they knew hot from whom; other times they waited for whom they knew not. They slept on their feet, their sleep being interrupted by shifts from place to place. It was all setting of spies, listening to scouts, blowing the matches of their firelocks." The mountainous country round Barcelona remained a resort of bandits until comparatively recent times.

don quixote character analysis

Don Quixote and Sancho, with every fibre of their beings, feel the urgent need to question Sansón Carrasco about the account of themselves in the book; and the reader with equal urgency requires to witness the conversation. At the opening of each new chapter, Avellaneda ultracorrectly avoids composing elaborate exordia to preface the new section of text, which after all is in principle only a sub-section and therefore does not warrant an elaborate opening; equally he is incapable of Cervantine feats of stylistic retrospection. He pursues the middle course, and simply presumes, as at the opening of each of the new partes, that the reader recalls the situation with which the previous chapter closed, and simply resumes the story.

analysis of dorian gray

Basil seems intuitively to understand Dorian Gray's progressive demonism, and is forever inquiring about Dorian's soul or Dorian's inability to pray. Dorian realizes that Basil can only be an impediment to power and must be destroyed. And so after telling Basil his secret, Dorian stabs him "in the great vein that is behind the ear". I would not contend that there is anything vampiric about this neck wound had Dorian not later driven the same knife through his own heart in the painting. These acts seem a metaphoric and brutally ironic image, not only of the vampire attack, but also of the staking of the vampire.

analysis of the picture of dorian gray

By the time Henry James came to tell his own vampire story, the myth had been worn almost to the bone. Both traditions of the vampire, one as nocturnal terrifier and the other as psychological analogy, had been pushed almost to parody in Dracula and The Portrait of Dorian Gray. What remained was for them to be combined -- for a novel to include a truly dangerous but believable character (no perpetually demonic antagonist like Dracula or foppish, time-warped Dorian Gray), whose actions paralleled or, better yet, mimicked those of the artist. To combine these two, however entailed a shift in both point of view and narrative distance, for the reader must become involved enough in the character to be sympathetic, etc.

analysis of emily dickinson poems

Emily Dickinson wrote at least one elegy in memory of her mother, who died in November, 1882. Emily's letters give no adequate portrait of her mother, for references to Mrs. Dickinson are relatively few. Apparently she was rather overshadowed and subordinated by the personality of Edward Dickinson. Her major function, it appears, was to be a dutiful wife and to keep charge of household affairs. The relationship between mother and daughter was not close and they seem to have had little in common. The remark Emily made to T. W. Higginson is revealing: "My Mother does not care for thought"