Literature critical essays

essays on shakespeare in love

In his melodrama Shakespeare in Love, Richard Penn Smith pictured the poet not as an awesome symbol of culture but as a poor, worried, stumbling young man in love with a woman of whose feelings he is not yet certain. In the end, of course, he triumphs and proclaims his joy in words that identify him as a well-rounded human being to whom one can relate: "I am indeed happy. A poet, a lover, the husband of the woman I adore. What is there more for me to desire?" Nineteenth-century America swallowed Shakespeare, digested him and his plays, and made them part of the cultural body.

critical essay on the color purple

For the female and male characters in The Color Purple, spiritual redemption evolves through the self. Through Mister's illustration of the new man he has become and through Celie's acceptance of the absence of Shug in her life, Walker presents her belief that the individual cannot depend on man or woman to provide the love that the self must foster. Individuals must struggle to recreate and subsequently redeem the self in the face of adversity. Despite adverse criticism, novelists such as Alice Walker must continue to explore the psyche of the black woman and female self-expression in words or in art as part of the development of black feminine consciousness.

critical essay on the importance of being earnest

Each of the four divisions of the play opens with deceptively amusing dialogue and moves toward more overtly serious conflict. If the tone of the opening scene in Lady Brit's library had been preserved throughout the comedy, the work could bear Wilde's ironic subtitle for The Importance of Being Earnest—"A Trivial Comedy for Serious People." Just as Wilde's criticism of private property, private charity, the Church, and the press, as voiced in "The Soul of Man under Socialism", reappears in The Importance of Being Earnest, so Shaw's themes emerge in his first act, though wearing the guise of drawing-room comedy.

 critical essay on the minister black veil

Mysteries that arise from the continuing symbolic and mesmeric aura of these icons and the desire of the human imagination to pursue them further, including the mysteries of the nature of consciousness itself, continue to resonate in the reader's mind at the stories' conclusion--for instance, in "The Minister's Black Veil" and The Scarlet Letter, in which the veil and the letter literally provide the last words in the text. At the end of "Ethan Brand," however, the main character has immolated himself, and the rude lime-burner Bartram crushes the remaining relics of Brand's skeletons into fragments.

critical essay on the old man and the sea

Unquestionably, as many interpreters have felt, The Old Man and the Sea goes "far outside" the limits of realistic fiction to grasp its truths. But Hemingway will not go beyond the severe strictures of his own aesthetics. The significance of the lions conforms to the story's unity and derives from Santiago's recollection of his earliest experience as a fisherman, his recognition of the biological brotherhood, and his knowledge that he was born to be a fisherman. That the fabled king of beasts should play on the beach in Santiago's dreams suggests the innocence of their participation in the necessary order, the brotherhood that includes the cheerful Santiago and the cheerfully floating manof-war.

research paper on the old man and the sea

The lions exist in Santiago's dreams to remind him of the lesson Hemingway presented in his fable "The Good Lion" ( 1951, a year before The Old Man and the Sea appeared in Life). "This lion, that we love because he was so good," wrote Hemingway, "had wings on his back." All the other lions, "wicked lions indeed," ate not only zebras and antelope but also people, especially fat "Hindu traders," because they are "delicious to a lion." But the "good lion" is a puzzling "pasta-eating lion," who is frightened by the others' roaring laughter, their bad breath, and the "old pieces of Hindu trader" that remained in their claws; so he flies away to his original home in Venice.

critical essay on the old man and the sea

The Old Man and the Sea they honor the sea reality that Hemingway illuminates by refracting the Light promised in the Eucharist. Far from transcendent, this light seems wrestled from the heavens into the stream, where Hemingway captures it in the watery prisms that Santiago sees: "The sea was very dark and the light made prisms in the water. The myriad flecks of the plankton were annuled now by the high sun and it was only the great deep prisms in the blue water that the old man saw now with his lines going straight down into the water that was a mile deep"

critical essay on the snow of Kilimanjaro

One may conjecture that this dislike was compounded of reaction to Fitzgerald's somewhat pretty good looks, Fitzgerald's liking for the tinselly life that he himself despised, Fitzgerald's willingness to compromise his writing for money which Hemingway, once he was on his own, never did. His own latter-day works were inferior, not compromised. There may also have been some residual resentment because the 'older' man had been successful first, had helped him to Scribner's-a favor hard to forget and therefore hard to forgive. In any event, in 1936, when Fitzgerald was small threat to him, he took the notorious crack at him in The Snows of Kilimanjaro.

critical essay on the tempest

Reuben Brower's essay on The Tempest is a paradigm of New Criticism. Following lines set out by Knight and Knights, Brower says that "the harmony of the play lies in its metaphorical design. . . . It is hard to pick a speech at random without coming on an expression that brings us by analogy into direct contact with elements that seem otherwise remote". The "recurrent analogies (or continuities) are linked through a key metaphor into a single metaphorical design". "The . . . main continuities . . . are: 'strangewondrous,' 'sleep-and-dream,' 'sea-tempest,' 'music-and-noise,' 'earth-air,' 'slavery-freedom,' and 'sovereignty-conspiracy'".

critical essay on walt whitman

So in the twilight of the romantic revolution Whitman quietly slipped away. The great hopes on which he fed have been belied by after events--so his critics say; as the great hopes of the Enlightenment have been belied. Certainly in this welter of today, with science become the drab and slut of war and industrialism, with sterile moneyslaves instead of men, Whitman's expansive hopes seem grotesque enough. Democracy may indeed be only a euphemism for the rulership of fools. Yet in a time of huge infidelities, in the dun and breakdown and disintegration of all faiths, it is not wholly useless to recall the large proportions of Walt Whitman, his tenderness, his heartiness, his faith, his hope.